When Iliad 19 begins, Thetis attempts to console Akhilleus, whose grief at the death of Patroklos exceeds all norms of the Akhaian community:

εὖρε δὲ Πατρόκλῳ περικείμενον ὃν φίλον υἱόν,
κλαίοντα λιγέων· πολέες δ’ ἀμφ’ αὐτὸν ἑταῖροι
μύρονθ’. ἣ δ’ ἐν τοῖσι παρίστατο δῖα θεάων,
ἔν τ’ ἄρα οἱ φῦ χειρὶ ἔπος τ’ ἔφατ’ ἔκ τ’ ὀνόμαζε·
τέκνον ἐμόν, τοῦτον μὲν ἐάσομενἐάσομεν ἀχνύμοενοί περ
κεῖσθαι, ἐπεὶ δὴ πρῶτα θεῶν ἰότητι δαμάσθη·
τύνη δ’ Ἡφαίστοιο πάρα κλυτὰ τεύχεα δέξο
καλὰ μάλ’, οἷ’ οὔ πώ τις ἀνὴρ ὤμοισι φόρησεν.
ὣς ἄρα φωνήσασα θεὰ κατὰ τεύχε’ ἔθηκε
πρόσθεν Ἀχιλλῆος· τά δ’ ἀνέβραχε δαίδαλα πάντα.
Μυρμιδόνας δ’ ἄρα πάντας ἕλε τρόμος, οὐδέ τις ἔτλη
ἄντην εἰσιδέειν, ἀλλ’ ἔτρεσαν. αὐτὰρ Ἀχιλλεὺς
ὡς εἶδ’, ὥς μιν μᾶλλον ἔδυ χόλος, ἐν δὲ οἱ ὄσσε
δεινὸν ὑπὸ βλεφάρων ὡς εἰ σέλας ἐξεφάανθεν·
πέρπετο δ’ ἐν χείρεσσιν ἔχων θεοῦ ἀγλαὰ δῶρα.

Thetis found her beloved son wrapped wholly around Patroklos,
lamenting with shrill cries, and the many companions around him
mourned. She, shining of goddesses, stood amongst them.
She clung hard to Akhilleus’ hand and spoke:
“My child, let him lie dead, though we grieve for him,
since he was utterly overcome by the plan of the gods.
But you now, take up the glorious arms of Hephaistos,
surpassing beautiful, such as no mortal has ever set to his shoulders.”
The goddess spoke and laid the armor down
before Akhilleus, and all its cunning wonders clashed aloud.
Trembling took hold of all the Myrmidons. None could endure
to look straight at it. They feared it. Only Akhilleus
looked, and as he looked rage held him all the more,
and his eyes shone wondrous from under his lids, like flares from the sun.
And he found pleasure, taking in his hands the shining gifts of Hephaistos.^[1]

Nowhere else in the Homeric poems is a corpse so wholly embraced by the mourner, as if he might somehow press it back into life; to “lament with a shrill cry” is otherwise the action of a mourning wife. Akhilleus’ grief for Patroklos both exceeds and reverses Homeric norms. Thetis takes Akhilleus’ hand, as if she would separate him from Patroklos, and initially offers perhaps the most anodyne of consolations: it’s all the will of the gods. But then, she presents to Akhilleus the arms that Hephaistos, in the preceding night, has forged, including the ecphrastic shield, which glitters and resounds with the vivified images of a world just to come, just to follow the fall of Troy and the returns of those few who survive and sail back to the west: a world of juridical institutions, of agricultural labor, and of craftspeople, shaped less by the will of the gods than by mortal exchange, speech, and craft.

For the companions of Akhilleus, the shield is a terror. They cannot endure to look at its “cunning wonders”—its daedala, its works of Daedalus (19.9)—because they see in those images their own death, their own obsolescence; there are no heroes in the post-Iliadic world. The response of Akhilleus to the shield runs differently, double and mixed: he feels “rage” (χόλος, kholos, 19.16), an adrenal surge that—in its Homeric scenarios—can erupt in violent words and actions or that might, in the course of time, be “digested” (1.81).^[2] Here, the kholos of Akhilleus, upon viewing the armor, is so intense as to kindle an inner fire, visible in the eyes, even as they look and look again at the shield. But anger gives way to—or exists alongside—pleasure (τέρπω, terpō), as Akhilleus takes up Hephaistos’ gifts in his hands, giving up, it would seem, his mourning embrace of Patroklos so as to heft the shield. Akhilleus’ strange mix of rage and pleasure at the sight of the shield provokes this essay’s series of readings.  For this hero, rage is provoked by the mechanics of exchange itself, which require losses: of Patroklos for the ecphrastic shield, of the life of the beloved for an artful recompense. This exchange reprises the one that has driven Akhilleus’s rage throughout the Iliad, the promise of fame in poetry—of Homeric κλέος, kleos—for his own short life. At the same time, pleasure arises from the recognition that the exchange is no longer that traditional Iliadic exchange of life for kleos, in which the hero must always die in youth, a berserker on the battlefield, in the repetition of an unchanging ideal; rather, the recompense for Patroklos is an image of a future—welcome for Akhilleus—devoid of heroes, yet still shaped by the traditional poet’s craft of creation in performance, of fluidity, of multiple paths of song, none of which foreclose another. The ecphrastic craft of the shield is not principally a cumulative, ordered gathering of the poet’s similes (as has sometimes been claimed), but a means for envisioning a future that will not be “like to …” any elements of the prior, heroic world. 

