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January Conference 1996

THE RECEPTION OF CLASSICAL TEXTS AND IMAGES

Inheritors of the Shield: An Homeric Mise En Abyme

Paula James, The Open University

Contents      Abstract

Introduction

This article examines aspects of the shield of Achilles (Iliad 18) that have inspired refracted responses in subsequent literature. The discussion will support current approaches to the Homeric shield, especially those which read the shield as a complex literary device, and will also draw attention to sophisticated classical responses to the blazon as ecphrasis. Virgil and Ovid both rework the shield as iconic artefact with predictive qualities. However, their literary use of the Homeric ecphrasis further reveals its potential as a mise en abyme within the text.

A discussion upon the Virgilian and Ovidian shields will be followed by a reading of two twentieth century poems which, the author believes, demonstrate how the Homeric intersecting landscapes of peace and war have provided a lasting Leitmotif for artistic responses to human conflict. It will be argued that, although post classical poetry may have dispensed with the warrior shield as a device for highlighting the polarity, modern poets continue, nevertheless, to evoke the scenes upon this seminal shield to achieve similar correspondenses and tensions between peace and war.

Mise en Abyme

André Gide coined this heraldic term to describe how a central motif in a literary work restates or illuminates the whole. 'The practice in heraldry where a quadrant of a coat of arms reduplicates in miniature the structure of the entire coat of arms in which it appears'[1] makes an apt and succinct metaphor for the theme within the theme. The repetition of a pattern within a pattern which has such a simple visual representation in the heraldic shield - a shield in miniature sits inside the shield itself - lends itself to all sorts of philosophical complexities once it has been translated to the literary text.

The mise en abyme in literature 'is any aspect enclosed within a work that shows a similarity with the work that contains it'.[2] This technique of reflection can reinforce the meaning and structure of a work and may even function as a self conscious intrusion of the author, who deliberately draws attention to the fictionality of the text. The vertiginous concept of a mirror of the text within the text initiating endless reflections can, in certain circumstances, ensure that the narrative never escapes from the narrow world of self referentiality. Dällenbach connects this tendency with the author's obsession with articulating his own act of authorship. The fact that Homer's enduring mise en abyme itself takes the form of a shield gives an added piquancy to its development by subsequent poets.

Current literary criticism lays emphasis on those aspects of the mise en abyme that remind the reader of the artificer who has crafted the narrative, and that therefore focus on the coming into being of the work itself.; in short,
the mirror[3] in the text concentrates upon the process of production of the text containing the mirror. Classical scholarship is rediscovering the Homeric shield along these lines, paralleling the creation of the shield with the genesis of the poem which encapsulates it[4] Ancient commentators had noted the allegorical dimension in the making of the shield and its parallels with the act of Creation. Modern scholarship adds another layer of complexity by viewing the shield as 'a meta narrative level of poetic self-consciousness'.[5]

'Inheriting' the shield

Virgil is an obvious starting point for the reception of the shield in Latin literature. His Homeric allusions are generally filtered through and enriched by Hellenistic traditions in poetry and philosophy, an important consideration for any analysis of the arming of Aeneas in Book 8. The panegyrical and prophetic properties of the embellished shield will be reviewed at this point and the theme of destiny will be readdressed in the discussion of Ovid's Metamorphoses Book Thirteen.

The description of the artistic content of the Homeric shield in Ovid's iudicium armorum provides us with an instructive treatment of the artistry and allusiveness of the armour. The efficacy of the decorated shield and the potency of its symbols have a vital part to play in the contest of words between Ajax and Ulysses. Elsewhere and more obliquely Ovid alludes to the shield as a paradigm of creation, which ties in with the Ovidian preoccupation with the artist creator, poeta creator. In other words, Ovid's sophisticated interpretation of Homer should come as no surprise in a work which emphasizes the creativity of the artist and the artistry of the creator at nodal points in the poetic narrative.[6]

A short study of Thomas Hardy's poem In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations' will demonstrate the influence of the Homeric approach to war and look at the reworking of Homeric literary artifice to convey the concept of peace finding its place in an embattled landscape. It will be argued that Alistair Maclean's poem, also entitled In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations', combines nuances from Homer and Hardy, and at the same time reprises the 'indifference motif' which echoes the approach to momentous events found in Auden's Musée de Beaux Arts.

This kind of intertextual approach uses the Homeric shield as a reference point and assumes that the early ecphrasis can be traced in numerous poetic treatments of war, since it has already raised the essential issues and explored many of the tensions that the human and historical condition presents to the creative cognition of the artist.

