The Shield of Heracles is an archaicGreekepic poem that was attributed to Hesiod during antiquity. The subject of the poem is the expedition of Heracles and Iolaus against Cycnus, the son of Ares, who challenged Heracles to combat as Heracles was passing through Thessaly. It has been suggested that this epic may reflect anti-Thessalian feeling after the First Sacred War : in the epic, a Thessalian hero interfering with the Phociansanctuary is killed by a Boeotian hero, whose mortal father Amphitryon had for allies Locrians and Phocians. This was a pastiche made to be sung at a Boeotian festival at midsummer at the hottest time of the dogstar Sirios. To serve as an introduction, fifty-six lines have been taken from the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. The late 3rd- and early 2nd-century BCE critic Aristophanes of Byzantium, who considered the Catalogue to be the work of Hesiod, noted the borrowing, which led him to suspect that the Shield was spurious. The poem takes its cue from the extended description of the shield of Achilles in Iliad xviii, from which it borrows directly, with a single word altered: The Iliad gives enough detail for its hearers to marvel at Hephaestus' workmanship. The Shield of Heracles piles on repetitive description, without gaining added effect: The round shield's "whole orb shimmered with enamel and white ivory and electrum, and it glowed with shining gold; and there were zones of cyanus drawn upon it." Cyanus denotes a blue low-fired glass-paste or smalt. At the center was a mask of Fear with the staring eyes and teeth of a gorgon. Though Achilles' shield has nothing about it that might mar its function, the shield of Heracles is a tour de force of high relief: the vineyard has "shivering leaves and stakes of silver" and the snake heads "would clash their teeth when Amphitryon's son was fighting" and in the ocean vignette the "fishes of bronze were trembling." As for "the horseman Perseus: his feet did not touch the shield and yet were not far from it—very marvellous to remark, since he was not supported anywhere; for so did the famous Lame One fashion him of gold with his hands." The extravagant description seems to have encouraged rhapsodes to contribute their interpolations, which have been identified and teased apart by modern scholarship. Some similes may strike the careful listener as infelicitous, such as the contrast of glowering with fierce action in "fiercely he stared, like a lion who has come upon a body and full eagerly rips the hide with his strong claws..." The popularity of The Shield of Heracles in 6th-century BCE Athens may be assessed from instances where H.A. Shapiro detected its presence in Attic vase-painting between ca 565 and ca 480 BCE. A calyx-krater by Euphronios depicting the minor episode of Heracles' combat with the Thessalian brigandKyknos occasioned Shapiro's examination of the myth's creative reworking among Attic vase-painters, who based their imagery of Heracle's shield on the literary model. The likelihood of both oral and literary transmission during the same time is noted by Janko. The Shield of Heracles was first printed, included with the complete works of Hesiod, by Aldus Manutius, in Venice, 1495; the text was from Byzantine manuscripts. In modern times several papyri have offered sections of the text, notably a 1st-century papyrus in Berlin, a 2nd-century papyrus from Oxyrhynchus, and the 4th-century Rainer Papyrus at Vienna. There are numerous texts from the 12th to the 15th century. Compare Virgil's "Shield of Aeneas" and the much briefer description of Crenaeus' shield in Thebaid ix.332–338. Marcus Mettius Epaphroditus wrote a commentary on the Shield of Heracles in the 1st century CE.