 

I. The Death of Patroklos, the Scream of Akhilleus, and the End of the Heroic

 

Within the Iliad, questions of loss and compensation are distilled in the figure of Patroklos. He is the hero with the “perfect” Homeric name, as “Patroklos” denotes “the fame of the fathers” (κλέος/kleos means “that which is heard,” which is “fame,” while πατρ-/patr– is the stem for “fathers,” “ancestors”). Patro–kleos names, that is, the very genre of poetry that is warrior epic, within which the hero dies for fame, for the paternal name. Within the Iliad itself, however, Patroklos is the beloved of Akhilleus, whose loss on the battlefield—fighting in the armor of Akhilleus—defies, for Akhilleus, all compensation. Patroklos is, for Akhilleus, not a genre or an ideology, but the one “most loved”—φίλτατος / philtatos. The break between the traditional meaning of “Patroklos” and the meaning of “Patroklos” for Akhilleus generates the grief, the rage, and the impurity of the last third of the Iliad.

As Patroklos rushes to his death on the battlefield in Iliad 16, the performing oral poet breaks from his third-person narration with a moment of direct, second-person address:

ἀλλ’ ὅτε δὴ τὸ τέταρτον ἐπέσσυτο δαίμονι ἶσος,
ἔνθ’ ἄρα τοι, Πάτροκλε, φάνη βιότοιο τελευτή·
ἤντετο γάρ τοι Φοῖβος ἐνὶ κρατερῇ ὑσμίνῃ
δεινός.

But when for a fourth time Patroklos rushed forward, like to his own Apportioner,
there—look!—for you, Patroklos, the end of life appeared.
For Phoibos met you in the overwhelming fight,
dread Apollo.^[3]

In the melee on the Trojan Plain, the central Iliadic warriors become ever more maddened by their own carnage. Violence redounds, both without and within, as the hero becomes most like to the divine in his death-dealing force, even as he also becomes the agent of his own destruction. At the full pitch of Patroklos’ battlefield frenzy, which is also the moment of Apollo’s arrival, he is daimoni isos, “like to a daimōn” (786 above)—like, that is, to a god (as in many translations) or, better, like to a divine power that arises from within, a fate of his own making.^[4] Patroklos had entered the battlefield in Iliad 16 at a juncture of near-disaster for the Akhaians, who—in Akhilleus’ absence—have suffered defeat. Patroklos goes into battle dressed in Akhilleus’ armor, so that the Trojans, mistaking Patroklos for Akhilleus, might be overcome by fear.  Patroklos’ battlefield trajectory then follows that of a traditional Indo-European hero:  an initial martial success, spurred first by the desire to protect his comrades, leads to an intractable, ever accelerating aggressive drive and to a manic frenzy of indiscriminate slaughter (in the line that precedes those cited above, Patroklos has just killed twenty-seven men in four words: τρὶς δ’ ἐννεα φῶτας ἔπεφεν, 785), which culminates in a death where heroic self-making and self-destruction coincide.^[5] 

The shock of the emergence of that traditional narrative in Iliad 16—the poem both fulfills and critiques its own tradition—is that Patroklos had seemed, within the poem, to stand apart from that trajectory. Patroklos has been prior characterized as the patient listener, as the healer of the wounded, and as the companion of Akhilleus who weeps for and pities those that Akhilleus has abandoned and who would risk his own life to save them; after his death he is remembered, in Briseïs’ mourning speech, as “always honey-sweet”—μείλιχον αἰεί (19.300). The poet’s apostrophe to Patroklos at 16.787 is uniquely conjoined with the discourse particle ἄρα (ara), which serves to call out to the oral poet’s audience a vivid present in which both poet and protagonist, as if together at the same vantage point, momentarily watch the moment of accumulating disaster (“Look Patroklos … the end of your life”), a moment that binds poet, audience, and even the hero in the recognition that the traditional destiny of the warrior will claim even that one hero who had seemed to stand at some ameliorative remove from that plot of violence and self-destruction.^[6] As if the poet were to say to the audience that he has invoked: look, this is the inevitable destiny of even the most “gentle” of heroes.

