SIMILESOur initial survey of similes in Chapter 2 may now be augmented by a
collection of some types employed in battle contexts.
When Agamemnon slaughters the fleeing Trojans, it is ‘as when ravaging
fire falls upon dense woodland, and the wind blazes it up and carries it in all
directions, and the thickets fall root and branch from the force of the fire’s
onset’ (Il. 11. 155–7; cf. 15. 605 f., 20. 490–4). The Indian epic uses the same
simile. Sa ̄tyaki says ‘let them watch me... when I by myself kill the best Kuru
fighters, as the doomsday fire burns down a dead wood!’ (MBh. 3. 120. 10;
cf. 6. 112. 88; 7. 3. 16, 13. 1, 20. 24). Narantaka mows the enemy down like a
fire burning a forest (Rm. 6. 57. 65). More compendiously, a Homeric hero
may be described as φλογ? εAκελο,‘flamelike’ (Il. 13. 53, 688, al.). Ra ̄ma,
‘adorned in his firelike armour, had the appearance of a smokeless flame
flaring up in the dark’ (Rm. 3. 23. 15). In Old Irish praise poetry the hero is
sometimes called a ‘red flame’, ‘fierce flame’, etc.^137
Alternatively he may be ‘a powerful wave of the sea on the shore’, ‘a sea
storm’. Lugaid ‘rushed to their aid ..., the roar of the vast sea’.^138 The
metaphor corresponds to an ample Homeric simile: Hector falls upon the
Achaeans like a huge wave falling on a ship (Il. 15. 624–8).
Immediately before this (618–21) the Achaean resistance to Hector has
been compared to a great sheer cliff on the coast that withstands the keening
winds and swollen waves that beat against it. When Antinous throws a foot-
stool at Odysseus, the hero stands ‘firm as a rock’ and does not lose his
balance (Od. 17. 463). We find comparable similes in the Indian epics and the
early British heroic poems. Ra ̄ma stands firm under assault like a mountain
under thunderbolts (Rm. 3. 24. 12). As a rock obstructs a torrent, so Kumbha
withstands the onset of his adversaries under a hail of missiles (Rm. 6. 63. 27;
cf. also MBh. 6. 59. 8, 74. 24, 88. 23; 7. 74. 28). ‘No more than a stone of vast
girth is shaken was Gwid son of Neithan moved’ (Y Gododdin 386 f.). Merin
was ‘an unshaken rock before the host’ (ibid. 742 f.).
In other passages the firm-standing one is likened to a great tree. The two
Lapiths Polypoites and Leonteus stood defending the gate of the Achaean
fortification ‘like tall oaks in the mountains that withstand wind and rain at
all times, fixed with their long thick roots’ (Il. 12. 132–5). ‘Tree of battle’ is a
(^137) Campanile (1977), 121; (1990b), 61 f. Cf. West (1997), 250.
(^138) Campanile (1977), 121 f.; (1990b), 62; K. Meyer (1913), 40/43 vv. 9 f., trs. J. Carey in
Koch–Carey (2000), 55.
494 12. Arms and the Man