CHAPTER IX.

THE METALS IN HOMER.

THE undivided Aryans knew very little of the underground riches of the earth. They transmitted to their dispersed descendants no common words for mining, forging, or smelting, none to indicate a metal in general, and only one designative of a metal in particular. This took in Sanskrit the form _ayas_, in Latin, _æs_; it is represented by the German _Erz_, equivalent to the English _ore_; and, after drifting through a Celtic channel, took a new meaning and form as _Eisen_, or _iron_.[310] The original signification of the term was _copper_; and copper seems, in general, to have been the first metal to engage the attention of primitive man. This is easily accounted for. Copper is widely distributed; it frequently occurs in the native state, when its strong colour at once catches the eye; it is easily worked, and displays a luminous glow highly engaging to an unsophisticated taste for ornament. And, because copper was at first the only substance of the kind known, its name was used to determine those of other related substances. Thus, in Sanskrit, iron was called ‘dark blue _ayas_,’ _ayas_ having come to mean metal in general; and a specific sign (possibly that for _hardness_) added, in the Egyptian inscriptions, to the hieroglyph for copper, causes it to denote iron.[311] But in South Africa these positions are exchanged. There iron ranks as the fundamental metal; gold being known to at least one Kafir tribe as ‘yellow,’ silver as ‘white,’ copper as ‘red’ iron.[312] And to these linguistic facts corresponds the exceptional circumstance, due probably to early intercourse with Egypt, that the stone-age in South Africa yielded immediately to an iron-age.

Footnote 310:

Much, _Die Kupferzeit in Europa_, p. 173; Schrader and Jevons, _Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryans_, p. 188; Taylor, _Origin of the Aryans_, p. 138.

Footnote 311:

Lepsius, _Les Métaux dans les Inscriptions Égyptiennes_, p. 55.

Footnote 312:

Schrader and Jevons, _op. cit._ p. 154; Rougemont, _L’Âge de Bronze_, p. 14.

In Asia, gold was discovered next after copper, the Massagetæ, described by Herodotus, exemplifying this stage of progress; silver, or ‘white gold’ succeeded, bringing lead in its train; then, little by little, tin crept into use; while iron, destined to predominate, came last. All the six, however, are enumerated in a Khorsabad inscription;[313] they were familiar to the ancient Egyptians, to the Israelites of the Exodus, and to the Homeric Greeks.

Footnote 313:

Lenormant, _Trans. Soc. Bibl. Archæology_, vol. vi. p. 345.

Gold was with Homer supreme among terrestrial substances. It represented to him beauty, splendour, power, wealth, incorruption. It was the metal of the gods, and mortals by its profuse employment, borrowed something of divine glory. Its availability for them had, nevertheless, narrow limitations unfelt supernally. For the visionary metal of Olympus might be dispensed at will without restrictions either as to quantity or qualities. Inexhaustible stores of it lay at command; and it could be rendered infrangible and impenetrable by some mythical process unknown to sublunary metallurgists. Hence the golden hobbles with which Poseidon secured his coursers might have proved less satisfactory for the restraint of commonplace Thracian or Thessalian horses; the golden sword of Apollo would surely have bent in the hand of Hector; the golden mansion of the sea-god built for aye in the blue depths of the Ægean, could not have supported its own weight for an hour on realistic dry land; nor would the process of lifting earth to heaven by hauling on a rope have been facilitated by making that rope (as Zeus proposed to do for the purpose in question) of gold. Of gold, too, were the garments of the gods, their thrones, utensils, implements, appurtenances; the pavement of their courts was ‘trodden gold’; golden were the wings of Iris, golden was the beauty of Aphrodite. No doubt, all these attributions were half consciously metaphorical, but their main design was to set off immortal existence by decorating it with an enhanced degree of the same kind of magnificence marking the dignity of mortal potentates.

It is remarkable that the Olympian gold in the Shield of Achilles retained some part of the occult virtue properly belonging to it only in that elevated sphere. Of the five metallic layers composing the great buckler, the middle and most precious one gets the whole credit of having arrested the quivering spears of Æneas and Asteropæus.[314] The verses, to be sure, recording its superior efficacy are held to be spurious, and the inclusion of a hidden stratum of gold does indeed seem without reason, as it is certainly without precedent. Yet the original poet would not have altogether disavowed the inspiring idea of the passage; and the alleged impenetrability of the gold-mail of Masistius[315] may be held to imply that traces of its old mystical faculty of resistance lingered about the metal so late as when Xerxes invaded Greece.

Footnote 314:

_Iliad_, xx. 268; xxi. 165; and Leaf’s annotations.