Apollo arrives, invisibly, and what follows is one of the eeriest and most brutal of Homeric scenes. The divine antagonist of Akhilleus strikes Patroklos from behind with a blow to the back, such that his eyes whirl in a daze (792: στρεφεδίνηθεν δὲ οἱ ὄσσε, a unique phrase), then proceeds to knock the helmet, spear, and shield from Patroklos; and finally,

λῦσε δέ οἱ θώρηκα ἄναξ Διὸς υἱὸς  Ἀπόλλων.
τὸν δ’ ἄτη φρένας εἷλε, λύθεν δ’ὑπὸ φαίδιμα γυῖα,
στῆ δὲ ταφὼν.

Lord Apollo, son of Zeus, broke Patroklos’ corselet.
Confusion seized his mind, and his shining limbs were unstrung,
and he stood, stunned.^[7]

As Patroklos’ armor is stripped from him, so too his mind and body is undone (the verb that marks the destruction of both corselet and limbs is the same: λῦσε / λύθεν). Apollo’s blow to Patroklos’ back is followed by a spear wound from Euphorbos and, in the end, by yet another spear thrust, now at close quarters, from Hektor, who is—in Patroklos’ dying words—his “third killer” (σὺ δέ με τρίτος ἐξεναρίζεις, where the verb (ἐξ-)εναρίζω has a sense of both “strip” and “kill”). With that rebuke, “the end that is death covered Patroklos … and his spirit, flying from his limbs, departed, / mourning her destiny, leaving behind manhood and youth” (16.855–57). 

Hektor then puts on the armor and the shield that Patroklos had brought into battle. That regalia had been made by Hephaistos as a gift from the gods to Akhilleus’ father Peleus, on the occasion of his marriage to Thetis. That first immortal armor did not save Patroklos, nor will the second save Akhilleus (as Hephaistos himself remarks, as he begins to forge that second shield, 18.464-67). The underlying point for the argument here is that the first set of armor—which will now be replaced by the panoply that includes the ekphrastic shield of Akhilleus—marks both the origin of the Trojan War (the strife that precipitates the war first erupts at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis) and the birth of Akhilleus (the child of Peleus and Thetis). The first shield sets in motion the mythic episodes—the birth of Akhilleus, the war at Troy—that bring the age of heroes to an end, while the second conjures a world still to come, itself made possible by the eventual fall of Troy and the death of Akhilleus. The images on Akhilleus’ first shield—the one that Hektor strips from Patroklos—are nowhere depicted in the Iliad (or anywhere else). But perhaps the story that those images might have told is the one that sets the birth—and always foretold death—of Akhilleus within the overarching mythological context to which the poem does make numerous allusions: Thetis was first desired by both Zeus and Poseidon, until Themis—goddess of the boundaries of divine and mortal order—prophesied that a child of Thetis would be greater than the father. And so, the two male gods drop their pursuit of Thetis and marry her off—displacing her down—to the mortal Peleus. Akhilleus, the mortal child that is then engendered, thus ensures the permanence of Zeus’ cosmic rule, as the prior usurpations of father by son—as Kronos had displaced Ouranos, as Zeus had displaced Kronos—will not be repeated.^[8] The mortality of Akhilleus fixes the Olympian order, even as it anticipates a newly historical age, one in which forms of compensatory immortality—the singing of heroic epic, the foundation of cities—come to the fore.

Within the Iliad that mythological background, as well as Akhilleus’ maddened grief for the loss of Patroklos, registers in the extraordinary scene in which Akhilleus, bereft of his old armor and not yet furnished with new, screams from the periphery of the battlefield, and—in the terror that ensues—makes the rescue of Patroklos’ body possible:

