The difference between the age of Homer and Hesiod in respect to the use of metals is well described by Mr. Gladstone. The former[70] “lived at a time when the use of iron (in Greece) was just commencing, when the commodity was rare, and when its value was very great;” but in the days of Hesiod “iron, as compared with copper, had come to be the inferior, that is to say the cheaper metal,” and the poet “looks back from his iron age with an admiring envy on the heroic period.” Hesiod gives to Hercules[71] a helmet of steel and a sword of iron, and to Saturn[72] a steel reaping-hook. His remark that at the feast of the gods the withered[73] part of a five-fingered branch should never be cut from the green part by black iron, shows that this metal was in common use, and that for religious ceremonies the older metal bronze retained its place. Bronze was, however, a favourite metal with the poet, if not indeed in actual use long after iron was known,[74] for Pindar, about B.C. 470, still frequently cites spears and axes made of bronze. By the time of Herodotus, who wrote before 400 B.C., the use of iron and steel was universal among the Greeks. He instances, as a fact worth recording, that the Massagetæ,[75] a powerful tribe which occupied the steppes on the east of the Caspian, made no use of iron or silver, but had an abundance of χαλκὸς and gold, pointing their spears and arrows and forming the heads of their battle-axes with the former metal. Among the Æthiopians,[76] on the contrary, he states that bronze was rarer and more precious than gold; nor was it in use among the Scythians.[77] The Sagartii[78] in the army of Xerxes are mentioned as not carrying arms either of bronze or iron except daggers, as if bronze were still of not unfrequent use. Strabo,[79] at a much later date, thinks it worth while to record that among the Lusitanians the spears were tipped with bronze. But certainly some centuries before the time of Herodotus, and probably as early as that of Homer, the Chalybes on the shores of the Euxine practised the manufacture of iron on a considerable scale, and from them came the Greek name for steel, χαλυψ.[80] Daïmachus, in the fourth century B.C., records that different sorts of steel are produced among the Chalybes in Sinope, Lydia, and Laconia. That of Sinope was used for smiths’ and carpenters’ tools; that of Laconia for files, drills for iron, stamps, and masons’ tools; and the Lydian kind for files, swords, razors, and knives. In Laconia iron is said to have formed the only currency in the days of Lycurgus. Taking all the evidence into consideration, there can be no doubt that iron must have been known in Greece some ten or twelve centuries before our era, though, as already observed, it was at that time an extremely rare metal. It also appears that as early as B.C. 500, or even 600, iron or steel was in common use, though bronze had not been altogether superseded for offensive arms such as spear-heads and battle-axes.