Classical Receptions in Drama and Poetry in English
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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      Full Paper

This article takes the shield of Achilles (Illiad 18) as a starting point for several strands of reception in subsequent literature. The inheritors of the shield can be applied to the heroes who are armed with significant blazons, bearing predictive as well as commemorative icons related to their famous deeds. More obliquely, the Homeric shield as a seminal ecphrasis raises the issue of poeta creator and the very nature of the poet's transmission to the reader of an artistic work in progress along with the subtext of his own creative process.

It is suggested that Homer invested his vision of Hephaistos' handiwork with something more than an imaginative evocation of a world wider than the war. The decorated shield became the ideal pattern, an ecphrasis par excellence, for restating structure and theme in a literary work. The heraldic technique of mise en abyme was appropriated by André Gide to describe the inset of thematic refrains within a work of literature. Homer's decorated shield embeds itself so firmly within the literary texture of the poem that it reveals the richness of this iconic piece of armour as a symbol or artistic cross fertilisation.

The discussion ranges from the reworking of the shield motif by classical authors, Virgil and Ovid, both of whom, it will be argued, recognised and exploited the richness of the literary artifice. Two twentieth century poems come under scrutiny for correspondences with the intersecting landscape of peace and war implied by the Homeric similes and realised explicitly in the scenes depicted upon the shield of Achilles. Thomas Hardy and Alistair Maclean are connected to Homer primarily by the 'moments of vision', a gift shared by creative poets across the centuries.