We thus come to a puzzle of unusual magnitude. If Homer does not know small circular shields, but refers always to huge shields, whereas, from the eighth century B.C. onwards, such shields were not in use (disregarding Tyrtaeus, and the vase of Aristonothos on which they appear conspicuously, and the Dodwell pyxis), where are we? Either we have a harmonious picture of war from a very ancient date of large shields, or late poets did not introduce the light round buckler of their own period. Meanwhile they are accused of introducing the bronze corslets and other defensive armour of their own period. Defensive armour was unknown, we are told, in the Mycenaean prime, which, if true, does not affect the question. Homer did not live in or describe the Mycenaean prime, with its stone arrow-tips. Why did the late poets act so inconsistently? Why were they ignorant of small circular shields, which they saw every day? Or why, if they knew them, did they not introduce them in the poems, which, we are told, they were filling with non-Mycenaean greaves and corslets? This is one of the dilemmas which constantly arise to confront the advocates of the theory that the _Iliad_ is a patchwork of many generations. "Late" poets, if really late, certainly in every-day life knew small parrying bucklers worn on the left arm, and huge body-covering shields perhaps they rarely saw in use. They also knew, and the original poet, we are told, did not know bronze corslets and greaves. The theory of critics is that late poets introduced the bronze corslets and greaves with which they were familiar into the poems, but scrupulously abstained from alluding to the equally familiar small shields. Why are they so recklessly anachronistic and "up-to-date" with the corslets and greaves, and so staunchly but inconsistently conservative about keeping the huge shields? Mr. Leaf explains thus: "The groundwork of the Epos is Mycenaean, in the arrangement of the house, in the prevalence of copper" (as compared with iron), "and, as Reichel has shown, in armour. Yet in many points the poems are certainly later than the prime, at least, of the Mycenaean age"--which we are the last to deny. "Is it that the poets are deliberately trying to present the conditions of an age anterior to their own? or are they depicting the circumstances by which they are surrounded--circumstances which slowly change during the period of the development of the Epos? Cauer decides for the latter alternative, _the only one which is really conceivable_ [Footnote: Then how is the alleged archaeology of the poet of Book X. conceivable?] in an age whose views are in many ways so naive as the poems themselves prove them to have been." [Footnote: _Classical Review, ix. pp. 463, 464._]