The Iliad

Symbols & Motifs · The Iliad

Recurring objects and images — and what they carry.

1. 01

   The shield of Achilles

   Hephaestus covers it with an entire world: two cities, one at peace with a wedding and a lawsuit being argued, one under siege. Ploughing, harvest, a vineyard, dancing. The poem stops dead for a hundred and thirty lines to describe a picture of ordinary life, and then hands it to a man who is about to go and end lives. Everything the war destroys is engraved on the thing he fights behind.

2. 02

   Armour, and wearing another man's identity

   Patroclus borrows Achilles' armour and the Trojans run from a dead man's reputation, until Apollo strips it off him and he dies as himself. Hector then puts that same armour on and it fits him like a curse. Armour in this poem is never just protection. It is who the enemy thinks you are, and it can be taken.

3. 03

   Hector's plumed helmet

   The most domestic moment in the poem. Hector reaches for his baby son and the child screams, terrified of the horsehair crest on his own father's head. Hector laughs, takes the helmet off, and puts it on the ground. It is the only time in the Iliad a man is allowed to be a father instead of a soldier, and it lasts about ten lines.

4. 04

   The wall and the ships

   The Greeks build a wall and a ditch to protect the beached ships, and the poem tracks the fighting by how close the Trojans get to them. Burn the ships and nobody goes home. Distance from the water becomes the plot's only real scoreboard, which is why Patroclus finally breaks and asks to fight.

5. 05

   Apollo's arrows

   The poem opens with a plague, and it arrives as a god walking down from Olympus like nightfall, shooting first the mules and dogs and then the men. The war has not caused this. A commander insulted a priest. The Iliad announces in its first hundred lines that ordinary human arrogance kills more people than the enemy does.

6. 06

   The body of Hector

   Achilles drags it behind his chariot for days and the gods keep it from decaying, which means the desecration is pointless as well as monstrous. The poem does not end with a victory. It ends with an old man kissing the hands that killed his son in order to buy the body back, and two enemies crying in the same tent about different people.