A simile in an ancient Greek or Roman epic poem uses the simile form “A is like B” to frame a brief tale about something outwardly unrelated to the poem’s main story. The simile structure asserts a kinship between two things that come from different conceptual domains: a warrior is like a wild beast, an ocean wave, or a dead flower.1 But each of us must flesh out these relationships for ourselves: How are the two things alike? How are they different? How does one simile mesh with others to create a simile world that shapes an epic poem as a whole? An epic simile typically starts with an “as” phrase and ends with a “so” expression; this recapping “so,” in particular, defines the extended narrative simile that characterizes epic poetry as a literary genre.2 The “as/so” ring identifies likeness between superficially different phenomena as an explicit subject of the narrative. It fashions a border around a simile that both sets it apart and weaves it into the main story of an epic poem.3 These deceptively simple framing expressions of likeness invite each of us to reweave those connections afresh, a process that is simultaneously intellectual, emotional, and immersive.
Most readers equate the story of an epic poem with its mythological characters and events. Homer’s Iliad is a tale of Achilles, Hector, and the sack of Troy. Vergil’s Aeneid tells the story of Aeneas founding Rome in part by drawing on the stories told in the Iliad and the Odyssey about the experiences of comparable characters. Because an epic poem presents the mythological story in a more connected and linear fashion than the stories of the individual similes, we have not tended to regard similes themselves as elements of a cohesive epic “story.” But just as the story of any epic poem is woven from characters and plot, so too do the individual similes within an epic create a unified and unique simile world. A poem’s similes band together to create an internally consistent world like any other story, peopled by individual characters, happenings, and experiences. The simile world that complements the epic mythological story is not an unchanging transcultural baseline. Rather, it is re-imagined afresh in relation to the themes of each epic poem. Indeed, the story and simile worlds are reshaped in tandem from epic to epic. As each epic poem becomes part of the fabric of epic poetry over time, an ongoing simile world takes shape across many poems composed over many centuries. This evolving landscape resembles the epic story world of battles and heroes and voyages that comes into being through relationships among different epic poems. As the simile worlds evolve over the course of the epic tradition, so does the relationship between the simile and story worlds, with less and less separation between them. Epic narrative is woven from a warp of the mythological story world and a weft of the simile world. They are partners in creating the fabric of epic poetry.
Like Alice Oswald’s Memorial, a poem fashioned from the similes and obituaries of the Iliad, my book is an answer to the question “What kind of stories emerge from ancient epic if we put similes front and center?” What do we see if we approach similes with the same assumptions of narrative significance that we grant automatically to the characters and events of the Trojan War or the Voyage of the Argonauts? First and foremost, similes are highly concentrated nuggets of immersive storytelling, which “invite the reader to construct a mental representation of the described situation that is grounded in perception, action, and emotion” (Allan Reference Allan, Meineck, Short and Devereaux2019b: 17).4 This feature of similes was familiar to ancient scholars, the scholiasts, who associated them with enargeia (“vividness”).5 Individual similes include spatial environments for the events they depict, bodily experiences of heat and rain and hunger and injury, emotional ties of love or loss, and social relationships powered by conflict, awe, or cooperation. Similes, in fact, are the most intensely embodied, immersive part of epic poetry. Moreover, like the individual scenes and characters of the mythological story, individual similes give rise to a coherent and cohesive simile world that is distinctive to an individual poem. Indeed, the themes and outlook of an epic poem reach the audience at least as much through its simile world as through the mythological story. In the context of an epic poem, a simile is not an analytical tool for dissecting experience. It is itself an experience that places us within a world that is just as important to the epic narrative as the mythological story.
Modern scholars working on embodied cognition have come to see mental processes not as fundamentally different or separate from the physical body but as closely dependent on and related to it: psychological and linguistic research has shown how someone reading words that refer to visual and spatial ideas activates areas of the brain associated with seeing and moving. This view can shed light on virtually any kind of cognitive processing ranging from how we understand figurative language to the vividness of Homeric narrative.6 From this perspective, similes provide a fruitful way not simply to study the immersive aspects of narrative but to “embody” it. Too often, scholarship on embodied cognition is far from embodied itself. In highly abstract language, such analyses present the phenomenon they seek to explain, but readers seeking a taste of what an embodied experience of literature would feel like are unlikely to find it in scholarly writing. As I will explain in more detail later in this Introduction, many of my choices of language, style, and presentation are intended to maximize the reader’s experience of personal, affective engagement with the subject just as similes do in epic poetry. For example, I use the first-person plural when I refer to the experiences arising from a given simile to embody the emotional bonds created by the reading process between us and the poem as well as among different readers.
