BOO KS
123
in carefully wrought detail and all encircled by the river, Oceanus. The
shield had its uses as both Achilles and his enemies were soon to learn,
but it also describes in its use and its appropriate contours the nature
of Homer's two major poems,
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey.
The image is
of the human comedy, as well as that of a national and heroic life; it is
made of enduring metals; it is to protect the hero, and therefore ad–
vance his progress in the world; it is to ward off death until the
moment, signaled by divine will, comes; it is to endure beyond the life
of the hero; surely few poets have created a better, or less pretentious,
simile for immortality than Homer's description of Achilles' shield.
As for the dramatic art of
The Iliad
which differentiates it from all
other racial and national epics, once we have credited Homer's genius
for creating formal structures, we find that the poem resembles an oral
scenario: the first book with its quarrel between Agamemnon and
Achilles provides a more than brilliant curtain raiser, and the next two
books are the most remarkable dramatis personae in all literature; each
scene that follows until they close in battle clears the stage for the
meeting between the two knights,
Achille~
and Hector, which can be
completed only by Agamemnon's recognition of Achilles' worth, Hector's
death and the ritual of Hector's funeral . There can be little doubt that
the dramatic genius of the later Greeks had its precedent in the spoken
lines of
The Iliad
and that Thucydides' history, with its memorable
orations, owes its dramatic powers to the same source. The age of
Pericles, remarkable as it was for its great figures, was no less remark–
able for its brevity; the wars had come; yet the flowering of dramatic
Greek eloquence did not come from nowhere; its last hours, including
the scenes of Peloponnesian victories and defeats, were prefigured,
if they were not actually foretold, in the last two books of
The Iliad.
Horace Gregory
A welcome addition for your library
The Paintings of WILL
BARN~ET
with an introduction
by
James T. Farrell
Format: SY2 x 1014 • 96 pages • 36 reproductions • price 3.50
PRESS EIGHT
182 Third Avenue
New York City 3, N. Y.
