The line in the _Odyssey_ is found, one must add, in most suspicious circumstances, and in the worst of company. It first appears in _Odyssey_, xvi. 294, when Odysseus, at the house of Eumaeus, is prophesying to Telemachus about the misbehaviour of the Wooers. He bids his son, at his nod, to conceal the arms and the weapons in the hall, and if asked why he has done so, reply that they afford occasion for brawls, as "iron draws a man to him." The passage goes on, "but for us alone leave two swords, two spears, and two shields to grasp with our hands" Here the word for shields is βοάγρια, which occurs in no other line of Iliad or Odyssey except Iliad, xii. 22; while the following line (23), mentioning "demigods," "takes us at once away from the Homeric world, and opens an entirely new order of conceptions."[20] "The most careless critics," says Mr. Leaf, cannot pass this passage in the _Iliad_, nor can the most conservative critic defend it. As the dubious passage of the _Odyssey_ concerning iron contains the same non-Homeric word for shields as the indubitably false passage of the _Iliad_, and as the poet of the _Odyssey_ expects the shields to be held in the hand (_an die Arme zu nehmen_, Faesi) while Homer's shields are always suspended by baldrics, it is clear that the Odyssean passage with the mention of iron as synonymous with weapon is rather more than _suspect_. The line recurs[21] in changed circumstances when Telemachus and Odysseus together remove the weapons, but do not leave two swords, two spears, and two shields (βοάγρια) for themselves. Everything falls out otherwise than Odysseus had practically prophesied in Book xvi., when we come to the slaying of the Wooers in Book xxii. This would mean nothing in a modern novel; but, as Mr. Monro says, in Homer it is singular; it would be more in his manner to let events exactly fulfil the boding of Odysseus. I have proved that the whole passage not only contradicts the uniform tenor of the two Epics as to bronze weapons, but causes hopeless confusion, has the most suspicious associations, and contravenes the Homeric practice of suspending shields by baldrics. Even if we excised the line concerning iron, which can be omitted without injuring the sense, the whole passage in both of its appearances is decidedly suspicious.[22] [1] _Iliad_, vi. 48, ix. 365, 366, x. 379, xi. 133; _Odyssey_, xiv. 324, xxi. 10. [2] _Iliad_, vii. 472 _seqq_. [3] _Ibid_. viii. 232. [4] Ridgeway, _Early Age of Greece_, vol. i. pp. 413-416. [5] _J. H. S._, 1907, p. 320. [6] Cf. "Burial and the Future Life." [7] Evans, _Prehistoric Tombs of Cnossos_, p. 134. [8] _Iliad_, iv. 123. [9] vii. 141 _seqq_. [10] Helbig, _Homerische Epos_, 1887, pp. 330, 331. Bérard, _Les Phéniciens et l'Odyssée_, 1902, vol. i. 435. Cauer, _Grundfragen des Homer-kritik_, pp. 183-189. Naber, Quaestiones Homericae, 1897, p. 60. [11] _Iliad_, xxiii. 826-835.