instantaneously sprung into mature existence. And, unless it is maintained that all of Homer's rivals,
earlier or contemporary, all produced poetry just as good as his- in fact indistinguishable from it-then
there must have been ways in which Homer was better. The ways in which he was better than the others
constitute his originality. So, however much he was within his tradition, he must also have improved on it.
The question now is, how far was Homer the servant of his tradition, how much its master? Must he have
worked entirely with it and within it, or might he have worked against it also? It is still an open question,
indeed, whether very long epics were a centuries-old norm or an invention of Homer; whether or not
something very like the Iliad or the Odyssey could have been heard generations before Homer.
We have not got any of the poetry of Homer's predecessors or rivals, and so nothing much can be said
with confidence; that this or that was innovative or anti-traditional on the part of Homer must remain a
speculation. There are those, for instance, who have claimed that Patroclus is a Homeric invention, and
Eumaeus, and the pastoral element in the Odyssey. The hope for progress on such issues is one of the
great challenges facing Homeric scholarship.
It seems to me more than plausible that Homer was doubly original, that he worked against the tradition
as well as within it. Take as a test case the attitude of the Iliad towards Troy. The tradition seems to have
been partisan in favour of the Greeks and to have supplied Homer with much more material for telling of
Greek victories than of reverses. Although the Trojans generally have the better of Books 8 to 17, more
Trojans are killed than Greeks, and there are constant Greek revivals, and-a telling detail-the left and right
of the battlefield are always viewed from the Greek perspective. In creating a epic where the Trojans have
the better of the battle for much of the time, and where the battle is in poetic terms seen from their side no
less than from the Greeks', it looks as if Homer must have gone against his tradition. The challenge of
doing so seems indeed to have been an essential poetic catalyst.
Long similes are one of the special glories of Homer and one of his distinctive contributions to the whole
future of European poetry. They may be another example of an innovation or late development in tension
with the tradition. It is widely supposed that long similes are a product of long epic, and that 'monumental'
compositions like the Iliad and the Odyssey are a late development. On the other hand it would be no
surprise to find the standard long similes of beasts of prey, especially lions, well back in the tradition of
heroic epic. The philologists say that the language of the similes is notably non-formulaic and late: but
this seems largely explicable by the non-heroic subject-matter of many similes. What seems to me most
unlikely to be traditional about Homeric similes is the wide variety of relationships between the similes
and their surrounding contexts. Each seems to set the audience a challenge in working out the connection.
Some work by similarity, some by contrast, some concentrate on a physical comparison, others on
comparison of tone or emotion.
An example from each poem will have to suffice. At Iliad 21. 342 ff. Hephaestus, helping Achilles against
the river Scamander, burns the vegetation and corpses on the banks of the river:
As when the north wind of autumn suddenly makes dry
a garden freshly watered and makes glad the man who is tending it,