BRONZE AND IRON. WEAPONS AND TOOLS
The Aegean civilisation, till its last age of decadence in art, knew nothing about the use of iron for weapons or tools: at least no such relics have been discovered. Homer, on the other hand, is thoroughly familiar with iron as a commodity. A recurrent formula describes wealthy men as rich in gold, bronze, women, and iron.
Iron, bronze, slaves, and hides were bartered for wine, at the siege of Troy, when a large trading fleet came in from Lemnos, sent by Euneos, son of Jason and Hypsipyle, a princess of that island. Lemnos seems to have been rich in wine, which provoked the heroes to utter gabes (as in the Chansons de Geste) about their future triumphs in the war.
Thus iron is abundant, but its uses are strangely restricted. All careful readers must perceive that Homer lives in an age of “overlap.” Remains of such ages are common on European sites almost everywhere; the explorer finds in the overlap iron and bronze things together, iron comes gradually in: bronze, for weapons and tools, gradually disappears.
Thus at the great prehistoric cemetery of Hallstatt in the Austrian Alps, we find weapons of bronze fitted with iron edges, then swords with iron blades and hilts of bronze, then swords of iron, hilt and blade.
In Crete was found a tholos tomb (a domed stone edifice) with a bronze spear-head, a set of iron tools including a double pick and an axe, and a sword of iron. This tomb was of the period when “geometric” ornament on vases had nearly supplanted the Aegean forms of decoration: in fact it was in the period to which we may assign Homer. Other tholos tombs near the same site contained vessels Aegean in shape, with geometric ornament, and an iron dagger, and bronze fibulae and bracelets, objects for which iron was not used. In a tomb at Muliana in Crete, were found bronze weapons with human remains that had been buried beside iron weapons with cremated bones. The vases were partly of Aegean, partly of Dipylon geometric style.
Now Homer describes this period of gradual overlap of iron and bronze. But he adds the strange peculiarity that the weapons, but for a single arrow-head and an iron mace, mentioned as the peculiar fancy of a warrior when Nestor was young, are always of bronze, while the tools and the masses of metal out of which they are forged are usually of iron. This fact has often been the subject of comment. Of the critics mentioned in the note below, Helbig and Cauer think that the steady mention by Homer of bronze for weapons is a mere tradition of the epic, maintained by poets in the Iron Age. It would be interesting to find any such tradition in any other literature of the early Iron Age. But we do not find it. Moreover, the lays of the Bronze Age, when they mentioned tools, must have said that they were of bronze, as Homer occasionally does; but we are not told why later poets maintained the bronze tradition for weapons, but spoke of tools as iron. As in the case of the arrow-head it is called “the iron,” so in the case of tools, and of knives (not used in battle); the wheelwright is said to fell a tree “with the iron,” though Odysseus trims the wood of his bed “with the bronze.” Achilles, it is feared, will cut his own throat “with the iron” (knife); the cattle struggle when slain “with the iron” — the butcher’s knife; and Odysseus shoots “through the iron,” through the holes in the axes. But no man, in battle, strikes with or dies under “the iron.” This distinction could not have been uniformly maintained throughout several centuries by poets living in an age of iron weapons.
Naber and Bérard, unlike Cauer and Helbig, give the obvious explanation that when iron came in, but its manufacture and the sharpening of it were ill understood, men would make heavy axes and other rural implements of iron, but would not trust their lives to iron weapons which were brittle or which “doubled up.” This is the view which occurred to myself before I had read the works of Naber and Bérard; but I then knew no proof that a stage of iron tools and bronze weapons had ever existed.
As Monsieur Bérard puts the case, “I might almost say that iron is the popular metal ... the shepherd and ploughman can extract and work it without going to the town.” It is probable that the princes who had lands remote from towns kept each his own smithy for rough work, like Highland chiefs in 1680-1745, who had the rough iron work done on the estate, but always imported their sword blades from the Continent. The hilts were made at home, basket hilts.
