Dr. Bernard Knox

ersonally, I find the project interesting and the photograph(s) with accompanying text, absorbing. I found myself following the different units round the shield as I read the Greek text and was pleased to see all the Homeric components present and correct, as they say in the Army.

I think what Webster meant by his remark1 was merely that Homer was describing an ideal, imaginary shield and that no such ornate and complicated piece of armor really existed. But even though it was an imaginary shield, you have shown that it could in fact have been made.


.


.


.

FOOTNOTES:


1. "Detailed reconstruction of the shield is impossible," writes T.B.L. Webster, From Mycenae to Homer (London: Methuen, 1958), pg. 214.


.


.


.


.

Bernard Knox

Dr. Bernard Knox has taught at Yale University for many years and is director emeritus of Harvard's prestigious Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC.

The recipient of many academic honors and awards, he was recently the editor of The Norton Book of Classical Literature, the editor of and a contributor to the Cambridge History of Classical Literature, and wrote the introductions and notes for Robert Fagles' translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
He is the author of The Heroic Temper, The Oldest Dead White European Males, and Backing into the Future: The Classical Tradition and Its Renewal, in addition to many other authoritative and critically acclaimed texts on ancient drama and literature.

Among his many accomplishments, he has been the recipient of awards from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the National Endowment of the Humanities, as well as receiving an appointment as a Guggenheim fellow and being elected president of the noted American Philological Association.


The Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC website: http://www.chs.harvard.edu/