Similes about relationships offer the fullest variety of immersive features, showing the characters as they experience the world in which they live, the sensations of their own bodies during those experiences, and the feelings that bind them to other characters. Shepherding similes embody several relationships that bring out a range of themes fundamental not simply to all the poems in this book but to any exploration of the human experience. The shepherd needs skill, strength, and mutual trust to fulfill his responsibilities to his flock. The shepherd’s domestic animals have feelings for one another and for their shepherd. Their behavior as a group brings forward the bonds of community and how communities respond to internal conflict or external threats. The predators, storms, and other dangers endured by both shepherds and flocks evoke the hazards that threaten a safe, stable, and orderly way of life for animals and human beings alike. Because shepherding similes explore several of the most basic themes in epic poetry by immersing us in the experiences and feelings of different kinds of creatures, this one type of simile scene offers the best view of both the simile world of a given poem and the epic narrative in which that world is found. Moreover, herding and animal scenes form part of the simile worlds of all five poems in my book. Therefore, shepherding scenes offer both a wide-ranging perspective on a particular poem and a standard by which to compare poems to one another. Such scenes define the shape and the aims of one poem, and they give a sense of the qualities unique to each poem in comparison to the others.
In the landscape of the epic similes, this book strives to be both a guidebook that describes the sights and sounds that the traveler encounters and a safari in which we experience the feelings, emotions, and sensations of the simile world for ourselves. As we set off to explore the simile worlds of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Apollonius’ Argonautica, Vergil’s Aeneid, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we begin our journey in this Introduction with a simile that includes many features typical of the simile world. One of the most typical features of similes is the way they create meaning, not by stating it explicitly but by the accumulation of details that invite us to forge relationships among them. It is in these relationships, and the interpretive and affective process of experiencing them, that the significance of similes lies. So too, my analysis of this simile – and of the “typical simile” that opens each chapter of the book – begins with the simile itself rather than with an overview of the main conclusions the analysis will reach. My points will emerge over the course of exploring the simile, and they are summarized at the end of the section.
I.1 Simile Shepherds and Their Flocks: Apollonius Argonautica 2.121–29
The opening of Book 2 of Apollonius’ Argonautica finds Jason and the Argonauts in quest of the Golden Fleece, sailing from Greece to the city of Colchis on the eastern end of the Black Sea. On their way to Colchis, they beach their ship Argo in the kingdom of the Bebrycians, located just to the east of present-day Istanbul. Here, the Argonauts encounter a warlike people living under the rule of the hostile and inhospitable king Amycus. Instead of welcoming his visitors politely, as a civilized host would be expected to do, Amycus greets the new arrivals by telling them that anyone who wants to return home must box with him first. Several punches later, the Argonaut Polydeuces lands a deadly blow to Amycus’ head. The Bebrycians then try to kill Polydeuces to avenge the death of their king, but instead, several of them are hurt or killed by Greek fighters. As Jason and several other Argonauts advance on the Bebrycians, a simile compares them to a pack of wolves menacing a flock of domestic sheep.
Apollonius Argonautica 2.121–29
As we readers leap to our mental “feet” along with the Greek fighters rushing at the Bebrycians (2.121–22), a simile comes along to interrupt our forward motion. The simile announces itself with “as when” (ὡς δ’ ὅτ’, 2.123), a common simile introductory expression that indicates that the narrative is about to change direction. Instead of attacking the Bebrycians, we now find ourselves literally reversing course along with a large herd of fleeing animals in a sheepfold (ἐνὶ σταθμοῖσιν ἀπείρονα μῆλ’ ἐφόβησαν, 2.123).
The antagonists of the sheep, a pack of gray wolves that rush at the sheep on a winter’s day, arrive in 2.124. Now we are off and running once again, but this time as the predators who are attacking the sheep. The reader in effect has walked the paths of both antagonists, the sheep and the wolves (and thus also, the Bebrycians and the Argonauts). The bulk of the detail in the simile describes the wolves (2.125–27). First, they evade the notice of both dogs and shepherds (λάθρῃ ἐυρρίνων τε κυνῶν αὐτῶν τε νομήων, 2.125). The aptness of these additional characters is self-evident in the simile – well-tended sheep require both animal and human supervision – but unclear in the adjacent story where no characters are mentioned besides the sheep and wolf analogues. So, this verse would arouse extra attention, as we both inhabit the experiences of the sly wolves and the keen-nosed dogs and wonder how the dogs and their human masters might be related to the adjacent story.7
Having eluded the caretakers, the wolves now reconnoiter the herd to decide which animal to attack first (μαίονται δ’ ὅ τι πρῶτον ἐπαΐξαντες ἕλωσιν, / πόλλ’ ἐπιπαμφαλόωντες ὁμοῦ, 2.126–27). The wolves, in fact, never progress beyond spying out possible victims. The end of the simile returns to the sheep, who are piled on top of each other – and us – in a compressed heap of words (πάντοθεν αὔτως / στείνονται πίπτοντα περὶ σφίσιν, 2.127–28). We finish the simile underneath a crush of frightened bodies whose connection to the story once again becomes unclear as it links penned-in, passive, terrified herd animals to the “arrogant” Bebrycians (ὣς ἄρα τοί γε / λευγαλέως Βέβρυκας ὑπερφιάλους ἐφόβησαν, 2.128–29).
