The tradition of the earlier use of bronze still, however, remained even in later times, and the preference shown for its employment in religious rites, which I have mentioned elsewhere,[81] is a strong witness of this earlier use. It seems needless again to do more than mention the bronze ploughshare used at the foundation of Tuscan cities, the bronze knives and shears of the Sabine and Roman priests, and the bronze sickles of Medea and Elissa. I must, however, again bring forward the speculations of an intelligent Greek traveller, who wrote in the latter half of the second century of our era, as to the existence of what we should now term a Bronze Age in Greece. Pausanias[82] relates how Lichas the Lacedæmonian, in the fifth century B.C., discovered the bones of Orestes, which his countrymen had been commanded by an oracle to seek. The Pythia[83] had described the place as one where two strong winds met, where form was opposed to form, and one evil lay upon another. These Lichas recognised in the two bellows of the smith, the hammer opposed to the anvil, and the iron lying on it. Pausanias on this observes that at that time they had already begun to use iron in war, and that if it had been in the days of the heroes it would have been bronze and not iron designated by the oracle as the evil, for in their days all arms were of bronze. For this he cites Homer as his authority, who speaks of the bronze axe of Pisander, and the arrow of Meriones. A farther argument he derives from the spear of Achilles, laid up in the temple of Minerva at Phaselis, and the sword of Memnon in that of Æsculapius at Nicomedia, which is entirely of bronze, while the ferrule and point of his spear are also of that metal. The spear-head which lay with the bones of Theseus[84] in the Isle of Scyros was also of bronze, and probably the sword likewise. There are no works of Latin authors of a date nearly so remote as that of the earlier Greek writers, and long before the days of Ennius, iron was in general use in Italy. If the Articles of Peace which “Porsena, King of the Tuscans, tendered unto the people of Rome” were as Pliny[85] represents them, the Romans must even in those early days have had iron weapons, for they were forbidden the use of that metal except for tilling the ground. In B.C. 224 the Isumbrian Gauls who fought with Flaminius were already in possession of iron swords, the softness and flexibility of which led to the discomfiture of their owners. The Romans themselves seem but to have been badly armed so far as swords were concerned until the time of the Second Punic War, about B.C. 200, when they adopted the Spanish sword, and learnt the method of preparing it. Whether the modern Toledo and Bilbao blades are legitimate descendants of these old weapons we need not stop to inquire. In whatever manner the metal was prepared, so thoroughly was iron identified with the sword in classical times that _ferrum_ and _gladius_ were almost synonyms.