Footnote 315:

Herodotus, ix. 22.

The metallic treasures allotted to the gods in the Iliad are confiscated for human enrichment in the Odyssey. For the golden automata of Hephæstus are substituted the golden watch-dogs and torch-bearers of Alcinous; resplendent dwellings are erected, no longer on Olympus or at Ægæ, but in Sparta and Phæacia; Helen shares with Artemis in the Odyssey the golden distaff exclusively attributed to the latter in the Iliad; the ‘dreams of avarice,’ in short, are tangibly realised, in the Epic of adventure, only by human possessions; they shrink for the most part into shadowy epithets where divine surroundings are concerned. Nor is this diversity accidental or unmeaning. It indicates a genuine shifting of the mythological point of view—an advance, slight yet significant, towards a more spiritualised conception of deity.

Oriental contact first stirred the _auri sacra fames_ in the Greek mind. That this was so the Greek language itself tells plainly. For _chrusos_, gold, is a Semitic loanword, closely related to the Hebrew _chârûz_, but taken immediately, there can be no reasonable doubt, from the Phœnician. The restless treasure-seekers from Tyre were, indeed, as the Græco-Semitic term _metal_ intimates,[316] the original subterranean explorers of the Balkan peninsula. As early, probably, as the fifteenth century B.C. they ‘digged out ribs of gold’ on the islands of Thasos and Siphnos, and on the Thracian mainland at Mount Pangæum; and the fables of the Golden Fleece, and of Arimaspian wars with gold-guarding griffins, prove the hold won by the ‘precious bane’ over the popular imagination. Asia Minor was, however, the chief source of prehistoric supply, the native mines lying long neglected after the Phœnicians had been driven from the scene. Midas was a typical king in a land where the mountains were gold-granulated, and the rivers ran over sands of gold. And it was in fact from Phrygia that Pelops was traditionally reported to have brought the treasures which made Mycenæ the golden city of the Achæan world.

Footnote 316:

Schrader and Jevons, _Antiquities of the Aryans_, p. 155; Much, _Die Kupferzeit in Europa_, p. 147.

The Epic affluence in gold was not wholly fictitious. From the sepulchres of Mycenæ alone about one hundred pounds Troy weight of the metal have been disinterred; freely at command even in the lowest stratum of the successive habitations at Hissarlik, it was lavishly stored, and highly wrought in the picturesquely-named ‘treasure of Priam;’ and has been found, in plates and pearls, beneath twenty metres of volcanic debris, in the Cycladic islands Thera and Therapia.[317] This plentifulness contrasts strangely with the extreme scarcity of gold in historic Greece. It persisted, however, mainly owing to the vicinity of the auriferous Ural Mountains, in the Milesian colony of Panticapæum, near Kertch, where graves have been opened containing corpses shining ‘like images’ in a complete clothing of gold-leaf, and equipped with ample supplies of golden vessels and ornaments.

Footnote 317:

Much, _Die Kupferzeit_, p. 41.

Silver[318] was, at the outset, a still rarer substance than gold. Not that there is really less of it. The ocean alone is estimated to contain nearly ten thousand million tons, and the mines yielding it, though few, are rich. But it occurs less obviously, and is less easy to obtain pure. Accordingly, in some very early Egyptian inscriptions, silver, by heading the list of metals, claims a supremacy over them which proved short-lived. It terminated for ever with the scarcity that had produced it, when the Phœnicians began to pour the flood of Spanish silver into the markets and treasure-chambers of the East. Armenia constituted another tolerably copious source of supply; and it was in this quarter that Homer located the ‘birthplace of silver.’[319] Alybé, on the coast of the Euxine east of Paphlagonia, whence the Halizonians came to Troy, was identified by Strabo with Chalybe, a famous mining district.[320] The people there, indeed, as Xenophon recorded, lived mostly by digging iron; and their name was preserved in the Greek _chalups_, steel, and survives with ourselves in _chalybeate_ waters. The district has, however, in modern times, again become known as argentiferous. The Homeric tradition receives countenance from the discovery, in the neighbourhood of Tripoli, of antique, half obliterated silver-workings; and from the existence, not far off, of a ‘Silver-town’ (Gunnish-kana), and a ‘Silver-mountain’ (Gunnish-dagh), whence a large tribute in silver still flowed, a few years ago, into the leaky coffers of Turkey.[321]

Footnote 318:

Blümner, _Technologie der Gewerbe_, Bd. iv. pp. 28-32.

Footnote 319:

_Iliad_, ii. 857.

Footnote 320:

_Geog._ xii. 3.

