The Shield of Achilles: From Metalepsis to Mise En Abyme

Abstract

The Shield of Achilles (Iliad 18.478-608) can easily be qualified as ‘the mother’ of all ekphraseis, and scholarly interest in this passage has been massive. Scholars have mainly discussed three issues: the relation between the Shield and real shields; the relation between the scenes on the Shield and the Iliad; and the method of description.In this article I will focus on the third point. As noted famously by Lessing, the description of the Shield is dynamic, both in the sense that we see Hephaestus making the shield and that the scenes depicted become stories, with characters speaking and thinking and events following one after the other. My central question is: who is responsible for these narrativised scenes, Hephaestus or the Homeric narrator? Or to put it more poignantly: who creates the scenes on the Shield? I note the following positions. It is the divine artist Hephaestus who either creates figures which (1a) can really move, like his tripods and handmaids: 18.376f., 418-20 (‘the figures are not merely lifelike, they really live!’), or (1b) at least suggest movement, a suggestion to be decoded by the narrator (‘the consistent transformations of gold into natural image, of image into action, give us to understand that the qualities of sound and movement and emotion come into being through the responsive participation of the spectator in the work’). Or, it is the Homeric narrator who either (2a) cannot suppress a ‘youthful pleasure in animated narration’ and himself narrates stories instead of describing the figures which Hephaestus makes, or (2b) subtly blends description and narration (‘a cycle of scenes wrought in metal—or in words? This description of the shield actually is a poem’).