Home For Fiction – Blog

Today’s post – “Similes in the Iliad: The Horrors of War” – is authored by Igor da Silva Livramento. He’s a fellow academic from UFSC, fellow author, fellow creative-writing advisor, and overall a great fellow. He’s also a composer, music theorist, and producer. Check out his papers on Academia.edu, his music on Bandcamp, and his personal musings on his blog – in Portuguese, Spanish/Castilian, and English. You can also find him on LinkedIn.

I know this must be one of the most common themes of all time. Any individual who is minimally literate and in possession of some literary culture knows that the Iliad is full of great similes.

Contrary to what it may seem at first glance, these artful chunks of language exhibit more than the eye can see: They establish Homer’s views on war in a manner that is surreptitiously under our noses. Through a game of hiding what is in plain sight, Homer criticizes the war at the same time that he seems only to report what is happening on the battlefield.

Similes in the Iliad: Examples

The similes are more or less extensive comparisons, covering everything from short metaphors to extensive analogies between natural scenes and warriors in battle. Comparisons that exclude the comparative term create an ontological intermingling, as Julio Cortázar says, stating that one thing is another – e.g. “my girlfriend is a flower” – in place of the long and explicit “my girlfriend is as pleasant to stare at as a flower”.

Here’s an example of a Homeric simile, in my English rendition of Haroldo de Campos’ Brazilian translation (book 2, verses 455–68):

As the voracious fire devours an immense forest, igniting the mountain top, and the flames, far away, glow, so, circum-shining, goes, divine-bronzy, through the air, rising to the skies, the glow of those who advance. As flocks of geese, cranes or long-necked swans flock in the Asiatic, where the Chaistros flow, landing here and there, flapping their wings, to the shrieks that reverberate shrilly in the field, so, in flocks, outside the tents and ships, over the plain scamandrous the troops spread, and the ground under the feet of steeds and men thundered. Like leaves and flowers on the spring banks of the river they stood still, by thousands.

As should be immediately noted, the simile contains smaller similes, as in the first sentence: “As the voracious fire devours an immense forest”. Now, fire is not a living being to have voracity – although the Greek intellect of the time noticed how lively fire can be, swirling randomly and consuming forests.

Voracity is an adjective pertinent to living beings that feed and move, exhibiting remarkable intensity in their acts, especially linked to feeding themselves. However, as a kind of miniature foreshadowing, Homer includes this prosopopoeiaFrom Wikipedia: "a figure of speech in which an animal or inanimate object is ascribed human characteristics or is spoken of in anthropomorphic language. Quintilian writes of the power of this figure of speech to ‘bring down the gods from heaven, evoke the dead, and give voices to cities and states’". The term comes from Greek and literally means "to make a face" (prosopon, "face" + poiein, "to make"), i.e. to emulate a personality through rhetoric.
Paul de Man has cleverly noted that prosopopoeia is at the basis of all literature and even of all language use, for what speaks is language (as the Heideggerian formula puts it die Sprache spricht, "speech speaks"), and not the one through whom language comes to speak. To claim, for example, that a character said something in a book is a prosopopoeic act, for a book is a mute object. The character’s dialogue may be written in the text of the book, but that does not mean that the character spoke those words, for there is no voice coming out of the book that registers this. These invisible extensions are everywhere in our use of language and our understanding of the world. in his extensive simile in order to prepare us for the comparison ahead: It is not a matter of forest fire, but of soldiers advancing in combat (the use of the verb “devours” also points to the prosopopoeia in question).

However, what most catches my attention is not the comparison with fire, because even though it is quite intense, it has already become commonplace, especially after the invention of firearms. I am much more impressed by the comparison with birds in flight and flocks. This is by no means the first or only comparison of warriors to animals. Here’s another example (bk. 2, verses 87–93, trans. to Portuguese Haroldo de Campos, English by me):

Then the multitude, like a honeyed swarm of bees bursting out of a hollow rock – ever-sizzling or when buzzing around the flowers (which have sprung!), now here, now there, bunches of honey-bees flying – thus the multitude rushes from the ships and tents in tumult, along the deep-sounding-seashore, to the agora.

How am I supposed to interpret this comparison of warriors to honey-bees?

Interpreting a Figure of Speech in the 21st Century

It is common knowledge that Homer is an objective narrator: He tells us the last fifty days of the Trojan War without any moral of the story at the end. But it is also known that his literature was used as educational material in the upbringing of ancient Greek citizens. That is to say, his poetry has some lesson to be extracted. However, this task is not an obvious one.

