CHAPTER IX.THE METALS IN HOMER.

Theundivided 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 formayas, in Latin,æs; it is represented by the GermanErz, equivalent to the Englishore; and, after drifting through a Celtic channel, took a new meaning and form asEisen, oriron.[310]The original signification of the term wascopper; 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 unsophisticatedtaste 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 blueayas,’ayashaving come to mean metal in general; and a specific sign (possibly that forhardness) 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.

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.

311.Lepsius,Les Métaux dans les Inscriptions Égyptiennes, p. 55.

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.

313.Lenormant,Trans. Soc. Bibl. Archæology, vol. vi. p. 345.

Gold was with Homer supreme among terrestrialsubstances. 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 enhanceddegree 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.

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

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 latterin 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 theauri sacra famesin the Greek mind. That this was so the Greek language itself tells plainly. Forchrusos, gold, is a Semitic loanword, closely related to the Hebrewchârûz, but taken immediately, there can be no reasonable doubt, from the Phœnician. The restless treasure-seekers from Tyre were, indeed, as the Græco-Semitic termmetalintimates,[316]the original subterranean explorers of the Balkan peninsula. As early, probably, as the fifteenth centuryB.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 Phœnicianshad 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.

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.

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 thousandmillion 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 Greekchalups, steel, and survives with ourselves inchalybeatewaters. 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]

318.Blümner,Technologie der Gewerbe, Bd. iv. pp. 28-32.

319.Iliad, ii. 857.

320.Geog.xii. 3.

321.Rougemont,L’Âge de Bronze, p. 169; Riedenauer,Handwerk und Handwerker, p. 101.

The wordsilver(Gothic,silubr) has even been conjecturally associated with the Homeric Alybé;[322]while other philologists prefer to regard it as equivalent to the Assyriansarpu.[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 Greekargurosand the Latinargentum, although closely related, are really different words. That is to say, they were formed independently from the common root,ark, to shine, modified intoarg, 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 Greekargurosis, 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.

322.Hehn,Wanderings of Plants, p. 443.

323.Taylor,Origin of the Aryans, p. 143.

324.Schrader and Jevons,Antiquities of the Aryans, pp. 154, 180-82.

The subsequence of its invention to the adoption into the Greek language ofchrusos, 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, andChryseïs, 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.

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 toamber. 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 formelektros, while amber was designated by the neuterelektron.[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 apoint which must otherwise remain unsettled, by acquainting us with the Phœnician mode of designating amber.

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, whereasem, 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 immemorialasemof Egypt, should be understood. Egyptian analogies, as Lepsius manyyears 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 formelektor, signifying ‘the beaming sun.’

327.Herodotus, i. 50.

The third Homeric metal, and the most important of all, ischalkos. But what doeschalkosmean? 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 wordchalkosis without Aryan equivalents, and can best be explained by means of the Semitichhalaq, 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.

328.Lenormant,Antiquités de la Troade, p. 11.

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,’ redchalkosas 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 unwroughtchalkos, frequentlyspoken of as stored for future use or barter, was without sensible admixture of tin.

330.Odyssey, i. 184.

331.Schrader and Jevons,op. cit.p. 196; Buchholz,Homer. Real.Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 326.

332.Iliad, ix. 365.

This inference, however, cannot reasonably be carried further. Homeric armour was altogether ofchalkos, 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, hischalkoswas a term sufficiently comprehensive to embracebothbronze 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 Homericchalkoswas imparted to it, we may be quite sure, by the tin mixed with it.

333.Iliad, iii. 363.

334.Riedenauer,Handwerk und Handwerker, p. 103.

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 millenniumB.C., bronze tools were used in Egypt; and under the namezabar, whence the Arabiczifr, 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 thatchalkos, like the corresponding Hebrew termnechosheth, and the Egyptianchomt, 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 Englishbrassinvolves a gross error. Copper was not systematically alloyed with zinc until about the second centuryB.C.[338]

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 1700B.C.

337.Lenormant,Trans. Soc. Bibl, Archæology, vol. vi. p. 344.

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 representativetin-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]

339.Blümner,Technologie, Bd. iv. p. 86.

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 Phœniciansmay, it is thought, have picked it up from Accadian bronze-smiths along the shores of the Persian Gulf. It survives in the Arabickasdîr, and under the formkastîramade 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 whereverkassiterosisbrought 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.

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]

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.

343.Dawkins,Early Man in Britain, p. 402.

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]

345.Schliemann,Troy, pp. 31, 162.

346.Schuchhardt and Sellers,op. cit.p. 67.

347.Schliemann,Mycenæ, p. 257.

348.Iliad, xxiv. 80.

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 theAsiatic 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]

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 Latinsidus, 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, whilechalkosis mentioned 279,siderosonly23 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.

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 steamSinged all his brows, and the deep roots of sightCrackled with fire. As when in the cold streamSome 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]

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]

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.Siderosstands for sword in a maxim which may be translated ‘Cold steel masters the man,’[353]signifying that when weapons are at hand, bloodshed isnot far off. In the Iliad, on the contrary, swords and spears are invariably of bronze; and the commentators’caveatmarks 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.

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