αὐτὰρ Ἀχιλλεὺς ὦρτο Διῒ φίλος· ἀμφὶ δ’ Ἀθήνη
ὤμοις ἰφθίμοισι βάλ’ αἰγίδα θυσσανόεσσαν,
ἀμφὶ δέ οἱ κεφαλῇ νέφος ἔστεφε δῖα θεάων
χρύσεον, ἐκ δ’ αὐτοῦ δαῖε φλόγα παμφανόωσαν.
ὡς δ’ ὅτε καπνὸς ἰὼν ἐξ ἄστεος αἰθέρ’ ἵκηται
τηλόθεν ἐκ νήσου, τὴν δήϊοι ἀμφιμάχωνται,
οἵ τε πανημέριοι στυγερῷ κρίνονται Ἄρηϊ
ἄστεος ἐκ σφετέρου: ἅμα δ’ ἠελίῳ καταδύντι
πυρσοί τε φλεγέθουσιν ἐπήτριμοι, ὑψόσε δ’ αὐγὴ
γίγνεται ἀί̈σσουσα περικτιόνεσσιν ἰδέσθαι,
αἴ κέν πως σὺν νηυσὶν ἄρεω ἀλκτῆρες ἵκωνται:
ὣς ἀπ’ Ἀχιλλῆος κεφαλῆς σέλας αἰθέρ’ ἵκανε.
στῆ δ’ ἐπὶ τάφρον ἰὼν ἀπὸ τείχεος, οὐδ’ ἐς Ἀχαιούς
μίσγετο· μητρὸς γὰρ πυκινὴν ὠπίζετ’ ἐφετμήν.
ἔνθα στὰς ἤϋσ’, ἀπάτερθε δὲ Παλλὰς Ἀθήνη
φθέγξατ’· ἀτὰρ Τρώεσσιν ἐν ἄσπετον ὦρσε κυδοιμόν.
ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἀριζήλη φωνή, ὅτε τ’ ἴαχε σάλπιγξ
ἄστυ περιπλομένων δηΐων ὕπο θυμοραϊστέων,
ὣς τότ’ ἀριζήλη φωνὴ γένετ’ Αἰακίδαο.
οἳ δ’ ὡς οὖν ἄϊον ὄπα χάλκεον Αἰακίδαο,
πᾶσιν ὀρίνθη θυμός· ἀτὰρ καλλίτριχες ἵπποι
ἂψ ὄχεα τρόπεον· ὄσσοντο γὰρ ἄλγεα θυμῷ.
ἡνίοχοι δ’ ἔκπληγεν, ἐπεὶ ἴδον ἀκάματον πῦρ
δεινὸν ὑπὲρ κεφαλῆς μεγαθύμου Πηλεΐωνος
δαιόμενον· τὸ δὲ δαῖε θεὰ γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη.
τρὶς μὲν ὑπὲρ τάφρου μεγάλ’ ἴαχε δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς,
τρὶς δὲ ἐκυκήθησαν Τρῶες κλειτοί τ’ ἐπίκουροι.
ἔνθα δὲ καὶ τότ’ ὄλοντο δυώδεκα φῶτες ἄριστοι
ἀμφὶ σφοῖς ὀχέεσσι καὶ ἔγχεσιν…

Ἠέλιον δ’ ἀκάμαντα βοῶπις πότνια Ἥρη
πέμψεν ἐπ’ Ὠκεανοῖο ῥοὰς ἀέκοντα νέεσθαι
ἠέλιος μὲν ἔδυ, παύσαντο δὲ δῖοι Ἀχαιοὶ
φυλόπιδος κρατερῆς καὶ ὁμοιΐου πολέμοιο.

Akhilleus, beloved to Zeus, rose up. On his strong shoulders
Athene wrapped a tasseled aegis.
Bright amongst goddesses, she crowned his head with a cloud,
golden, from which she kindled a far-shining flame.
Just as when smoke rises up into the clear air,
from a town on a far-away island, around which enemies fight.
All day long, the townsmen measure themselves in loathsome Ares
until the sun goes down
and close-set signal-fires blaze, and the shine quavers on high,
gleaming that their neighbors might see
and come with their ships, defenders against war’s harm.
Just so from the head of Akhilleus the blaze rose into the bright air.
He went from the wall and stood by the ditch, nor did he join with
the Akhaians, since he obeyed the shrewd order of his mother.
There he stood and screamed; and Pallas Athene from her place
cried out. But Akhilleus drove infinite terror upon the Trojans.
As when the piercing voice of a war trumpet screams out
from murderous besiegers,
just as piercing was the voice of Akhilleus.
The Trojans, when they heard the brazen voice of Akhilleus,
every man’s heart shook, and the horses with their beautiful manes
themselves spun the chariots about, 
for they saw in their spirit the disaster to come.
The charioteers were stunned, when they saw the weariless,
uncanny fire above the head of great-spirited Akhilleus,
blazing, kindled by the grey-eyed goddess Athene.
Three times, across the ditch divine Akhilleus screamed,
three times, the Trojans and their allies were routed.
There and then, twelve of the best mere mortals perished,
on their own chariots and spears.
…

The ox-eyed Herē
drove the unwilling weariless
sun god down into the depths of Okeanos.
The sun set, and the brilliant Akhiaians gave up
the strong fighting and levelling war.^[9]

In this moment at the ditch, Akhilleus gains the apotheosis that the mythological tradition otherwise denies. Commanded by Iris to show himself “just as he is” (αὔτως … φάνηθι is Iris’ order at 18.198), Akhilleus—naked, unarmed—ends his withdrawal from the Akhaian camp and appears, still at a distance from the battlefield, as overwhelming force. The hero’s implicit desire for divinization—the fate Akhilleus’ birth forecloses—comes to fruition for one awe-filled, elemental moment. The golden cloud (νέφος χρύσεον, 205–6) with which Athene crowns Akhilleus is, elsewhere in the Iliad, associated only with divinities (Ares in Book 13, Zeus in Book 14), while the flame (φλόξ, 18.205) that burns from Akhilleus’ head is comparable to that with which Zeus defeats the Titans (Hesiod Theogony 692, 697).