Knives, never said to be used in war, agricultural and pastoral implements, and axes, though occasionally of bronze, are usually of iron in the Epics. No graves opened in Greek soil have as yet yielded iron tools accompanied by bronze weapons alone. Mr. Arthur Evans, however, who accepts the view that Homer describes an actual period of bronze for weapons, iron for tools, writes, “This corresponds with a distinct phase of archaeological evidence. Thus in the Cypro-Minoan tomb at Enkomi the weapons were of bronze, but small iron knives also occurred (Murray, Excavations in Cyprus, ).” The Homeric state of affairs is illustrated by Mr. MacAllister’s diggings in a certain stratum of the ancient city of Gezer in Palestine. All weapons are of bronze, all implements are of iron. Gezer was in touch with Aegean art; a bronze sword-blade of the Cnossian “horned” type (the hilt turning up like two horns) was found there. Gaza also had “her Minoan traditions and the cult of the Cretan Zeus.” Jewellery of late Aegean taste has been found at Gezer; and the Philistines are suspected of being settlers from Crete, whether Aegean or Achaean.
In the present state of knowledge we can say safely that Homer, with his bronze weapons and iron tools, has not invented a state of culture that never existed. The relative uses of excellent bronze for spears and swords, and of dubious iron for implements, were perfectly natural. Homer probably saw this stage in actual life; nobody could invent it; but no Homeric cairn with buried weapons and tools has ever been discovered, and if any had been found, they would long ago have been plundered.
There are two lines, or rather one line is twice repeated in the Odyssey, which give the démenti to the uniform descriptions in both Epics. Odysseus bids Telemachus hide the weapons in the hall, and, if asked why he does it, reply that the Wooers in their cups may quarrel, and use the arms, and “shame the feast, and this wooing, for iron of himself draws a man to him.” This is a proverbial expression of the age when iron is, at least, the dominant if not the only metal for weapons. If, then, this line be as old as the rest of the Odyssey, in which weapons are always of bronze, its maker has let out that all the other makers have been saying what they do not mean; and in an age of iron, or overlap of bronze-and iron, have consistently maintained that all weapons are of bronze, while tools are of iron, as a rule.
Helbig and others think the line a very late intrusion; it may be removed without altering the sense of the passage. Mr. Monro, on Odyssey, xix. 1-50, discusses the question fully. “Ancient and modern critics,” he says, “are generally agreed that the first mention of ‘iron’ as synonymous with ‘weapon’” (Od. xvi. 294), and the rest of the passage, “is an interpolation founded on xix. 1-50, and intended to lead up to it.” But Kirchoff (Odyssey, ) reverses the process, the second appearance of the passage is the earlier. Mr. Monro argues that both passages “are additions to the original context.”
It is essential to the whole story that the Wooers, who, of course, wear swords, as was universally done in time of peace, should, when attacked by arrows, need shields and spears to throw. The interpolator, if interpolator there were, thought that, in ordinary circumstances, shields and spears would be hanging on the walls of the hall, as in the Ionian house of Alcaeus (Fragm. 15, Bergk.).
We do not know from other descriptions of Homeric halls that this was the custom in Homer’s age; it is nowhere mentioned.
The war-gear in the palace of Cnossus was certainly stored apart in special chambers. Suppose, then, that a late poet, accustomed to see war-gear arranged on walls, had the opportunity to introduce the practice into the Odyssey, he would inevitably cause confusion; and the passage does cause great confusion, as Mr. Monro proves in his long note.
(1) The moment foreseen and prepared for by Odysseus never arrives, and that is quite contrary to “the Epic manner.”
(2) It is a weaker argument, that the speech about arms tempting men to use them disregards the fact that the Wooers wear swords; what they need under the rain of arrows is shields and throwing spears. For these they send the Goatherd to the store-chamber, where, in fact, they were probably kept in a Homeric house, not, as in the case of Alcaeus, on the walls.
(3) The use of “iron” for “weapon” is, as Mr. Monro says, an anachronism.
(4) The vocabulary “has a post-Homeric stamp.” Of this I am no judge; but I point out later what Mr. Monro omits to notice, that in the first passage, xvi. 296, the δοιὰ βοάγρια χερσιν ἑλέσθαι is archaeologically utterly un-Homeric (cf. ); while the command to bring two βοάγρια and spears, as Mr. Monro says, is not repeated nor carried out in the second passage; again contrary to the manner of the Epic.