The Function of the Shield in Homer

The complexity of the ecphrasis, the Shield of Achilles, in Book 18 of Homer's Iliad has at times met with more confusion than enthusiasm. That a weapon of war should contain a landscape of peace has always attracted scholarly attention and was bound to give rise to some interesting speculations on the function of the decorated shield embedded, as it were, in the literary text.[7] It is a considerable challenge to unravel the nature of the literary device whereby a writer crosses the boundaries of the representation he is describing and moves into the 'reality' that representation describes.[8]

The Homeric shield seems to have broken new ground by presenting the shield as a window on a wider world, allowing the reader to look beyond the confines of the poem. It also, in some measure, restates an overall theme in miniature, as a city under siege is depicted in the broader context of the cosmos and alongside a variety of peacetime activities on earth.

The fact that a scene akin to the Trojan war, the subject and substance of the text in its totality, appears as only part of the picture within that text encourages the reader to place the war in the context of the shield, momentarily at least. This alters our perspective not only in regard to the centrality of the war; we are also encouraged to forget temporarily which work of art is the framework for the other. The Iliad becomes the mise en abyme in the divine execution of Hephaistos' cosmic work. This sets the war in the context of a broader spatial and temporal canvas, demonstrating that even a great conflict should have a sense of its place in the universe; gnothi se auton - the advice of the Delphic Oracle, to know oneself was to possess a clear understanding of human limitations.

The Homeric shield of Achilles serves not only as a model for ecphrasis, the detailed description of a work of art within a literary text, but also, it has been convincingly argued, as a coherent cosmogony which could be alluded to as the act of creation itself.[9] Since Hephaistos is described in the very process of fabrication, the process of designing and ordering is constantly before the eyes of the reader. There is much movement in this ecphrasis; we do not view the static and finished work but follow the steps of craftsmanship. The identity of the god as demiurgos as well as artist has significant repercussions for this particular artefact's heritage.

Hephaistos' handiwork unites the skill of the artist with the power of the creator. Conversely the impression we gain of the cosmos as artefact is bound to involve a discussion on the representation of reality and the relation of art and literature to life.[10] It becomes a reference point for artists who aspire to its Olympian level of skill and execution, and a test of aesthetic appreciation even for those who strive to inherit it as heroes in the heat of battle. The shield of Achilles is truly a locus classicus on several dimensions. It could be argued that the full force of poeta creator is there in Homer and that imitations of the shield device are bound to carry the baggage of artistic self consciousness with them.

The mirror in the text

It has been suggested that, in Homer, the Trojan war is the dark and narrow place of the narrative, relieved by glimpses of moments past and future. The similes give glimpses of the world beyond the poem and these ensure that the narrative is not claustrophobically self referential. Reading the shield as a culmination of the similes it becomes an aerial view of a broader human landscape which also gives us room to breathe, moving beyond the mere reassertion of the stated theme's autonomy, the wrath of Achilles and its repercussions for the Greeks and the Trojans. The shield which will serve the wrath of Achilles undercuts the very centrality of that wrath by turning the reader away from the time of war.

Taplin has noted that Greek visual and literary representations of the shield of Achilles, after Homer, tended to discard the very scenes that converted it into a mirror of human society in the broader sense. Homer chose not to portray the shield and its decoration exclusively as an icon to war and the warrior in his poem about war. A number of ancient versions of the shield of Achilles seem to be concerned, then, with siting it in a more appropriate iconography where heroic armour, the protection of kings, is a clear symbol of the power of its possessor. The apotropaic shield should be embossed with awe-inspiring and fearful figures who can freeze the enemies facing them; hence the discomfort with visual and literary representations of 'the joys of civilisation and fertility' which might detract from the potency of the prophylactic armour.

The concentration upon the warrior status of the bearer of the shield can also involve an oblique casting of his horoscope. Auden invests the shield with a pessimistic prophecy for the hero whose spiritual descendants will be killing machines.[11] Auden is following in the tradition of realism that allows no modifications to the shield and its bearer as militarist icons. There are even classical versions of the shield which suggest the terror of the goddess when she is shown the work. In a sense, these prefigure Auden's 'Thetis of the shining breasts' who 'cried out in dismay / at what the god had wrought'.

Hardie draws attention to just such a reaction in the Pompeian painting of the scene in the forge, (a popular topos for Greek vases). Thetis is possibly having her attention drawn to her son's inevitable death, but, unlike Auden's concept of a deathless Achilles in the form of a warrior prototype, the Pompeian wall painting may be depicting 'an astral apotheosis' for the hero. This would give the nice irony that Achilles bears as emblem of his powers the image of the heavens themselves but that this image of his might is also an image of his inevitable subjection to the laws of fate as proclaimed in the stars.[12] It has been deftly observed that the Homeric Shield of Achilles charts the choices for the future of the hero in its visual narrative.[13]

When Orbis equals Urbs

Hardie convincingly demonstrates that Virgil followed the Hellenistic traditions with his shield of Aeneas in Book Eight.[14] Virgil was not the first to identify the city with the cosmos. The circular shield lent itself to civic ideology from Athens to Alexander, the polis being portrayed on the same spatial pattern as the cosmos. Virgil's shield emphasizes the universal significance of the history of the Imperial city; Rome itself becomes the imago/representation and symbol of the ordered world, its boundaries coterminous with the encircling ocean. The Virgilian universe is intimately bound up with the expansion of Rome, the coming into being of the eternal city.