But the Iliad-poet is most often an experimental ironist of his mythological tradition, and one of the poet’s ironic strategies regularly insists that the completion and the destruction, the perfection and the negation, whether of a traditional form or of a desire, are the same. Akhilleus is most a god at the moment of his return to battle, which ensures his own very mortal death. Akhilleus is both the most divine of mortals and the most mortal of mortals, both closest to and farthest from the gods. His momentary nearness to the divine only foregrounds the absoluteness of a distance that is impassable—and further kindles a rage at that impassability. The simile of the besieged city that follows upon his apotheosis (18.207–13) evokes the Fall of Troy, which Akhilleus’ return to battle ensures, though that return also necessitates Akhilleus’ own death. Akhilleus’ divinity is never so evident as at the moment that it is denied.^[10]

At an earlier juncture in the poem, as Akhilleus begins his rejection of the gifts intended to lure him back to the Akhaian camp, he rebukes Agamemnon’s messenger Odysseus:

διογενὲς Λαερτιάδη, πολυμήχαν’ Ὀδυσσεῦ
χρὴ μὲν δὴ τὸν μῦθον ἀπηλεγέως ἀποειπεῖν,
ᾗ περ δὴ φρονέω τε καὶ ὡς τετελεσμένον ἔσται,
ὡς μή μοι τρύζητε παρήμενοι ἄλλοθεν ἄλλος·
ἐχθρὸς γάρ μοι κεῖνος ὁμῶς Ἀίδαο πύλῃσιν,
ὅς χ’ ἕτερον μὲν κείθῃ ἐνὶ φρεσίν, ἄλλο δὲ εἴπῃ.

God-born son of Laertes, much-devising Odysseus,
I must speak my intent bluntly,
just as I think it and just as it will come to be,
lest one after another of you sit beside me and coo.
As hateful to me as the Gates of Hades is that man
who hides one thing in his heart, but says another.^[11]

Akhilleus’ animus is directed at Odysseus, the consummate verbal trickster, but his speech also articulates the peculiarly heroic dream of speech that is absolute, that bears nothing but its originary meaning and that cannot be heard otherwise; a speech in which sign and signified cohere absolutely. Such a form of speech would, on Akhilleus’ fantastical reckoning, be equivalent to life, as the hero might finally gain the power to denominate his own ego, his own name, his own praise-song. Such a dream of heroic speech—nurtured in rage at the devaluations of speech, especially by the king and his counsellors, the Homeric βασιλεῖς—renders the language of mortals like to that of clucking birds.^[12] But again, for the Iliad-poet, perfection is always destruction, always a reversal of values: at the ditch, at the moment of apotheosis, Akhilleus’ fantasy of speech finds voice, but it conduces rather to terror, to a divine and annihilating speech, to the Hades that Akhilleus would despise.  

If we move, as well, from Akhilleus’ scream at the ditch at its most suggestively, vengefully divine to its mortal meaning within the plot of the Iliad, the epiphany at the ditch also voices Akhilleus’ surpassing grief. At the very moment of his own greatest force, Akhilleus articulates his pain and rage at the loss of Patroklos, the most mortal of attachments. Grief at the failure of love—of Homeric φιλότης, philotēs—to gain any purchase, any stable presence, within the mortal world of heroes, becomes itself the force of the heroes’ destruction. Akhilleus’ alienation—his non-communication with the world—is here confirmed by his frenzied scream at the death of the one with whom there was possibility of converse and union; the very inarticulateness of the scream, its deadly negation of communication, is one supreme measure of Akhilleus’ separateness and social impossibility, his queerness; that is, Akhilleus’ scream—the culmination of his μῆνις, his “wrath” (1.1)—is thus a double articulation of what made the heroic perishable: on the cosmic, theological level (that of the overarching, mythological Διὸς βουιλή, the “plan of Zeus”), his scream instantiates the absolute partition of mortal and immortal. Within the poem (the “plan of Zeus that is the Iliad’s plot), the heroic world is furiously acknowledged as unable to sustain the greatest of mortal loves.

Akhilleus’ divinization as pure force and pure, world-destroying grief is momentary. He unlooses into the world a daemonic force that must be quickly quelled. Immediately upon the death of the twelve Trojans and the rescue of Patroklos’ body, Herē, who is otherwise the most ferocious of Troy’s divine adversaries, rescues the Trojans by driving the “unwilling” Helios down into the streams of Ocean (18.239–40). Herē temporarily disturbs the balanced procession of day and night so that order might be restored to the human battlefield; one cosmic disturbance registers and rectifies another. And yet, the next day will not be at all the same; for upon Akhilleus’ return and with the certainty of Troy’s destruction, the heroic is itself accelerating toward its end.

 

II. Akhilleus’ Shield as History and as Communitas

 

The scream at the ditch is one of the Iliad’s signal moments of negation. Poles of meaning within structures of opposition cross, such that one pole no longer serves to make the other legible: immortal and mortal, friend and enemy, love and death; and as these opposites collapse, so too does the capacity of speech to make meaning. Akhilleus’ scream of anguish communicates nothing and everything. Anger and grief at the world become a brute—uncommunicating and incommunicable, unspeaking and unspeakable—force of terror and death.