Footnote 321:

Rougemont, _L’Âge de Bronze_, p. 169; Riedenauer, _Handwerk und Handwerker_, p. 101.

The word _silver_ (Gothic, _silubr_) has even been conjecturally associated with the Homeric Alybé;[322] while other philologists prefer to regard it as equivalent to the Assyrian _sarpu_.[323] All that is certain is the absence of a general Aryan name for the metal, showing that the Aryans collectively made no acquaintance with it. Thus, the Greek _arguros_ and the Latin _argentum_, although closely related, are really different words. That is to say, they were formed independently from the common root, _ark_, to shine, modified into _arg_, white. Its whiteness, in fact, has supplied the designations of this metal in all parts of the world. Silver is the ‘white iron’ of the Kaffirs, the ‘white gold’ of the Afghans, the ‘white copper’ of the Vedic Indians; and the antique Accadians and Egyptians defined it by the same obvious quality.[324] The Greek _arguros_ is, then, a comparatively late word, formed, perhaps, after the Achæan tribes were already settled in their Hellenic home, when their first supplies of silver began to come in from Pontic Asia Minor.

Footnote 322:

Hehn, _Wanderings of Plants_, p. 443.

Footnote 323:

Taylor, _Origin of the Aryans_, p. 143.

Footnote 324:

Schrader and Jevons, _Antiquities of the Aryans_, pp. 154, 180-82.

The subsequence of its invention to the adoption into the Greek language of _chrusos_, gold, can be inferred from the relative paucity of proper and placenames compounded with it. Homer has only four such, while his ‘golden’ appellations number thirteen. Take as specimens the series Chryse, Chryses, and Chryseïs, designating a place in the Troad, the priest of Apollo in that place, and his daughter, all memorably connected with the tragic Wrath of Achilles. The nomenclature, no doubt, took its rise from solar associations; yet the typical relationship between gold and the sun, silver and the moon, is nowhere in the Epics directly recognised. Helios is never decorated with the epithet ‘golden’; Apollo, if he wears a golden sword, is more strongly characterised by his silver bow. Lunar mythology is ignored; nor is the ready metaphor of the ‘silver moon’ to be found in Homeric verse. The ‘apparent queen’ of the nocturnal sky does not there, as elsewhere in poetry and folk-lore, ‘throw her silver mantle o’er the dark.’ The metallic sheen, on the other hand, of water rippling in sunshine, produces its due effect in the generation of epithets; rivers being habitually called ‘silver-eddying,’ and Thetis, the Undine of the Iliad, wearing a specific badge as ‘silver-footed.’

For the concrete purposes of actual decoration, the metal was in constant Homeric demand. Heré’s chariot and the car of Rhesus shone with its delicate radiance; the chair of Penelope was spirally inwrought with silver and ivory; the greaves of Paris were silver clasped, and the sheath of his sword silver-studded; a silver hilt adorned the weapon of Achilles, and the strings of his lyre were attached to a silver yoke.[325] Of silver, too, was the tool-chest of Hephæstus; the guests of Circe ate off silver tables; the guests of Menelaus, if particularly favoured, might have bathed in silver tubs, two of which were presented to him in Egypt; and from golden ewers water was poured into silver basins for the ablutions before meals in every establishment of some pretension. The fittings shared the splendours of the furniture in Odyssean palaces. In the great hall of Alcinous, the door-posts and lintel were of silver, and golden and silver hounds, fashioned by Hephæstus, kept watch beside its golden gates. And the courts of Menelaus were resplendent with gold, bronze, silver, and electrum.

Footnote 325:

_Iliad_, i. 219; ix. 187; Buchholz, _Homerische Realien_, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 316.

The term ‘electrum,’ however, is a somewhat ambiguous one. In classical Greek, it denotes two perfectly distinct substances, one metallic, the other of organic origin—the latter, indeed, chiefly; the word came to be applied almost exclusively to _amber_. Or it may be that two primarily distinct words coalesced with time into one. Lepsius has urged the probability that the name of the metal was of the masculine form _elektros_, while amber was designated by the neuter _elektron_.[326] Nor is it unlikely that these words had separate genealogies, the first being derived from an Aryan root signifying ‘to shine,’ the second from a Semitic name for resin. Phœnician inscriptions may eventually throw light upon a point which must otherwise remain unsettled, by acquainting us with the Phœnician mode of designating amber.

Footnote 326:

_Les Métaux dans les Inscriptions Égyptiennes_, p. 60.

