The Iliad: “rising like a dawn mist from the sea into a cloud” [updated]

1/ The quote in the headline comes from Book 1, about Thesis, mother of Akhilleus (better known as Achilles). 

I like the comparisons and images in the Iliad: 

“From the camp 

the troops were turning out now, thick as bees 

that issue from some crevice in a rock face, 

endlessly pouring forth, to make a cluster 

and swarm on blooms of summer here and there, 

glinting and droning, busy in bright air. 

Like bees innumerable from ships and huts 

down the deep foreshore streamed those regiments 

toward the assembly ground—and Rumor blazed 

among them like a crier sent from Zeus…” 

(Book 2) 

(translated by Robert Fitzgerald) 

Reminds me of the long passage in War and Peace in which Tolstoy compares people in Moscow to bees. 

This is an even more interesting passage, as Homer piles simile upon simile, comparing the troops to different kinds of animals: 

“And as migrating birds, nation by nation, 

wild geese and arrow-throated cranes and swans, 

over Asia’s meadowland and marshes 

around the streams of Kaystrios, with giant 

flight and glorying wings keep beating down 

in tumult on that verdant land 

that echoes to their pinions, even so, 

nation by nation, from the ships and huts, 

this host debouched upon Skamander plain. 

With noise like thunder pent in earth 

under their trampling, under the horses’ hooves, 

they filled the flowering land beside Skamander, 

as countless as the leaves and blades of spring. 

So, too, like clouds of buzzing, fevered flies 

that swarm about a cattle stall in summer 

when pails are splashed with milk: so restlessly 

by thousands moved the fighters of Akhaia 

over the plain, lusting to rend the Trojans. 

But just as herdsmen easily divide 

their goats when herds have mingled in a pasture, 

so these were marshaled by their officers 

to one side and the other, forming companies 

for combat.” 

(ibid.) 

I guess that is what people call a Homeric simile. 

Here the troops are compared to other animals: 

“The Trojans were not silent: like the flocks 

that huddle countless in a rich man’s pens, 

waiting to yield white milk, and bleating loud 

continually as they hear their own lambs cry, 

just so the warcry of the Trojans rose 

through all that army—not as a single note, 

not in a single tongue, but mingled voices 

of men from many countries.” 

(Book 4) 

In the Odyssey, once in a while we find an extended simile. 

“He pushed aside the bushes, breaking off

with his great hand a single branch of olive,

whose leaves might shield him in his nakedness;

so came out rustling, like a mountain lion,

rain-drenched, wind-buffeted, but in his might at ease,

with burning eyes—who prowls among the herds

or flocks, or after game, his hungry belly

taking him near stout homesteads for his prey.

Odysseus had this look, in his rough skin

advancing on the girls with pretty braids;

and he was driven on by hunger, too…” 

(Book 6) 

(translated by Robert Fitzgerald) 

But I think most of the comparisons in the Odyssey are in a single phrase—“Eteóneus left the long room like an arrow”, “killed him, like an ox felled at the trough”, “her mind turning at bay, like a cornered lion/ in whom fear comes as hunters close the ring”, “the boat careered like a ball of tumbleweed/ blown on the autumn plains, but intact still”, etc.—not lines and lines of similes as here. 

On a side note, the Odyssey is filled with goddesses and nymphs and monsters, full of fun; the Iliad also has gods but it’s a war story—just fighting and killing and fighting and killing—so the vivid imagery makes it more compelling. 

2/ There is something strange about reading such a foundational, influential literary work like the Iliad for the first time. You’ve known about the Trojan war from pop culture, and now see the fighting in close-up. You’ve encountered Agamemnon, Menalaos, Odysseus, Aias, Hecabe… in Athenian tragedy, and now see them—sometimes quite different—in Homer’s epics. You know Christopher Marlowe’s line “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships/And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?”, and now not only meet Helen but also get a catalogue of the ships.

(The catalogue of ships reminds me of the long catalogue of armies in Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus). 

What does it say, though, that the first substantial piece of Western literature was a war story? 

3/ The gods don’t just interfere in people’s lives—they take sides in the war. 

“The whipping 

string sang, and the arrow whizzed away, 

needlesharp, vicious, flashing through the crowd. 

But, Menelaos, you were not neglected 

this time by the gods in bliss! Athena, 

Hope of Soldiers, helped you first of all, 

deflecting by an inch the missile’s flight 

so that it grazed your skin—the way a mother 

would keep a fly from settling on a child 

when he is happily asleep. […] 

Then dark blood rippled in a clouding stain 

down from the wound, as when a Mêionian  

or a Karian woman dyes clear ivory 

to be the cheekpiece of a chariot team…” 

(Book 4)

The last bit is a strange—cold—comparison. 

4/ Sometimes Homer compares one thing to multiple things in the same passage, piling simile upon simile. Sometimes he picks a single image and extends it over several lines: 

“… Think of a lion that some shepherd wounds 

but lightly as he leaps into a fold: 

the man who roused his might cannot repel him 

but dives into his shelter, while his flocks, 

abandoned, are all driven wild; in heaps 

huddled they are to lie, torn carcasses, 

before the escaping lion at one bound 

surmounts the palisade. So lion-like, 

Diomedes plunged on Trojans.”

(Book 5) 

A couple of stanzas later: 

“Next two sons 

of Dardan Priam Diomedes killed 

in one war-car: Ekhemmon and Khromios. 

Just as a lion leaps to crunch the neck 

of ox or heifer, grazing near a thicket, 

Diomedes, leaping, dragged them down 

convulsed out of their car, and took their armor, 

sending their horses to the rear.” 

(ibid.) 

The next time we see the lion image, the simile is no longer about Diomedes however, but about a Trojan who has been fighting Diomedes in the same scene: 

“With shield and spear Aineias, now on foot, 

in dread to see the Akhaians drag the dead man, 

came and bestrode him, like a lion at bay.”

(ibid.) 

This is fascinating.