Achilles, Patroclus and Parental Care in Some Homeric Similes

None of these three passages from the Iliad would be classified as anything other than an extended simile, but the differences between them in subject matter and what is compared make clear how difficult it is to make any simple summary of the nature and functions of the extended simile in Homer that would gain general assent. As the immense quantity of scholarship on these similes would indicate, it is impossible either to argue convincingly that they can have only one or two main functions in the narrative, or categorically to prove or deny that a particular simile has a certain effect or significance for the narrative. To give one brief example, Stephen Nimis usefully distinguishes six major trends in interpretation among earlier scholars' views on the function of similes in Homer: (1) the presentation of the generic alongside the individual, (2) creation of atmosphere, (3) imagistic continuity, (4) characterization and foreshadowing, (5) incorporating the past into the present, and (6) allusion to antecedent literary traditions. Not all of the three similes quoted above perform all of these functions at once, but they certainly perform more than one of them. The only definition that would probably be generally accepted is the rather dry and unhelpful one that a simile functions by briefly interrupting the narrative in order to compare one element in the narrative with another, in order to illuminate something about the original element in the narrative. Moreover, an extended simile begins from an original main point of comparison, but it compares the likeness of two things that are actually not alike in many other respects.