Explain the title Arms and the Man.

The title is an allusion to the first line
of Virgil's Aeneid. In English, the line translates as "I sing of
arms and the man." In Virgil, "the man" is, of course, Aeneas, and "arms"
refers to the Trojan War & Aeneas' journey from Greece. The
Aeneid stands as a glorious epic, depicting battles as defined by
their heroes, who emerge from the war triumphant.

However,
because Shaw's play is a satire, the title should be looked at ironically.
Rather than praising "arms" & the men who use them by describing
epic battle scenes and glorious triumphs, Shaw is dissecting the reality of war, showing
the futile nature of taking up those arms. In Shaw's vision, war is
dirty, brutal, unforgiving, and serves to support the inequalities inherent in the
status quo. The characters in Shaw's play, especially Major Sergius Saranoff, serve to
underscore the traditional heroism in war of the epic. Saranoff becomes a caricature,
desperately clinging to his romanticized ideal of a hero. He struggles to be defined as
one himself, but Shaw uses the character to instead suggest that no man could compare to
a mythological hero in reality.