The Odyssey: Homeric Similes
How did Homer make his audience “see” the scenes he recited? Figures of speech!
A figure of speech compares one thing to something else that is unlike it, except for a few important
features. For example, Homer uses the phrase, “like squirming puppies” to describe two of Odysseus’s
men seized by the Cyclops. The simile (a directly stated comparison using the words like or as) helps the
audience picture how helpless and unwilling the men are.
Homer uses extended similes so masterfully that such comparisons now bear his name. A Homeric
simile is an elaborate comparison, developed over several lines, between something strange or
unfamiliar to the audience and something more familiar to them. For example, in Book 9, Homer
compares the Cyclops eating the men to a mountain lion devouring its prey, bones and all.
1. Identifying Homeric Similes
Using the chart below, identify the two things, one familiar and one unfamiliar, that Homer
compares in each extended simile.
Homeric Simile
Comparison
Unfamiliar:
In a smithy one sees a white-hot axhead or an adze
plunged and wrung in a cold tub, screeching steam
– the way they make soft iron hale and hard – just
Familiar:
so that eyeball hissed around the spike.
Book 9, lines 385-389 (p. 666)
Unfamiliar:
A man surf-casting on a point of rock for bass or
mackerel, whipping his long rod to drop the sinker
and the bait far out, will hook a fish and rip it from
the surface to dangle wriggling through the air; so
Familiar:
these were borne aloft in spasms toward the cliff.
Book 12, lines 822-827 (p. 683)
Unfamiliar:
Then, throwing his arms around this marvel of a
father, Telemachus began to weep. Salt tears rose
from the wells of longing in both men, and cries
burst from both as keen and fluttering as those of
Familiar:
the great taloned hawk, whose nestlings farmers
take before they fly.
Book 16, lines 1028-1033 (p. 693-694)
2. Your Turn! Write three (3) Homeric similes of your own in which you compare something
unfamiliar to something more familiar. Extend each comparison over three or more lines.