The shield is
formed of five superimposed plates of different metals, each plate of
smaller diameter than the one immediately below it, their flat
margins showing thus as four concentric stripes or rings of metal,
around a sort of boss in the centre, five metals thick, and the
outermost circle or ring being the thinnest. To this arrangement the
order of Homer's description corresponds. The earth and the heavenly
bodies are upon this boss in the centre, like a little distant heaven
hung above the broad world, and from this Homer works out, round and
round, to the river Oceanus, which forms the border of the whole; the
subjects answering to, or supporting each other, in a sort of
heraldic order--the city at peace set over against the city besieged-
-spring, summer, and autumn balancing each other--quite congruously
with a certain heraldic turn common in contemporary Assyrian art,
which delights in [203] this sort of conventional spacing out of its
various subjects, and especially with some extant metal chargers of
Assyrian work, which, like some of the earliest Greek vases with
their painted plants and flowers conventionally arranged, illustrate
in their humble measure such heraldic grouping.
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