The object of the present paper is not to give a full account of the Homeric chariot, but merely to call attention to a somewhat minute point, in which, as it seems to me, light may be thrown upon the words of Homer from the representations given us in the painted vases.

By way of preface it may be mentioned that the war-chariot was hardly known in Greece proper, at all events after the heroic age. The only occasion in Greek history when it played an important part was on the half-oriental soil of Cyprus. In the battle so picturesquely described by Herodotos (v. 113), the fortune of the day was finally decided by the treachery of the war-chariots of Salamis, whose desertion threw the island into the hands of the Persians (498 B.C.). On the rugged and broken mountains of the mainland, such an arm could hardly ever have been of practical service, and we may assume that the type familiar to the vase-painters of the fifth century B.C. must have been derived from Asia Minor.