If, on the one hand, the comparison with the natural world gives the idea that war and the warrior spirit are natural phenomena, it is also inevitable to note that the tone of the Iliad is tragic (in both senses of the term: The results of the story are bad, and the poem is, in some way, a foreshadowing of the Greek theater that would emerge some time after the poet, with its abundance of dialogues). Here’s another example (again, from Haroldo’s translation to my retranslation), book 3, verses 15–29:

As soon as the two armies clashed, here was Paris Alexandrous, at the head of the Trojans. Divine-like-shaped, with the skin of a leopard on his shoulder, carrying a bow, a sword and two pointed spears, bronzed, he called the bravest Achaeans to measure themselves against him, face to face. When Menelaus, the beloved-of-Ares, saw him advancing in broad strides, he rejoiced like a lion that confronts great prey – a wild goat, a stag – and hungrily devours it, even when pursued by dogs and young men eager to hunt. Thus rejoiced Menelaus, with his eyes seeing the divinely-shaped Paris, the culprit to be punished. He jumped close to the chariot, weapons ready.

Natural forces in opposition appear as the measure of human behavior. This structure makes the actions narrated in the epic seem the result of some irresistible cosmic order, much like the natural processes to which they are compared. But is it really so?

Similes in the Iliad: Irony and Criticism

See, for example, the following verses (book 12, verses 451–9, same (re)translation process as before):

And just as a shepherd holds up the skin of a sheep with one hand only – and it weighs little –, Hector holds up the millstone and aims at the solid boards that fastened the doors to the high door frames; double locks, criss-crossed, closed them with a single bolt. In front of the doors, Hector stops. He spreads his legs wide apart, so that the throw does not slacken, and points the grinding wheel, aiming fixedly at the middle. The hinges break.

The comparison with a shepherd is striking: A shepherd would not be throwing rocks and spears on a battlefield. Rather, they would be enraged by the dirt that bodies, fallen weapons and blood leave on the earth, making it infertile for planting, and useless for feeding livestock.

The comparison, therefore, is not gratuitous. Even the part in which the heavy rock is compared to the light sheepskin is, in fact, a piece of subtle criticism because of the irony of the terms used in the comparison. It is as if Homer were saying to us: Instead of standing there scrambling with guns and rocks, in bloody waste of your lives, be creative and collaborative with your strengths, feed the people, and work collectively for the benefit of all, just like shepherds. In order to sediment the argument, I present the verses 53–69 from book 17 (same (re)translation process again):

As when one tends the blossoming olive-blossoms, in a solitary grove, bathed with abundant water, and the beautiful plant, exposed to the most varied winds, bursts forth in bright blossom, till a gust bursts it in a whirlwind and hurls it upon the ground: thus does Menelaus strip Euphorbo, the spear-master, of his armor, after he has slain him. As a mountain lion, relying on his strength, preys on the herd that grazes the fairest heifer, and breaks her neck with his mighty teeth, and then strips her naked, and devours her entrails, and tears her to pieces; and at the cry of the shepherds, dogs growl and howl, but from afar, dare not defy him, seized with green-hued dread; so in the heart no one was encouraged to face the glorious Menelaus.

Growing olives, as is known, was one of the most common occupations in the region and was very profitable, as well as being an activity that served the community, as it fed them, and also producing olive oil, which was used in medicines, as well as for food.

In this way, Homer is not simply comparing one scene to another, but producing – like a journalist or film director who chooses very carefully which scenes to place before the spectator or the reader – an instance of criticism by the force of the opposition of the images, by the clash between the calm and the violent scenes.

In short, even though similes in the Iliad state that conflict is a natural force, therefore being inevitable, these same similes, in an almost ironic key, remind us of other possibilities of human activity besides armed conflict, death, and the destruction war brings.

What Lesson to Learn?

There are no lessons to learn by default, other than those we can extract from a careful and dedicated reading. To me, this meticulous study of Homeric language has given me the idea that I can trust my reader to understand a critique without having to shove it down their throat.

Furthermore, I understood that the mere juxtaposition of contrasting images can produce more effect than the logical sequencing that leads the reading from an initial observation to a conclusion. Of course, to understand this subtlety, reading will serve as a kind of filter between skillful and unskillful readers.

In any case, the discontinuity, the contrast between the images accumulated in the similes in the Iliad, taught me that the composition of a literary text does not need to be logical, in the mathematical sense of the term, but may very well be like a mosaic, made of small shards, fragments, disjointed units that compose themselves in the end into something much greater than the sum of these minimal parts. What has it taught you?