We come away from this simile with vivid experiences of both the sheep-Bebrycians (who begin and end the comparison, the most emphatic positions not only in poetic composition but also in psychological understandings of how human beings process and remember sequences, Smith Reference Smith and Darity2008) and the wolf-Argonauts (whose behavior is described at the greatest length). Moreover, the simile is full of sensory details, many of which would linger in part because they have no clear relevance to the story: the weather is cold (ἤματι χειμερίῳ, 2.124), the wolves are gray (πολιοὶ λύκοι, 2.124), the dogs have a keen sense of smell (ἐυρρίνων τε κυνῶν, 2.125). As a group, these individual details create a lively scene in which we inhabit the experiences of both sheep and wolves and so of both Argonauts and Bebrycians, even while the Bebrycians are some of the most violent and uncivilized of the peoples encountered by the Argonauts along their journey. While the lush detail in the simile creates an engaging sensory experience for us, it also raises unanswered (and unanswerable) questions about the relationships between the simile and the story. Our experience of epic similes arises in large part from grappling with such questions, even – or especially – when we cannot fix on specific answers. What does it imply for the human fighters in the mythological story that the simile takes place in the winter? Is there a story analogue to the behavior of the wolves who “survey” their prey before deciding which one to kill first? In what way does the frontal assault of the Greek fighters (2.121–22) relate to the wolves sneaking into (λάθρῃ, 2.125) the sheep’s pen?
We cannot know for sure, in part because the story never describes the Greek attack that precedes the simile. Instead, the Greek soldiers’ assault on the Bebrycians is narrated by the simile itself. When the simile begins, the Greeks are rushing at the Bebrycians; when it ends, the defeated Bebrycians are fleeing in all directions. The intervening step unfolds between the wolves and the sheep, not between the human combatants. Similes regularly fill such silences, telling parts of the epic tale that are not included in the main story.8 These gaps themselves are carriers of meaning through both the interpretations that we create in order to fill them and the subjective experience of these gaps as places where meaning comes not from words and content but from empty space. When the edges of a mythological story on either side of a simile do not join up smoothly with each other, it falls to us to weave together the simile and the story to create the poem’s narrative. The meaning of a simile, in fact, is fashioned from both the connections that it forges (“wolves are like Greek fighters”) and the gaps that it opens up (“who in the story corresponds to the dogs and shepherds in the simile?”).
Regardless of how we respond to those gaps, our immersion in the landscape of the simile world creates a subjective, embodied experience of an epic poem that arouses a bodily rather than a lexical response from us. Describing and analyzing this experience inevitably offers a pale shadow of the experience itself both for your author and for you, the reader. But for travelers in the world of epic poetry, as for travelers anywhere, knowing what to expect and how to make the most of our experience can lead to a more satisfying trip. Following the simile shepherd through the different relationships in which he participates will show us a road map that – like similes – makes a broad narrative terrain more approachable and engaging. Shepherding similes, a motif common to all five poems in this book in which the main characters have a wide range of embodied and emotional experiences, offer a good overview of the simile worlds of epic narrative.
I.2 Shepherds and the Simile World: “Pattern”
Relationships among the typical shepherding characters in Argonautica 2.121–29 – both within the simile and between the simile and the adjacent story – help to establish the tone and themes of the Argonautica as a whole. Although dangerous wild animals menace a shepherd’s charges in several similes besides this one, no domestic animals in similes in the Argonautica come to any real harm. This simile is one of several in which the predator frightens or threatens the flock without hurting any of them. In fact, just as the simile of wolves and sheep narrates the otherwise missing clash between Greek and Bebrycian fighters, so too the fleeing Bebrycians who follow the simile (2.128–36) may supply the end of this simile by implying that the sheep, like the Bebrycians, escaped unharmed.