The shield and its pageant of Roman destiny can be read as the broader canvas in which to contextualise the smaller narrative space of the Epic overall, just as it is possible to reverse the mise en abyme in Homer. However both epics, and this is particularly true of the Aeneid, expand their themes, recapping and prefiguring at other moments in the work. The shield of Aeneas has been compared with the temple of Juno in Book One, both being ekphrases which present an image of the epic cycle and the epic tradition so as to provide a framework for the independent narrative space of the Aeneid itself.[15]

Aeneas gains in stature as he takes upon his shoulders a blazon packed with the successes of Rome to come. The arming of the Trojan hero has strong psychological overtones and does not serve as his physical protection alone. It further encourages him to pursue his mission. Virgil takes the theme of cosmos and imperium to its ultimate conclusion and enables Aeneas to share in the glories of Rome to come, if only as a spectator. Aeneas is constantly fortified on the basis of deferred gratification. Of course, it has to be remembered that the stages of Roman history are easily identified by the reader, for whom they are past events whereas Aeneas can only absorb their general significance and gain some measure of their greatness.

Both the reader and Aeneas view the finished product of the armour and are not privy to its construction. In Homer and Virgil the superior knowledge of the divine craftsman is vital to the realisation of the artistic process and the wonder expressed by Achilles and Aeneas guides the reader to the appropriate response. Heroes and audience partake in the superior sight of the gods, as granted to and filtered through the poetic bard.

Ajax, Ulysses and the Armour of Achilles.

In his prologue to the Metamorphoses, Ovid describes the ordering of the universe. This has been interpreted as a reprise of Hephaistos' cosmic shield, following the stages of the artistic creation described by Homer.[16] In other words, Ovid exploits Homer's artistic representation of the cosmic shield to describe his poetic world as it comes into being. The poet's transmission to the reader of his creation myth is possible because he has been the receiver / reader of the description of a description of creation. Ovid's source is impeccable if we can assume that the ancient world accepted Homer as a divinely inspired bard endowed with privileged knowledge of the god at work.

When Ovid highlights the magnificent workmanship of Hephaistos on the doors of the palace of the Sun in Book Two, another cosmic creation scene occurs. It is important that the ordered universe which has emerged in the Ovidian prologue is restated and preserved on pieces of art. Paradoxically, the real world proves to possess a fragility not unlike that of Arachne's woven picture of Book Six, a fluid composition easily destroyed by the irate goddess, Minerva (Met. 6, 130-131).[17]

Close after the creation story of Book One, the carefully separated elements are almost returned to primeval confusion on two occasions, in the great flood instigated by Jupiter and the fiery fiasco of Phaethon's chariot ride with the horses of the Sun. This has been interpreted as identity crisis on the cosmic level to match the unfortunate transformations of the life forms that inhabit Ovid's universe. The significance of this cosmic shield is already, by the time of Ovid, expanding and fragmenting into the area of aesthetics and the supremacy of art over reality.

In Book Thirteen Ovid introduces the shield as artefact and armour proper. Predictably his treatment of this story from the Trojan cycle is sophisticated and convoluted. Although his rhetorical artifice can be a major irritant, especially when he is at pains to point out every conceivable paradox in a given situation, there are some particularly inspired moments to the controversia, at this point in the narrative. As ever, the appreciation of his skill relies on the reader's educated reception of the ironic nuances which emerge as the episode evolves.

During the course of his claim to the arms, Ajax disparages the courage of Ulysses on more than one occasion and triumphantly concludes that he is entirely unsuited to carry a shield that boasts the imago mundi, the appearance of the cosmos, upon it.

Nec clipeus, vasti caelatus imagine mundi,

Conveniat timidae nataeque ad furta sinistrae.

Debilitaturum quid te petis, improbe, munus?

Quod tibi si populi donaverit error Achivi,

Cur spolieris, erit, non cur metuaris ab hoste:

Et fuga, qua sola cunctos, timidissime, vincis,

Tarda futura tibi est gestamina tanta trahenti.

Met.13.110-114.

