θα ̃ σσον ... N σC ξυνα ́ ψαι βλφαρα βασιλεοι κο ́ ραι, ‘quicker than you could
close the lids of your kingly eyes’. A number of parallels from Old and Middle
High German are collected by Grimm (1883–8), 791 f., cf. 1534. Sanasar in
the Armenian oral epic rides to his mother’s house and arrives ‘in the wink of
an eye’ (Sassountsy David 57).
In Greek epic good-looking men and women are often described as looking
like gods or goddesses.^73 So they are in the Indian epics. S ́amtanu begot ‘eight
sons who resembled immortals’; Bhı ̄masena is ‘like the offspring of a god’;
the Pa ̄n
̇
d
̇avas had ‘sons like children of gods’.^74 Damayantı ̄ is ‘a woman with
the form of a goddess’; Sı ̄ta ̄ is like a goddess, or like a daughter of the gods.^75
When Telemachus, and later his father and grandfather, come out of the bath
‘like the immortals in bodily appearance’, this is strikingly paralleled in the
Ra ̄ma ̄yan
̇
a, where ‘after bathing... Ra ̄ma resembled the blessed lord Rudra
after his bath’.^76 It is not surprising that similes of this type are absent from
literatures such as the Celtic and Germanic, produced in Christian times.
Another formula for female beauty appears in the pseudo-Hesiodic
Catalogue of Women, where a woman is described as !κλη φαεσσι σελ νη,
‘like the moon’s beams’. So in the Ra ̄ma ̄yan
̇
a we read of women ‘with a face
like the moon’.^77 A woman’s necklace can also shine like the moon (3. 50. 31),
which recalls how, when Aphrodite went to seduce Anchises, ‘it shone like the
moon’ about her breasts, upon which elaborate gold necklaces reposed
(Hymn. Aphr. 88–90). In Armenian oral epic too we find ‘a maiden lovely as
the moon’ (Sassountsy David 94).
The palaces of Menelaus and Alcinous in the Odyssey are built with bronze,
gold, and silver, and shine with ‘a splendour like that of the sun or moon’.
Likewise the assembly hall built for the Pa ̄n
̇
d
̇avas, which had gold pillars and
gem-encrusted walls, was ‘radiant and divine; it had a superb colour like the
fire, or the sun, or the moon’.^78 One may doubt whether any such opulent
edifices were known even by repute in Graeco-Aryan antiquity, in the second
half of the third millennium. Yet it is imaginable that the simile could have
been applied at that period to some chieftain’s hall that blazed in the night
with torches, gold cups and ornaments, bronze weapons, and so forth.
No such doubt on cultural-historical grounds need attach to the simile
used of one who stands out from a crowd ‘like a bull among the herd’; it is
(^73) For Near Eastern parallels see West (1997), 242 f.
(^74) MBh. 1. 92. 43, 139. 23, 213. 82; cf. 3. 73. 25, 112. 1; 4. 67. 8; 8. 21. 7.
(^75) MBh. 3. 65. 36; Rm. 5. 28. 2, 22. 42; cf. 2. 86. 20.
(^76) Od. 3. 468, 23. 163, 24. 370 f.; Rm. 3. 15. 39.
(^77) [Hes.] fr. 23a. 8, 252. 4; Rm. 3. 50. 2; 5. 12. 50, 13. 27. The male hero Ra ̄ma is praised in the
same terms, 5. 29. 5, al., which a Greek hero would probably not have appreciated.
(^78) Od. 4. 45; 7. 84; MBh. 2. 3. 20 f., cf. 11. 12. For neo-Assyrian and neo-Babylonian parallels
see West (1997), 251 f., 419 f.
- Phrase and Figure 97