Published in 1955, the poem draws on a passage of Homer’s Iliad, where the lame blacksmith god Hephaestus, at the request of Thetis, Achilles’ mother, fashions a magnificent shield for the ...

Wearing the trademark armor of Achilles, Patroclus sets forth to battle against Troy. (Homer's Iliad contains timeless lessons of war.) The Olympian god Apollo (depicted in a relief from the ...

Hephaestus instead presents Thetis with a shield that depicts the destructiveness of war and Achilles’s bleak future ... our etchings of pasts made possible only by deaths and the passage ...

It is only a fragment of the truth, which needs to be put forward and made a part of the historical ... the warrior-hero has led our species? But in the shield of Achilles, described in book 18 of the ...