'and that shield, engraved / with scenes that show the whole wide world, ill suits / that shy left hand that nature meant for theft. / Why seek a prize to crush and cripple you, / you scoundrel? If the Greeks are gulled enough / to give it you, you'll simply be a source / of loot not fear; you speed to sprint away, / sole prize you win against the world, will fail, / you chicken heart, beneath the weight of gear.'[18]

Ajax suggests that Ulysses has not the strength to bear the physical weight of the shield but could also in his reference to skulking timidity be thinking of the terror cosmic symbols could inspire in the faint hearted, the very pictures intended to scare the enemy. This line of argument leaves Ajax wide open to the nimble wits of Ulysses on more than one count

Ulysses is able to counter attack Ajax on the grounds that Ajax could not bear the intellectual weight of the shield as he would have no understanding of the things depicted thereon. Hardie has drawn attention to the mischievous allusion to Virgil's Aeneas in this line. Ulysses reinforces his point about Ajax's limited mind and he draws attention to his opponent's lack of knowledge about the oceans, cities and customs of men. Such representations would be lost on a raw soldier (rudis miles) This is particularly underhand as Ajax is no new recruit in battle.[19]

....ut caelestia dona,

Artis opus tantae, rudis et sine pectore miles

Indueret? neque enim clipei caelamina norit,

Oceanum et terras, cumque alto sidera caelo'

Pleiadesque, Hyadasque, inmunemque aequoris Arcton

Diversasque urbes, nitidumque Orionis ensem.

Postulat, ut capiat, quae non intellegit, arma.

Met 13. 289-295

Was it for this that - that these celestial gifts, this work of art / so fine, should deck a rough and doltish soldier? / Why, he knows nothing of the scenes embossed / upon the shield, the ocean and the lands / the constellations in the height of heaven, / the Pleiads and the Hyads and the Bear / banned from the sea, Orion's shining sword, / the cities set apart. He claims to win / arms that his brain's too stupid to take in!

Ovid's use of the word rudis, following on fast from the reference to artis opus tantae - a work of such art, is a telling one. Rudis has already been used to describe the primordial material the demiurgos has to deal with in creating the universe. In Ovid it also doubles at strategic points for the raw material of the artist. Bomer notes the parallel syntax; rudis sine pectore miles the rough soldier without understanding echoes rudis sine imagine tellus - the crude and featureless world at 1.87.[20]

In fact the correspondence is even closer between Ulysses' description of Ajax and the portrayal of the newly peopled earth, transformed and housing the unknown forms of humans - Induit ignotas hominum conversa figuras. By implication, then, Ajax is as unrefined and unshaped in his aesthetic appreciation as the raw material of art and life before it has been manipulated into a coherent and beauteous appearance. He would simply put on the shield without any consciousness of what he 'wears'..

However, Ovid is not above making a joke at Ulysses' expense. Ulysses' articulate account of the pictures on the shield reminds us that he will be forced to experience the oceans and the diverse cities of men at first hand The first lines of the Odyssey springs to mind, when the hero is introduced as a man who suffers much on the high seas and acquires a knowledge about other cities and societies of men, lines echoed in Horace:

Homer presented us with a model of courage and wisdom in Ulysses who conquered Troy and looked circumspectly upon the cities and social practice of many men. While he worked towards a homecoming for himself and his men across an expanse of sea, he put up with many hardships but he never went under in those times of crisis. (Epistles 1.2, 17-22).

The fact that the cosmos as depicted on the shield contains awesome simulacra deorum, likenesses of the gods as well as images of superhuman creatures (as observed, a recurrent motif for heroic armour) is another prophetic feature. Ulysses will chart his course across the seas by these very constellations. Manilius calls Ulysses naturae victorem[21] and there may even be a recondite allusion in Ovid to the hero's encounter with monsters, giants and other supernatural terrors akin to the divine phenomena which were regularly elevated to the constellations. Artistic imitations of such terrors are unlikely to frighten such a sophisticated connoisseur as Ulysses but he does not realise that they are, for him, the shape of things to come.

Ulysses is clearly well aware of the divine craftsmanship of the shield and the divine overview it contains. Ajax emphasizes its physicality and apotropaic potency, cutting through the self conscious artistry emphasized by his rival. Both heroes regard the shield as a source of wonder, thauma and therefore an enormous honour to win. Ulysses cunningly weeps for Achilles to return before he even makes his claim of inheritance, rapidly repeating the dead hero's name three times in the custom of funereal ritual and thus emphasizing his special closeness to the deceased (lines 130-134).

Ulysses wins the armour by a rhetorical tour de force and yet the shield he inherits shows him his future suffering and has a more direct purchase on his reality, the world as he will experience it, than the over sophisticated hero suspects in his confident response to Ajax's speech. Ovid's inheritor of the shield, like Achilles, has his own place within it. Such is the potency of a mirror in the text.

The shield emerges as an awesome and possibly predictive artefact for its owners. Achilles takes up the burden of his personal choice. Aeneas' shield illuminates the destiny of his descendants. In both cases the heroes' lifting of the shields to their shoulders can be read symbolically. Ovid hints, with grim humour, that Ulysses rightly receives the shield which also reflects his future and to which he has unknowingly drawn attention in his point scoring over Ajax. He, too, will shoulder his destiny when the time comes.

