Iliad, Book 18 — Achilles Mourns; the Forging of the Shield

Reading Troy — chapter 18 of 74 · Iliad, Book 18

Iliad, Book 18 — Achilles Mourns; the Forging of the Shield (Dusk into night of Day 26 of the Iliad; ~1184 BCE traditional date for the Trojan War; Achilles's tent at the ships, the depths of the sea, and Olympus)

Antilochus reaches Achilles at the ships, weeping, his words choking. Patroclus is dead. They are fighting now over his naked body. Hector has taken your armour. Achilles pours black dust over his head with both hands, fouls his face, lies in the dust himself outstretched like a fallen warrior, and groans aloud. The maids he and Patroclus had taken in their raids run from the tent and beat their breasts. Antilochus holds Achilles's hands lest he should drive a sword into his own throat.

Thetis hears the great cry in the depths of the sea, in her father's cave with the sisterhood of Nereids. They come up in a great procession around her — Glauce, Thaleia, Cymodoce, Speio, Doto, Galatea, Amphithoë, Iaira, Melite — and Homer prints the catalogue of fifty Nereid-names as a great crowd of black flies around a milk-pail. Thetis comes up onto the beach, sits beside her son, takes his head in her hands. My child, what is it? Achilles answers: Patroclus is dead, and I must kill Hector, and then I myself must die — for it is fated that I die soon after Hector. Thetis weeps and confirms it: yes, you will die soon after Hector. Achilles accepts. Let me die then, since I could not protect my friend; I will go now and kill Hector. Let me not live where my hands cannot save those I love.

Thetis promises new armour from Hephaestus at dawn. Meanwhile Iris, sent by Hera unbidden, flies to Achilles: get up, show yourself at the ditch, the Trojans are dragging Patroclus's body to the city. Achilles cannot fight (his armour is on Hector); but Athena throws the aegis over his shoulders and lights his head with a flame like the smoke from a besieged island town that rises to heaven calling for help from the neighbours. Achilles stands at the ditch and shouts — three times he shouted, and three times the Trojans wheeled in panic, twelve of their best men dying under their own chariot-wheels in the rout. The body of Patroclus is brought safely back to the camp.

Night falls. The Greek captains wash the body, anoint it with warm water and oil, and lay it on the bier. Achilles vows not to bury Patroclus until he has brought Hector's head and twelve Trojan youths slaughtered at the pyre as offerings. The body is laid out on the bed; Achilles sits beside it, his hands on his friend's breast, as a lion mourns his lost cubs that some hunter has taken from the den while he was away.

On Olympus the Trojan council meets. Polydamas, for the second time, gives clear counsel: retreat now inside the walls; Achilles is back; he will be on the plain at dawn; we cannot face him in the open. Hector for the second time refuses: one omen is best, to fight for one's country. He will face Achilles on the plain at dawn.

Then the great Hephaestus-sequence. Thetis arrives at Olympus and at Hephaestus's house — the bronze-floored house of brass with its golden women-servants, figures of beaten gold made to look like real women, capable of motion and speech, who help him at the forge; the smith-god himself sweaty at his bellows working on twenty bronze tripods for the Olympians, each with golden wheels to roll into the assembly of the gods and back. Hephaestus is moved by Thetis's old kindness to him (when his mother Hera had hurled him from heaven, Thetis and Eurynome had received him into the sea and reared him for nine years); he agrees instantly. He works through the night.

The forging of the Shield of Achilles is the cycle's most extended set-piece of pure description. Five concentric circles. At the centre: the earth, the heavens, the sea, the sun and moon, all the constellations. Around them: two cities, one at peace (with a wedding-procession through the streets, lyres playing, women watching from the doorways; and a marketplace where two parties stand at law over the blood-price for a slain man, the elders sitting on polished stones giving judgement in turn); one at war (besieged by two armies whose chiefs cannot agree whether to sack it or accept ransom, with a raid on the cattle at the river-ford and a battle by the river-banks). Then ploughed fields with men driving teams; a king's estate at harvest with reapers and gleaners and the king watching silently with his sceptre; a vineyard with golden grapes on silver poles and a young boy playing the lyre and singing the Linus song while the harvesters dance. Then cattle herded by the river, attacked by lions; sheep in pasture on a wooded ridge. Then a great dancing-floor like the dance Daedalus made in broad Knossos for fair-haired Ariadne, with young men and women in fine linen turning round and round, an acrobat among them tumbling. Then the river Ocean running all the way around the rim. Then helmet, cuirass, greaves of tin, the great Pelian spear — all of god-forged work. By dawn the gear is finished. Thetis flies back with it to the beach. The book closes on Hephaestus's golden women still working at the forge and Thetis bearing the armour down to the camp.