The Iliad does, of course, continue on beyond the scene of Akhilleus at the ditch (though in my own imaginary turn as bard, I might end the performance there). The death of Patroklos and the loss of Akhilleus’ first set of armor elicit one of the poem’s most extravagant and self-referential inventions, the mise en abîme of Akhilleus’ shield. Following the world-destroying chaos of the scene at the ditch, the making of the shield is a performative recovery of the possibilities of verbal craft. Hephaistos’ forging of the shield on Olumpos is analogous to the poetry-in-performance of an oral bard: the scenes on the shield come into view as the god forges them (as the poet sings them), rather than as a fully-formed artifact received upon completion (as, for example, Aineias’ shield is delivered to him in the Aeneid); so too, the song of a traditional performing bard is (in a way largely lost to readers) ever composed anew in its moment of performance, ever fluid and, so, resistant to a definitive version. The scenes that Hephaistos forges on the shield abound in motions that defy the art of any mortal metal-worker—motions of the constellations, of Okeanos, of the seasons; of civic processions and choral dances, of plowmen and herdsmen.The shield vibrates, as well, with sounds—of public argument, of pipers, of the harvest song, of lowing cattle—and in shimmer—of cloth, of ornamentation, of the track left by the plow, of bodies in motion, which themselves attract desiring looks. In the sensory hubbub of the shield, the poet counters Akhilleus’ scream at the ditch with a cumulating demonstration of the capacity of speech to multiply signifying and, in the performative moment, to cohere within an image of order—a cosmos—that itself remains ever in motion, as fluid and as resistant to completion as an order can be.

The images on the three central bands of the shield (18.490–606, between the constellations at the center and Okeanos on the rim) point toward a post-heroic world of civic litigants, judges, and assemblies, of agricultural small-holders and laborers, of civic, choral festival, and of strife with neighbors, both within and outside the community. Amidst the shield’s profusion of sociality, three over-arching structures of exchange conduce to cultural order: the exchange of things, which is the domain of the economy; of women, which is the domain of kinship; and of words, the domain of politics and of art. All three of those structures of exchange are critically contested within the plot of the Iliad itself. The negations of the Iliad, that is, make possible the cultural order that follows.

Crucially, however, that future order (the hypothesis of the shield) is itself shaped by the Iliad’s suspicion that the recompenses of culture are never sufficient to their correspondent limitations of consciousness and deformations of  desire. Akhilleus’ kholos at the loss of Patroklos stands as an on-going rebuke to the foundational lie that nothing is lost in the exchanges of social life for which there is not sufficient compensation. If the images of the Shield look forward, beyond the generations of heroes who have been the oral-poet’s material (the heroes whom the oral-poet has brought to perfection and destroyed), those images are nonetheless vivified by the oral poet’s continuing valuation of invention, of flux, of the instantaneity of unmaking and remaking, of creation in performance. This persistence of the oral-poet’s improvisatory mode, which values deconstruction as much as construction, is a future form of collective resistance, an acknowledgement of, and response to, the doomed hero’s critique of culture more largely.

In the fourth of the five concentric rings of the Shield of Akhilleus, a figure of the performing poet—the ἀοιδός, aiodos—appears: in the rush of both the choral dancers and the leaping soloists, themselves crowded around by a responsive audience, “the divine bard”—θεῖος ἀοιδός, 18.604 (below)—sings and plays at his lyre. The lines that depict the singing bard have been variously excised and restored (and excised and restored) over the long history of the Iliad’s textual transmission.^[13] I include those lines both because they surely belong to an oral tradition characterized by mouvance (there is no “fixed” text of an oral poem, though there is a text established by literate editors) and because they seem to me if not quite a signature (the bard, unlike the hero, remains nameless) nonetheless a last assertion of the presence and practice of the oral singer within the monumental poem—and again, within the singer’s images of the post-heroic world. In the terms of the argument sketched above, the ring of the dance is the Iliad-poet’s fullest vision of a community that—for all the larger skepticism of the Iliad about the mediating claims of culture—might be most nearly concordant with desire:

 

ἐν δὲ χορὸν ποίκιλλε περικλυτὸς ἀμφιγυήεις,
τῷ ἵκελον, οἷον ποτ’ ἐνὶ Κνωσῷ εὐρείῃ
Δαίδαλος ἤσκησεν καλλιπλοκάμῳ Ἀριάδνῃ.
ἔνθα μὲν ἠίθεοι καὶ παρθένοι ἀλφεσίβοιαι
ὠρχεῦντ’, ἀλλήλων ἐπὶ καρπῷ χεῖρας ἔχοντες.
τῶν δ’ αἳ μὲν λεπτὰς ὀθόνας ἔχον, οἳ δὲ χιτῶνας
εἵατ’ ἐυννήτους, ἦκα στίλβοντας ἐλαίῳ·
καὶ ῥ’ αἳ μὲν καλὰς στεφάνας ἔχον, οἳ δὲ μαχαίρας
εἶχον χρυσείας ἐξ ἀργυρέων τελαμώνων.
οἳ δ’ ὁτὲ μὲν θρέξασκον ἐπισταμένοισι πόδεσσι
ῥεῖα μάλ’. ὡς ὅτε τις τροχὸν ἄρμενον ἐν παλάμῃσιν
ἑζόμενος κεραμεὺς πειρήσεται, αἴ κε θέῃσιν·
ἄλλοτε δ’ αὖ θρέξασκον ἐπὶ στίχας ἀλλήλοισι.
πολλὸς δ’ ἱμερόεντα χορὸν περιίσταθ’ ὅμιλος
Τερπόμενοι· μετὰ δὲ σφιν ἐμέλπετο θεῖος ἀοιδὸς
φορμίζων, δοιὼ δὲ κυβιστητῆρε κατ’ αὐτοὺς
μολπῆς ἐξάρχοντες ἐδίνευον κατὰ μέσσους.

