This inference, however, cannot reasonably be carried further. Homeric armour was altogether of _chalkos_, 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, his _chalkos_ was a term sufficiently comprehensive to embrace _both_ bronze 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 Homeric _chalkos_ was imparted to it, we may be quite sure, by the tin mixed with it. Footnote 333: _Iliad_, iii. 363. Footnote 334: Riedenauer, _Handwerk und Handwerker_, p. 103. Footnote 335: Blümner, _Technologie_, Bd. iv. p. 51.