The shield of Achilles plays a major role in Homer’s The Iliad. In book XVIII, the shield is created by the crippled Greek god of fire (or the god of the blacksmiths) Hephaestus. This passage can be seen as Homer’s “ekphrasis”, a Greek word which in rhetorical terms is a description of a visual work of art. The description of the shield is one of Homer’s greatest accomplishments because it allows Homer to portray poetically not only the images appearing on the shield but also the effect of those images through the use of literary devices such as imagery, similes and so on. For example, Homer is able to tell a story just through the description of the shield. It is almost as if the ten years of war were described in the shield, hence, making the shield a microcosm of what was going on at that time. The people dancing or the people marching for war; it sounds so realistic that for a moment it seems like it is actually happening in the story, but when in fact, it is actually......

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Title: The Illiad Book Xviii Lines 548-720
Approximate Word Count: 921
Approximate Pages: 4 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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