[In the following essay, Mills concentrates on extended similes that recall scenes of parental or mutual care in the Iliad—particularly those associated with Achilles and Patroclus—as they emphasize the poem's countertheme of “love and cooperation between human beings.”]

And the two fought it out over Kebriones, like lions
who in the high places of a mountain, both in huge courage,
and both hungry fight together over a killed deer.

(Il. 16.756-8)

… the flung stones dropped to the ground
like snowflakes which the winds' blast whirling the shadowy clouds
drifts in their abundance along the prospering earth.

(Il. 12.156-8; cf. Il. 12.278-87)

As when dense disaster closes on one who has murdered
a man in his own land and he comes to the land of others,
to a man of substance, and wonder seizes on those who behold him,
so Achilles wondered …

(Il. 24.480-3)¹

None of these three passages from the Iliad would be classified as anything other than an extended simile, but the differences between them in subject matter and what is compared make clear how difficult it is to make any simple summary of the nature and functions of the extended simile in Homer that would gain general assent. As the immense quantity of scholarship on these similes would indicate, it is impossible either to argue convincingly that they can have only one or two main functions in the narrative, or categorically to prove or deny that a particular simile has a certain effect or significance for the narrative. To give one brief example, Stephen Nimis usefully distinguishes six major trends in interpretation among earlier scholars' views on the function of similes in Homer: (1) the presentation of the generic alongside the individual, (2) creation of atmosphere, (3) imagistic continuity, (4) characterization and foreshadowing, (5) incorporating the past into the present, and (6) allusion to antecedent literary traditions.² Not all of the three similes quoted above perform all of these functions at once, but they certainly perform more than one of them. The only definition that would probably be generally accepted is the rather dry and unhelpful one that a simile functions by briefly interrupting the narrative in order to compare one element in the narrative with another, in order to illuminate something about the original element in the narrative. Moreover, an extended simile begins from an original main point of comparison, but it compares the likeness of two things that are actually not alike in many other respects. These differences, when combined with Homer's inclusion of many other minor details in the simile, are a major complicating factor in all interpretations, since there is no agreement among scholars as to whether these extra details are also part of the comparison intended to illuminate the narrative, or whether they are simply included to give a fuller picture of the item on which the initial main point of comparison depends.³ In any case, we have no reason to assume that Homer's practice in this respect was always consistent. The analysis of similes is difficult precisely because their effects are gained by working through suggestion, rather than the more concrete statements that the narrative offers us.⁴ Any discussion of similes that goes beyond a mere categorization, and into an attempt at critical interpretation, will inevitably contain some subjective element. Such an element can be decreased, but probably not eliminated, by a preliminary discussion of the aesthetic and compositional criteria underlying a particular interpretation.

Similes incorporate different material into the narrative, and it is quite commonly agreed that this new material gives an extra, and often special, intensity to the narrative, though its exact nature is variable. Sometimes it is visual, sometimes emotional and there is rightly no absolute agreement on what its primary effect is, because there are so many types of simile and therefore relationships between simile and narrative.⁵ Because they bring into the picture material that the narrative would not normally incorporate without them, virtually any subject can surface in virtually any narrative: thus battlefield narratives encompass ivory dyeing (Il. 4.141-5), female birth-pangs (Il. 11.269-74) or leather-tanning (Il. 17.389-95). The diversity of material for the simile guarantees that its uses will also be diverse.

Many similes are like that of Il. 16.756-8 quoted above in concerning hunting or other elemental violence in nature, such as that of storms or floods. Few would doubt that one major function of these is to emphasize the violence that predominates in so much of the Iliad. Men fight and kill other men with the passion and violence of two lions fighting over a dead deer. Such similes use one type of violence to illustrate another, and although when analysed, there is always some disjunction between men and animals—none of the heroes will eat their kill, for example—the points of comparison in this type of simile are the most obvious. There is, however, another type of simile in which the relationship between the thing compared and the comparison is not so obvious, because they commonly compare some aspect of the narrative's activities of war with the activities of peacetime, or the rest of the world far from the battlefield. When the material that they bring is very different from the battlefield narrative, this kind of simile often functions as a window onto another level of existence, bringing into view another world that is not otherwise a part of the regular narrative. Often, their world is so far away from that of war that great emotional intensity and pathos are generated by their juxtaposition with the war scenes.⁶