The metallic electrum was an alloy of gold with about twenty per cent. of silver. It occurs naturally, but was produced artificially as well, especially in Egypt, where _asem_, as it was called, came into favour long before any of the pyramids were built. It was in the Nile valley thought fit for goddesses’ wear, its pale radiance suggesting feminine refinement; and stores of it were laid up in the treasures of all the early kings. The first Lydian coinage was of electrum; many of the utensils and ornaments discovered at Hissarlik and Mycenæ prove to be similarly composed; and electrum continued in favour down to a particularly late date in the Græco-Scythic settlements on the Black Sea. It made one of its few historical appearances in the ‘white gold’ offered by Crœsus at Delphi;[327] and there are two instances of its epical employment. The ground of the Hesiodic Shield of Hercules was inlaid, the walls of the banqueting-hall of Menelaus were overlaid, with gold, electrum, and ivory. Although, in two other passages of the Odyssey, the same word undoubtedly designates amber, it is safe to affirm that here, where mural incrustations are in question, a metallic substance, none other than the immemorial _asem_ of Egypt, should be understood. Egyptian analogies, as Lepsius many years ago pointed out, strongly support this supposition, above all where Egyptian associations are so marked as in the Odyssean description of the Spartan court. Electrum is unknown in the Iliad. The word occurs only in the form _elektor_, signifying ‘the beaming sun.’

Footnote 327:

Herodotus, i. 50.

The third Homeric metal, and the most important of all, is _chalkos_. But what does _chalkos_ mean? Copper or bronze? The question is not one to be answered off-hand or categorically. It has been long and learnedly debated; and admits, perhaps, of no decision more absolute than the cautious arbitrament of Sir Roger de Coverley.

No help towards clearing up the point in dispute has been derived from etymological inquiries. The word _chalkos_ is without Aryan equivalents, and can best be explained by means of the Semitic _hhalaq_, signifying ‘metal worked with a hammer.’[328] Its primitive meaning, thus left conjectural, was most probably ‘copper.’ For, from all parts of Europe, evidence has gradually accumulated that the transition from the use of stone to the use of bronze was through a ‘copper age,’ which, though perhaps of short duration, has left relics impossible to be ignored. Indications are even forthcoming among the prehistoric ‘finds’ at Hissarlik, of the tentative processes by which copper was improved into bronze.[329] The lower strata of ruins on the site of ancient Troy contained articles and implements of approximately pure copper; nearer the surface, a sensible ingredient of tin was added, augmented, here and there, to the normal proportion for bronze of about twelve per cent. At Mycenæ, domestic vessels were fabricated of copper, weapons and ornamental objects of bronze; and a copper saw, dug from beneath the lavas of Santorin, gives corroborative evidence of the early Greek use of the unalloyed metal.

Footnote 328:

Lenormant, _Antiquités de la Troade_, p. 11.

Footnote 329:

_Ib._ p. 10.

_Chalkos_, then, must, to begin with, have denoted copper, and indeed it partially preserves that sense in the Homeric poems. The cargo, for example, taken on board at Temesé, in Cyprus, by the Taphian king Mentes,[330] must have been of pure copper, the distinctively ‘Cyprian’ metal. The port of Temesé, afterwards Tamassos, be it observed, was a Phœnician establishment, and bore a Phœnician name denoting ‘smelting-house,’ both instructive circumstances as regards the agency by which metallic supplies were transmitted westward.[331] Again, when Achilles enumerated with gold and ‘grey iron,’ red _chalkos_ as forming part of his wealth,[332] he could have meant nothing but unadulterated copper. The colour-adjective does not recur, but its employment this once strongly supports the inference that the unwrought _chalkos_, frequently spoken of as stored for future use or barter, was without sensible admixture of tin.

Footnote 330:

_Odyssey_, i. 184.

Footnote 331:

Schrader and Jevons, _op. cit._ p. 196; Buchholz, _Homer. Real._ Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 326.

Footnote 332:

_Iliad_, ix. 365.

This inference, however, cannot reasonably be carried further. Homeric armour was altogether of _chalkos_, and it would be absurd to suppose that the ‘well-greaved Greeks’ went into action copper-clad. This on two grounds. In the first place, archæological research has proved to demonstration that bronze was fully and freely available in the late Mycenæan age, when Homer, there is good reason to believe, flourished. Articles composed of it must have been continually before his eyes and within his grasp. Unless he deliberately elected, which is inconceivable, to exclude from his poems all mention of a material of primary importance to the known arts, his _chalkos_ was a term sufficiently comprehensive to embrace _both_ bronze and copper. In the second place, pure copper could not have played the part assigned to it. Its inadequacy as a material for weapons or armour should promptly have led to its rejection. Assuredly it could neither have sustained, nor been the means of inflicting, the heavy blows and buffets exchanged by the heroes of the Trojan War. The mere fact of the shattering of Menelaus’s sword against the helmet of Paris[333] is conclusive as to its having been made of a less yielding substance than copper;[334] and the hardening process, by sudden cooling, imagined with the view to removing the difficulty, has been pronounced, on the authority of experts, impracticable.[335] The rigidity and occasional brittleness of the Homeric _chalkos_ was imparted to it, we may be quite sure, by the tin mixed with it.

