Throwing the Diskos

‘Then the son of Peleus took an unwrought metal mass which anciently the mighty Eetion was wont to hurl.’ This σόλος αὐτοχόωνος, which was at once the weight to be thrown and the prize in the Homeric competition, was apparently a mass of pig iron just as it came from the furnace; probably, as Mr. J. L. Myres suggests to me, ‘the contents of one of the old open-hearth furnaces of the Mediterranean world, the natural unit quantity for the purveyor and buyer of the metal, the classical analogy to which is the mass of iron (μύδρος σιδήρεος) which the Phocaeans threw into the sea before their voyage westwards.