Analysis

The cycle's most famous artefact

The Shield of Achilles is the cycle's most extended single ekphrasis (description-of-art-object), and the model for every later ekphrasis in Western literature — the shield of Aeneas in Aeneid 8, the cloak of Jason in Apollonius's Argonautica 1, the tapestries of Arachne in Ovid's Metamorphoses 6, the brass plates of Heracles in Hesiod's Shield, Spenser's tapestries in the Faerie Queene, Keats's Grecian Urn, Auden's Shield of Achilles. The basic moves Homer establishes here are: (1) the artefact is described as if you were looking at it, in spatial order; (2) the description includes both the visual subject and the implied action (the singers sing, the dancers dance); (3) the artefact contains a totalising picture of the world (earth, heavens, sea, war, peace, work, festival); (4) the artefact's making and its making's circumstances are themselves narrated. The reader who comes to the Shield knowing only the basic technique of ekphrasis is meeting that technique's source.

A shield of two cities

The shield's most studied single feature is its juxtaposition of two cities — one at peace, one at war — as the central panel of the picture-of-the-world. The city at peace has wedding-processions and a court-of-law deciding a blood-price; the city at war has armies, raid, ambush, battle. The two cities are presented as the two normal conditions of human community. The reader is invited to see them as alternatives — but Homer is careful to give the city at peace its own act of arbitration over a killing (the blood-price case in the marketplace). Peace, on the shield, is not the absence of violence but the orderly management of it. The image is the cycle's clearest single statement that war is not an interruption of normal human life but one of the two modes in which normal human life occurs. Auden's Shield of Achilles (1952) reads the image as the cycle's most pessimistic single passage — the only world the shield-maker offers Achilles is the one in which his choices are these two cities. The reading is darker than Homer's but not foreign to him.

Achilles's acceptance of death

Watch the moment Achilles speaks his death-acceptance to Thetis: let me die now, since I could not protect my friend. This is the moment the Iliad's whole long arc resolves. In Book 9 Achilles chose the long life over kleos; in Book 16 he sent Patroclus, hoping the army would survive and he himself would go home; in Book 18 he reverses. He will avenge Patroclus and die. The reversal is the cycle's most concentrated single moment of moral self-knowledge — the warrior whose wrath cost his friend's life now accepts the death the wrath was set up to avoid. The Iliad does not spare him; Thetis confirms the death; the avenging of Patroclus is bought with Achilles's own life. The Aeneid quotes the structural pattern at Aeneas's grief over Pallas (the reluctant prince becomes the killer of Turnus to honour the dead boy). The Odyssey gives Achilles's ghost the line that comments on this whole decision: I would rather be a serf to a poor man on earth than king of all the dead. Book 18 is the moment that line is bought.

Hephaestus and the golden women

The small detail of Hephaestus's golden women — figures of beaten gold made to look like real women, capable of motion and speech — is one of the cycle's most extraordinary single inventions. They are the first robots in Western literature. They have wisdom, voice, learning put in them by the immortals; they help the smith at the forge. The image carries forward to the Talos-tradition (the bronze giant who guards Crete in Apollonius); to Pandora (constructed by Hephaestus in Hesiod's Works and Days); to the maidens of Daedalus; and ultimately to the entire science-fiction tradition of artificial humans. The fact that Homer's smith-god is also the cycle's only craftsman of artificial beings is one of the deep continuities of Mediterranean cosmology — craft and life-making are the same skill, exercised by the same god, at the same fire.

