Greaves
GREEVZ
Attested elsewhere in ancient sourcesBronze shin armour, shaped to the leg and sprung onto it without straps. The shield covers a man from chin to knee; the greaves cover what is left.
Homer uses the epithet so often that it becomes a name for the Greeks themselves, the well greaved Achaeans, repeated through the Iliad as a matter of course.
The silver-grey work down Acenes' shins in this account is marked out like greaves, with a gorgon's head below one knee, which is where the metal ones carried decoration.
Sources
- Hom. Il. 1.17
- Hom. Il. 3.330-332
References are to the standard divisions of the ancient texts, not to any one edition.
Acenes of Sparta: The Dragon Slayer
A dragon is the reason the 300 died. Leonidas used the magic of the gods to bind Kalaxes beneath Taygetus, and the price was his life and his men's. Sixty-two years later a seven-year-old of the agoge falls into the dragon's crypt and inherits the unpaid balance.
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