In the middle of the bloodiest stretch of the poem, Homer stops the war to describe a work of art. The smith-god Hephaestus forges Achilles a new shield, and on it he sets the whole world — cities and weddings and harvests and dancing, and, beside them, a city at war. For a few hundred lines the Iliad shows us everything the fighting has cost, all of it hammered into a single circle of metal.
When Patroclus is killed, he dies wearing Achilles' armor, and the Trojans strip it from his body. Achilles' goddess-mother Thetis goes to the smith-god Hephaestus, who forges a magnificent new set — and above all a great shield, described across some 130 lines of Book 18. On it Hephaestus works the earth, sky, sea, sun, moon and stars; two cities, one at peace and one under siege; plowing, harvest, a vineyard, herds, and a dancing-floor — the whole human world, encircled by the river Ocean.
What Homer describes is not really a shield you could carry into battle; it is a cosmos. At its center are the heavens; around them turn two cities. In the first, there is a wedding with torches and song, and a lawsuit in the marketplace being settled by argument rather than by spears — a whole civilization running on words and custom. In the second city, an army lays siege while the defenders plan an ambush, and Strife and Panic and Death move among the fighters: the world of the Iliad itself. Around these Hephaestus sets the turning year — plowmen and reapers, a king's estate at harvest, a vineyard heavy with fruit, cattle attacked by lions, sheep in the valleys, and finally young men and women dancing in a ring, while a crowd delights and a bard sings among them.
The genius of the shield is where Homer puts it. He is about to send Achilles back into battle to kill and to die; the poem is at its darkest. And precisely here he pauses to show the reader the entire world of peace — marriage, law, farming, music, the dance — the ordinary human life the war has suspended and that Achilles, choosing glory, has given up forever. The shield does not comment on the war. It simply stands beside it, whole and shining, and lets you measure one against the other. The most warlike object in the poem carries, on its face, an argument for peace.
This is the founding example of ekphrasis — a poem describing an imagined image so vividly that it seems to move — and it has haunted writers ever since; W. H. Auden's great modern poem "The Shield of Achilles" answers Homer directly, replacing his dancing-floor with the barren landscapes of the twentieth century. Read in a Jungian light, the shield is a mandala: a single round image that gathers the whole of existence — heaven and earth, war and peace, labor and love — into one contained and ordered form, held up at the very moment the hero's own life is flying apart.
What is the Shield of Achilles?
A new shield forged for Achilles by the smith-god Hephaestus in Book 18, after Achilles loses his armor with the death of Patroclus. Homer describes its images at length — the earth, sky and sea; a city at peace and a city at war; harvest, herds, and a dance — the whole of human life worked into metal.
What does the Shield of Achilles symbolize?
It is usually read as an image of the entire world — everything the war has suspended. By setting a full vision of peacetime life at the center of his poem, Homer measures the cost of the fighting against the world it destroys.
What is ekphrasis?
A vivid, extended literary description of a work of art. The Shield of Achilles is the most famous example in Western literature — the founding instance of poetry describing an imagined image so fully that it seems to move.