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Reichel's hypothesis is that the heroes of the original poet had no defensive armour except the great Mycenaean shields; that the ponderous shield made the use of chariots imperatively necessary; that, after the Mycenaean age, a small buckler and a corslet superseded the unwieldy shield; that chariots were no longer used; that, by the seventh century B.C., a warrior could not be thought of without a breastplate; and that new poets thrust corslets and greaves into songs both new and old.
Nothing can be less like a chiton or smock, loose or tight, than either the double-bellied huge shield, the tower-shaped cylindrical shield, or the flat, doorlike shield, covering body and legs in Mycenaean art. "The bronze chiton," says Helbig, "is only a poetic phrase for the corslet." Reichel and Mr.
Meanders, lozenges, and zigzags. Circles joined by tangents replace Mycenaean spirals. Ornament crowded. Rows or single specimens of long-legged water birds. Human figures rare, rude angular silhouettes. Shapes fewer and curves less flowing. Amphorae, plates, bowls, and jugs. Trefoil lip to jug first appears. Terra-cotta loom weights from now onwards often pyramidal in form and glazed. Bronzes.
A big leather shield could keep out stone-tipped arrows; but as bronze-tipped arrows came in and also heavy bronze-pointed spears, defensive armour was necessarily strengthened; the shield was plated with bronze, and, if it did not exist before, the bronze corslet was developed. To keep out stone-tipped arrows was the business of the Mycenaean wooden or leather shield.
This is commonly called Dipylon pottery, from the fact that the cemetery near the Dipylon, the chief gate of ancient Athens, has supplied the greatest number of specimens. Some of these Dipylon vases are of great size and served as funeral monuments. It is four feet high. Both the shape and the decoration are very different from those of the Mycenaean style.
The science of this remarkable ignoramus, in this view, accounts for his being aware that pelts of animals were in vogue as coverlets, just as fur dressing-gowns were worn in the sixteenth century, and he introduces them precisely as he leaves corslets out, because he knows that pelts of fur were in use, and that, in the Mycenaean prime, corslets were not worn.
This kind of shield, the kind known to Homer, was not the invention of late poets living in an age of circular bucklers, worn on the left arm, and these supposed late poets never introduce into the epics such bucklers. What manner of military needs prompted the invention of the great Mycenaean shields which, by Homer's time, were differentiated by the addition of metal plating?
The probability, then, seems to be that while the technique of the dagger-blades was directly or indirectly derived from Egypt, the specimens found at Mycenae were of local manufacture. The greatest triumph of the goldsmith's art in the "Mycenaean" period does not come from Mycenae.
But if we judge from their shape, as represented in works of Mycenaean art, some of the Mycenaean shields were not of wood, but of hide. There also exists a set of small Mycenaean relics called Palladia, found at Mycenae, Spata and in the earliest strata of the Acropolis at Athens.
It also prompted them to describe all shields as made on the far-away old Mycenaean model, though they were themselves used to small circular bucklers, with a bracer and a grip, worn on the left arm.
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