The author of Book X. is now regarded as a precise archaeologist, who knew that corslets and bronze helmets were not used in Agamemnon's time, but that leather caps with boars' tusks were in fashion; while again, as we shall see, he is said to know nothing about heroic costume (cf. The _Doloneia_). As a fact, he has to describe an incident which occurs nowhere else in Homer, though it may often have occurred in practice--a hurried council during a demoralised night, and the hasty arraying of two spies, who wish to be lightfooted and inconspicuous. The author's evidence as to the leather cap and its garnishing of boars' tusks testifies to a survival of such gear in an age of bronze battle-helmets, not to his own minute antiquarian research.
Bronze greaves are not found, so far, in Mycenaean tombs in Greece, and Reichel argued that the original Homer knew none. The greaves, [Greek: kunmides] "were gaiters of stuff or leather"; the one mention of bronze greaves is stuff and nonsense interpolated (VII. 41). But why did men who were interpolating bronze corslets freely introduce bronze so seldom, if at all, as the material of greaves?
Bronze greaves, however, have been found in a Cypro-Mycenaean grave at Enkomi (Tomb XV.), _accompanied_ by _an early type_ of _bronze_ dagger, while bronze greaves adorned with Mycenaean ornament are discovered in the Balkan peninsula at Glassinavç. [Footnote: Evans, _Journal of the Anthropological Institute,_ pp. 214, 215, figs. 10, 11.] Thus all Homer's description of arms is here corroborated by archaeology, and cannot be cut out by what Mr. Evans calls "the Procrustean method" of Dr. Reichel.
A curious feature about the spear may be noticed. In Book X. while the men of Diomede slept, "their spears were driven into the ground erect on the spikes of the butts" (X. 153). Aristotle mentions that this was still the usage of the Illyrians in his day. [Footnote: _Poctica_, 25.] Though the word for the spike in the butt (_sauroter_) does not elsewhere occur in the _Iliad_, the practice of sticking the spears erect in the ground during a truce is mentioned in III. 135: "They lean upon their shields" (clearly large high shields), "and the tall spears are planted by their sides." No butt-spikes have been found in graves of the Mycenaean prime. The _sauroter_ was still used, or still existed, in the days of Herodotus. [Footnote: Tsountas and Manatt, p. 205; Ridgeway, vol. i. pp. 306, 307.]