Achilles’ shadow shield in Hades

Achilles’ shield in Hades was just a shadow. It didn’t look very spectacular because it was gray and on its surface something like smoke was constantly moving.

This shadow shield didn’t attract Odysseus’ attention when he visited his dead friend. Not even Homer wasted time trying to describe it, but the Muses told me in a revealing dream that this shield was more fearsome than the one Perseus used when he killed Medusa.

This is because a regular mirror only shows the reflection of what is placed in front of it, and Achilles’ shadow shield in Hades had the power to paralyze whoever looks at it because the smoke on its surface shows each person a different image.

This image can be what the person loves most and has lost, what they fear but hide from other people and what they desire and know they cannot have. And that explains why Achilles told Ulysses that he would rather be the last of a peasant's slaves, a wretched piece of dung but alive, than be Achilles dead.

The Muses showed me Achilles’ shadow shield and I could catch a glimpse of my own image as an unhappy man who enters competitions in Antigone magazine knowing that all I do is irritate the organizers of those competitions by forcing them to read what they don't want or summarily reject what they don't bother to read.

On the shield of Achilles' shadow my image was a tiny gray person doomed to eternal failure. And that made me wake up very bitter and paradoxically happy, because everyone should be forced to see their own image on the shadow shield of Achilles but they can't do it. Yet.

I suppose Freud would have said immensely helpful and profound things about that fearsome shield. But the Muses don't always show the right people the things they should see.


PS: The image was generated by AI because I don't know how to draw and paint what was described.



Text originally written for a contest by Antigone magazine.