Polydamas refused again

Watch Polydamas. He spoke in Book 12 (clear advice, refused, one omen is best); he speaks again here, in Book 18 (clear advice, refused, one omen is best). The doubling is exact. Hector's refusal of Polydamas's Book-18 advice is the decision that kills him. Polydamas's three appearances (Books 12, 13, 18) are the cycle's longest single character-arc of a rejected counsellor; the figure carries forward to Drances in Aeneid 11 (the eloquent counsellor whose advice Turnus refuses, with the same fatal consequence). The pattern is among the cycle's most fully worked: the captain who refuses the wise advisor dies. The Odyssey has its own version of this — the suitors refuse the counsel of Halitherses in Odyssey 2 and the counsel of Mentor; both refusals are vindicated by the suitors' slaughter in Book 22. Polydamas is the structural seed of every later refused-counsellor in the cycle.

The Nereid catalogue and the Iliad's lists

The catalogue of Nereids in Book 18 is the cycle's most condensed single list — fifty names of sea-nymphs in three lines. The Iliad has many catalogues (the catalogue of ships in Book 2, the catalogue of Trojan allies, the catalogues of warriors in many battle-books); Book 18's Nereid-list is the smallest in scope but the most concentrated. The reading-effect is to make the sea suddenly populated — Achilles's cry, given as a single sound on the beach, reaches a community we have not seen before, who hear it and rise in concert. The cycle uses lists to make worlds visible. The Aeneid will adopt the technique for its catalogues of the Latin forces (Aeneid 7) and the Etruscan allies (Aeneid 10); the Odyssey will adopt it for the catalogue of Penelope's suitors (Book 22's death-list). Each list is the cycle's way of granting reality to a community that would otherwise be a single noun.

Butler's prose and the shield-description

The Shield-description is the cycle's longest single test of any translator. Butler keeps it in clean, present-tense English: he wrought the earth, the heavens, the sea, the sun, the moon, and all the constellations. The plainness gives the ekphrasis the right pace — the reader walks around the artefact's circles at the pace at which Hephaestus is working. Pope made it ornate (and influential — every English shield-description for two centuries was Pope's Shield, not Homer's); Lattimore restores Homer's plainer line. Auden in The Shield of Achilles writes against Pope's tradition by returning to a plainer voice still. The reader who comes to the shield through Butler is closest to Homer's actual texture, and the Auden parallel — which everyone should read alongside — works only if Homer is read in Butler's register.

What to watch for

Watch the new armour as a kind of restoration. Achilles's old armour, lost to Patroclus's death, was a wedding-gift from Peleus; the new armour is god-forged. The cycle's principle of armour-as-identity is reset here: Achilles in Book 19 will arm in a wholly new self. Watch Polydamas's refused counsel — it is the decision that kills Hector at dawn. Watch the Hephaestus-Thetis bond. The smith-god owes his rearing to the goddess; this debt is the engine of every craft-help to the cycle's Greek favourites — Hephaestus will not be asked to forge armour for any Trojan. Watch the dancing-floor on the shield — Homer says it is like the dance Daedalus made in broad Knossos for fair-haired Ariadne, the only Iliad-reference to the Knossos/Minotaur tradition that the Aeneid will pick up in Book 6 (the gates of the temple at Cumae carved with Daedalus's labyrinth). And watch Achilles's three shouts at the ditch. The Trojans flee though Achilles cannot fight, his armour is on Hector — the cycle's clearest single picture of the warrior whose voice alone is a weapon. The voice will resume the fight in Book 20 in his new armour, and the cycle's final movement will be Achilles's voice and Hector's silence.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Book 18 is the structural answer to Book 1. The wrath that took Briseis from Achilles in Book 1 took Patroclus from him in Book 16 and is paid back here in Achilles's grief. Thetis's appearance to her son in the sand pays off her first appearance in Book 1 (the grey sea, the prayer to Zeus); the wager Thetis won then (the Greeks ground down for Achilles's honour) is paid here in Achilles's own death-acceptance — the honour Thetis bought has cost her son his life. The two-fates speech Achilles made in Book 9 (long life vs kleos) is settled here: he chose kleos; the choice has consequences. Polydamas's Book-12 refused counsel is rehearsed here in Book 18 — same advisor, same advice, same refusal, but now with Achilles back in the war the refusal is fatal. The pyre-vow Achilles makes (twelve Trojan youths slaughtered at the pyre) is the cycle's first mention of the human-sacrifice scene that will be enacted in Book 23.

