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 avaluable contribution to our understanding of the Iliad as an early work of political thought and evidence of the nascent city-state.