In a scenario that is unique to the simile world of the Argonautica, various shepherds take strategic actions that put their animals out of harm’s way, preventing a predator from threatening them in the first place. One group of herders in the simile world of the Argonautica, for example, shut their flocks into their pens before a wild animal can get to them, and their careful advance planning is one of the main subjects of the simile: “for beforehand the shepherds themselves have shut them in their pens” (πρὸ γὰρ αὐτοὶ ἐνὶ σταθμοῖσι νομῆες / ἔλσαν, 1.1246–47). “For beforehand” (πρὸ γάρ) draws us into the shepherds’ thought process as they make a plan to protect their sheep, and the intensifier “the shepherds themselves” (αὐτοὶ … νομῆες) highlights both the actions of the shepherds and their bond with the flocks. In this simile – in contrast to the wily wolves in 2.131–39 – the hungry predator cannot figure out how to get past the shepherds’ defenses. Through simile vignettes of shepherds who make and carry out plans to keep their animals safe, the Argonautica establishes the positive force of human expertise as a key theme of the poem. While the shepherds in the Argonautica differ from the shepherds in other poems, the Argonautica similes about human relationships – also a feature of the simile worlds of all five of our poems – depict feelings as even stronger and more powerful than the human intellect. The mythological story of the Argonautica is, of course, the sum of all its individual scenes and happenings and characters. In the same way, the individual scenes and characters of the various similes in the Argonautica create a simile world with consistent features that define this particular poem.
By and large, the shepherds in the simile world of the Argonautica are watching over their animals and keeping them safe from harm. But shepherds in other epics do not fare as well. For instance, Iliad shepherds often fall short in their responsibilities, both because they are defeated by enemies who are stronger than they are and because they make mistakes – or fail to show up at all – when danger threatens their animals. The Iliad explores themes of bad or ineffective leadership in no small part through the experiences of its simile shepherds.9 Aeneid shepherds, meanwhile, almost never appear in the same simile as domestic animals; when shepherds and their flocks do interact, they relate to each other with fear and conflict rather than trust and harmony. Like Aeneas, Dido, and Turnus, these shepherds and their flocks inhabit a world where meaningful emotional connections are the exception rather than the rule, and relationships may be even more painful and destructive than loneliness. In each poem, herding motifs in the simile world help to depict key themes about leadership, authority, and bonds between people. By contrast, there are no herders at all in the simile world of the Metamorphoses, a poem that takes delight in placing the central characters of earlier epics on the sidelines and focusing on previously marginal figures instead. Such sidelined heroes of earlier epics characterize both the story world – the mere four verses devoted to the tragedy of Dido is a famous example (Metamorphoses 14.78–81) – and the simile world.
Within the Argonautica, capable shepherds form one thread of a narrative that is keenly interested in the power of human knowledge, strategy, and expertise to shape the world.10 But in the larger simile world found across multiple epics, the successful shepherds in the Argonautica are outliers whose success becomes even more striking in contrast to their more feckless and less attentive colleagues. A simile world is part of the narrative not simply within an individual poem but across multiple epics. In many cases, individual similes in post-Homeric epics allude to specific passages in earlier literature, and meanings are created in their new contexts in part through precise relationships with these earlier contexts. Indeed, similes resemble allusions because they juxtapose two superficially unrelated things from which we are invited to create connections and meaning about both the narrative itself and the narrative process.11 But even without an allusion to specific passages from earlier epic, the simile world of the Argonautica takes on its unique coloring in part alongside the simile worlds found in other poems.
For various reasons, we have not explored these simile worlds before, in large part because the ways that similes tell their individual stories do not invite us to put them together to fashion larger tales. For one thing, the structures that weave a simile into the narrative connect it to the adjacent story rather than to other similes. And because most similes feature nameless, timeless, self-contained scenes, they do not foster the chronological and causal links that we naturally create when we build longer stories out of individual incidents.12 The absence of such ties fosters the illusion that similes across the centuries exist in an unchanging natural or precultural landscape shared by all epic poems, which in fact is far from true. While we can reframe the mythological story component of an epic poem as a series of individual events that happen to specific people – as something that we can summarize, however superficially and simplistically, one step at a time – similes barely exist as individual discrete stories that can be summarized. Their meaning cannot be understood apart from the fabric of connections that they weave with multiple storytelling contexts and the experiences that they create for us. The stories of the simile world of an epic poem are, quite simply, less congenial to conventional interpretive tools than the mythological story.13
For many of the same reasons, the challenges of analyzing similes extend to scholarly interpretations as well. Because similes are defined by webs of relationships, they mean several things at once, depending on the specific vantage point from which we approach them. Yet academic studies of similes almost without exception are organized around a single main idea, and whichever features of similes are most relevant to that idea. This approach unavoidably produces a partial view of the rich variety of roles that similes play in shaping epic narrative. Even foundational analyses that argue for the “multiplicity” of similes (such as Fränkel Reference Fränkel1921 and West Reference West1969) use “multiple” in one particular sense: both of these influential studies strive to correct the idea – stretching back to ancient literary critics – that a given simile has only one point of contact with the adjacent story, and our job is to identify what that point of contact might be. While it is both important and useful, this sense of “multiple” is also limited. It leaves out most of the multiplicities that similes create.
