“Then hurl’d the hero, thundering on the ground, A mass of iron (an enormous round), Whose weight and size the circling Greeks admire, Rude from the furnace and but shaped by fire. This mighty quoit Ætion wont to rear, And from his whirling arm dismiss’d in air; The giant by Achilles slain, he stow’d Among his spoils this memorable load. For this he bids those nervous artists vie That teach the disk to sound along the sky. Let him whose might can hurl this bowl, arise; Who farthest hurls it, takes it as his prize: If he be one enrich’d with large domain Of downs for flocks and arable for grain, Small stock of iron needs that man provide, His hinds and swains whole years shall be supplied From hence: nor ask the neighbouring city’s aid For ploughshares, wheels, and all the rural trade.”
The mass of iron was large enough to supply a shepherd or a ploughman with iron for five years. This circumstance is a sufficient proof of the high estimation in which iron was held during the time of Homer. Were a modern poet to represent his hero as holding out a large lump of iron as a prize, and were he to represent this prize as eagerly contended for by kings and princes, it would appear to us perfectly ridiculous.
Hesiod informs us, that the knowledge of iron was brought over from Phrygia to Greece by the Dactyli, who settled in Crete during the reign of Minos I., about 1431 years before the commencement of the Christian era, and consequently about sixty years before the departure of the children of Israel from Egypt: and it does not appear, that in Homer’s time, which was about five hundred years later, the art of smelting iron had been so much improved, as to enable men to apply it to the common purposes of life, as had long before been done by the Egyptians. The general opinion of the ancients was, that the method of smelting iron ore had been brought to perfection by the Chalybes, a small nation situated near the Black Sea,[54] and that the name _chalybs_, occasionally used for steel, was derived from that people.
Pliny informs us, that the ores of iron are scattered very profusely almost every where: that they exist in Elba; that there was a mountain in Cantabria composed entirely of iron ore; and that the earth in Cappadocia, when watered from a certain river, is converted into iron.[55] He gives no account of the mode of smelting iron ores; nor does he appear to have been acquainted with the processes; for he says that iron is reduced from its ore precisely in the same way as copper is. Now we know, that the processes for smelting copper and iron are quite different, and founded upon different principles. He says, that in his time many different kinds of iron existed, and they were _stricturæ_, in Latin _a stringenda acie_.