The use of body armour too is in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ universal in regular war; from the rarity of delineation thereof in Minoan art this appears to be another innovation. Homer is quite conscious that he is singing of events gathered from legends of a time long before his day, a time with which he is in touch, which has bequeathed much to his age, but which, we see, is in some respects less advanced than and in many ways different from his own. He attributes to the old legendary heroes, however, the institutions with which he is familiar--institutions that are not those of any known period of historic Greece. They are no figments of fancy. They closely correspond, as far as form of government is concerned, with the early feudalism described in the oldest Irish epical romances, and in the French _chansons de geste_ of the eleventh to the thirteenth century A.D. We find an Over Lord, like the Celtic _Ardrigh_, or the _Bretwalda_ in early England, ruling over Princes (_Ri_), with an acknowledged sway, limited by unwritten conventions. He holds, as Mr. Freeman says of the Bretwalda, ‘an acknowledged, though probably not very well defined, supremacy.’ His rule is hereditary; the sceptre is handed down through the male line. Zeus has given him the sceptre, and he confessedly rules, like Charlemagne even in the later _chansons de geste_, by right divine. He has the Zeus-given sceptre, and he has the _θέμιστες_, a knowledge of ‘a recognized body of principles and customs which had grown up in practice’ (_Iliad_ ix. 99).