Indeed, the Homeric poems are full of that interplay of polar opposites which Fraenkel has claimed as a basic constituent of archaic Greek thought.⁷ It is particularly noticeable in the similes, but is not confined to them, and some larger narrative units gain much of their emotional effect from the juxtaposition of different types of material. In Iliad 6, for example, Hector the warrior is set against Hector the father and husband, and the intensity of both the scenes set in battle and those set at home in Troy is intensified by the juxtaposition. The technique used by Homer in miniature in the similes is used on a grander scale in the narrative as a whole. The contrast between the lovely work of technological perfection given to Achilles by the god Hephaestus and Achilles' own messy, human grief in Iliad 18 exemplifies some of the power of this technique, while the contrast of Iliad 23 with Books 22 and 24 shows how it works on a larger scale. Among these similes which work by contrast with the narrative are those concerning mothers and children that I will be discussing in this article.

Inherent in the nature of similes is a serious problem of critical interpretation. It is now widely accepted that the Homeric works are a product of oral composition, whose aesthetics and conditions of production are very different from those of a written poem. Even so, it is hard entirely to shake off a long-ingrained tendency among Homeric scholars to read the Iliad as though it were the Aeneid and to assume that a simile in one book about parenthood must unquestionably be reflected and extended by a simile or other narrative details two or three books away, since the difference in content between the simile and the narrative highlights the similes⁸ and leads one to compare simile with simile rather than—as an audience might be presumed to do—to interpret the simile only in its immediate context. Any interpretation of this kind has literary texts as its model and therefore needs some justification as to its validity in interpreting a poet such as Homer.⁹

Can a simile ever do more than illuminate one, or at most, several aspects of its immediate context? Can it ever, by itself, or in conjunction with others, express or even expand the broader themes of the poem? It has long been recognized that similes do, in fact, have a role in the narrative beyond the immediate purpose of comparison. They are vital for an oral poet as substitutes or supplements for ordinary narrative description, when he wishes the audience to concentrate on a particular moment while he must keep the flow of his narrative going without pausing. They can also bridge time, displace dialogue, and they even bring an extra realism to the narrative by including elements of nature, such as the weather, that it otherwise ignores.¹⁰ Some similes, especially those of the Odyssey, seem to be strikingly ‘aware’ of their broader narrative context. Notable examples include Od. [Odyssey] 8.523 ff., where the sacker of Troy is compared to a woman weeping for her husband in the Trojan War, or the comparison in Od. 23.232-9 of Penelope's reunion with Odysseus with a sailor finding dry land.¹¹ These similes very obviously replay in miniature the underlying themes of the Odyssey, and show an awareness of the narrative that goes well beyond illuminating a specific moment in it. By contrast, because the scenes of fighting tend to generate so many comparisons, most of the similes of the Iliad are more directly tied to their immediate context, so that one might be reluctant to attribute a greater significance to them. Nonetheless the Iliad does contain some similes that do plainly have a thematic connection with the broader narrative in the way that their theme and language recapitulate or foreshadow other similes or the narrative. At Il. 12.40, the comparison of Hector to a lion whose courage kills him must be a specific proleptic reference both to his eventual fate in Iliad 22, and to Andromache's prophesy for him at Il. 6.407, ‘Your own great strength will be your death’. Furthermore, the fate of Hector is dependent on that of Patroclus, and at Il. 16.751-3, the latter is also compared with a lion whose courage kills him.¹²

Whitman seems to me to have made a very valuable point when he says that image-making and choice of specific similes in oral poetry will depend on the poet's subrational selection from his repertoire of possibilities at the relatively high speed demanded by simultaneous composition and performance: ‘beneath the selection must lie half-conscious patterns of association and symbolic consistency.’¹³ The idea that the choice of similes in the poem is to some degree dependent on the poet's sense of its broader themes has interesting implications. In particular, a ‘secondary’ theme of the poem might, on Whitman's reasoning, generate similes which express that theme. To use a metaphor myself, the ‘iceberg effect’ would, however, detach them from an immediately obvious connection with the broader narrative or with each other. Certain themes run through the Iliad. Some, such as the violence of battle, are consistently emphasized. Others, such as that of care-giving, are very important and closely related to the violence which is articulated at such great length, but they are less regularly or specifically emphasized in the Iliad and could therefore be called ‘secondary’. Thus, the relatively rare similes that derive from these secondary themes would be like the tips of the iceberg that stand out while the themes of the narrative run on like the large part of the iceberg underwater. The simile ‘tips’ look separate from one another and from their base, but are, in fact, inseparable from one another and the themes they embody.

