The World of Homer
designs, but do not know where it now is.
[16] See Note to this chapter, "Shield and Body Armour."
[17] _R. G. E._ p. 143.
[18] _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 576.
[19] _Ibid._ vii. 206-209. Mr. Leaf's translation, 1906, p. 134.
[20] Iliad, iii. 114, 115.
[21] iii. 134, 135.
[22] Against this opinion may be cited Odyssey, xxii. 108-114, where
the only protective armour used by the men of Odysseus is helmets and
shields, yet the formulae of "doing on bronze over the flesh," and
"donning the fair pieces of armour" are employed. To myself it may
seem that these are epic formulae which arose in a period of corslets
but are used where no corslets were being worn, in the fight with the
Wooers. Mr. Murray, however, takes the absence of specific mention
of corslets in the Odyssey generally as a proof of his theory that
"the _Odyssey_ has been altogether less worked over, expurgated,
and modernised than what books still persist in calling without
qualification 'the older poem'" (_R. G. E._ pp. 145, 146). Here he
has to discover why the Odyssey, according to critics, has (in his
view) been "worked over and modernised" as regards the house and the
bride-price, while in a few fighting passages the warriors are left in
the supposed state of Aegean nakedness, save for the shield, which,
unlike Mycenaean shields, has a bronze plating, as in the _Iliad_. Mr.
Murray (_R. G. E._ p. 137, note 1) grants that armour of bronze "may
have been, in some elements, a revival of something long forgotten...."
but was still unaware that the seals of Haghia Triada represent a man
in a cuirass of plate, a thick belt of plate, and a mailed kirtle.
[23] _Homer and the Iliad_, p. 212.
[24] _Monumenti Antichi_, vol. xiii., 1903, pp. 42, 114.
[25] _B. S. A_., vol. xii. p. opposite plate A.
[26] _Ibid._., vol. xiv., plate vii. A.
[27] Savignoni, _Mon. Ant._, 1903, p. 114.
[28] When disposing, in sixteen lines (_R. G. E_. 154, note I), of my
_Homer and his Age_, Mr. Murray oddly represents me as maintaining
that the body armour of Paris and Hector was "soft and very baggy like
a Minoan cope." As at that time I had never consciously heard of this
famous "Minoan cope," I never dreamed of such a thing as "soft and
very baggy" armour in the _Iliad_, though I know the Protestant silk
armour during "the Popish Plot." In fact, judging from the designs in
_Monumenti Antichi_, the Minoan cope was of hard material.
Messrs. Hogarth and Bosanquet also report on "a very remarkable
'Mycenaean' bronze breast-plate" from Crete, which "shows four female
draped figures, the two central are holding a wreath over a bird,
below which is a sacred tree. The two outer figures are dancing. It is
probably a ritual scene, and may help to elucidate the nature of early
Aegean cults, in which female worshippers and sacred trees and birds
are common." _J. H. S_., vol. xix., 1899, p. 322.
[29] _Iliad_, xvi. 134.
[30] Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 580, citing Studniczka, p. 59.
[31] The "taslets" of Dugald Dalgetty (1645) were thigh pieces
(cuisses), as in seventh to sixth century Greek art.
[32] I had written this before the publication of Miss Stawell's _Homer
and the Iliad_. In pp. 204-206, she has taken the word out of my mouth.
[33] _Iliad_, iv. 141-144.
[34] On the affair of Menelaus, see Leaf, vol. i. p. 581, and note
I, where Mr. Leaf thinks the clasping of the corslet in front "an
unreasonable arrangement." Mr. Murray (_R. G. E_. pp. 144, 145)
also takes it that there was "a solid metal breast-plate." The term
_γύαλον_ (_Iliad_, v. 99), where an arrow hits "hard by Diomede's
right shoulder the plate of his corslet," may refer to the broad plate
over the shoulder-strap; some of the corslets of two metal plates have
shoulder-straps in art. We really cannot expect to understand every
detail with certainty, while we have no actual examples of the corslets
and shields of many early centuries before our eyes. Mr. Ridgeway
believes the body armour of the Achaeans to have been hauberks of
bronze scales or small plates, not back-and breast-plates as in seventh
and early sixth century art. He illustrates by many bronze studs found
at Koracev and Ilijak in Bosnia, of the Glasinatz epoch (_Early Age of
Greece_, vol. i. pp. 435, 436). Such a hauberk would well correspond
to that worn by "the bronze-shirted Achaeans." The hauberk would be "a
shirt of leather," with "small pieces of bronze, either in the form
of studs, or scales, or rings, or by the addition of plates of larger
size" (_Ibid_. p. 310). The hauberk made of metal studs on leather
seems to be illustrated in Schliemann's copy of a man on a very old
vase from Tiryns, of a style apparently earlier than the art of the
Dipylon (Schliemann, _Tiryns_, plate xvii.).
[35] Frontispiece.
[36] _B. S. A_., vol. xii., plate A.
[37] Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 573, note I, citing M. d'Arbois
de Jubainville, _La Civilisation des Celtes et celle de l'Epopée
Homerique_, p. 349, Paris, 1899.
CHAPTER IX
WOMEN'S COSTUME
As to the evolution of feminine costume, I speak with the greatest
diffidence. Homer's women wore the loose brooched peplos, with brooch,
pin, clasp, and over it the _pharos_. Women of the later dark age and
the Dipylon period apparently dressed otherwise. In the archaic period
the brooched peplos, girdled at the waist, was worn; but I think that
there was also a revival or survival of Aegean sewn and shaped bodices,
jackets, and skirts. Lastly, historic Greece reverted to the Homeric
peplos and _chlaina_.