(5) In Odyssey, xxii. 23-25, when Odysseus has shot Antinous, the Wooers look at the wall to find spears vainly; but why? They do not expect a fight, they think (xxii. 31, 32) that Odysseus, aiming at some other mark, has shot Antinous by accident. In xxii. 5-7 he has said, enigmatically, that he will try, with Apollo’s aid, to hit a mark that no man has struck before. The words about their looking to the walls for weapons “are an interpolation, and prove nothing about the removal of the arms.”
(6) Mr. Monro renders the speech of Melanthius (xxii. 139-141) in this manner: “Go to, I will bring you gear to arm you from the store-chamber, for the arms are in their place (ἔνδον), I think, and Odysseus and his sons have not put them elsewhere.” Melanthius merely means that the armour has not been moved by Odysseus and Telemachus from its natural place, the store-chamber; he will there find what is needed.
(7) The passage in Book xxiv. 164-166, where the ghost of Amphimedon tells the story of the removal of the arms to Agamemnon in Hades, is late, like all Book xxiv. It is possibly later than the passage about removing the arms from the hall.
Averse as I am to theories of interpolation, the whole passage in which “iron” is made a synonym for “weapon” is rich in the non-Epic manner as well as matter, and causes very un-Homeric confusions. Critics of all shades of opinion recognise this, and I do not object to the line about iron merely because it is as fatal to my theory as it is friendly to that of Mr. Ridgeway.
In this case the line contradicts the whole of both Epics, which in itself provokes suspicion; just as a single passage in which cavalry were introduced, or burials by humation were introduced, or armorial bearings on small bucklers appeared, would rightly be deemed a late interpolation.
This line apart, the two Epics seem uniform work of a peculiar stage, the Gezer stage, of the overlap of bronze and iron.
Hesiod knew all about the Bronze Age, and knew that his was the age of iron, whereas the ancients tooled with bronze, “and there was no black iron.” Put Hesiod at 700 B.C., and we wonder why “late poets” about that date gave iron tools but bronze weapons to the Achaeans.
The line in the Odyssey is found, one must add, in most suspicious circumstances, and in the worst of company. It first appears in Odyssey, xvi. 294, when Odysseus, at the house of Eumaeus, is prophesying to Telemachus about the misbehaviour of the Wooers. He bids his son, at his nod, to conceal the arms and the weapons in the hall, and if asked why he has done so, reply that they afford occasion for brawls, as “iron draws a man to him.” The passage goes on, “but for us alone leave two swords, two spears, and two shields to grasp with our hands” Here the word for shields is βοάγρια, which occurs in no other line of Iliad or Odyssey except Iliad, xii. 22; while the following line (23), mentioning “demigods,” “takes us at once away from the Homeric world, and opens an entirely new order of conceptions.” “The most careless critics,” says Mr. Leaf, cannot pass this passage in the Iliad, nor can the most conservative critic defend it. As the dubious passage of the Odyssey concerning iron contains the same non-Homeric word for shields as the indubitably false passage of the Iliad, and as the poet of the Odyssey expects the shields to be held in the hand (an die Arme zu nehmen, Faesi) while Homer’s shields are always suspended by baldrics, it is clear that the Odyssean passage with the mention of iron as synonymous with weapon is rather more than suspect.
The line recurs in changed circumstances when Telemachus and Odysseus together remove the weapons, but do not leave two swords, two spears, and two shields (βοάγρια) for themselves. Everything falls out otherwise than Odysseus had practically prophesied in Book xvi., when we come to the slaying of the Wooers in Book xxii.
This would mean nothing in a modern novel; but, as Mr. Monro says, in Homer it is singular; it would be more in his manner to let events exactly fulfil the boding of Odysseus. I have proved that the whole passage not only contradicts the uniform tenor of the two Epics as to bronze weapons, but causes hopeless confusion, has the most suspicious associations, and contravenes the Homeric practice of suspending shields by baldrics. Even if we excised the line concerning iron, which can be omitted without injuring the sense, the whole passage in both of its appearances is decidedly suspicious.