Homeric Simile also called Epic Simile Review: What is a simile?

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” (line 279) to describe two of Odysseus’s men seized by the Cyclops. The simile (a directly stated comparison suing words like or as) helps the audience—then and now—picture how helpless and unwilling the men are.

The Homeric / Epic Simile: 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 lines of The Cyclops myth: Homer compares the Cyclops eating the men to a mountain lion devouring its prey, bones and all.

Homeric / Epic Simile: Extended comparisons (usually more than 1 sentence!) that compare hero or epic events to simple and easily understandable everyday events that the audience would relate to. epic event everyday event

Example: During the Trojan War, the goddess Athena protects King Menelaus from being struck by an arrow. Homer describes it with these words: (copy this in your notes exactly!) She brushed it away from his skin as lightly as when a mother brushes a fly away from her child who is lying in sleep. Underline the 2 events being compared. Label the epic event and the everyday event.

Do you get it? Practice! See Lit textbook page 652, lines Read the text passage and find the epic simile. Write and label each event in your notes.

No words were lost on Hermes the Wayfinder who bent to tie his beautiful sandals on, 35 ambrosial, ° golden, that carry him over water or over endless land in a swish of the wind, and took the wand with which he charms asleep— or when he wills, awake—the eyes of men. So wand in hand he paced into the air, 40 shot from Pieria ° down, down to sea level, and veered to skim the swell. A gull patrolling between the wave crests of the desolate sea will dip to catch a fish, and douse his wings; no higher above the whitecaps Hermes flew 45 until the distant island lay ahead, then rising shoreward from the violet ocean he stepped up to the cave.

Find the epic simile. Write it in your notes Label the EPIC event and the everyday event

No words were lost on Hermes the Wayfinder who bent to tie his beautiful sandals on, 35 ambrosial, ° golden, that carry him over water or over endless land in a swish of the wind, and took the wand with which he charms asleep— or when he wills, awake—the eyes of men. So wand in hand he paced into the air, 40 shot from Pieria ° down, down to sea level, and veered to skim the swell. A gull patrolling between the wave crests of the desolate sea will dip to catch a fish, and douse his wings; no higher above the whitecaps Hermes flew 45 until the distant island lay ahead, then rising shoreward from the violet ocean he stepped up to the cave.