Chapter 2 - Homer Iliad

Summary

The dangers, sorrows, and failures of caretaking figures in the simile world of the Iliad parallel and reinforce the poem’s concern with the costs of poor leadership. Absent or incompetent leaders in the simile world range from shepherds and helmsmen to parents – both human and animal – who fail to keep their charges and children safe. Without effective leaders, both the simile characters and the story characters to whom they are compared are injured, killed, and bereaved. The similes contribute to an epic tale about the sufferings that all leaderless characters endure, whether a shepherd whose cattle are eaten by a lion, the grief of Patroclus over the sufferings of his fellow Greeks, or Trojan forces dying in battle. Even though the Greeks and Trojans are fighting each other, the simile world treats them very much the same. In scenes of battlefield stalemate, clusters of similes regularly bring together the perspectives of different participants and create unity between the warriors on both sides. The similes convey that more unites Greek and Trojan warriors than separates them, including but not limited to the misery they endure because of their leaders’ shortcomings.