Achilles's grief; the new shield

Achilles hears Antilochus's news and falls. He throws himself face-down in the sand, pours black dust over his hair, tears his own clothes. His scream is so terrible that his mother Thetis, sitting under the sea with her sister-nymphs, hears it and rises. She comes to him with all the Nereids around her and asks what has happened. He tells her. He has to kill Hector. He knows what this means — she has told him; he knows that if he kills Hector, he himself will die soon after. He says he no longer cares. He cannot live without Patroclus.

Iris arrives with a message from Hera: he must go to the Greek wall and show himself, even unarmed, so that the Greeks have the courage to bring back the body. Achilles goes. Athena drapes the aegis around his shoulders, makes a flame burn from his head. He stands on the wall and shouts. His cry, magnified by Athena, breaks across the plain. The Trojans, hearing it, recoil; in the confusion the Greeks pull Patroclus's body free and bring it back into the camp. The body is washed and laid out on Achilles's bed. He weeps over it.

That night Thetis goes to Hephaestus's forge on Olympus. The smith-god, lame and gruff, agrees at once to make her son new armor. The forge fires up. Hephaestus makes a breastplate, a helmet, greaves — and then the great shield. Homer describes the shield over more than a hundred lines: an entire world engraved on it. Cities at peace, with weddings and lawsuits in the public square. Cities at war, with siege and ambush. Fields being plowed. Vineyards being harvested. Cattle being driven; lions attacking them. Young men and women dancing on the threshing floor. The Ocean encircling the whole. It is one of the most famous passages in classical poetry — the entire human world, summed up, as a thing the killer is going out wearing on his arm.