I've been reading the Iliad recently and I was wondering what bronze spears and armor were like back then (assuming the fictional poem reflects what soldiers in ancient Greece actually did use). In the poem people are killed by javelins or even just rocks that are thrown. How much protection did the bronze armor that they wore provide? Could it be penetrated by their bronze javelins? Did all the soldiers have armor or just the important ones? Does the Iliad give us a good representation of what warfare was like in ancient Greece?
Edit: One other thing I also forgot, In the poem it mentions that I think it was a chariot axle or something was made out of iron. If they had access to iron, why did they still make weapons and armour out of bronze?
Your question is somewhat problematic cause the Iliad and Odyssey in no way give us a coherent account fo how Greek arms and armour work due to the way that the Iliad and Odyssey were 1) composed and 2) written down in their present form. The general consensus is that the Iliad was written down somewhere around 800-700 B.C. and was the foundational work to use the Greek alphabet. Yet the material which the Iliad and Odyssey describe is much, much older than that, ranging back to 1200 B.C or even earlier. Since writing was nonexistent the epic stories were transmitted orally by Aoidoi, professional poets and singers who embellished and made up new stories with an eye for the dramatic. So the poem was written during the Iron age, the mythic elements during the Bronze age and everything was elaborated and exaggerated on inbetween. As such some of the weapons and armour in the Iliad are very ancient, the boars tusk helmet in Book 23 (?) comes to mind as does Ajax's wall shield that is described as being "as high as a tower", designs which were not used when the poem was written down in the 800s and were far older than living memory. Further, methods of warfare, with individual chariots and so on are very ancient and were later abandoned in favour of cavalry or none at all (compare the battle of Meggido in the 1500s C. B.C. where each side had 1000 chariots with with the Battle of Thermopylae where the Greeks had no cavalry at all and the Persians only 1000) Yet, there are other elements that seem to be of a much later variety, such as the Corinthan Helmet (in use during the archaic and early classical period) with the horsehair plume which Astyanax gets frightened by in book 6. I know that my answer has not really answered your question, but that is because the Iliad does not provide us with any reliable answers because of the nature of its composition. For that we have to look to archaeology and pick our period carefully, since Ancient Greek armour and weaponry could cover any time between 1500 B.C to the Roman conquest in 146 B.C. during which armour changed beyond recognition.
Azdac7 above covers some of the general anachronisms that crop up due to the poems being a combination of oral tradition and composition when they were written down in the 8th or 9th century BC.
I will focus on the descriptions of armour being penetrated with ease, though. The thing to remember is that the characters being described in the Iliad are super-human. A number of times in the poem characters are described as lifting rocks the likes of which 'ten men today could not lift'. Spears ripping through armour like nothing is part of the heroic description, so I would caution against taking it as a description of the armour-penetrating power of contemporary weapons.
