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Shield“Summer” 388 – but one adjective whose meaning has since changedwas once the distinctive epithet: “silly.” Sometimes found in the form“seely,” its oldest sense is “blissful” and “blessed” (cf. modern Germanselig,“blessed”) and by extension “innocent,”“harmless,” and “simple,”then “pitiable” and “helpless.” It is the perfect epithet of Christians,andhence of sheep. Spenser has “silly/seely sheep/lamb” about ten times,and “silly/seely shepherd” twice. In Shakespeare we hear of “shepherdslooking on their silly sheep” (3H6 2.5.43) and “silly lamb(s)” (Venus 1098,Lucrece 167). The phrase was so well established by Shakespeare’s day thathis comic characters can play on it in their badinage: “A silly answer,andfitting well a sheep” 2GV 1.1.81). Milton imagines the unsuspecting shepherdson the first Christmas: “Perhaps their loves,or else their sheep,/Was all that did their silly thoughts so busy keep” (“Nativity” 91–92).The term remained in use through the nineteenth century,though withan archaic ring,as in Matthew Arnold’s pastoral elegy “Thyrsis” (45).ShieldShipsee ArmorA fragment of the early Greek lyric poet Alcaeus describes a ship strugglingthrough a fierce storm at sea: “one wave rolls in from this side,another from that . . . bilge-water covers the mast-hold; all the sail letsthe light through now . . .” (frag. 208,trans. Campbell). There is nothingin what survives to suggest that this is anything other than what itseems,but Heraclitus of Helicarnassus tells us that it is an allegory forpolitical strife; Archilochus,he says,another poet,used the same symbolism(Homeric Allegories). If Heraclitus is right,these are the earliestexamples of the ship-of-state metaphor,whereby the king or tyrant isthe captain or helmsman,the citizens are the crew,the weather is allpolitical,and the goal is safe harbor. It is found in a poem attributed toTheognis,where he complains of a mutinous crew that has deposed thepilot and refused to bail (667 – 82). It is found throughout Aeschylus’Seven Against Thebes (1–3,62–64,208–10,652),and in Sophocles’ Antigone(163,189); in both cases it is Thebes that is rocked by waves or set straightagain. It is explicitly developed in Plato’s Republic 488a–89b.The Alcaeus poem probably inspired a similar allegory by Horace(Odes 1.14). It begins: “Oh Ship! New billows sweep thee out / Seaward.What wilt thou? Hold the port,be stout”; this translation is by W. E.Gladstone,who captained the British ship of state for many years. Dantedenounces Florence as “a ship without a helmsman in a great storm”(Purgatorio 6.77). The metaphor is concealed in the words “govern” and“government,” which descend from Latin guberno,from Greek kuberno,“steer (a ship).” It has informed many modern literary works,more orless by implication in Shakespeare’s Tempest and Melville’s Moby-Dick,explicitly in the anonymous fifteenth-century poem “The Ship of State”(where the mast is Prince Edward,the stern is the Duke of Somerset,etc.) and Whitman’s lament for Lincoln,“O Captain! my Captain! ourfearful trip is done.” The whole of humankind might be thought of aslaunched upon a sea,an idea encapsulated in the recent catch-phrase“Spaceship Earth.”193