That corslets are usually taken for granted as present by the poet, even when they are not explicitly named, seems certain. He constantly represents the heroes as "stripping the pieces of mail" [Greek: teuchea], when they have time and opportunity, from fallen foes. If only the shield is taken, if there is nothing else in the way of bronze body armour to take, why have we the plural, [Greek: teuchea]? The corslet, as well as the shield, must be intended. The stripping is usually "from the shoulders," and it is "from his shoulders" that Hector hopes to strip the corslet of Diomede (Iliad, VIII. 195) in a passage, to be sure, which the critics think interpolated. However this may be, the stripping of the (same Greek characters), cannot be the mere seizure of the shield, but must refer to other pieces of armour: "all the pieces of armour." So other pieces of defensive armour besides the shield are throughout taken for granted. If they were not there they could not be stripped. It is the chitons that Agamemnon does something to, in the case of two fallen foes (_Iliad_, XI. 100), and Aristarchus thought that these _chitons_ were corslets. But the passage is obscure. In _Iliad_, XI. 373, when Diomede strips helmet from head, shield from shoulder, corslet from breast of Agastrophus, Reichel was for excising the corslet, because it was not mentioned when the hero was struck on the hip joint. I do not see that an inefficient corslet would protect the hip joint. To do that, in our eighteenth century cavalry armour, was the business of a _zoster_, as may be seen in a portrait of the Chevalier de St. George in youth. It is a thick ribbed _zoster_ that protects the hip joints of the king. Finally, Mr. Evans observes that the western invaders of Egypt, under Rameses III, are armed, on the monuments, with cuirasses formed of a succession of plates, "horizontal, or rising in a double curve," while the Enkomi ivories, already referred to, corroborate the existence of corslet, _zoster_, and _zoma_ as articles of defensive armour. [Footnote: _Journal of Anthropological Institute_, xxx. p. 213.] "Recent discoveries," says Mr. Evans, "thus supply a double corroboration of the Homeric tradition which carries back the use of the round shield and the cuirass or [Greek: thoraex] to the earlier epic period... With such a representation before us, a series of Homeric passages on which Dr. Reichel... has exhausted his powers of destructive criticism, becomes readily intelligible." [Footnote: Ibid., p. 214.]