Melville's Doubloon and the Shield of Achilles

Abstract

IF ASKED TO NAME ONE WORK of fiction as the American epic, most students of literature would no doubt choose Moby-Dick. By general consent this work not only has most of the internal qualifications of epic (however they may be defined), but it has also attained a standing in our national self-conception roughly comparable to that of Paradise Lost in England or Homer's poems in Greece. Milton, who was deeply immersed in academic classical learning from an early age, has been widely studied for Greek and Roman influences. Melville has not, perhaps because his schooling was informal and haphazard, and because in his writing there is little of that learned allusiveness with which Milton advertised his classical models. These conditions have led to a widespread assumption that the influence of classical epic on Moby-Dick, however profound, must have been general, broadly conceptual, and more or less diffuse. In this article I hope to encourage a more precise and specific classical reading of Moby-Dick by pointing out some striking similarities between the gold doubloon which is nailed to the Pequod's mast and the shield made by Hephaestus for Achilles in the eighteenth Book of Homer's Iliad. The Homeric parallels to Melville's doubloon invite the surmise that it was actually suggested by Homer's Shield of Achilles. As I will show, there is some good circumstantial evidence in favor of such an interpretation. The object of my argument is not, however,