Where weapons of war perish. (But the ecphrasis lingers on)

(Both Hardy and Maclean poems appear in full at the end of the article)

Thomas Hardy's poem, In Time of "The Breaking of the Nations", was written in 1915 but was apparently inspired by an experience forty five years before.. He had made a note of a 'simple pastoral scene' at Lyonesse at the time and observed later that the poem 'contains a feeling that moved me in 1870'. Like much of Hardy's poetic output, the three stanzas are deceptively simple and appear to operate on one dimension alone. Warring dynasties are mentioned but very much in the background and first impressions receive this as a poem observing and expressing the unhurried rural rhythms of peacetime activities.

This is, however, what one might call, a poem of shifting foreground. The title is clearly significant as it warns us that the 'idyllic and timeless scene' has to exist alongside the destruction of war and the wholesale punishment of civilisation by a vengeful Jehovah. Attention had been drawn to the ambivalence of such words as 'harrowing' and a reference back to the passage in Jeremiah to which the title alludes is revelatory in more sense than one.[22] The breaking, burning and threshing of Babylon, the metaphor of death as harvester evokes Homeric similes as well as scenes, and this is the grim picture lurking behind the ploughman and the couch grass. Both in 1870, on the eve of the Franco-Prussian war, and in August 1914, Hardy summoned up the Horatian quote, 'Quicquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi?' and he seems generally to be echoing the Epistle's opening attitude to the conflict of kings.[23]

The young maid and her Wight of the last stanza are not only connected to Hardy and his Emma as spectators of the scene at Lyonesse (which in itself plays with the idea of narrative presence intruding on the poetic space) but also universal lovers, a Tristan and Iseult, a romantic and mournful whisper within Hardy's thoughts of 'the Greeks and battles of long ago and the unchanging tragedy of war'. It suddenly becomes possible to view this poem as a landscape of war with Hardyesque moments of vision, based on his memory of an unravaged countryside.

The hiss of the first world war shell could evoke the ' whispering by' of the maid and her Wight, an intriguing reinforcement that it is peace which is struggling to reassert itself during the smoke and sounds of battle, as opposed to the battle receding behind the eternally trysting lovers. Hardy's melancholy optimism allows 'war's annals to cloud into night' from the flames of destruction ere their story dies. It is but a short step to recall the poignant realisation of Hector in Iliad 22 (127-128) that he cannot plead gently for his life to Achilles, 'talking love like a young man and a young girl, in the way a young man and a young maiden talk of love together.'

This poem has much to offer the literary critic but the purpose of this short exposition has been to find correspondences between Hardy and Homer in their attitudes to war and in their techniques for conveying a sense of past and future through a vivid and powerfully drawn present, their use of the mirror in the text, in fact. Hardy has no shield of Hephaistos but he does, through wordplay, achieve the 'otherness', the alternative world that Classical scholars have discovered in the ecphrasis of Homer. Hardy reinstates the shield by another kind of mise en abyme which strives towards and succeeds, as did Homer, in temporarily evoking a time beyond the compass of the narrative and where violence does not exceed the capacity of human endurance.

We turn finally to Alistair Maclean's 'reprise' of the Hardy poem. Clearly the identical title summons up for the reader in the know the forerunner and inspiration for Maclean's offering. How has he read Hardy and what kind of modifications is he making to the theme? It is still possible, without attempting a full scale analysis of this poem, to disentangle several motifs and examine the creative reworking of a mise en abyme that conveys the message 'life goes on', in all the complexity that belies the triteness of the statement.

An obvious artistic cross fertilisation from the opening of the poem is the physical subject matter. The poet is describing a Dutch genre painting; the connection with Auden's Musée de Beaux Arts is forged primarily by the use of this technique, since Maclean is imitating Auden's literary transmission of a painting to illustrate a legendary and tragic moment largely unnoticed by the world enclosing it.[24] The peasant in the picture described by Maclean, both physically and intellectually as 'having grasped what matters' is oblivious to suffering on the grand scale and the fall and destruction of 'dynasts'. At the same time, more conspicuous and celebrated religious paintings, The Head of John the Baptist, are marginalised and put in their place in the line ''where bigger heads come daily in on platters'. It is the 'epic' picture that becomes commonplace in Maclean's treatment.