Footnote 333:

_Iliad_, iii. 363.

Footnote 334:

Riedenauer, _Handwerk und Handwerker_, p. 103.

Footnote 335:

Blümner, _Technologie_, Bd. iv. p. 51.

Moreover, it is incredible that the Homeric Greeks, although acquainted with iron, had no share in the bronze-culture flourishing, then and previously, along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. The persistence, anywhere in that region, of so late, and so extraordinarily developed a copper age, would indeed be a glaring anomaly. Already,[336] in the third millennium B.C., bronze tools were used in Egypt; and under the name _zabar_, whence the Arabic _zifr_, bronze was fabricated by Sumero-Accadian metallurgists at the very outset of Mesopotamian civilisation.[337] It was, in fact, probably from Mesopotamia that knowledge of the art and its attendant advantages was carried westward by Sidonian traffickers. Customers, then, who, like the Achæans, procured from them plentiful supplies of copper, and a smaller quantity of tin, could not long have remained ignorant of the vast superiority of their alloyed over their separate condition. The conclusion is inevitable that _chalkos_, like the corresponding Hebrew term _nechosheth_, and the Egyptian _chomt_, was a word of some elasticity of meaning, designating ordinarily bronze, but occasionally copper. The translation, it need hardly be said, of any of the three by the English _brass_ involves a gross error. Copper was not systematically alloyed with zinc until about the second century B.C.[338]

Footnote 336:

Perrot et Chipiez, _Histoire de l’Art_, t. i. p. 829; Beck (_Gesch. des Eisens_, p. 79) considers, however, that no Egyptian bronzes yet analysed go back beyond the eighteenth dynasty, about 1700 B.C.

Footnote 337:

Lenormant, _Trans. Soc. Bibl, Archæology_, vol. vi. p. 344.

Footnote 338:

Blümner, _Technologie_, Bd. iv. p. 199.

But the bronze industry of old must have been seriously hampered in its growth and spread by the scarcity of tin. This metal is of most restricted distribution. The reservoirs of it held by the earth are few and far apart. The two principal, in Cornwall and the Malaccan peninsula respectively, are ‘wide as the poles asunder.’ Yet its discovery goes back to a hoar antiquity, and its prehistoric use was extensive and continuous. This wide dispersion of so scarce an article gives cogent proof of unexpectedly early intercourse between remote populations, and strikingly illustrates the effectiveness of those gradual processes of primitive trade by which desirable commodities permeated continents, and reached the least accessible markets.

The earliest historical source of tin was in the Cassiterides, or ‘tin-islands’ of Britain; and there can be no doubt, geographical mystifications notwithstanding, that the tin thence derived came, directly or indirectly, from Cornwall. Not improbably, the staple of the Phœnician tin-trade was in the Isle of Wight, which accordingly became the representative tin-island.[339] But this is questionable. What is certain is, that the metal was transported overland to the Gulf of Lyons long before the Phœnicians passed the Pillars of Hercules, and was available, much earlier still, in Egypt and Assyria. The Cornish was not, then, the first source of supply to be opened, nor was the Malaccan. Tin was, in fact, an article of export from Alexandria to India down to the beginning of the Christian era. The modern discovery, however, of tin-mines in Khorassan, the ancient Drangiana, irresistibly suggests that the primitive bronze-workers derived the less plentiful material of their industry from the Paropamisus, and tends to confirm the Turanian lineage imputed to them by Lenormant.[340]

Footnote 339:

Blümner, _Technologie_, Bd. iv. p. 86.

Footnote 340:

Von Baer, _Archiv für Anthropologie_, Bd. ix. p. 266; Blümner, _Technologie_, Bd. iv. p. 84.

