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Some Odyssean Similes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Anthony J. Podlecki
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Extract

Perhaps the one feature that makes the Iliad and Odyssey most characteristically Homeric—not Virgilian, nor Apollonian—is the similes. They allow Homer to turn from the material at hand for a brief moment to look at some other scene, and the intensity with which he looks at the new scene gives a heightened awareness to the original subject, the thing, person, or event which suggested the simile in the first place and was the simile's point of departure. It is well known that the poet's interest in this new subject occasionally goes beyond the strict needs of the poetic context; he often seems absorbed in and even distracted by the other scene, and so the poetic device to which he has lent his name is frequently understood to mean nothing more than an extended comparison whose development and details are thought to be somehow irrelevant. What I wish to do here is look closely at several of these similes in the Odyssey, not from a statistical point of view or to compare them with those of the Iliad, but rather to consider them as poetic devices which Homer uses in an expert way to achieve just the effect he intends; often, as I hope to show, the subtlety of the effect achieved is surprising.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , April 1971 , pp. 81 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1971

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References

page 81 note 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented to a conference of the ‘Society for Homeric Studies’, held at Chios on 17 August 1968.

page 81 note 2 Lee, D. J. N.'s The Similes of the Iliad and the Odyssey Compared (Melbourne, 1964)Google Scholar provides such a study. The only extensive treatment of the similes as poetic devices I know is Fränkel, Herman's Die homerischen Gleichnisse (Göttingen, 1921)Google Scholar, now hard to obtain, but well worthy of being reprinted. Lee provides a handy list of all the similes in both poems (List A, pp. 50–61), and a breakdown by subject-matter (List C, pp. 65–73); Fränkel groups and discusses them using a similar subject-classification. I have not seen Seyffert, Hans, Die Gleichnisse der Odyssee (diss. Kiel, 1949).Google Scholar

page 81 note 3 The translations are in general those of Rieu, E. V. (Penguin Classics, 1946)Google Scholar, unless otherwise specified.

page 82 note 1 Fränkel, , who discusses these ‘father-similes’, op. cit. 90–1Google Scholar, points out that the comparison is used ironically by Telemachus of Antinous at xvii. 397.

page 82 note 2 This theme has now been traced through the poem by Müller, Marion, Athene als gottliche Helferin in der Odyssee (Heidelberg, 1966), esp. 92 ff.Google Scholar

page 83 note 1 ‘Omitted by most MSS. and many editors’, as Stanford notes; he, however, defends it.

page 83 note 2 Fränkel, calls the lion in this simile a ‘Poesielowe’, op. cit. 70.Google Scholar

page 84 note 1 Some interesting parallels between Homer's lion similes and representations of lions in Greek art of the eighth century are drawn by Hampe, R., Die Gleichnisse Homers und die Bildkunst seiner Zeit (Tübingen, 1952), 31–4.Google Scholar

page 85 note 1 Stanford finds it ‘curiously inept’.

page 85 note 2 My translation.

page 89 note 1 Die homerischen Gleichnisse, 95.Google Scholar

page 89 note 2 Cf. Odysseus' own description of himself as пολ⋯στονος (xix. 118). For the etymology see Stanford's note on xix. 407–9 with refs. there.

page 90 note 1 Fränkel, who notes the shift from Odysseus' to Penelope's viewpoint in the simile, asks pertinently, ‘hat der Sänger nicht vielmehr, wo er den einen nannte, doch immer von beiden gesprochen? Ist doch das Glück des Wiedersehens für beide eins und dasselbe’ (op. cit. 95).

page 90 note 2 For Homer's Ionicism as manifested in the similes see Platt, Arthur, Journ. of Phil, xxiv (1896), 28ff.Google Scholar, and 31–3 for the similes of the Odyssey.

page 90 note 3 Bowra, C. M., Tradition and Design in the Iliad (Oxford, 1930)Google Scholar. The quotations are from pages 122 and 127.

page 90 note 4 ‘The similes of the Iliad are characterized by linguistic lateness’ (Shipp, G. P., Studies in the Language of Homer [Cambridge, 1953], 79).Google Scholar

page 90 note 5 See my article, ‘Omens in the Odyssey’, Greece & Rome xiv (1967), 12–23.Google Scholar