Dendra corselet: that panoply weighed at least 15 kg, and its plates extended to
mid-thigh and would have prevented the wearer from moving at a rate more rapid
than a hobble. Crouwel conceded that an infantryman wearing something like the
Dendra corselet would have been more or less stationary:
The Dendra fighter would not have needed a shield and would have had both
hands free to handle his weapons. At the same time, his mobility on the ground
would have been minimal and he would surely have needed a vehicle to convey
him any distance once he was armed.^68It is difficult to imagine how a chariot could have delivered such a ponderous
infantryman into the midst of a fray, or—even worse—picked him up when he
was wounded or exhausted. The chariot driver and his horses would have been
easy targets, leaving the heavily armored infantryman with no taxi to carry him
back to safety.
The taxied infantryman was an important device for Homer’s poetry—allowing
the poet to focus on the heroes seriatim, as one by one they were brought into the
poetic narrative—but in the real world neither a chariot driver nor a taxied
infantryman wearing the Dendra corselet would have survived very long. With
good reason Hans-Günter Buchholz, in his final fascicle on warfare in the
Mycenaean period and in the Homeric epics, concluded that Homer’s depiction
of chariots as taxis for infantrymen shows decisively that the poet did not know
how chariots were used—or how battles were fought—in the Late Bronze Age.^69
Bows and arrows
The bow is the least publicized of the weapons prized in the new militarism on
the Greek mainland. In Mycenaean art the bow seldom appears. It is true that scenes
of violence in Mycenaean art usually included both opponents, and that inclusion
of both an archer and the person or animal he was targeting demanded a
considerable space (a wall of an Egyptian pharaoh’s mortuary temple served very
well). The absence of the bow in Mycenaean art is nevertheless striking. Helen
Lorimer, discounting the Silver Siege Rhyton as Minoan, found only two
representations, both from Shaft Grave IV.
Surviving arrowheads indicate that impressive bows were placed alongside many
of the men buried in the Shaft Graves, but no Mycenaean bow has survived to be
uncovered by archaeologists. Self bows are entirely perishable, but a composite
bow can leave durable traces. Although the wood core and the sinew on the outer
face of a composite bow must have perished long ago, as must have the bow string
(often made from the sciatic nerve of an ox or some other large animal), the inner
facing of horn can survive. At Sintashta, as we have seen, pieces of horn have
been identified by Russian archaeologists as the remains of composite bows. No
such pieces have yet been noticed in LH tombs.
Although Mycenaean chariot kraters do not show archers riding on chariots,
neither do the kraters or other LH media (with the probable exception of the Shaft
190 Militarism in Greece