And on the shield, the renowned, Hephaistos, who moves in all directions,
was devising a dance-floor
like to the one in spacious Krete that Daidalos
once made for Ariadne with her beautiful braids.
There young men and maidens, worthy of fortunes,
were dancing, each holding the wrist of another.
The maidens wore light linen robes, the young men,
fine-spun tunics, shimmering with olive oil.
The maidens had fair garlands in their hair, the young men
golden knives hanging from silver belts.
All together, at one time they rushed round with fleet steps,
lightly, as when a potter, hovering over his wheel,
holds it close in his hands and tests it to see how it runs;
and then again they rushed in lines, each crossing the other.
A great crowd stood about the enchanting chorus of dancers,
delighting, and amongst them sang the divine bard,
playing his lyre, while two leaping dancers,
whirled solo amongst them, leading the revel .^[14]

Within the five chiastic rings of Akhilleus’ shield, the ring of the dance, which is the fourth ring (counting out from the center), corresponds with the second ring, which depicts the city at war and the city at peace (18.490–540).^[15] Both the second and the fourth rings offer visions of collective life, which in the second ring takes form in marriage processions, in political adjudication, and in strife between neighboring cities over borders and property. That is, the city takes form in institutions of kinship and of juridical adjudication, as well as in the deadly hardening of a distinction between inside and outside, us and them. The depictions of the second ring have, I think, a pointedly unsettled, almost hypothetical, quality to them, which resists closure: we don’t see the completion of the marriage procession, we don’t see the ruling of the judges in the scene of arbitration, and, more ominously, the battle between neighboring cities is left incomplete. The lineaments of political order (and intimations of its consequences) are present, but the picture is not resolved, the consequence is not yet made necessary. The ring of the dance, by contrast, depicts community as communitas, as a joyous community, as ever in motion, ever in construction and deconstruction; ends are not so much suspended, as effaced.^[16]

In the ring of the dance, the usual form of Homeric similes is—only here—reversed. The work of the divine Hephaistos is compared to that of the mortal, if heroic, Daidalos who made the “dancing space”—χορός, khoros, 590 above—in Krete. The word khoros can also mean the dance itself, and as Ariadne dances and leads her companions, she makes and remakes the space that Daidalos had first marked out; and so too does the crowding audience, amongst whom are found the bard and the leaping soloists, remake the khoros. Ariadne creates not a city of litigants and brides and combatants (as on the second ring), but a community of dancers joined by their hands, of soloists, and of a participatory audience that is wholly choral. Moreover, the hero whose action the dance commemorates is not the warrior, but Ariadne, whose stratagem of the thread made possible Theseus’ slaying of the Minotaur, thus bringing to an end a yearly ritual in which young men and women were put to death as sacrifices to the founding tyrant. Those who now dance in imitation of Ariadne and her chorus commemorate those first freed from the terrors of sacrificial logic; theirs is a dance of freedom, of exchange without bounds, and of restoration to life.^[17]

Are the “cunning wonders” of the shield, including Ariadne’s choral community, recompense for the loss of Patroklos, the singular beloved? Does the pleasure balance the rage? I would note that Akhilleus himself remains, for the final third of the Iliad, resistant to all forms of sociality, despite the persistent efforts of the Akhaians to draw him back into the political and ritual community. Even after he shares a meal and tears with Priam in the final book of the poem, the Iliad-poet tells us that “he wept yet again for Patroklos”—ἄλλοτε δ’ αὖτε / Πάτροκλον (24.511–12). The losses that collective life forces—of love, of value, of consciousness—keep Akhilleus forever on the outside (he is the original queer pessimist). But perhaps there yet persists, if not for Akhilleus, some present pleasure and vivification in viewing Ariadne’s dance and in glimpses of the threads that yet remain to follow, themselves called forth by Akhilleus’ losses and scream of rage.^[18]

 

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^[1]  Iliad 19.4–18

^[2]  Earlier in the Iliad, Akhilleus says that kholos “makes harsh even an intelligent man; / it is far sweeter than honey pouring within one, / and in the breast it rises like smoke” (18.107–10).