Forward echoes

Inside the Iliad. Achilles's three shouts from the ditch are the bridge to Book 19 (the reconciliation, the new arming, the entry to the field). The pyre-vow drives the funeral games of Book 23 and the human-sacrifice scene there. Polydamas's refused advice is the decision that kills Hector in Book 22. The new armour will be worn through Books 19, 20, 21, 22, and stripped from Hector by Achilles after the killing — the armour will then become a relic for Book 23's funeral games.

Into the Posthomerica. Quintus's Book 5 is the Judgement of the Arms — Ajax and Odysseus contesting which of them shall inherit the Hephaestus-forged armour after Achilles's death. The whole Posthomerican plot of Book 5 (and Sophocles's Ajax) is structurally impossible without the existence of god-forged armour that has a clear ownership-history, and Iliad 18 is that history. Thetis's grief here is the structural template for her grief at Achilles's death in Posthomerica 3 — the same Nereid procession, the same lament, the same returning to the sea. The shield's two cities (one at peace, one at war) are quoted in Posthomerica 12 (the shield of Eurypylus before he dies). Hephaestus's role as the gods' craftsman is referenced in Posthomerica 5 (the arms-judgement passage) and in the cycle's later stagings of god-forged objects (the bow Apollo gives Paris).

Into the Aeneid. Virgil reads Iliad 18 as the cycle's master-template for his own central Book 8. Venus visits Vulcan as Thetis visits Hephaestus; Vulcan forges new armour as Hephaestus forges new armour; the shield of Aeneas is described in extended ekphrasis as the shield of Achilles is described in extended ekphrasis. The Roman cosmology is different (Aeneas's shield depicts future Roman history — Aeneid 8.626–728 — where Achilles's shield depicts the cosmos) but the structural template is identical. Virgil also reads the two cities image as the cycle's permission to think of the Aeneid as a war-poem with a peace-vision; the city-at-peace on the shield is the implicit answer to the city-at-war the Aeneid is about. Polydamas's refused counsel is the structural model for Drances's refused counsel in Aeneid 11 (clear advice to make peace with Aeneas; refused by Turnus, with the same fatal result).

Into the Odyssey. Achilles's grief here is the structural foundation of the line his ghost speaks in Odyssey 11: I would rather be a serf to a poor man on earth than king of all the dead. The death-acceptance of Iliad 18 is the condition that makes the kleos-critique of Odyssey 11 possible. The Hephaestus-and-his-golden-women image returns in the Odyssey only obliquely — the cycle's principle that craft can make life is recast in the Odyssey's craftsman-figures (Daedalus is referenced; Hermes carries the rod that ferries souls; the cycle's hands-make-the-world principle is consistent). The shield's dance-floor like the dance Daedalus made for fair-haired Ariadne in broad Knossos is the Iliad's only reference to the Minotaur-tradition; the Aeneid quotes it in Book 6 (the temple at Cumae carved with the Cretan labyrinth); the Odyssey's reference to Daedalus is in Odyssey 11 (Phaedra and Ariadne in the underworld pageant). The cycle's small references to the Cretan tradition all run through this one phrase on the shield.

The new armour will be brought to the camp at dawn. The cycle's final movement begins in Book 19.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Achilles — receives the news; fouls his face with black dust; accepts his death; shouts three times from the ditch; mourns at the bier
• Thetis — rises from the sea with the Nereid procession; confirms the death-fate; flies to Hephaestus to ask for new armour
• Antilochus — delivers the news; holds Achilles's hands lest he kill himself
• Hera — sends Iris unbidden to Achilles to drive the Trojans from the body
• Iris — carries Hera's order to Achilles at the ditch
• Athena — throws the aegis over Achilles's shoulders, lights his head with the besieged-town flame
• Hector — overrules Polydamas's advice for the second time; chooses to face Achilles on the plain at dawn
• Polydamas — advises retreat behind the walls; refused
• Hephaestus — at his forge with the golden women; forges the new armour and the great shield

Mentioned / off-stage

• Patroclus — the body now in Achilles's tent; the picture's silent centre
• Zeus — silent on Olympus through this book
• Andromache — implied behind Hector's choice
• Helen — the cause; not named in this book
• Peleus — Achilles's father, named in the death-acceptance
• Chiron — implied in references to the old Pelian spear
• Daedalus — named in the shield's dance-floor passage

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This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.