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[34] The description of the decoration of the shield seems hopeless. The ὀμφαλός is naturally the single boss in the middle of the shield (13.192); it is only by a wrong use of the word that there can have been twenty “ὀμφαλοί” — presumably running round the edge. That they were made of tin shews that the author regarded them as purely decorative, not structural, such as the heads of nails fastening the bronze face on to the backing. At the same time it may be pointed out that the intaglio, App. B, Fig. 3, shews rims of dots, apparently knobs, running in a circle round the Mykenaean shield. But how the central boss is to be reconciled with the Gorgon head and the figures of “Δεῖμος” and “Φόβος” we cannot say. We must either read “τῶι” for τῆι in 36, and suppose that the Gorgon head is on the central boss itself, or assume that the two couplets Gorgon, 34-5 and 36-7, were parallel and independent accounts wrongly combined. In that case it is not easy, or indeed necessary, to say that one is older and the other an interpolation; each has its own difficulties. The only conclusion which seems safe is that the author of the passage is describing things of which he has no clear conception.

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