Reading the Shield of Achilles: Terror, Anger, Delight

Abstract

W HEN he agrees to Achilles' armor, Hephaistos tells Thetis that any mortal wonder when he sees (18.466-467). But, as it happens, nobody in the poem singles out any one scene on the shield for comment, and only rarely is the shield even noted by a character in the Iliad. Rather than inspiring a specific response from characters in the poem, the detailed description of the scenes on the shield, like an extended simile, invites the audience of the poem to consider Hephaistos' creation against the larger story of which it is a part.' While vocabulary and theme in those vignettes resonate with key scenes in the poem proper, as critics have observed,2 it has proven more difficult to define the particular relevance, if any, of the god's work of art for the heroes of the Iliad and most particularly for the hero who is to bear that shield. In one scholar's words, the ekphrasis represents the good life, its purpose to make us ... see [war] in relation to peace, reminding the audience of all that will be lost with the fall of Troy.3 The description of