Mr. Leaf gets rid of this solitary iron _casse tete_ in a pleasant way. Since he wrote his _Companion to the Iliad_, 1902, he has become converted, as we saw, to the theory, demolished by Mr. Monro, Nutzhorn, and Grote, and denounced by Blass, that the origin of our Homer is a text edited by some literary retainer of Pisistratus of Athens (about 560-540 B.C.). The editor arranged current lays, "altered" freely, and "wrote in" as much as he pleased. Probably he wrote this passage in which Nestor describes the man of the iron mace, for "the tales of Nestor's youthful exploits, all of which bear the mark of late work, are introduced with no special applicability to the context, but rather with the intention of glorifying the ancestor of Pisistratus." [Footnote: Iliad (1900), VII. 149, Note.] If Pisistratus was pleased with the ancestral portrait, nobody has a right to interfere, but we need hardly linger over this hypothesis (cf. pp. 281-288). Iron axes are offered as prizes by Achilles, [Footnote: Iliad, XXIII. 850.] and we have the iron axes of Odysseus, who shot an arrow through the apertures in the blades, at the close of the Odyssey. But all these axes, as we shall show, were not weapons, but _peaceful implements_. As a matter of certain fact the swords and spears of Homer's warriors are invariably said by the poet to be of bronze, not of iron, in cases where the metal of the weapons is specified. Except for an arrow-head (to which we shall return) and the one iron mace, noted as an eccentricity, no weapon in Homer is ever said to be of iron. The richest men use swords of bronze. Not one chooses to indulge in a sword said to be of iron. The god, Hephaestus, makes a bronze sword for Achilles, whose own bronze sword was lent to Patroclus, and lost by him to Hector. [Footnote: _Iliad_ XVI. 136; XIX. 372-373.] This bronze sword, at least, Achilles uses, after receiving the divine armour of the god. The sword of Paris is of bronze, as is the sword of Odysseus in the Odyssey. [Footnote: _Iliad_, III. 334-335] Bronze is the sword which he brought from Troy, and bronze is the sword presented to him by Euryalus in Phaeacia, and bronze is the spear with which he fought under the walls of Ilios. [Footnote: _Odyssey_, X. 162, 261-262] There are other examples of bronze swords, while spears are invariably said to be of bronze, when the metal of the spear is specified. Here we are on the ground of solid certainty: we see that the Homeric warrior has regularly spear and sword of bronze. If any man used a spear or sword of iron, Homer never once mentions the fact. If the poets, in an age of iron weapons, always spoke of bronze, out of deference to tradition, they must have puzzled their iron-using military patrons.