The Homeric name for tin, _kassiteros_, is at any rate clearly of Oriental origin. The Greeks adopted it from the Phœnicians; the Phœnicians _may_, it is thought, have picked it up from Accadian bronze-smiths along the shores of the Persian Gulf. It survives in the Arabic _kasdîr_, and under the form _kastîra_ made its way into Sanskrit, on the occasion of Alexander’s invasion of the Punjâb. Pure tin ranked with Homer almost as a precious metal. Its scarcity gave it prestige; but he had evidently very little acquaintance with its qualities. As Helbig remarks,[341] difficulties of interpretation arise wherever _kassiteros_ is brought on the scene. A good deal of critical discomfort, for instance, has been created by the statement that greaves of tin were included in the warlike outfit supplied to Achilles from Olympus. And bewilderment is heightened later on by the defensive power they are made to exhibit in the hardest trials of actual battle. In point of fact, they would have been as ineffective as papier-maché against the thrust of Agenor’s spear; and their clattering would scarcely have produced the awe-inspiring effect ascribed to it in the following passage.

Footnote 341:

_Das Homerische Epos_, p. 285.

He [Agenor] said, and hurled his sharp spear with weighty hand, and smote him [Achilles] on the leg beneath the knee, nor missed his mark, and the greave of new-wrought tin rang terribly on him; but the bronze bounded back from him it smote, nor pierced him, for the god’s gift drave it back.[342]

Footnote 342:

_Iliad_, xxi. 591-94; cf. Blümner, _Technologie_, Bd. iv. p. 53.

Elsewhere in the Iliad, tin is employed ornamentally, as it was on the pottery of the ancient pile-dwellers of Savoy.[343] But the poet is much more sparing of it than he is of either gold or silver. Even his imaginary stores appear to be strictly limited. ‘Relucent tin,’ however, bordered the breastplate presented by Achilles to Eumelus as a consolation-prize in the Patroclean games; the chariot of Diomed was ‘overlaid with gold and tin’;[344] the cuirass of Agamemnon was inlaid with parallel stripes, and the buckler of Agamemnon decorated with bosses of tin.

Footnote 343:

Dawkins, _Early Man in Britain_, p. 402.

Footnote 344:

_Iliad_, xxiii. 503.

The metal was also turned to account by Hephæstus for the purpose of adding to the effect and variety of his delineations on the Shield of Achilles. But we get no hint as to how it came into Achæan hands; no rich man’s treasure contains it; and it drops completely out of sight in the Odyssey.

Tin corrodes so readily that its extreme archæological rarity is not surprising. None has been found, either at Mycenæ or in any part of the stratified débris at Hissarlik.[345] Lead, on the other hand, has been disinterred from all the Trojan cities, and was in use at Mycenæ, both pure, and alloyed with silver. Among the objects brought to light there was a leaden figure of Aphrodite, doubtless an idol,[346] and a vessel in stag-shape composed of silver mixed with half its weight of lead.[347] The latter substance is unmentioned in the Odyssey, but is twice familiarly alluded to in the Iliad. Its cheapness and commonness can be gathered from the circumstance incidentally disclosed, that poor fishermen attached pieces of it as weights to their lines.[348] Its quality of softness comes in to illustrate the ease with which the spear of Iphidamas was turned by the silver in the belt of Agamemnon.[349]

Footnote 345:

Schliemann, _Troy_, pp. 31, 162.

Footnote 346:

Schuchhardt and Sellers, _op. cit._ p. 67.

Footnote 347:

Schliemann, _Mycenæ_, p. 257.

Footnote 348:

_Iliad_, xxiv. 80.

Footnote 349:

_Ib._ xi. 237.

Tin and lead made part of the booty taken in the land of Midian by the Israelites, as well as of the Asiatic tribute paid to early Egyptian conquerors. But the lead disposed of by the Achæans of the Iliad was most likely brought by the Phœnicians from southern Spain; and the surmise is plausible that the Homeric word, _molubdos_—lead—-otherwise isolated and unexplained, may have been transferred, by the same agency, from the perishing Iberian to the vigorous Greek tongue.[350]

Footnote 350:

Schrader, _Prehistoric Antiquities_, p. 217.

The Greek name for iron, _sideros_, is equally destitute of known affinities. It has, indeed, sometimes been deemed cognate with the Latin _sidus_, a star, on the ground that meteoric, or star-sent iron was the earliest form of the metal made available for human purposes; but modern philologists do not see their way to admitting the connexion. The coincidence is impressive, yet may, none the less, be wholly misleading.

The Homeric poems testify to everyday experience of the powers and faculties of iron. In the Iliad, knives are made of it, and rustic implements of all sorts; iron-tipped arrows are sped from tough bows; iron axes perform the rough work of the forest and farm-yard. The Odyssean functions of the metal cover a still wider range. The iron age, just beginning in the first Epic, has pretty well made good its footing in the second. Thus, Beloch[351] has pointed out that, while _chalkos_ is mentioned 279, _sideros_ only 23 times in the Iliad, the proportion has become, in the Odyssey, 80 to 29; and his detailed analysis partially supports the conclusion that iron comes most prominently into view in the latest portions of both poems. Yet no amount of skill in critical carving can divide off a section of either in which ignorance of the metal prevails. The differences are only in degrees of acquaintanceship.

