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This chapter focuses upon the ubiquitous theme of design and fabrication. Particular attention is devoted to the shield that Hephaistos designs for Achilles in book 18. Analysis explores the design of the shield description as well as the shield, and the shield's thematization of design in the cosmos. A concluding section relates the mythology of Troy in the Iliad to a wider body of myth in which Zeus's continuous planning, including the inspiration of poetry through the Muses, enables human beings to better their lives.

This chapter uses the shield of Achilles, a quintessential example of a picture that aspires to depict the whole world, as a backdrop in defining description and narration. This shield is described in the eighteenth book of the Iliad, when the divine craftsman Hephaistos forges new weapons for Achilles. It is described as such; “The shield consisted of five layers, and he made all sorts of decorations for it, executed with consummate skill.” The arrangement of the individual images on the shield is left open to interpretation, but the poet implicitly seeks to represent nothing less than the entire world with these “decorations.” The descriptive character of this text is associated with an idiosyncratic grammatical form that clearly deviates from the characteristic form of epic narration. The dominant tense is the aorist; however, there are hardly any aorist forms to be found in the shield's description.

This chapter examines key episodes of ancient Greek and Chinese history, as reflected in well-known historical and literary texts. It discerns a peaceful narrative in Homer's Iliad, and expressed visually in his description of the Shield of Achilles. It shows that critical attitudes on the Greek stage can be identified not only in the Peace and other familiar works of Aristophanes, but in many of the surviving plays of the great tragedians. The chronicles of the Spring and Autumn and subsequent Warring States periods of pre-imperial China, with their endless tales of battle and intrigue, might also seem poor material for a peace-oriented study. Yet rational arguments can be reconstructed giving preference to peace rather than war in the counsel offered by ministers and advisers in the historical annals, and by the main schools of political thought from Kongzi (Confucius) onwards. The popular voice of the farmers who had to abandon their fields to fight on remote frontiers is rarely heard, but the anti-war sentiment in many of the folk songs recorded in the Shijing (Book of Songs) should be noted.

This chapter analyzes the ideology of retributive punishment in the wider context of archaic Greece. It begins by identifying the language associated with vengeance—words etymologically connected with tisis—and outlining some of its uses. Documentary examples in Mycenaean Greek and from Crete are considered and tisis is shown to have a basically transactional sense. Anthropological theory helps distinguish tisis as negative reciprocity over and against positive reciprocity. Three features come to the fore: (1) temporality; (2) the calculation of the object exchanged; (3) the agent calculating the object and whether the exchange is negative or positive. These characteristics are each examined in turn with recourse to examples from the wider Greek corpus down through the archaic period, with particular emphasis on examples from the Iliad.