The Napoleon who 'thunders helplessly by' could be a combination of two images, the annals clouding into night and the whispering by of the maid and her Wight. The allusion to the painting of Napoleon in a covered carriage, fleeing in retreat from Russia, further demonstrates the richness of Maclean's intertextuality. Partly parodic of Hardy here, Maclean is minimising the larger than life, legendary figure of Napoleon so that he is the momentary glimpse for the reader, whereas with Hardy it is his symbols of peace that are ghostlike. Napoleon is as transitory as the cannons he controls, a war impulse incarnate and with as little capacity for independent action. As a fleeting vision, whether past or future, he and his war have a place outside the temporal compass of the painting (under another sky). This post classical Achilles is debunked as a war machine with a limited life.

The peasant takes centre stage and in contrast chooses and creates his own movement and space in the painting. The poet lingers upon his urination, the ecstasy of release he has deliberately delayed and strategically timed to interrupt his game of bowls, an ironic reversal of the legendary Drake, who refused to attend to the invading Armada, until he had finished his game. The reader is drawn beyond the painting to the reality of the moment. Around Maclean's 'heroic' peasant, war's annals truly 'cloud into night.'

Maclean redesigns Hardy's landscape and displaces the images of war which dominated the original poem under the guise of scenes of peace. Ironically, the constancy of this truth and the sense of proportion, war and warriors knowing their place, is itself concealed in the dark recesses of the gallery and needs to be sought out by the poet. His poem has to make the revelation. The reader, as always in the ecphrasis, relies upon the poet to disclose the artefact. Maclean's painting is actually concealed from view and the poet brings it into the foreground, having discovered the secret and censored places of faithful representation. His poem restores the perspective of the peaceful and mundane so that the military and the epic appear as mere inconsequential details.

The Homeric Inheritance

The scenes, sensations and strife of battle which unite the four examples covered in this article are ample illustration of the power of the Homeric treatment of war, as encapsulated in the shield of Achilles. In the Iliad, the time spent in the workshop of the god translates the reader to an Olympian height of awareness from which s/he shares with the gods a sense of perspective and proportion in regard to the momentous struggles of mankind.

Virgil's readership are taken forward in time for a view of the past which lends coherence and purpose to the present. His audience, too, are privileged and enlightened by the reflections of the future. In the first book of Ovid's epic poem the shield functions as an icon to poetic invention, uniting the skill of the human artist with the creative power of the divinity. In the contest over the armour of Achilles, there is, once again, an opportunity for the reader to go beyond the temporal space of the text. The idea that scenes on the shield allow us to slide into the world of Odysseus and the text of the Odyssey, suggests that Ovid, like Taplin read this intertextuality into the Homeric shield.

Hardy and Maclean follow in the tradition of the shield of Achilles by displacing human wars with an alternative vision. They demonstrate the difference between classical and modern attitudes to human suffering. Both these twentieth century poets reaffirm the tenacity of human life through the most fundamental of activities whereas the business of kings and heroes is portrayed as insignificant and precarious. The ancient world is peopled with the gods of Olympus and their deathless presence is the backdrop of all human history. It is difficult to say whether the absence of these divinities lends more or less optimism to Hardy's and Maclean's intersecting visions of peace and war.

These twentieth century poets do not acknowledge the gods for ultimate inspiration and their insider knowledge but they lay claim to the poet's perspective and moment of vision. They are, therefore, inheritors of the bardic tradition and the richness of their artistic imagination can be far better appreciated by reviewing Achilles' war shield in its various manifestations. It is this seminal ecphrasis, the first attested mirror in the text that reveals the power of the poet 'to proceed to the essential', an art which Aristotle recognised differentiated it from 'the anecdotal method of history'.[25]

The Homeric shield of Achilles clearly continues to enjoy a very fertile refraction across centuries of literary artifice; it will perhaps never be surpassed as the most satisfying and multi-layered mise en abyme of its type.

Thomas Hardy

In Time Of "The Breaking Of Nations"

Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.

Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch grass;
Yet these will go onward the same
Though dynasties pass

Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War's annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.

Alastair MacLean

In Time Of "The Breaking Of Nations"

It's in the corners of the galleries one finds them
where it's dark,
those old Dutch genre paintings,
hung there in Victorian days
after so many vapourings and faintings,
after such loosening of stays.
For in them nearly always,
as one's guarantee,
some peasant has held up his game of bowls
and quite without remark
walked off for a pee

Not far, of course.
but under a different sky It isn't delicacy he has in view.
The nearest shady bit of wall will do
where he may lean and cool his forehead
while he waits for confirmation to come through.
Indeed, for the better savouring of this hour
he has topped up his bladder well beyond itsmeasure.
His muscles seal the opening an exquisite moment more
then 'Ah!' he goes 'Ah!' in sheer pleasure.
Good luck to him!
I think that in a world
where bigger heads come daily in on platters
he is his own continuation,
having grasped what matters.
It pleases me to see him there
while in the same painting
Napoleon or whatever his name was then
thunders helplessly by.

