An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

by Daniel Mendelsohn

I talked about the stock epithets, so useful for quick identification of the characters, so crucial for oral composition. I told them to look out for “epic similes”: passages in which the poet pauses to compare a character or an action in his fabulous tale, sometimes at considerable length, to something belonging to the everyday world of his audience—of us. (My favorite of these crops up in a battle scene in the Iliad, when the poet compares a warrior who drives a spear through an enemy’s head and cantilevers the poor man out of his chariot to an expert angler landing a fish.) The point of these lengthy similes is simultaneously to make the fictional action more present, more vividly knowable to the audience, and yet, by briefly returning to the familiar realities of our humdrum lives, plowing and fishing and cooking, to give the audience a respite from the world of the poem, unforgivingly violent or strange as it often is.