Footnote 351:

_Rivista di Filologia_, t. ii. p. 55.

The diversity in this respect between the Odyssey and Iliad can be perceived at a glance by contrasting the weapons Odysseus left behind him at Ithaca with those he wielded before Troy. The first set were of iron, probably of steel, the existence of which is implied in the practice of tempering by immersion in cold water, referred to in connexion with the feat of plunging a hot stake into the vast orbit of the Cyclops’ solitary eye.

And from the burning eye-ball the fierce steam Singed all his brows, and the deep roots of sight Crackled with fire. As when in the cold stream Some smith the axe untempered, fiery white, Dips hissing; for thence comes the iron’s might; So did his eye hiss, and he roared again.[352]

Footnote 352:

_Odyssey_, ix. 391-95 (Worsley’s trans.).

Iron or steel has even reached, in the Odyssey, the stage of proverbial familiarity as the material for arms. _Sideros_ stands for sword in a maxim which may be translated ‘Cold steel masters the man,’[353] signifying that when weapons are at hand, bloodshed is not far off. In the Iliad, on the contrary, swords and spears are invariably of bronze; and the commentators’ _caveat_ marks the lines presenting the iron-headed arrow of Pandarus, and the iron mace of Areithöus. The passage, too, is not exempt from their suspicions, in which Achilles offers, as prizes in the Funeral Games, a ‘massy clod’ of freshly-smelted iron, and two sets of iron axe-heads.

Footnote 353:

_Ib._ xvi. 294.

The scanty use made of _sideros_ in the compounding of Homeric epithets,[354] no less than its total neglect in the formation of proper names, is a further argument for the comparatively late introduction of the metal. More especially when the plentifulness of derivatives from _chalkos_ is taken into consideration. Nevertheless, a good deal of allowance has to be made, in this matter, for what may be called ethnical caprice. So the Teutons excluded copper from among the elements of their local and personal appellations, while admitting gold and iron; those of the Slavs were coined from gold, silver, and iron; the Celts excluding from employment for the purpose all the metals except iron.[355] More decisive is the designation of a smith as _chalkeus_, irrespective of the particular metal wrought by him, showing that the term had been fixed when neither gold nor iron, but only copper or bronze, was welded in Achæan forges. _Nam prior æris fuit quam ferri cognitus usus._

Footnote 354:

Beloch, _loc. cit._ p. 50.

Footnote 355:

Schrader and Jevons, _op. cit._ p. 194.

Iron, copper, and gold served as the Homeric media of exchange. Definitions of value, however, are always by head of oxen. The golden armour of Glaucus, for instance, was worth one hundred, the bronze equipment of Diomed, inconsiderately taken in exchange by the chivalrous Lycian, no more than nine oxen,[356] and the figures may be considered to represent the proportionate value of those two metals. Iron probably occupied an intermediate position. It must, however, have been much cheaper in Ithaca than in the Troad. For, since the Taphians are said to have conveyed it in ships to Cyprus, where they bartered it for copper, it was evidently mined and smelted in notable quantities on the mainland of Epirus.

Footnote 356:

_Iliad_, vi. 235.

Iron has no decorative function in the Homeric Poems. It contributes nothing to the polymetallic splendours of the palaces of Menelaus and Alcinous, of the Shield of Achilles, or of the Breastplate of Agamemnon. Except where it furnishes an axletree for the chariot of Heré, it is never employed in purposeful combination with any other substance. Esteem, rather than admiration, seems, in fact, to be considered its due. Its colour is described, usually as grey, sometimes as violet; and the distinction may possibly, as has been supposed,[357] mark the observed difference between the hoary appearance of newly fractured iron, and the bluish gleam of steel blades. Nevertheless, an arbitrary element in Homeric tints has often to be admitted. Iron is, however, chiefly characterised in the Iliad and Odyssey—and with indisputable justice—as ‘hard to work.’ It demands, indeed, far more strenuous treatment than its ancient rival, copper; and the difficulties connected with its production and working long retarded the prevalence of its use. Metallurgy advanced but slowly to the point of being dominated by its influence.

Footnote 357:

Buchholz, _Homer. Realien_, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 335.