Books on similes within a single epic poem effectively bring together the various threads that weave similes into one particular epic narrative, at the cost of seeing individual poems within a larger epic story told by multiple poems over the course of several centuries.14 The largest proportion of such studies focus on Homeric epic, both because Homeric poetry has more similes than later epics and because it sets the baseline for those later poems.15 Conversely, wide-ranging studies of “the simile” can show us sweeping vistas of the simile as a narrative or rhetorical technique but limited views of how the object of study functions within its poetic habitats.16 All of these approaches are useful; none of them is adequate to the engaging and elusive power of the same-yet-different paradox that is a simile. How, then, can a single approach embrace the different kinds of multiplicities found in epic similes without becoming so broad or diffuse as to be unworkable?
To do justice to epic similes, they should be studied both within the immediate narrative contexts in which they appear and within the many webs of meaning that they create. Some of these are found within a single poem while others emerge across multiple poems over time. To some extent, this approach is a contradiction in terms because a bodily sensation or a multifaceted relationship cannot easily be captured in a single verbal description. But even though key aspects of similes in some fundamental sense lie beyond conventional verbal forms of analysis, we can learn a great deal by openly admitting these challenges and forging ahead as best we can. Similes use words to convey several forms of meaning and experience at the same time. This book will strive to do the same by drawing on the variety of approaches to similes in Greek and Roman epic, complemented by ways of thinking about how people engage with similes that focus more than literary criticism has done on the nonverbal and the experiential.17
I.3 Similes and the Mythological Story
At the story level, whether and how individuals and groups interact in fighting scenes resembles the various relationships that unfold in shepherding scenes of the simile world across multiple epic poems. Indeed, battle is the most common story context for shepherding similes. How important is individual prowess? How do individuals and groups relate to each other in a well-functioning society? What does effective leadership look like? These themes emerge with equal force from battle stories and shepherding similes. The scene of conflict between the Argonauts and the Bebrycians at the beginning of Argonautica 2 makes one link in the plot of the poem, the chain of events that brings the Argonauts from Greece to Colchis and back. The opening of Book 2 emphasizes that the conflict between the Argonauts and the Bebrycians happens because King Amycus makes the “disgraceful and uncivilized” choice to force his visitors to box with him (ὑπεροπληέστατον ἀνδρῶν· / ὅς τ’ ἐπὶ καὶ ξείνοισιν ἀεικέα θεσμὸν ἔθηκεν, … 2.4–5). But when they cannot avoid violence, both Polydeuces in individual combat with Amycus and the Argonauts as a group handily defeat their attackers in order to continue their travels. This encounter maps out one strand of the characters of Jason and the Argonauts. With two dire exceptions – in emphatic positions at the beginning and end of the voyage – the Argonauts are generally reluctant to fight unless they are forced into it by the actions of others.18 As one might expect in a tale about an epic journey, fighting tends to be closely related to the theme of guests and hospitality (e.g. “guest-friends” [ξείνοισιν 2.5, rendered “strangers” in Race Reference Rouse2008]), which defines civilized behavior for Greeks and non-Greeks alike.
Similes accompany battle scenes more often than any other kind of story element, and partly for that reason, similes that appear with battle scenes have been closely studied in a way that the associations between similes and other story contexts have not.19 But it is also true that battle and simile have a natural kinship as modes of storytelling. A battle scene, like a simile, revolves around powerful physical and emotional experiences of injury, hatred, fear, sorrow, and death. Embodiment also characterizes story scenes about intense feelings, which are the second most common story motif after battle scenes to have simile descriptions.20 Accordingly, each chapter touches at least briefly on story scenes about both emotion and battle for the same reasons that shepherding similes offer a particularly fertile field for understanding epic similes: both battle and emotion story motifs are defined by multiple relationships that arouse a variety of strong feelings in the participants, and both subjects are common to all five poems.
Different poems use the basic tools of epic storytelling – similes and mythological tales – in different ways to fashion different kinds of narratives, but the epic poetry toolbox contents themselves remain largely stable over time. Both within one poem and across centuries of epic storytelling, the same elements – such as shepherds and flocks – tell a progressively longer simile story across a broader and broader canvas. And the pieces of the mythological narratives in epic poetry build up larger stories in just the same way. Most readers, by contrast, take the mythological tale as the main story, the normative story, of an epic poem and the similes as a different, lesser, and auxiliary form of narrative. But taking similes on their own terms rather than approaching them according to the standards of a different kind of storytelling shows that this is not in fact the case. An individual simile has a different texture from an individual episode of a mythological story because the characters do not have names and because simile incidents generally take place in a timeless and generalized space. But aside from this difference, both individual similes and individual units of the mythological story join to build up larger tales created out of a stable yet evolving set of characters and scenes. Individual similes and the simile world they create are partners with the mythological story in creating the narratives of epic poetry.
