Abstract
The paper revisits Homer's description of the making of the shield of Achilles in light of the recent discussions on the relation between ekphrasis and materiality. In order to bring out the ecphrastic shield's animated "thingness" rather than a simply visualized "objecthood", I focus on Homer's obvious cardiocentrism and his understanding of imagination as embodied power whose inner working is contiguous with the forging of metals that compose the shield.
It is Hephaestus' "visionary diaphragm" that projects forth the images, and it is this projection that the audience is supposed to emulate with the imagination of their own. At the same time, this emulation cannot erase the subtle yet persistent tension between the vivid evocation of details in particular scenes on the shield, and a striking lack of determination when it comes to the overall arrangement of these scenes and even to the shield's physical shape.
This lack is not due to an omission: reinforcing the performative rather than descriptive nature of the shield, it makes us alert to the fact that the shield, insofar as it originally connects to our imagination, cannot be consistently understood as "the cosmic icon": this is because we cannot coherently imagine one thing as enclosing all smaller things including ourselves as both its parts and its beholders. The second part of the study develops this focus on the shield's implied agency by turning to its fate in both the Iliad and later poetry, especially the Hellenistic epigrams.
This turn confirms is that, regardless of the poetic genre, the shield of Achilles lives its neither natural nor simply artificial life on the ontologically ambiguous threshold of imaginary object and material thing.