of peace. Odysseus is a capable plough
man, carpenter, and shipwright, as well as a good soldier. But
the simplicity is by no means rudeness; it consists with a highly
developed code of manners, and even a considerable refinement.
Brutes like Penelope's suitors may, in half-drunken anger, fling
the furniture or an ox-hoof at the object of their scorn; but there
are brutes in every society, and the manners of the Achaeans in
general are stately and dignified.

On the field of war there is still evidence of an advanced stage
of civilization. The whole question of the equipment of the Homeric
heroes has been the subject of perhaps even more dispute than that
of the Homeric house. Infinite pains have been spent in the effort
to show, on the one hand, that the equipment worn by the heroes
of the Iliad was of the more ancient type, consisting mainly of
a great shield of ox-hide large enough to cover the whole body,
behind which the warrior crouched, wearing for defensive armour
no more than a linen corselet and leathern cap and gaiters, and
on the other that the hero wore practically the complete panoply
of the later Hellenic hoplite, the small round shield, the bronze
helmet, with metal cuirass, belt, and greaves; while the question
of whether the offensive weapons were of iron or of bronze has been
debated with equal pertinacity. The discussion of such details
is beyond our purpose, and it is sufficient to say that the poems
seem to contemplate both forms of defensive equipment, the old
form of large shield and light body armour, and the later form of
small shield and metal panoply, as being in common use, while on
the question of iron versus bronze, the evidence seems to indicate
that the age contemplated by the bulk of the references is, in the
main, a bronze-using one, though the knowledge of the superiority
of iron is beginning to make itself evident.

But the point which is of importance for our present purpose is the
magnificence with which the arms of the Hellenic heroes, when of
metal, are wrought and decorated. The polished helmets, with their
horse-hair plumes of various colours, the in-wrought breastplates,
and the greaves with their silver fastenings, are not only weapons,
but works of art as well. The supreme instance is, of course, the
armour of Achilles, fabricated, according to the poet, by the hands
of Hephaestos, but none the less to be regarded as the ideal of
what the highly wrought armour of the time