I.4 Simile Constructions: “Weave”
The previous section offers various answers to the question “What are simile stories about?” or – to use the weaving metaphor for poetic composition that goes back to proto-Indo-European21 – the simile “patterns.” This section explores how similes are put together, the “weave” that frames both the simile world and the texture of the relationship between the simile and story worlds. As in any form of communication, both form and content shape meaning in similes. But readers of a typical simile, including scholarly critics, spend more time thinking about the actions of a shepherd and his animals than about the “as/so” frames that liken them to a battle in the mythological story, even though such frames allow us to recognize a simile in the first place.22 In fact, the framing structure is itself a carrier of meaning. It establishes a cognitively rich kind of likeness that “asserts similarity but presupposes dissimilarity,” inviting the addressee to consider both terms of the comparison at once rather than to see one as subordinate to the other.23 The form of a simile establishes explicit and precise terms for a comparison between two things, but this explicit form by no means entails an explicit meaning.24 In Homeric epic, virtually all similes include both an introductory “as” and a concluding “so” expression. But where part of a simile frame is missing, the interpreter’s task becomes even more demanding. Concluding expressions become less common over time, so that the majority of similes in both the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses return directly to the story after a simile with no “so” expression to mark the transition. The lexical boundaries between the simile and story worlds grow weaker over time, changing the contours of epic narrative.
Various kinds of simile frames may appear alongside the most common “as/so” structures, creating different kinds of relationships and adding distinctive tones and themes to the narratives in which they appear. In a cluster of multiple similes, for example, one simile may make a frame for another simile.25 In such passages, we are immersed not simply in the likenesses between a shepherd and a human battle but also in the relationships between them and the insects, or ocean wave, or snowfall that appear in the other similes in the cluster. Both likeness and dissimilarity become multidirectional relationships among several different scenes, not just among several different features of one simile and the adjacent story. For instance, immediately after the shepherding simile about the Argonauts and the Bebrycians, a second simile likens the fleeing Bebrycians to bees smoked out of their hive.
Argonautica 2.128–35
Whereas the shepherd simile (2.123–28) engages us with the sheep and the wolves in comparably vivid and detailed terms, this second comparison focuses mainly on the animals being threatened. Once human beings put smoke into the bees’ hive (2.130–31), the rest of the simile follows the buzzing swarm as they try and then fail to withstand the noxious fumes that gradually fill their home. As the scene progresses, the escalating sounds and smells billowing through the rocky hive swirl around us.
Simile clusters often present different perspectives on the same occurrence or describe different stages of an unfolding series of events.26 This pair of similes does both. The shepherding simile immerses us in the experiences of both the sheep/Bebrycians and the wolves/Argonauts in the thick of their fight as does the story on either side of it; the bee simile focuses primarily on the bees, and after the simile ends, the story follows the defeated and fleeing Bebrycians. Just as the form of an individual simile establishes a likeness between two equally important things without offering an interpretation of it, so also a series of similes offers multiple views of the same thing without explaining how they relate to each other. Such questions are left up to us.
Not only the framing language, but also the framer – who narrates – shapes our experience of a simile. Some poems include no similes at all that are spoken by characters while in others, characters often use similes when they tell stories.27 Most characters describe someone else with their similes, but a few use similes to embody their own past experiences. Both direct speech and similes weave together feelings, subjectivity, and interpretation, but in different ways. The contents and structures of a direct quotation are rooted in the subjectivity of one character.28 Similes, too, create immersive experience through both content and structure, but instead of centering the feelings of one speaker, they immerse us in several different perspectives, often in indirect and implicit ways. Moreover, similes and speech have different relationships to the story events as they are experienced by the characters. Speech exists within the world that the characters inhabit, but similes ordinarily do not. That is to say, a character interacts with other characters’ speeches, but not with a simile that a narrator uses to describe them.29
When two narrative techniques with such different relationships to the story occur together, they create complementary layers of feelings and relationships. A simile within a story told by a character embodies the feelings and experiences of the characters within that story. It also conveys the character-narrator’s feelings about the story they are telling, which the character may or may not consciously intend to communicate. At the same time, it forges connections between the external narrator and the different levels of the narrative spread across the nested story told by the character, the main story in which the character-narrator is telling a story, and the external addressees of the poem. When a character is telling a story that happened to them in the past, similes show that character in the act of distinguishing between their past experience of the events in the story, and their (often quite different) present experience as the narrator of that story. By the same token, the audiences at different narrative levels have different, but interrelated, responses to a nested narrative in which a character tells a story. As with a cluster of similes, a character narrating a simile creates multidirectional relationships and overlapping forms of embodiment. But whereas a simile cluster creates a larger number of the same types of relationships that arise from a single simile, a simile narrated by a character creates new kinds of relationships that engage us not only with the stories being told but also in the layers of narrators, addressees, and narrative that make up an epic poem.