[return to contents]

Notes

[1] This succinct explanation, accompanied by a diagram, appears in B. Stonehill The Self Conscious Novel: Artifice in fiction from Joyce to Pynchon, University of Pennsylvania Press USA 1988, pp.8-9. [return to text]

[2] This definition gives plenty of leeway. It is taken from L. Dällenbach The Mirror in the Text: An essay on the Mise en Abyme Paris 1977, tr. E Hughes, J Whiteley, Polity Press, Cambridge 1989, p.8. [return to text]

[3] The Narcissistic duplication of the artist and the artefact through the metaphor of the mise en abyme is introduced by Dällenbach at an early stage (pp.15-19) and returned to passim throughout the analysis. [return to text]

[4] 'The shield of Achilles, like the proem , describes the relationship between the referent of the images (the events and characters portrayed therein), the material surface of the images, the maker (Hephaistus) and making of the images, and the reaction of the bard, who is both source (for the audience) and audience (for the images and their making). The forms of attention brought out in the ecphrasis are the forms of attention encouraged by Homeric song; on this reading, the poetics of the Shield of Achilles are the poetics of the Iliad.' Andrew Sprague Becker, 'The Shield of Achilles and the Poetics of Homeric Description' American Journal of Philology III (1990), 139-153, p.151. [return to text]

[5] Thomas. K. Hubbard makes this point on p.18 of his article, 'Nature and Art in the Shield of Achilles' Arion n.s. 3,no.2 (1992) 16-41. Hubbard is one of several powerful exponents of the view that Homer's Hephaistos stands as a figure for the poet as he sees himself. 'It thus remains for us to explore not only how the shield itself reflects the Iliad but moreover how Homer's depiction of its fabrication scene reveals his view of his own artistry.'p.17. [return to text]

[6] Alison Sharrock has not only produced influential work on the implications of ecphrasis in Ovid. She has also directly addressed the poet's deliberate foregrounding of the artist as hero, whereby 'all artists in the text become identified with the one artist, the poet himself'. See p.37 of 'Womanufacture' in The Journal of Roman Studies, vol. LXXXI (1991) 36-49. Elsewhere she connects the sculptor, Pygmalion, as depicted by Ovid with Hephaistos,the divine fashioner of Pandora, making the point that 'the craftsman god is a figure traditional in many cultures', p.174 of 'Re-viewing Pygmalion' in Ramus vol.20, No.2 (1991) 149-181, co authored with John Elsner. [return to text]

[7] Significant in the trend for sensitive readings is Oliver Taplin's 'The Shield of Achilles within the Iliad', Greece and Rome xxvii (1980) 1-21. His interweaving of the Odyssey text within the shield's narrative is particularly illuminating. [return to text]

[8] For the tensions set up in the technique of ecphrasis and ancient interpretations of it, see Sprague Becker, 'Reading Poetry through a Distant Lens: Ecphrasis, Ancient Greek Rhetoricians and the Pseudo-Hesiodic "Shield of Herakles" 'AJP 113 (1992) 5-24. [return to text]

[9] 'Ancient critics of Homer, influenced by Stoic cosmology, interpreted Hephaistus' manufacture of the shield as a philosophically conceived allegory of the creation of the universe by a demiurge. As a result of this type of exegesis, Roman poets came to regard the shield as a primary model for describing the origin and structure of the universe.' Stephen M Wheeler, 'Imago Mundi: Another View of the Creation in Ovid's Metamorphoses' AJP 116 (1995) 95-121, 97-98. [return to text]

[10] A useful distinction between the iconic and poietic processes, describing a finished product or following the work as it emerges, is made by Martz Vincent in 'Between Ovid and Barthes: Ekphrasis, Orality, Textuality in Ovid's "Arachne" , Arethusa 27 (1994) 361-411. It is worth noting that the nymphs take great joy in watching Arachne manipulating her materials, witnessing every stage of the creativity, in Ovid's version of this story. [return to text]

[11] Auden's shield portrays the'generic' descendants of Achilles; technology has replaced supernatural strength in the business of killing. The Homeric hero gains his immortality, living on in the ruthlessness of players in this pessimistic historical pageant. In some ways this is not only a distortion of the Homeric model but also a version of the Virgilian shield, a rereading of the master race's civilising mission, presenting the reader with 'a world of militaristic and totalitarian inhumanity fitting for an Achilles who is the prototype of the Aryan superman.' Taplin, G&R (1980) p.3 [return to text]

[12] Philip. Hardie 'Imago Mundi: Cosmological and Ideological Aspects of the Shield of Achilles' Journal of Hellenic Studies 105 (1985) 11-31, p.20. Pompeian wall paintings also provide an interesting variation on the shield's surface by using it as a mirror to reflect the goddess. The shield as mirror for the spectator has too complex a history to do justice to within the remit of this article. It is worth noting that Burne Jones replaces the shield-as-mirror of Athena with a mirror proper in his Perseus cycle. For scholarship on the (literally) reflecting shield, see Hardie, p.19. [return to text]

