Archery is not so highly considered as when "the man Heracles" and the great Eurytus were bowmen. Odysseus, the heir of the mighty bow of Eurytus, left it at home, and fought as a heavy-armed footman. Pandarus, on the other hand, left his horses and chariots at home, and came to Troy trusting in his bow.[12] Teucer, Pandarus, Paris, and occasionally Meriones, are the bowmen, among the princes, and Paris and Pandarus are taunted for their weak and cowardly missiles; honour was to be won with sword and spear. The Scots archers, in the same way, were always anxious to come to hand-strokes with their sperths, or battle-axes; the Highlanders threw down their muskets, after one discharge, and went in with the claymore; the French never reconciled themselves to the long bow; the Spartans despised it. This was the Homeric sentiment: the bow was scarcely the weapon for a hero. The arrow-heads were of bronze.[13] In Mycenaean graves at Kakovotos (Old Pylos) in Elis, the stone arrow points are of very fine neolithic work.[14] When archery declined yet lower, in historic times, the round or oval parrying buckler, carried on the left arm, came in, as a protection against spears and sword-strokes. This parrying buckler does not appear in Homer: efforts made to discover it are unsuccessful. Thus Homer describes a given stage in the art of war: his pictures are not patchworks of "Mycenaean" fighting (about which we know nothing), and of civic Greek fighting in the age of civic heavy-armed foot. [1] Iliad, iii. iv. [2] vii. 332-420. [3] xviii. 175-177. [4] Ferdiad, in the Old Irish _Tain Bo Cualgne_, also drags a dead man by his chariot wheels. [5] _R.G.E._ p. 118. _Ajax_, 1031. Euripides, _Andromache_, 399. [6] _Iliad_, vi. 37-65, xi. 122-147. [7] _Iliad_, xi. 100, ii. 416. [8] _Ibid._ xiii. 439, 440. That the bronze tunic is a softening of the sense by a late interpolator is not very likely, for Homer, we have seen, represents a warrior as cutting off a dead man's hands and head; and if he does not shirk this, if no later hand corrects him, why should he strain at tearing a chiton? Miss Stawell ingeniously remarks that the chiton-tearing is a proof of the prevalent use of corslet? If men fought without corslets, the chiton "must always have been getting torn in the mêlée, whatever the warrior's fate. But the sign would have been unmistakable if the tunic was usually covered by the corslet and could not be torn until that was taken off...." (_Homer and the Iliad_, p. 211). But, I fear, Homeric warriors did not come to such close quarters as at Rugby football. [9] _Iliad_, xvi. 702, 703. [10] See "Homeric Tactics." [11] For details and discussion, see "Homeric Armour and Costume." [12] Iliad, v. 193-205. [13] On stone and bronze arrow-heads, see Tsountas and Manatt, p. 209. [14] Kurt Müller, _Alt Pyhs_, p. 292. _Attische Mitteilungen_, 1909. Cf. plate xv. CHAPTER VII HOMERIC TACTICS