The Shield of Achilles Iliad 18.478-608

The construction of the shield of Achilles is one of the most fascinating sec-tions of the Iliad. Here, while Achilles and everyone else awaits the unfolding of his fate, the poet suspends the narrative to describe the decoration of the shield by Hephaestus. The adornment consists not of the frightening images seen on other Homeric shields, but rather the everyday scenes which comprise his vision of earthly life. It is a long departure from the usually rapid movement of Homer, and as such makes up our oldest example of extended ekphrasis, the verbal de-scription of an object or work of art. In ancient times, this lengthy digression led Zenodotus to eliminate the passage from his edition altogether. Other readers, however, have perceived the powerful narrative effect of an extended pause just at the crucial turning point of the story, as though it were — as Oliver Taplin called it — the calm before the storm. At the beginning of the eighteenth book, Achilles receives the news that Patro-colus has died, and the great armor which Achilles had lent him has been stripped by Hector. Achilles is devastated, and his anger at Agamemnon suddenly seems insignificant, as grief for his friend swells into an intense rage directed at himself and at Hector. While he is waiting for his mother, Thetis, to deliver new armor from the smith-god Hephaestus, he goes out before the ships, with flames encir-cling his head, and frightens the Trojans with three terrible screams. Throughout the poem we see fire as a symbol of anger, heroic passion, war, and even death (for more, see Whitman, Chapter 7); so, when the bellows of Hephaestus kindle the fires of his forge, it leads us naturally to think of the rekindling of Achilles’ ∗This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visi