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Book Ten
Figure i. The boar's tusk helmet. From H.-G. Buchholz, Arch. Horn, E pi. ia.
etymologically as a compound of Korrd and the root of Teuxco, the helmet
being so called because it lacked height, having no crest. It is clear that the
scholiasts had nothing before them but the text. Bechtel, Lexilogus zu Homer
(Halle 1914) 187, having accepted Schulze's hypothesis that A690S was a
Carian loan-word, conjectured the same source for KaTaiTU^.
260 Meriones used the bow in battle at 13.650 and in the archery contest
at the funeral games of Patroklos at 23.870-81. At other times, as second in
command to Idomeneus (see 13.249-50^), he fights in the normal way
with the spear. T remembered that Meriones was a Cretan and that the
classical Cretans were great archers. A more important question is why a
bow should be thought a useful weapon for a spy to have. T supposed that
Odysseus could have shot from the darkness at men illuminated by the
firelight. Rather the poet wanted variety, a spear for Diomedes and, with a
glance at the Odyssey, a bow for Odysseus, just as he provided the spies with
two different helmets.
261-5 The boar's tusk helmet (see fig. 1). To W. Reichel (see Uber
homerische Waffen (2nd edn Vienna 1901) 102) is owed the distinction of
recognizing the significance of the ivory fragments turned up by nineteenthcentury
excavators of Mycenaean sites. The boar's tusk helmet was chiefly
current during the LHI and LHII periods but fell out of fashion during
LHIIIA (sixteenth-fifteenth century B.C.), so Lorimer, HM 212-19, see
alsoj. Borchhardt, Homerische Helme (Mainz 1972) 18-37, 47-52. The telltale
boar's ivory plaques, however, are found in later contexts, as late as a
179