The facts being as we and Helbig agree in stating them, we suppose that the Homeric poets sing of the usages of their own time. It is an age when iron, though quite familiar, is not yet employed for armour, or for swords or spears, which must be of excellent temper, without great weight in proportion to their length and size. Iron is only employed in Homer for some knives, which are never said to be used in battle (not even for dealing the final stab, like the mediaeval poniard, the _miséricorde_), for axes, which have a short cutting edge, and may be thick and weighty behind the edge, and for the rough implements of the shepherd and ploughman, such as tips of ploughshares, of goads, and so forth.
As far as archaeological excavations and discoveries enlighten us, these relative uses of bronze and iron did not exist in the ages of Mycenaean culture which are represented in the _tholos_ of Vaphio and the graves, earlier and later, of Mycenae. Even in the later Mycenaean graves iron is found only in the form of finger rings (iron rings were common in late Greece). [Footnote: Tsountas and Manatt, pp. 72, 146, 165.] Iron was scarce in the Cypro-Mycenaean graves of Enkomi. A small knife with a carved handle had left traces of an iron blade. A couple of lumps of iron, one of them apparently the head of a club, were found in Schliemann's "Burned City" at Hissarlik; for the rest, swords, spear-heads, knives, and axes are all of bronze in the age called "Mycenaean." But we do not know whether iron _implements_ may not yet be found in the sepulchres of _Thetes_, and other poor and landless men. The latest discoveries in Minoan graves in Crete exhibit tools of bronze.
Iron, we repeat, is in the poems a perfectly familiar metal. Ownership of "bronze, gold, and iron, which requires much labour" (in the smithying or smelting), appears regularly in the recurrent epic formula for describing a man of wealth. [Footnote: _Iliad_, VI. 48; IX. 365-366; X. 379; XI. 133; _Odyssey_, XIV. 324; XXI. 10.] Iron, bronze, slaves, and hides are bartered for sea-borne wine at the siege of Troy? [Footnote: _Iliad_, VII. 472-475.] Athene, disguised as Mentes, is carrying a cargo of iron to Temesa (Tamasus in Cyprus?), to barter for copper. The poets are certainly not describing an age in which only a man of wealth might indulge in the rare and extravagant luxury of an iron ring: iron was a common commodity, like cattle, hides, slaves, bronze, and other such matters. Common as it was, Homer never once mentions its use for defensive armour, or for swords and spears.