By drawing our attention to the processes of narrative, complex simile constructions like these remind us of the separation between narrative and the real world in which we encounter it. Proper names or culturally specific details in similes – rare in Greek epic but a significant feature of the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses – have a similar effect, but for the opposite reason: they place elements of the real world within the simile world, weakening the separation between the two. For instance, proper names in similes in the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses refer to different kinds of things than they do in Homeric epic and Apollonius. In Greek epic, a proper name in a simile almost always indicates either a god and his most widely known sanctuaries, or – more unusual – a mythological character. Neither one evokes lived experience specific to a particular time or place. In fact, the gods show their power and their difference from mortals in part because they and their major cult sites exist in a universal reality that is not bound by time or place. But in the Metamorphoses, and especially in the Aeneid, similes are full of geographical references to specific locations that nudge similes away from the timeless generalized landscape of the Greek simile world into a contemporary Roman world that encompasses not only Italian mountains and streams but also the poet and his audiences. Readers may literally have walked the paths of a simile in the Aeneid, whereas the world of a Homeric simile is simultaneously recognizable to and beyond the reach of any individual person. This makes the simile world more familiar, more accessible, and more similar to the “real” world. The boundaries between the worlds of simile, story, and reader are no longer so sharp.
Anachronisms bring the temporal rather than the geographical world of poet and reader into the simile world.30 For instance, some forms of craft, such as weaving and shipbuilding, serve in similes as universals that define civilized human society rather than the practices of any particular time or place. Epic warriors in both the simile and the story worlds fight with spears, swords, and shields, weapons that might be used on any battlefield at any time. By contrast, the slingshots that regularly appear in similes in the Metamorphoses place the simile world in a specific temporal context.31 Building and construction, too, create products of a recognizable culture in the Metamorphoses and the Aeneid rather than a more generalized and abstract marker of civilization, a shelter from the elements or a demonstration of human ingenuity.32 Like specific places, products of a specific culture bring the world of the reader into the simile world, changing its contours and its relations with the worlds of both the story and the reader. Whereas similes in Homeric poetry are peopled by characters and objects from so-called basic categories – those easily observed in nature and acquired earliest by young children, such as “sheep” or “tree”33 – the worlds of Roman similes have become more like the worlds of both the mythological story and the poet and his readers.
I.5 Chapter Road Map
Each chapter of this book focuses on a single epic because one of its main goals is to map out the individual topographies of the simile worlds in the Odyssey, the Iliad, the Argonautica, the Aeneid, and the Metamorphoses. In each poem, we experience the simile world alongside shepherds, craftsmen, sailors, herd animals, and human beings in relationships with other creatures. What unites each of these characters is not simply that they appear throughout the simile worlds of various epic poems, but also that they consistently immerse us in a wide range of bodily experiences: cold, hunger, pain, and fear; love, delight, and sorrow; the expanse of an empty field, the looming dread of an ocean wave, the cramped impatience of sharing a small space; the tug of connection with other creatures. Each simile world is built from the same assortment of subjects and constructions, but those elements are assembled in a unique way in each poem. Each simile world, interwoven with the story world, shapes the epic narrative. The simile world brings forward key themes, creates a place for the poem in the ongoing tale of the genre of epic poetry, and helps us to shape our own relationship to this story. Each world is fully realized and complete on its own terms, but it also derives richer meanings from its relationships with the simile worlds of other poems. Accordingly, the poems are treated more or less in chronological order – leaving aside the vexed and unanswerable question of the relationship between the Iliad and the Odyssey – because an earlier poem provides material for the simile world of a later one.
Each chapter of this book sets the scene with a detailed exploration of a single simile that is in some way typical for that poem. As with Argonautica 2.121–29, which began this introduction, the meanings and typical features of these similes emerge gradually from the process of delving into them, with a final summary of key points making the transition to the next section. This approach reflects the process through which we create meaning from similes when we encounter them in an epic poem by inviting readers to take an active role in forging the simile’s meaning for themselves. At the same time, this is a work of analysis, not of poetry, and so each introductory section ends with a recapitulation of conclusions that link a particular simile to themes that are significant for both the poem in which it appears and the ongoing arguments of the book. Later sections explore the landscape of the simile world through various typical or distinctive scenes, the interaction of the simile and story worlds, and (in post-Homeric epics) the structural features characteristic of that poem. A final section of each chapter explores one or two simile “case studies” that show these narrative strands woven together. In post-Homeric poetry where position conveys emphasis for the poem as a whole (discussed further in Chapter 3), these case studies tend to be poems in programmatic positions where part of the simile’s purpose is to establish or explore expectations for the entire poem.
