Mr. Leaf's contention (Mr. Murray's is an _obiter dictum_) rests on the postulate that, when the corslet is not explicitly named in connection with a hero, he has no corslet; he has only a shield. If so, why are his "pieces of armour" (_τέυχεα_), whether he is putting them on or off, whether he is being stripped of them or is stripping others, always called τέυχεα in the plural? Aias is not explicitly said to have a corslet, but the space of time occupied by his arming he asks the Achaeans to devote to prayer to Zeus. "So said they, while Aias arrayed him in flashing bronze. And when he had now clothed upon his flesh all his armour...."[19] The time required, and the phrase "all his armour" which "clothes his flesh," cannot possibly apply to slinging on or off a shield, and donning or doffing a helmet, the work of five seconds. The sword was always worn, in peace and in war. This is so certain that we waste no more space over the matter. All the gentry wear τέυχεα, "pieces of armour," which they all take off and lay on the ground while they watch a duel, and which they always, when they can, strip from a fallen foe. Thus, before the duel between Paris and Menelaus, the men-at-arms dismount, take off their armour, and lay it on the ground.[20] They themselves "are leaning on their great shields," which are not their armour.[21] This use of τέυχεα is universal in Homer, and so, for men-at-arms, is the possession of body armour.[22] The difficulties which critics find in the details and mechanism of the armour cannot be impossibilities, for the "later poets" were familiar with corslets, and would not write nonsense about them. The opposing theory is that Ionian minstrels introduced the corslet of their own age, seventh century, (corslets not uniformly to be found in Homer), to satisfy the practical warriors who wore it. Yet, in doing so, the poets made incoherent nonsense. As Miss Stawell writes, "a warlike audience, versed in the use of the corslet, insisted on its introduction in the poems,--and yet never objected to the absurdities it introduced,--such a theory cannot bear thinking out."[23] When we came to discuss Homeric tactics, we found precisely the same objection to the German theories; they represent the poets as pleasing military experts by writing nonsense. The body armour is thus an integral part of the poem. The word _θωρήσσεσθαι_, to put on the _thorex_ or breast covering, is constantly employed in the general sense of arming, both in _Iliad_ and _Odyssey,_ though in the latter no corslet is specifically named. It would have been as easy to coin a verb for arming from _ἀσπίς_, the shield, in an age when shields were the only armour. That _θώρηξ_ should ever have been a term for the shield seems to me incredible.