^[3] Iliad 16.786–89

^[4] The Greek word δαίμων derives from δαίομαι, “to divide up [meat for a feast],” or “to apportion”; thus, my translation of δαίμων as “Apportioner” (“like to his own fate” would work too); P. Chaintraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque: histoire des mots (Paris, 1999 [1968]); M. Daraki, “Le héros à menos et le héros daimoni isos. Une polarité homérique,” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa 10 (1980):1–24. Pisa.

^[5] In Homeric Greek, the word for the berserk state that takes over a warrior is λύσσα, lussa, which in latter Greek means “rabies.” A warrior possessed by lussa “respects neither gods nor men” (9.238–39); it is both the pitch of the warrior’s strength and a disease.

^[6] On ἄρα and on this passage in particular, see E. Bakker, Pointing to the Past: From Formula to Performance in Homeric Performance (Washington DC and Cambridge MA, 2005), pp. 103–4. See too the excellent analysis of the death of Patroklos in E. Allen-Hornblower, From Agent to Spectator: Witnessing the Aftermath in Greek Epic and Tragedy (Berlin and Boston, 2016), pp. 44–81. Allen-Hornblower argues that the poet’s apostrophes to Patroklos, especially at 16.787-89 (above) and at 16.812–13 (ὅς τοι πρῶτος ἐφῆκε βέλος Πατρόκλεες ἱππεῦ/οὐδὲ δάμασσ’· ὃ μὲν αὖτις ἀνέδραμε, μίκτο δ’ ὁμίλῳ) evoke the “anxious, caring voice and gaze of one who is absent … [and] one whom we might have expected to call out” (p. 81)—that is, Akhilleus. More generally, see S. Budick and W. Iser: “Apostrophe is different from other forms of direct address or from narrative digressions, because in apostrophe all preceding time and place are for an instant totally interrupted, Instead a no-time and a no-space is momentarily inserted into the speaker’s, and our, quondam world” (Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory [New York, 1989], p. 314).

^[7] Iliad 16.804–6

^[8] The crucial study of Thetis (and much else) in the Iliad is L. M. Slatkin, The Power of Thetis and Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA and London, 2011 [1991]).

^[9] Iliad 18.203–6, 205–31, 239–42

^[10] As Akhilleus himself acknowledges, earlier in Book 18: αὐτίκα τεθναίην, ἐπεὶ οὐκ ἄρ’ ἔμελλον ἑταίρῳ / κτεινομένῳ ἐπαμῦναι, “Right now I would be dead, since I was not to stand by my companion when he was killed” (98–99).

^[11] Iliad 9.308–13

^[12] In later Greek, τρύζω, which I’ve translated above as “to coo” is used of the croaking of frogs (Theokritos 7.140), the squeaking of shoes (Philostratos Epistle 37), or, ugh, the squirting of diarrhea (Corpus Hippocraticum Prognosticum 11).

^[13]  For opposing accounts of the textual mishegoss, see, e.g., M. J. Apthorp, The Manuscript Evidence for Interpolation in Homer (Heidelberg, 1980), pp. 160–65 vs. M. H. A. L. H. van der Valk, Researches on the Text and Scholia of the Iliad I–II (Leiden, 1963–64), II 223–24, 527–30; also, M. Revermann, “The Text of Iliad 18.603 and the Presence of an ἀοιδός on the Shield of Achilles,” Classical Quarterly 48 (1998): 29–38.

^[14] Iliad 18.590–606

^[15] The organizing structure of the shield is chiastic: the inner ring (18.483–489) presents the heavenly bodies—i.e., the natural world as a system of fixed signs [=A]; the second ring (18.490–540) presents the civic world of solidarity and conflict [=B]; the third ring (18.541–589) presents the procession of the seasons, as they are demarcated by agricultural labor; here is precisely what the is excluded from the narrative of the Iliad: a productive relation between the social and the natural [=C]; the fourth ring (18.590–605) returns to the civic world, but now as—as I will argue—as motion, as communitas [=B’]; while the fifth ring (18.606–7) returns to the natural world of Okeanos—i.e., nature as flux [=A’].

^[16]  I take the ideal of communitas from the work of V. Turner, The Ritual Process (Chicago, 1969).

^[17] Tablets from Knossos make mention of a Daidaleion—a dancing space—and a Mistress of the Labyrinth (W. Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. J. Raffan (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 23); on the γέρανος-dance, “the crane-dance,” as a possible analog for the ring of the dance, see C. Calame, Les choeurs de jeunes filles en Grèce archaïque, I: Morphologie, fonction religieuse et sociale (Rome, 1977), 108-115, 225–30. For Robert Graves, Ariadne was the matriarchal paradigm of The White Goddess (1948).

^[18] I am grateful to Rebecca Ariel Porte for her initial encouragement and for her energizing editorial responses to the eventual essay. It’s a pleasure to work with a reader who is so careful, thoughtful, and generous.