ἔκτοσθε δὲ λευκοὶ ὀδόντες / ἀργιόδοντος ὑὸς θαμέες ἔχον ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα
As Hainsworth notes (1993 ad 10.261–265), “There is no doubt that a piece of bronze-age equipment is being referred to.” But how does this much-discussed example of Bronze Age material culture contribute to our understanding of the composition and poetics of the Iliad? Sherratt (1990:818) observes that the boar’s tusk helmet “though still occasionally found in graves as late as the 12th and 11th centuries, disappears from representational art of a military nature after 1200 BC.” (See also Lorimer 1950:212–219 and Stubbings 1962:516.) Is the boar’s tusk helmet evidence that Homeric poetry was being composed in the Bronze Age? Many scholars have rejected such a proposition, and instead have viewed this helmet as an instance of an eighth-century poet deliberately “archaizing” (on this concept, see e.g. Dickinson 1986, Kirk 1960:190ff., and Morris 1986:89ff.). Hainsworth questions whether the verses could survive from the Bronze Age, “their language being in no respect exceptionally archaic”; rather, he asserts that “[t]he poet of this book wanted to introduce an interesting and exotic object.” Those who see Iliad 10 as a particularly late composition are not inclined to accept that such an old object forms a natural part of this book, and instead prefer to see its inclusion as the work of an archaizing individual. But Sherratt (1990) has shown that, just as there are linguistic layers in the traditional language of Homeric poetry, so too are there archaeological layers that are not well explained by those who seek to isolate and dismiss individual Bronze Age relics as heirlooms or as products of deliberate archaizing. And just as the poetic diction evolved in such a way that we cannot easily separate out Aeolic language from Ionic (see above on 10.18), so too elements of disparate material cultures are integrated into the Iliad in such way that they can only be explained as the result of an evolving but also conservative process of oral composition, hundreds of years in the making. The arming scene of Odysseus and Diomedes in Iliad 10 is no different than countless other passages in the Iliad that include weapons from very different eras (see e.g. Sherratt 1990:810–811 on Iliad 19.369–391). Here, the boar’s tusk helmet seems to serve a poetic function beyond that of simply being an exotic object, for which see on 10.267.