First Similes in Epic

Abstract

EXTENDED SIMILES ARE PARTICULARLY AT HOME IN HEROIC EPIC, SO MUCH so that they are surprisingly rare in other genres, such as lyric or elegy; as we shall see below, they are also very rare in archaic didactic, although they later become more common in that genre.1 If similes are a marked feature of heroic epic, then the first similes in epic are themselves particularly marked. The programmatic nature of the first simile in Virgil’s Aeneid (1.148–53) has often been commented upon, as an emblem of restoration of order after chaos which generates a set of expectations for the rest of the poem. I shall argue that the iconic nature of the initial simile sequence is a feature of epic that goes back to Homer’s Iliad, and continues well past Virgil. In general, the first similes in epic are programmatic for the cosmos of the whole poem, for they present an icon of the relationship between human beings and the natural world, which in turn gives us an icon of the poem’s relationship between order and disorder, chaos and harmony. These icons are an ideal,