[28] When disposing, in sixteen lines (_R. G. E_. 154, note I), of my _Homer and his Age_, Mr. Murray oddly represents me as maintaining that the body armour of Paris and Hector was "soft and very baggy like a Minoan cope." As at that time I had never consciously heard of this famous "Minoan cope," I never dreamed of such a thing as "soft and very baggy" armour in the _Iliad_, though I know the Protestant silk armour during "the Popish Plot." In fact, judging from the designs in _Monumenti Antichi_, the Minoan cope was of hard material. Messrs. Hogarth and Bosanquet also report on "a very remarkable 'Mycenaean' bronze breast-plate" from Crete, which "shows four female draped figures, the two central are holding a wreath over a bird, below which is a sacred tree. The two outer figures are dancing. It is probably a ritual scene, and may help to elucidate the nature of early Aegean cults, in which female worshippers and sacred trees and birds are common." _J. H. S_., vol. xix., 1899, p. 322. [29] _Iliad_, xvi. 134. [30] Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 580, citing Studniczka, p. 59. [31] The "taslets" of Dugald Dalgetty (1645) were thigh pieces (cuisses), as in seventh to sixth century Greek art. [32] I had written this before the publication of Miss Stawell's _Homer and the Iliad_. In pp. 204-206, she has taken the word out of my mouth. [33] _Iliad_, iv. 141-144. [34] On the affair of Menelaus, see Leaf, vol. i. p. 581, and note I, where Mr. Leaf thinks the clasping of the corslet in front "an unreasonable arrangement." Mr. Murray (_R. G. E_. pp. 144, 145) also takes it that there was "a solid metal breast-plate." The term _γύαλον_ (_Iliad_, v. 99), where an arrow hits "hard by Diomede's right shoulder the plate of his corslet," may refer to the broad plate over the shoulder-strap; some of the corslets of two metal plates have shoulder-straps in art. We really cannot expect to understand every detail with certainty, while we have no actual examples of the corslets and shields of many early centuries before our eyes. Mr. Ridgeway believes the body armour of the Achaeans to have been hauberks of bronze scales or small plates, not back-and breast-plates as in seventh and early sixth century art. He illustrates by many bronze studs found at Koracev and Ilijak in Bosnia, of the Glasinatz epoch (_Early Age of Greece_, vol. i. pp. 435, 436). Such a hauberk would well correspond to that worn by "the bronze-shirted Achaeans." The hauberk would be "a shirt of leather," with "small pieces of bronze, either in the form of studs, or scales, or rings, or by the addition of plates of larger size" (_Ibid_. p. 310). The hauberk made of metal studs on leather seems to be illustrated in Schliemann's copy of a man on a very old vase from Tiryns, of a style apparently earlier than the art of the Dipylon (Schliemann, _Tiryns_, plate xvii.). [35] Frontispiece. [36] _B. S. A_., vol. xii., plate A.