Such personal armorial bearings are never mentioned by Homer. It is not usually safe to argue, from his silence, that he is ignorant of anything. He never mentions seals or signet rings, yet they cannot but have been familiar to his time. Odysseus does not seal the chest with the Phaeacian presents; he ties it up with a cunning knot; there are no rings named among the things wrought by Hephaestus, nor among the offerings of the Wooers of Penelope. {Footnote: Helbig citing Odyssey, VIII. 445-448; Iliad, XVIII. 401; Odyssey, xviii. 292-301.}
But, if we are to admit that Homer knew not rings and seals, which lasted to the latest Mycenaean times, through the Dipylon age, to the very late AEginetan treasure (800 B.C.) in the British Museum, and appear again in the earliest dawn of the classical age and in a Cyclic poem, it is plain that all the expansionists lived in one, and that a most peculiar ringlessage. This view suits our argument to a wish, but it is not credible that rings and seals and engraved stones, so very common in Mycenaean and later times, should have vanished wholly in the Homeric time. The poet never mentions them, just as Shakespeare never mentions a thing so familiar to him as tobacco. How often are finger rings mentioned in the whole mass of Attic tragic poetry? We remember no example, and instances are certainly rare: Liddell and Scott give none. Yet the tragedians were, of course, familiar with rings and seals.
Manifestly, we cannot say that Homer knew no seals, because he mentions none; but armorial blazons on shields could be ignored by no poet of war, if they existed.
Meanwhile, the shields of the warriors on the vase, being circular and covering body and legs, answer most closely to Homer's descriptions. Helbig is reduced to suggest, first, that these shields are worn by men aboard ship, as if warriors had one sort of shield when aboard ship and another when fighting on land, and as if the men in the other vessel were not equally engaged in a sea fight. No evidence in favour of such difference of practice, by sea and land, is offered. Again, Helbig does not trust the artist, in this case, though the artist is usually trusted to draw what he sees; and why should he give the men in the other ship or boat small bucklers, genuine, while bedecking the warriors in the adverse vessel with large, purely imaginary shields? {Footnote: Helbig, Das Homerische Epos, ii. pp. 313-314.} It is not in the least "probable," as Helbig suggests, that the artist is shirking the trouble of drawing the figure.
Reichel supposes that round bucklers were novelties when the vase was painted (seventh century), and that the artist did not understand how to depict them. {Footnote: Homerische Waffen, p. 47.} But he depicted them very well as regards the men in the galley, save that, for obvious aesthetic reasons, he chose to assume that the men in the galley were left-handed and wore their shields on their right arms, his desire being to display the blazons of both parties. {Footnote: See the same arrangement in a Dipylon vase. Baumeister, Denkmaler, iii. p. 1945.} We thus see, if the artist may be trusted, that shields, which both "reached to the feet" and were circular, existed in his time (the seventh century), so that possibly they may have existed in Homer's time and survived into the age of small bucklers. Tyrtaeus (late seventh century), as Helbig remarks, speaks of "a wideshield, covering thighs, shins, breast, and shoulders." {Footnote: Tyrtaeus, xi. 23; Helbig, Das Homerische Epos, ii. p. 315, Note 2.}
Nothing can be more like the large shields of the vase of Aristonothos. Thus the huge circular shield seems to have been a practicable shield in actual use. If so, when Homer spoke of large circular shields he may have meant large circular shields. On the Dodwell pyxis of 650 to 620 B.C., a man wears an oval shield, covering him from the base of the neck to the ankles. He wears it on his left arm. {Footnote: Walters, Ancient Pottery, p. 316.}
Of shields certainly small and light, worn by the chiefs, there is not a notice in the Iliad, unless there be a hint to that effect in the accounts of heroes running, walking considerable distances, and "stepping lightly" under shields, supposed, by the critics, to be of crushing weight. In such passages the poet may be carried away by his own verve, or the heroes of ancient times may be deemed capable of exertions beyond those of the poet's contemporaries, as he often tells us that, in fact, the old heroes were. A poet is not a scientific military writer; and in the epic poetry of all other early races very gross exaggeration is permitted, as in the {blank space} the old Celtic romances, and, of course, the huge epics of India. In Homer "the skill of the poet makes things impossible convincing," Aristotle says; and it is a critical error to insist on taking Homer absolutely and always au pied de la lettre. He seems, undeniably, to have large body-covering shields present to his mind as in common use.
Small shields of the Greek historic period are "unknown to Homer," Mr. Leaf says, "with a very few curious exceptions," {Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. p. 575.} detected by Reichel in Book X. 15 {Footnote: Ibid,vol. i. p. 569, fig. 2.}, where Diomede's men sleep with their heads resting on their shields, whereas a big-bellied Mycenaean shield rises, he says, too high for a pillow. But some Mycenzean shields were perfectly flat; while, again, nothing could be more comfortable, as a head-rest, than the hollow between the upper and lower bulges of the Mycenzean huge shield. The Zulu wooden head-rest is of the same character. Thus this passage in Book X. does not prove that small circular shields were known to Homer, nor does X. 5 13. 526-530, an obscure text in which it is uncertain whether Diomede and Odysseus ride or drive the horses of Rhesus. They couldride, as every one must see, even though equipped with great body-covering shields. True, the shielded hero could neither put his shield at his back nor in front of him when he rode; but he could hang it sidewise, when it would cover his left side, as in the early Middle Ages (1060-1160 A.D.).
The taking of the shield from a man's shoulders (XI. 374) does not prove the shield to be small; the shield hung by the belt ( telamon) from the shoulder. {Footnote: On the other side, see Reichel, Homerische Waffen, pp. 40-44. Wien, 1901. We have replied to his arguments above.}
So far we have the results that Homer seems most familiar with vast body-covering shields; that such shields were suspended by a baldric, not worn on the left arm; that they were made of layers of hide, plated with bronze, and that such a shield as Aias wore must have been tall, doubtless oblong, "like a tower," possibly it was semi-cylindrical. Whether the epithets denoting roundness refer to circular shields or to the double targe, g-shaped, of Mycenaean times is uncertain.
We thus come to a puzzle of unusual magnitude. If Homer does not know small circular shields, but refers always to huge shields, whereas, from the eighth century B.C. onwards, such shields were not in use (disregarding Tyrtaeus, and the vase of Aristonothos on which they appear conspicuously, and the Dodwell pyxis), where are we? Either we have a harmonious picture of war from a very ancient date of large shields, or late poets did not introduce the light round buckler of their own period. Meanwhile they are accused of introducing the bronze corslets and other defensive armour of their own period. Defensive armour was unknown, we are told, in the Mycenaean prime, which, if true, does not affect the question. Homer did not live in or describe the Mycenaean prime, with its stone arrow-tips. Why did the late poets act so inconsistently? Why were they ignorant of small circular shields, which they saw every day? Or why, if they knew them, did they not introduce them in the poems, which, we are told, they were filling with non-Mycenaean greaves and corslets?