Achilles’ Shield
Excerpt from James Redfield’s book “The Hector’s Tragedy”
The Shield comprises five concentric circles. The poet begins his description from its centre and proceeds to the periphery. The inner-circle represents the earth, the sea and the sky, the sun and the moon, and the constellations, which are the beings – signs and monsters (S, 485). Nature is thus presented to us, in the absence of man, as a kingdom of order and importance.
The second ring represents the human world in itself. We distinguish two cities, one in peace and the other in times of war. In the peaceful city we see marriage and a litany of social solidarity and social strife. In the war-torn city we see a council discussing war tactics and at the same time portraying an ambush.

The third ring represents the four agricultural seasons: ploughing, mowing, harvesting, and fallow season, during which the herds are driven to the fields to fertilize them for the next ploughing. In this ring, we see man along with nature, as well as the cycle of human productive activity.
The fourth ring represents a circular dance; in other words, society, which in the second ring is portrayed as a structure of cooperation and strife, appears here as a pure collectivity. And just as the fourth ring reflects the second with some difference, so does the fifth reflects the first, here we have the ocean current, which, as the whole world surrounds, so does the image of the whole world. The two inner rings represent nature and culture as a structure of full significance, the two outer rings as a pure act or simple process. Shield switches from nature to culture, and then to productivity, which is the inclusion of nature in culture, then returns, through culture, to nature. The set is, in a symmetrical construction, A-B-C-B-A, of its Homeric type.
by SearchingTheMeaningOfLife