The Attack on Troy by Rodney Castleden

Author:Rodney Castleden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2006-06-18T16:00:00+00:00

A Mycenaean warrior on an ivory plaque found on Delos. Dating from 1250 BC, it shows a warrior proudly bearing a spear and a figure-of-eight shield. He is wearing a boar’s tusk helmet.

The figure-of-eight shield evolved into what looks like a very unsatisfactory design, called the dipylon shield. This was shaped like a capital H on its side and made by stretching a hide on a vertical stave, with horizontal struts at the top and bottom. In time, the hide shrank, creating the narrow waist.17

Homer describes tower shields, but in a way that cannot be historically accurate; Ajax carries ‘a shield like a tower, made of bronze and seven layers of leather’.18 This would be too heavy to carry, and Homer was probably combining an oral tradition of the cowhide tower shields of the Mycenaean period with the smaller eighth-century round shields, which were indeed made of bronze covered with layers of leather – and would have been familiar to an eighth-century bard and his audience from first-hand observation. Agamemnon is described as being armed with two spears and a round shield, which sounds like eighth-century, iron age, gear, though round shields were in use at the time of the Trojan War. Ajax’s shield is also described as having a boss, which his tower shield (as big as a wall) would not have had. Both the figure-of-eight and the tower shields must have been very unwieldy. Hector’s shield, slung over his back, bumps against his neck and ankles as he runs. Periphetes, a warrior from Mycenae, trips on the rim of his shield, which must therefore have been large, but could have been of either figure-of-eight or tower design.19 Elsewhere, Homer has warriors bearing round shields; Aeneas has one.20 Round shields did in fact appear in the Mycenaean period, in the fourteenth century.21

A piece of pottery from the Geometric period just after the Trojan War shows three warriors each carrying a different type of shield, round, rectangular and dipylon, and this confirms what we might have expected – that several different types of shield were in use at the same time.22 Possibly tribal or family traditions dictated which shield type a warrior might use; possibly it was the particular type of fighting the warrior was involved in. A big figure-of-eight or tower shield would have been impossibly unwieldy in a chariot, except on ceremonial occasions, but it would have given better protection to an infantryman attacking a wall or defending a siege engine.

The Warrior Vase shows yet another type of shield. This was round but with a curved ‘bite’ taken out of one side only, unlike the dipylon shield, which had bites taken out of two opposing sides. It is not certain what purpose this unusual shape served, but it was in service at the time of the Trojan War.23 The shape may have been dictated by the need to hold the shield in front, covering as much of the chest and abdomen as possible, but allowing a space on one side for a forward-thrusting sword or spear.

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