Ekphrasis at the forge and the forging of ekphrasis: the ‘shield of Achilles’ in Graeco-Roman word and image MICHAEL SQUIRE The eighteenth book of the Iliad will be familiar to anyone interested in the history of Western visual–verbal relations. Achilles, the hero of the poem, sits on the Trojan shore, mourning his beloved Patroclus; as though Patroclus’s death were not grievance enough, Hector has stripped Patroclus’s corpse of its armour — the ancestral weapons which Achilles had lent him. Thetis, Achilles’s divine mother, weeps at her son’s distress. She cannot bring Patroclus back from the dead. But she can commission new armour for him: ‘do not enter into the strife of Ares until you see me arriving here with your own eyes’, she tells him; ‘for in the morning, at the rising of the sun, I shall return bringing fair armour from the lord Hephaestus’ (Il. 18.134–37). What follows is not just a description of the epic armour crafted for Achilles by Hephaestus, but Western literature’s earliest and most influential attempt at forging images out of words. After Thetis has arrived at Olympus and presented her case, the smith-god promises to fulfil her request (18.368–467). With hammer and tongs in hand, Hephaestus sets about making a work ‘such that anyone among the multitude of men will marvel, whoever looks upon it’ (vv.466–67). Towards the end of the description, the poet tells of a corselet, helmet and greaves (vv.609–13). But the bulk of the account is reserved for a ‘great and mighty shield’ (vv.478, 609), evoked in some 130 verses, and studded with a panoply of poetic-pictorial portrayals (vv.478–608). Homer’s grand evocation of the shield of Achilles has attracted a formidable bibliography. 1 Following Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s discussion in his 1766 essay Laocoö n, or An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Laokoö n, oder € uber die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie), the passage has played a funda- mental role in defining the proper post-Enlightenment ‘Grenzen’ or ‘boundaries’ between painting and poetry. 2 The end of the twentieth century, and the rise of poststructuralist criticism about word–image relations in particular, brought about a new resurgence of interest. On the one hand, scho- lars of comparative literature looked afresh at the passage, casting it as the prototypical Western attempt at ekphrasis — that is to say, of a ‘verbal representation of a visual repre- sentation’. 3 On the other, classical philologists have concentrated on the passage’s place within the narrative texture of the poem, as well as its impact on classical tradi- tions of set-piece literary description. 4 For all their shared interest in the description of Achilles’s shield, however, classical and comparative literary scholars have engaged in something of an academic tug of war. Both sides have acknowledged the significance of the Homeric passage. But some classicists have been suspicious of comparative literary claims about its status as prototypical ‘ekphrasis’ (literally a ‘speaking out’, according to its ancient Greek etymology). 5 In an influential article published in this journal fourteen years ago, Ruth Webb led the offensive to rethink the term and its use in antiquity. 6 Where ‘word and image’ studies have tended to stress the continuities between ancient and modern critical traditions, Webb argued, ancient rationalisations of ekphrasis had little to do with artistic subject matter, and everything to do with a culturally contingent ‘set of ideas about language and its impact on the listener’. ‘Not only is ekphrasis not conceived as a form of writing dedicated to the ‘‘art object’’, but it is not even restricted to objects: it is a form of vivid evocation that may have as its subject-matter anything — an action, a person, a place, a battle, even a crocodile’. 7 Webb’s comments have led scholars to rethink numerous aspects of ancient rhetorical theory, and in a host of stimulating and fruitful ways. In my view, however, there has been an unfortunate side-effect. While concentrating on the supposed gap between ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ traditions of theorising visual and verbal representation, there remains a danger of overlooking certain proximities (and indeed continuities) between them. It is here that the present article intends to deliver its gentle corrective. Returning afresh to antiquity’s paradig- matic attempt to capture vision in language, and rethinking the reception of the Homeric shield in both Graeco-Roman art and text, this article aims not only to describe the passage’s intermedial complexity, but also to sketch its enduring influence. By forging in words its description of Hephaestus forging the shield, the poet of the Iliad also forged an intellectual paradigm for figuring visual and verbal relations — one that permeated ancient literary and literary critical traditions, and by extension the Western cultural imaginary at large. WORD & IMAGE, VOL. 29, NO. 2, APRIL–JUNE 2013 157 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2012.663612 # 2013 Taylor & Francis Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 03:24 13 October 2013