The Art of Poetics and Politics: The Shield of Achilles

This book provides a current reading of the Shield of Achilles in the Iliad. Looking to combat views that regard aspects of the passage as confused and inessential, I hope to demonstrate the different ways in which this passage is important to the understanding of the greater epic. My first chapter provides a scene-by-scene analysis of the Shield passage, incorporating many of the views held by modern scholarship, arguing that the Shield works as a reflexive centerpiece within the poem, concentrating key themes and recalling crucial scenes at a climactic moment in the epic’s narrative. My second chapter explores how the Shield, as the earliest example of an extended ekphrasis in Western culture, provides a sophisticated comment upon the nature of art, and explores the inferences that can be made from the description of a creative process within a poem performed in an oral tradition. My final chapter examines the Shield’s political scenes arguing that the Shield passage provides a valuable contribution to our understanding of the Iliad as an early work of political thought and evidence of the nascent city-state.