I shall argue that this process may illuminate the use of a particular set of similes which are associated with Achilles and Patroclus, and which concern parents and children, both animal and human. These similes employ the techniques of juxtaposition discussed above in order to pit the themes of protection or care-giving between beings against the relentless destruction and cruelty ingrained in many other similes and in much of the surrounding narrative. By working within the narrative much as the Hector and Andomache scene in Iliad 6 does, the imagery of parenthood, when surrounded by that of war, reminds us of the existence of a world beyond the battlefield, and offers, in effect, a reason for the bloodshed happening there. In the world of peacetime, parents protect and nurture children, and children reciprocate that care when their parents are old and frail. Bonds of loyalty and affection between human beings make life worth preserving, even though its preservation is paradoxically facilitated by the deaths of those who sacrifice themselves in war, to protect their more vulnerable loved ones. In this article, I hope to show how this particular set of parent-child similes is both interconnected and also deeply connected with the broader themes of the poem, even to the extent of fleshing out the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus about which the narrative, at least of Iliad 1-17, is strangely silent.

At Il. 4.130-1, Athena is said to brush Pandaros' deadly arrow away from Menelaus like a mother brushing a fly from a sleeping child, and in an even more striking contrast between a simile's subject matter and the narrative context at Il. 8.271, Homer compares Teucrus dodging in and out of Ajax's shield with a child peeping around his mother's skirts in a game, although the game is not so much fun for the Trojans his arrows kill. At Il. 12.435, the fighting between the Greeks and the Trojans is said to be balanced as evenly as the scale of a poor woman working hard in order to look after her children.¹⁴ Thereafter, all the similes which focus on parental care of children concern Achilles and Patroclus in some way.¹⁵ At Il. 9.323-5, Achilles characterizes his role in the Greek army as that of a mother bird who must work tirelessly for her nestlings' survival, to her own severe detriment:

ὡs δ' ὄρνιs ἀπτη̑σι νεοσσοι̑σι προϕέρῃσι
μάστακ' ἐπεί κε λάβῃσι, κακω̑s δ' ἄρα οἱ πέλει αὐτῃ̑
os καὶ ἐγo …
‘For as to her unwinged young ones the mother bird brings back
morsels, wherever she can find them, but as for herself it is suffering,
such was I …’

The mother is worn down by the endless demands of her offspring, as Achilles claims that he is worn down by his responsibilities to the Greeks in protecting them, while at Il. 16.7-10, in an explicit inversion of the parental imagery, the idea of unfailing parental care is replaced by that of the nagging, persistent child who demands it:

τίπτε δεδάκρυσαι, Πατρόκλεεs, ἠἐτε κούρη
νηπίη, ἥ θ' ἅμα μητρὶ θέουσ' ἀνελέσθαι ἀνώγει,
εἱανου̑ ἁπτομένη, καί τ' ἐσσυμένην κατερύκει,
δακρυόεσσα δέ μιν ποτιδέρκεται, ὄϕρ' ἀνέληται;
                                                                                                                        ‘Why then
are you crying like some poor little girl, Patroklos,
who runs after her mother and begs to be picked up and carried,
and clings to her dress, and hold her back when she tries to hurry
and gazes tearfully into her face, until she is picked up?’

The two images view the same essential idea from opposite sides. Both similes are in Achilles' own mouth, although the use of extended similes in direct speech is relatively rare,¹⁶ and both express his feelings about his role in the Greek army, which is a ‘parental’, protective role of a kind that he has rejected by removing himself from the fighting. When Patroclus entreats him on behalf of the army, Achilles' anger touches even this unique recipient of his continued loyalty and protection. The combination of the uniqueness of these images, the relative rarity of the extended simile in direct speech, and the fact that both similes are in Achilles' mouth suggest to me that these similes may have more than a merely local significance.

In the space of 135 lines or so in the next book, Patroclus' dead, defenceless body attracts explicitly ‘parental’ care twice. At Il. 17.4-5, Menelaus is compared to a mother cow protecting her first-born as he stands over Patroclus' corpse,¹⁷ and then a longer simile compares Ajax's defence of the dead hero with that of a lion warding off hunters as it leads its cubs through the woods (Il. 17.133-6). Both men protect Patroclus' body even at risk to themselves, as a parent must protect vulnerable children, because Achilles, whose role such protection should be, is absent, having laid down his ‘parental’ burden. The unforeseen effect of his abandoning his protective role to the Greek army has been the abandonment of the one man whom he most wanted to protect.

