To the rendering "circular" it is objected that a circular shield of, say, four feet and a half in diameter, would be intolerably heavy and superfluously wide, while the shields represented in Mycenaean art are not circles, but rather resemble a figure of eight, in some cases, or a section of a cylinder, in others, or, again, a door (Fig. 5, p. 130). What Homer really meant by such epithets as "equal every way," "very circular," "of a good circle," cannot be ascertained, since Homeric epithets of the shield, which were previously rendered "circular," "of good circle," and so on, are now translated in quite other senses, in order that Homeric descriptions may be made to tally with Mycenaean representations of shields, which are never circular as represented in works of art. In this position of affairs we are unable to determine the shape, or shapes, of the shields known to Homer. A scholar's rendering of Homer's epithets applied to the shield is obliged to vary with the variations of his theory about the shield. Thus, in 1883, Mr. Leaf wrote, "The poet often calls the shield by names which seem to imply that it was round, and yet indicates that it was large enough to cover the whole body of a man.... In descriptions the round shape is always implied." The words which indicated that the shield (or one shield) "really looked like a tower, and really reached from neck to ankles" (in two or three cases), were "received by the poet from the earlier Achaean lays." "But to Homer the warriors appeared as using the later small round shield. His belief in the heroic strength of the men of old time made it quite natural to speak of them as bearing a shield which at once combined the later circular shape and the old heroic expanse...." [Footnote: _Journal of Hellenic Studies, iv. pp._ 283-285.] Here the Homeric words which naturally mean "circular" or "round" are accepted as meaning "round" or "circular." Homer, it is supposed, in practice only knows the round shields of the later age, 700 B.C., so he calls shields "round," but, obedient to tradition, he conceives of them as very large. But, after the appearance of Reichel's speculations, the Homeric words for "round" and "circular" have been explained as meaning something else, and Mr. Leaf, in place of maintaining that Homer knew no shields but round shields, now writes (1900), "The small circular shield of later times...is equally unknown to Homer, with a very few curious exceptions," which Reichel discovered--erroneously, as we shall later try to show. [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 575.] Thus does science fluctuate! Now Homer knows in practice none but light round bucklers, dating from about 700 B.C.; again, he does not know them at all, though they were habitually used in the period at which the later parts of his Epic were composed. We shall have to ask, how did small round bucklers come to be unknown to late poets who saw them constantly?