Ben Radcliffe (Loyola Marymount University)
The Iliad is populated by an array of manufactured objects—including weapons, clothes, utensils, and vehicles—that allude to social and economic realities beyond the horizons of the Trojan battlefield. This paper argues that the rare scenes of manufacturing in the Iliadic narrative serve as sites of aesthetic resistance to the protagonists’ aristocratic, status-seeking ethos: two depictions of metalworking (Il. 18.478-608; 23.826-49) trace the tenuous place of martial labor in the broader world of epic. Researchers have observed that the labor of artisans and craftspeople is depicted infrequently in the Iliad, almost exclusively in similes or in narratively marginalized women’s work (Rood; Wofford). In the narrative itself, manufactured objects, typically produced before the events of the Iliad, circulate as status symbols within the class of aristocratic heroes (Ready; van Wees). By relegating the domestic production of goods to the background of the narrative, the Iliad endows the elite pursuit of status with a fantastical autonomy, freed from its objective dependency on non-heroic labor. When manual labor does impinge on the narrative, however, it can underscore the ways in which heroic status is mediated through the working and reworking of material objects in contexts that complicate the aristocratic creation of value.
I focus on two revealing cases: the Shield of Achilles and Achilles’ iron discus (solos). The construction of the shield by Hephaestus is the longest depiction of manufacturing in Homer: the god’s metallurgical labor is interwoven with the ekphrasis of the shield’s imagery, including the cities of peace and of war, a representation of a world that, unlike the Iliadic narrative, synoptically encompasses martial expropriation alongside domestic industry (Scully; Becker; Taplin). But these two enterprises are abruptly juxtaposed in the ekphrasis: the “works of war” form only a single scene (509-40) disconnected from the surrounding world of peaceful labor except through violent encounters. Adapting this technique from the shield (cf. Il. 19.12-27), Achilles constructs his own image of an unreconciled social world in Book 23: he offers his iron discus—plundered earlier in the war—as a prize during the funeral games, promising that the victor’s serfs can use the object as scrap metal to repair their plows. The discus can be recycled into domestic production only once it is reduced to scrap and its provenance as a war trophy and status symbol is obliterated. For Achilles, the discus thus represents the fragility of the material and social basis of aristocratic status, a concern that underlies his own anti-social and immaterial conception of heroic subjectivity (Seaford).
In the conclusion, I discuss how these images of social discontinuity are galvanized by the metallurgical properties of the shield and discus (Seaford; Gray). I argue that my account complements recent treatments of the agency of material objects in Homer (Canevaro; Purves; Bassi; Grethlein), drawing especially on Theodor Adorno’s claim (cf. Wohl) that the aesthetic form of art objects can register social antagonisms otherwise papered over by ideological consensus.