[13] 'It is fitting that Achilles should win his supreme victory in this armor which embodies, as fully as any explicit statement in the poem, the fated alternatives of his own destiny: brief glory in war or a homely, peaceful old age.' Eleanor Windsor Leach 'Ekphrasis and the Theme of Artistic Failure in Ovid's Metamorphoses' Ramus 3 (1974) 102-142, p.104-105. [return to text]

[14] See the article in JHS (1985)cited above. Hardie argues persuasively elsewhere for the Virgilian identification of cosmos and imperium which is fully realised in the narrative of the shield. This does not divorce it from its Homeric model but places it in the continuum of archaiogonia, a potential parallel recognised and exploited by Athenian iconography of the shield and subtly reworked by Virgil. See P. Hardie, 'The Shield of Aeneas: the Cosmic Icon' pp.336-376 in Virgil's Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium Clarendon Press, Oxford 1986. [return to text]

[15] The strong metapoetic overtones of the Aeneid's ecphrases are investigated by Alessandro Barchiesi in Antike und Abendland (1995) 114 ff. I am indebted to Philip Hardie for this reference and for his very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. [return to text]

[16] Wheeler (AJP 1995) connects the deus et melior natura who transforms the unwrought mass of elements into an ordered universe with the Vulcan of Book Two and the activity of Arachne in Book Six. The parallels between Arachne and the demiurgos of Book One were briefly noted by P. James, 'Crises of Identity in Ovid's Metamorphoses Bulletin of The Institute of Classical Studies 33(1986) 17-25. Wheeler, p.117, concludes that 'Ovid's choice to begin Metamorphoses with an epic ecphrasis also highlights his own self-consciousness as a poet. It is well known that the device of ecphrasis offers the poet an opportunity to reflect upon his own art while describing the art of another. The deus et melior natura may therefore be read as a metaphor for the creation of the poem; thus the "real" subject of Ovid's cosmogony may be the literary creation of Metamorphoses, just as the shield of Achilles is emblematic of the creation of the Iliad.' [return to text]

[17] Recent work on the Arachne episode in Ovid emphasizes the fluidity of her composition in structural terms. Perhaps the lack of a fixed border to her work gives it a particular vulnerability. 'Arachne is no doubt right in proclaiming her independence from Minerva's tutelage since her tapestry owes little to Minerva's compositional order, or for that matter to the spatial integrity of the tapestry as object. There is no center, no corners to be filled. Only a narrow border of intertwined flowers and ivy frames the tapestry.' Vincent (Arethusa 1994) p.369. There are also some interesting observations on the framing of ecphrases and the intercalated stories which link narrative boundaries to the physical borders of the work described in the text. [return to text]

[18] Translations of Ovid are taken from A.D.Melville Ovid Metamorphoses, Oxford University Press 1987. [return to text]

[19] Ajax may not be a raw recruit but he does, unfortunately identify himself with the common soldier whereas Ulysses appeals from the outset to those who matter, the leaders /proceres in presenting his case. I am indebted to Professor E.J. Kenney for this observation. A further irony in Ajax's speech is his contempt for Ulysses' feigned madness which looks forward to his own genuine and tragic insanity after losing out in the awarding of the arms. [return to text]

[20] F. Bomer P.Ovidius Naso: Metamorphosen, Kommentar xii-xiii Heidelberg 1982, p.273. [return to text]

[21] Astronomica 1.764. Philip Hardie drew my attention to Manilius' portrayal of Ulysses as a kind of Epicurean spiritual triumphator and to strengthen the contrast with Ajax, he also pointed out the verbal slippage factor in the phrase rudis indegestaque moles at 1.7 which could so easily be adapted to fit Ajax as rudis indigestusque miles. [return to text]

[22] A useful background and analysis of this poem appears in Joanna Cullen Brown's Journey into Thomas Hardy's Poetry, Alison and Busby, London 1989, pp.164-169. [return to text]

[23] 'Whatever insanities the kings commit, the Greeks smart for it. This comes from Horace, Ep1.2., part of which was quoted earlier to illustrate the destiny of Ulysses. [return to text]

[24] For some thought provoking interpretations of 'the act of non witness' within the ecphrasis and the tensions invoked by the discourse of indifference, see M Riffaterre 'Textuality: W.H. Auden's Musee de Beaux Arts' in Textual Analysis, ed M.A. Caws New York 1986, 1-13. [return to text]

[25] For a discussion of this view, see p.187, 'Appropriation' in Paul Ricoeur Hermeneutics and the human sciences: essays on language, action and interpretation, ed, transl J.B. Thompson, Cambridge 1981. [return to text]