The discussion is, inevitably, concerned with minutiae in details
about which our actual information is far from being minute. We must
therefore state here explicitly the conclusions to which we are led:
namely, that neither the male nor female dress nor the armour described
in the Epics was introduced, at any period, by the Ionians employed
in any one of the four or five "recensions" which are postulated by
certain critics, as in the "first _Iliad_" of Robert, and his "second,
third, and fourth _Iliads_"[1] On the other hand, we contend that
both the costume and the armour in Homer are of a single period,
earlier than the Dipylon and barbaric Tirynthian age of art, while
historic Greece from the middle of the sixth century began to revert to
something like the Homeric type.
We must remember that hitherto no representations of Homer's people
in the free art of the Aegeans have been discovered, and thence no
light can be derived. When the crude art of Tiryns and, later (?) of
the "Geometric" school of ornament comes into view (1000-800 B.C.?),
the designs of men and women are childish. In painted vases which may
represent the palsied decadence of the Aegean age, the human figures
are simply absurd, still they are recognisably human; though in vases
of what may be called the "dotted" style of outline, they have heads
like birds, as on dotted bronzes of northern Italy in the Early Age
of Iron. In the "Dipylon" style, again, as soon as human beings are
represented, the heads of the men are like potatoes set on sticks; the
torso is an inverted isosceles triangle, with the pointed waist for
apex; and the naked legs are enormously thick in thighs and calves. The
women's bodies also are often equilateral triangles; the parts below
the waist are clothed in tight skirts, as a general rule; the breasts,
when the bust is represented, are either bare, or clad in a very tight
bodice, or are hidden by a hood which falls below the shoulders like
a cape. In one Tirynthian fragment we see a stout lady in a "princess
frock" tight, "of the Menzies tartan,"[2] and all of one piece; another
design shows a waist no thicker than a broomstick[3] (figs. 8, 9).
These costumes of women, in Tirynthian and Dipylon art, are un-Homeric
and post-Homeric. I doubt if we find such female costumes as Homer
apparently describes recognisably represented in Greek art till the
sixth and fifth centuries.
This seems to be stated with unnecessary force, because, it may well be
said, the meaning of the sentence turns on the words "_recognisably_
represented." How are we to "recognise," in art, costumes of which
Homer gives us only brief verbal descriptions? Are we not deceived by
the free and vivid style of Homer? All his human beings and gods come
in such living forms before us, that we see the flowing, glistening
garments of Nausicaa and Athene swaying with their motions. We can see
nothing like this represented in Greek art till the late sixth century
and onwards; because, it may be said, till that date Greek art is hard,
prim, constrained, conventional,--in fact, archaic. It is therefore,
we may be told, a kind of logical illusion which prevents us from
recognising the costumes of Homer's women in Greek plastic art, till
that art itself is beginning to attain Homeric freedom.
These considerations must be kept in mind. But another error is apt to
be suggested when we read that the historic Hellenic costume, or that
part of it styled "the Doric peplos," "is implied by the allusions
of Homer," the view of the ingenious Studniczka.[4] The remark is
illustrated by fig. 10, in which we see a lady in "a Doric peplos,"
though how Achaean women of Homer's time could wear the dress of the
Dorians whom Homer ignores is not apparent. This graceful and breezy
costume is, in fact, like what we suppose Homer to have had in his
mind, and to have seen. But it is not in the least like the dress shown
in the art which is immediately subsequent to his age, the art of
Tiryns and of the Dipylon; and, as far as I can ascertain, it is not
the costume displayed in the archaic art up to the middle of the sixth
century. Archaic Greek female costume, however, has this much in common
with Homeric and later Greek costume, that it essentially differs,
often, from Aegean or Mycenaean dress.
In describing the contrast of styles between the pre-Homeric Aegean
dress and the Homeric costume for women, Mr. Leaf says that the
Mykenaean (Aegean) women wore "a close fitting bodice, sharply marked
off from the full skirt..."; and though there were many changes of
fashion in the Aegean world, this account holds good for its later
periods. "The dress of Greek women in historic times is of a totally
different kind. It is marked by simplicity and flowing vertical
lines.... The peplos is, in fact, no more than a square woollen blanket
... taken up round the middle by a girdle and retained in its place
on the shoulders by pins." The Aegean female dress, sewn and fitted,
did not need pins or brooches, _περόναι, ἐνεταί, πόρται_.[5] On the
other hand, "no pins or fibulae have been found among the remains of
the Mykenaean prime," while they are common in the latter "lower city"
below the acropolis of Mycenae.
Mr. Leaf therefore conceives that "during the prime of Mykene fashion
was dominated by a non-Hellenic influence," perhaps Oriental. Bodices
and separate flounced skirts were in, "but for some reason which we
cannot expect to guess, fashion returned, at the end of the Mykenaean
age, to the older and simpler dress" (the Homeric), "which held its
ground till classical times."[6] The usual explanation is that the
fibulae and the pinned peplos were brought in from the north by Achaean
invaders; in the north the fibulae had long been common;[7] and that
the style of costume persisted continuously into historic times, being
the familiar classical Greek dress.
Now undoubtedly the fibula, and therefore the unsewn and unshaped
female attire, did come in at the close of the Aegean or Mycenaean