The mother cow is replaced by the heroic, fatherly lion, whose active defence of his cubs is successful, and in turn this successful protector becomes the lion who fails to protect his cubs, in the third simile in this sequence (Il. 18.318-22);¹⁸ Achilles' absence from battle has caused his friend's death, so he laments:

                                                                                                    ὥs τε λὶs ἠυγένειοs,
o ῥά θ' ὑπὸ σκύμνουs ἐλαϕηβόλοs ἁρπάσῃ ἀνὴρ
ὕληs ἐκ πυκινη̑s ὁ δέ τ' ἄχνυται ὕστεροs ἐλθών,
πολλὰ δὲ τ' ἄγκε' ἐπη̑λθε μετ' ἀνέροs ἴχνι' ἐρευνω̑ν,
εἴ ποθεν ἐξεύροι · μάλα γὰρ δριμὺs χόλοs αἱρει̑.
                                                                                As some great bearded lion
when some man, a deer hunter, has stolen his cubs away from him
out of the close wood; the lion comes back too late, and is anguished,
and turns into many valleys quartering after the man's trail
on the chance of finding him, and taken with bitter anger.

This simile, which mingles the violence of the lion with the softness and vulnerability attendant on parental care, is transitional between the values of the battlefield and the gentler virtues of parenthood that must prevail outside it: Hector the father-warrior of Iliad 6 is transitional between the two in a very similar way. The lion is the supreme hero among Homeric animals, and all the major heroes are described by lion similes, but especially striking lion imagery clusters round Achilles.¹⁹ All heroes swing between the two poles of violence (towards enemies) and care-giving (as fathers or husbands who must defend their loved ones),²⁰ but of all of them, Achilles goes furthest in the intensity of his emotions: the image of the savage beast mourning for his cubs is therefore uniquely appropriate for a hero capable of such strong hatred and love. Both the image of the grieving lion and that of the father-warrior encapsulate one of the central paradoxes of the hero that has been so well illuminated by James Redfield: he must be both a killer and a care-giver, but care-giving may demand that he is killed, with the result that he will be entirely unable to protect those dependent on him in the future.²¹

Finally, the animal imagery gives place to a simile derived all too clearly from the human experience recounted in the narrative:

ὡs δἐ πατὴρ οὔ παιδὸs ὀδύρεται ὀστέα καίων,
νυμϕίου, ὅs τε θανoν δειλοὺs ἀκάχησε τοκη̑αs
os 'Αχιλεὺs ἐτάροιο ὀδύρετο ὀστέα καίων …
As a father mourns as he burns the bones of his son, who was married
only now, and died to grieve his unhappy parents,
so Achilleus was mourning as he burned his companion's
bones …

(Il. 23.222-4)

This is Achilles' experience, and proleptically Priam's as well, and this simile of parents and children is the last in a series that runs through the Iliad, from Book 9 when Patroclus is still alive all the way to Book 23 and even beyond, when Priam and Achilles mourn the mutual loss of their loved ones in Iliad 24. I believe that these similes have two main functions: first they are one manifestation of themes of love and care-giving which run below the ‘surface’ of the Iliad as a counterpoint to those of war and death which are given more actual space in the narrative; second, and more controversially, they help to flesh out details of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus that are not explicitly portrayed in the narrative until after Patroclus is dead.

Achilles' relationship with Patroclus has become such a paradigm for lost love and devotion after death that we tend to interpret it only through the eyes of Achilles after Book 17. When observed from the other side, from what we know of the two men in the narrative while both are alive, it looks very different. Indeed Robert Finlay even regards Achilles' reaction to Patroclus' death as ‘incommensurate with what has been shown of the relationship between the two men’, in view of the way that their relationship has been described in the Iliad 1-16, on the grounds that it is ‘not of sufficient depth or intensity’, and ‘cannot apparently by itself bear the unique weight the poet assigns to it’.²²

As Homeric heroes go, Patroclus is a rather unusual figure: kindness does not normally feature highly in their pantheon of virtues, but immortals and mortals alike are unanimous in their appreciation of his kindness to all. In particular, he is described by Zeus (Il. 17.204) and Lycaon (Il. 21.96) as ‘powerful and kind’, and in the course of her lament for his death at Il. 19.287-300 Briseis recalls his previous kindness to her in her distress.²³ What we see of him in the Iliad is entirely consistent with what is said. Although he is running to deliver Nestor's urgent message to Achilles (Il. 11.805), his sympathy for his wounded comrade Eurypylus makes him stop to tend his wound for as long as the demands of the fighting allow, before regretfully going on (Il. 15.390 ff.), and it is he who begs Achilles to take pity on the sufferings of the Greeks. Although he behaves with all the violence and pride of a typical Homeric hero in his final aristeia, the abiding memory that he leaves behind is of a good-natured and oddly self-effacing man.

