This is not a scholarly book, but an interesting book. Its strength and its contribution are V.’s photographs of a shield that she has fashioned from metal and designed to be as faithful as possible to the Homeric Shield of Achilles (Il. 18.468–608). The book includes images of the entire shield (with an account of her materials and process) and 22 close-ups of individual scenes from her shield. As a visual artist working in metal, V. knows well the constraints and opportunities, both material and technological. V. has also fashioned her shield with consideration of a range of ancient Greek art (from the third millennium to the second century bce, most from the seventh to the fifth centuries). V. has produced a Shield of Achilles of interest in itself and also as a hermeneutic or heuristic tool to think about the Homeric passage.

V. asks: Assuming that Homer's audiences envisioned something, what might their imagined shield have looked like? Section 4, ‘Vail's Reconstruction of Achilles’ Shield’, is the best part of the book; it has an image of her shield, then the 22 individual scenes with a serviceable translation of the relevant passages underneath each image. V. has created a depiction of the words of the Homeric Shield, with some care and skill. Readers will also benefit from Section 7, ‘Historical Motifs and Notes to Scenes on Achilles’ Shield’. Here V. reproduces again the images she has made of the scenes on the Shield and considers comparanda from Greek art. These sections (4, 7) are both intriguing and useful.

The rest of the book is not impressive. Much of it consists of an oversimplifying, glorifying account of the Iliad. It feels like a throwback to the days of unselfconscious, uncritical moralising tales from what V. calls ‘the heroic forefathers of Western Civilization’ (p. 106). (The very kind of moralising questioned so hauntingly 80 years ago in Louis MacNeice's ‘Autumn Journal IX’.) V. says she is ‘mining Homer for spiritual gems’ and ‘beautifully simple ideals’ (p. 105), claiming ‘all of life's lessons are contained within it’ (p. 89). Achilles? To V. he is not problematic: ‘we are still celebrating the great and unfading glory of Shining Prince Achilles’ (p. 29), and, romanticised: ‘More awesome than charisma, Achilles possesses command; no woman or man can resist him … He wins for righting the scales of fairness on the battlefield of war … Achilles’ love for Briseis drives his next action’ (p. 96). There are many such sentences that will make readers cringe. This is frustrating, because V.’s metalwork shows much more faithfulness to the Iliad than V.’s words. The Iliad is darker and more conflicted, more complicated and problematic (and more useful to think with) than V.’s simple tale with a simple moral. We need only look at two scenes that touch upon Briseis and Achilles. The dominant image for each, as they consider one another, is Achilles’ murder of Briseis’ family – Achilles in anger at Il. 2.688–94 and Briseis, whose emotion is hard to read, at Il. 19.282–302. The fact that Achilles’ reaction is anger and Briseis’ reaction is complicated, but could hardly be described as affection for Achilles, underscores the complexity and pain that we would have to ignore if we were to make the Iliad give us ‘beautifully simple ideals’.

If we want moral tales that are more honest to the poetic power, moral complexity and pain of the Iliad, we have options. Perhaps Madeline Miller's novel The Song of Achilles; Pat Barker's heartbreaking The Silence of the Girls; Bryan Doerries's graphic novel The Odyssey of Sergeant Jack Brennan; Jonathan Shay's psychiatric study Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character; Simone Weil's moving essay L’Iliade ou la poème de la force; or Chris Erickson's political study The Poetics of Fear: a Human Response to Human Security. These works explore and respond to the complexity and challenges of the Iliad with more respect for its moral fissures. Each work in this brief list has changed the conversation; like V., they are not professional Classicists, but unlike V., all grapple with the moral difficulty of the Iliad (cf. also the interview and account of Emily Greenwood's ‘Philology and Reparation: Resisting Anti-Human Errors in “Great Books”’ (3 April 2019): https://medium.com/@utclassicssocialmedia/meet-the-speaker-emily-greenwood-719aef2def22).

V. adopts the stance of a committed amateur, which I can admire. V. rightly takes to task (p. 97) an older, dismissive attitude towards visualising the divinely crafted images, but V. chooses odd, old-fashioned handbook versions (Owen, Stobart, Hogan, Webster, Gardner). When taking scholarship to task, it would be more convincing were this book to engage, at least a bit, with a more representative range of current work on the Shield of Achilles. We are at last getting over, I hope, the damaging obsession with policing credentials and bibliography; nevertheless, V. would have found, from Taplin to de Jong, a richer, more sophisticated conversation, with more depth and nuance on ekphrasis and on the Iliad.

So, this is not a book of scholarship, and it is overly simplistic and misleading in its moralising reading of the Iliad. Nevertheless, philologists can, at times, be less attuned to the contributions that visual artists have made and continue to make to our understanding of the languages and literatures that we study. The images of V.’s shield, which are both close to the text and interesting in themselves, give us a visual springboard for deeper thought about the Shield of Achilles and the Iliad. Therein lies the contribution of this book.