This was probably first reached in Mesopotamia. Some Chaldean graves have been found to contain immense quantities of iron, of the best quality, and wrought with the finest skill.[358] One, opened by Place at Khorsabad, was a veritable magazine of chains and implements, still recognisable, though of course partly devoured by rust. They dated from about the eighth century B.C.; but the metal had been in some degree available for ages previously. In Egypt, although _men_ (iron) may have been known under the early Memphite dynasties, the nature of the hieroglyph employed to denote it proves that copper had the precedence. Utensils of iron were enumerated among the spoils of Thothmes III., in the seventeenth century, B.C.;[359] _barzel_ has a place in the Books of Moses, and was wrought at Tyre in the days of king Hiram, and no doubt indefinitely earlier. The Latin _ferrum_, indeed (equivalent to the Semitic _barezum_) testifies, it is held, to the Phœnician introduction of the metal to Italy in the twelfth century, B.C.[360]

Footnote 358:

Perrot et Chipiez, _Hist. de l’Art dans l’Antiquité_, t. ii. p. 720.

Footnote 359:

Lepsius, _Les Métaux dans les Inscriptions Égyptiennes_, p. _missing page_ See this transcriber note.

Footnote 360:

Taylor, _Origin of the Aryans_, p. 145.

Its still earlier diffusion through Greece is only, then, what might have been expected: and the complete acquaintance with it manifested in the Homeric poems conveys, in itself, no presumption of lateness in their origin. But there are archæological difficulties. Prehistoric iron is unaccountably scarce in the neighbourhood of the Ægean. True, it is of a perishable nature; but where not even a ferruginous stain survives, it is difficult to believe that objects made out of iron once existed. Until lately, iron was believed to be entirely absent from the ruins both at Hissarlik and Mycenæ, as well as from those of Orchomenos and Tiryns. But in 1890, Dr. Schliemann, in clearing the foundations of a building on the Trojan Pergamus, came upon two lumps of the missing substance; and some finger-rings composed of it are among the trophies of the recent excavations carried on in the lower city of Mycenæ, under the auspices of the Greek Archæological Society.[361] But the metal was then evidently very rare, although the ‘bee-hive tombs,’ where it was discovered, belong to a later stage of Mycenæan history than the ‘shaft-graves’ of the citadel. Still, the gap previously supposed to divide, at this point, the Homeric from the Mycenæan world, has to a certain extent been bridged; and other discrepancies may, in like manner, be qualified, if not removed, by further research.

Footnote 361:

Schuchhardt, _op. cit._ pp. 332, 296.

The metals chiefly employed in Homeric verse to typify abstract qualities are bronze and iron. The Shakespearian use of ‘golden’ to convey delightfulness of almost any kind, as in the expressions ‘_golden_ cadence of poesy,’ ‘a _golden_ mind,’ ‘_golden_ joys,’ ‘_golden_ sleep,’ and so on, is paralleled only by the Homeric ‘_golden_ Aphrodite.’ Lead does not exemplify, with the Greek poet, heaviness and sloth, nor silver the gentle ripple of sweet sounds. But death, as ‘a sleep of bronze,’ comes before us in all its unrelenting sternness; Stentor has a ‘voice of bronze;’ a ‘memory of bronze’ was needed for exceptional feats of recitation; and the ‘iron noise’ of battle went up to a ‘bronzen sky’ during the struggle ensuing upon the fall of Patroclus. In the Odyssey, the sky is alternately of bronze and of iron, the same idea of stability—of a ‘brave, o’erhanging firmament’ being conveyed by both epithets.[362] Moreover, iron is there the recognised symbol of pitilessness, strength of mind, and self-command. Odysseus listens, masked in an ‘aspect of iron,’ while Penelope, strangely touched by his still unrecognised presence, recites the weary story of her sorrows. A heart _steeled_—as we should say—against pity was said to be ‘of iron,’ as was that of Achilles against Hector in the days of his ‘iron indignation’ at the slaying of his loved comrade; and silence and secrecy, even in a woman, were represented by the rigidity of that unbending metal. Such metaphors occur, it is true, more frequently in the Odyssey than in the Iliad; but the conception upon which they are founded is present throughout the whole sphere of Homeric thought. There are, nevertheless, as we have seen, clearly definable differences, in the matter of metallic acquisitions, between the two great Epics. The Iliad knows six, while the Odyssey refers only to four of these substances, tin and lead not chancing to be noticed in its cantos; and iron, in their record, has made a considerable advance upon its Iliadic status. This is unquestionably a circumstance to be taken into account in attempting to deal with the Homeric problem.

Footnote 362:

Hayman’s _Odyssey_, vol. i. p. 63.