However we account for it, there was a long period in which Greek prehistoric and proto-historic dress was not the free-flowing costume which Homer describes, and which the appearance of safety pins, or fibulae, after 1400 B.C. attests. They are but rarely found in graves till the Dipylon age of Iron. Now no critic has had the heart to say that the costume described by Homer, the loose chiton, was "written into" early epic lays (which originally knew it not), at the moment when it came into fashion in the sixth to fifth centuries. But criticism has taken a similar course in regard to Homeric armour. This armour, like Homeric male costume, is in essence, we shall show, that of the sixth to fifth centuries B.C. with the exception of the shield,--a huge body-covering shield in Homer (a shield probably of various shapes, circular, oblong, cylindrical or like a figure of 8),[7] suspended by a baldric (see fig. 2),--while in the seventh to fifth centuries we find a round or oval blazoned buckler worn on the left arm. While critics, following Reich el, attribute the Homeric body armour to Ionian interpolations of the seventh century, they have also followed him in not observing that Homeric body armour is not that of the seventh, but rather of the sixth to fifth centuries, as we shall prove. We find, in art of the sixth to fifth centuries, or at least in the end of the sixth and the opening of the fifth centuries, such hauberks as Homer describes; they have variegated patterns of bronze scales; they are clasped down the front, and below are the bronze belt (_zoster_) and πτέρυγες, or mailed flaps.