This book begins with the Odyssey in Chapter 1, in part to allow the Odyssey’s approach to similes to emerge on its own terms without being overshadowed by the more numerous similes in the Iliad. Human beings are especially common in the simile world of the Odyssey, facilitating our engagement with the experiences of the simile characters. For this reason, the introductory simile in the Odyssey depicts a scene of human relations rather than – as in every other chapter – a shepherding or animal scene. Even parts of the simile world where characters in other epic poems rarely connect with other beings – such as craft – are teeming with human connections. This distinctive aspect of the simile world of the Odyssey helps to make it a tale of human relationships, the burden of sorrow when they are disrupted, and the heroic task of keeping relationships alive through danger, separation, and loss. Chapter 2 on the Iliad shows that the dangers, sorrows, and failures of the shepherds in the simile world parallel and reinforce the poem’s concern with the costs of poor leadership. Similes do as much as the mythological story to embody the emotional ties between the characters. Emotions begin and end the mythological story with the anger of Achilles in the first verse and the funeral of Hector in the last, but they emerge just as fully from the similes as from the plot of the Iliad. In Chapter 3, similes in the Argonautica tell two contrasting tales. On the one hand, humans with skilled expertise can exert an exhilarating amount of control over the world around them. But those skills are largely useless for women, and they fail completely in the face of human passions, which attract some of the longest and most gripping similes in the poem. With the Aeneid in Chapter 4, human beings become more scarce than before in the simile world, contributing to a tale about the loneliness and sorrow of human beings who struggle to connect with each other or to affect what happens in the world around them. Chapter 5, on the Metamorphoses, is organized differently from the others, mainly because Ovid’s simile world has a different relationship to the story world than those of his predecessors. It is a more fragmented and less cohesive place where simile characters from the past may appear rarely or not at all, similes are so short that they often do not achieve the immersive effects typical of the simile worlds of earlier epic, and they do not work hand in hand with the story to bring forward key themes. Yet similes retain many of their familiar qualities, and some of the poem’s most memorable moments are achieved in part with heart-pounding scenes familiar from earlier epics of predators chasing their prey, raging fires, battle scenes, and sailing. The Conclusion brings together the main characters of the simile worlds of each chapter, giving an overview of what we have experienced along with these characters throughout the book.
I.6 Embodiment and Academic Writing
This book was written to be not simply accessible but also enjoyable to readers who bring a wide range of experiences and interests to its subject matter. The book, as the title says, is conceived of as a “story of similes.” Accordingly, the endnotes contain the various features of scholarly discourse that specialist readers expect to find in support of a complex, wide-ranging analysis, most importantly the references that connect the argument to existing scholarly debates and the data analysis that underlies many of my conclusions (available in an open-access database located at https://epic-similes-beck.la.utexas.edu/). But anyone – specialist and nonspecialist alike – can approach the book as its title suggests, as a “story” of similes, by skipping the endnotes altogether. Professional scholars are so accustomed to toggling between the narrative of an argument and footnotes containing catalogues of supporting evidence that we do not notice the costs of this approach. Footnotes dictate a discontinuous, disembodied style of reading that can impede our engagement with both the argument and the primary source material itself. By supporting my points with relatively few references chosen to be the most relevant and informative and placing my supporting evidence in endnotes rather than footnotes, I hope to focus our attention on the landscapes of the epic similes themselves rather than on the construction of the scholarly vehicle from which we explore them.
For similar reasons of accessibility, I have placed the English translations first and the Greek or Latin text after it except when a Greek or Latin word is the focus of my analysis. Rather than writing my own translations, I have used published translations selected from among the many available options for a combination of felicity, accuracy, and availability to a general audience. I have often lightly modified these translations to more clearly bring out specific features of the Greek or Latin in which I am interested, but these translations are more engaging and enjoyable than my workmanlike renderings have ever managed to be.34 In a nod to the nature of my subject, as well as the embodied experiences of my readers, I have striven to make my writing more embodied and emotionally appealing than scholarly writing tends to be. When writing about Homer, Vergil, and Ovid, any writer is fighting a losing battle to do justice to the immersive experiences created by their subject. But we scholars can and should do more to foster embodiment in our own writing, as well as in the subjects of our academic analyses. This book grows in part out of my own delight in reading, teaching, and discussing epic poetry. I hope that my readers can partake at least somewhat in those experiences too.