We first see him at Il. 9.189 f. when he sits quietly listening to Achilles sing, and when Agamemnon's envoys arrive, his part is simply to obey Achilles' orders. He quietly gets on with the cooking, as though he were a housekeeper rather than a warrior (Il. 9.207-16), and Achilles, rather than Patroclus, controls the apportionment of the meat (Il. 9.217). This distribution is, of course, more than a simple practical detail, since meat is associated with male, heroic activity,²⁴ and good portions of meat are reserved for men of high standing, so that the distributor of meat is a man who controls the status of other men.²⁵ Descriptions of feasts are common in the Iliad, but the job of actually preparing them is not normally assigned to individual heroes. The closest parallel to Patroclus' role here is that of the maidservant Hecamede at Il. 11.623 f., and it is clear from Il. 19.315 and 24.621 that the preparation of Achilles' food is one of his regular tasks. In Iliad 9 Patroclus takes almost no part at all in the men's talk that follows the meal while Achilles is thoroughly dominant: as Beye notes, in the Iliad silence is equivalent to submission.²⁶ Between Il. 9.219 and 620, when Achilles tells him to make up a bed for Phoenix, he is not seen at all. In sum, the line ὥs ϕάτο, Πάτροκλοs δἐ ϕίλῳ ἐπεπείθεθ' ἐταίρῳ (‘Thus he spoke, and Patroclus obeyed his dear companion’, Il. 1.345, 9.205, 11.616) seems to be thoroughly emblematic of their relationship. Patroclus is a typical care-giver who subordinates his own needs to those of his friend, doing for Achilles the tasks which women typically do for others, as a Homeric mother or wife would naturally do (cf. Il. 19.315 ff., 11.623 ff.).²⁷

Most striking of all are Patroclus' words as he sets off for battle at Il. 16.270-1:

ἀνέρεs ἐστε, ϕίλοι, μνήσασθε δἐ θούριδοs ἀλκη̑s
ὡs ἂν Πηλεϊδην τιμήσομεν …
‘Be men now, dear friends, remember your furious valour;
we must bring honour to Peleus' son.’(28)

Fighting is such a severe burden, as Achilles emphasizes throughout Iliad 1-17, that the sacrifice is only worth making if the fighter receives proper honour for his contribution. Therefore by fighting ‘to honour the son of Peleus’, and apparently giving up any claim to his own heroic glory, Patroclus makes a self-sacrifice that is unique in the Iliad. Homeric men are typically highly competitive with one another in amassing glory—whether material or that derived from recognition by peers—and Patroclus' relationship with Achilles is highly unusual in its lack of concern with individual status.²⁹ One might say that his is a dual role of care-giving, both in the female, ‘mother-figure’ role of looking after Achilles off the battlefield, and in Book 16, if only briefly, in the male role of hero/father-figure on the battlefield. In his continual care for Achilles, Patroclus amply fulfills, and even exceeds, the expectations laid on him by his father Menoetius at the beginning of the war, when he enjoined him to be Achilles' mentor and counsellor (Il. 11.786 f.), as a kind of older brother to him. Andromache tells Hector that he is father and mother, brother and husband to her (Il. 6.429-30): in just the same way, Patroclus acts as mother, father, and elder brother to Achilles, and there are even analogies between his relationship with Achilles and that of Andromache with Hector, so that Patroclus is his ‘wife’ as well. Beye even suggests that their relationship had to be modelled on the male-female relationship because there was no model of uncompetitive male friendship available to Homer.³⁰ Unique to the Achilles-Patroclus relationship, however, is the way in which their roles alternate between protector and protected one.³¹ Such role reversal is only possible between two men: Andromache can never be a protector to Hector, because she is a woman and he is a man. Achilles, however, is also Patroclus' caregiver, although only after his death is the depth of the mutual care between them made totally explicit: before Iliad 18, it is only hinted at, partly by means of the similes.³²

Thetis is undoubtedly a loving mother who cares for her son, and who helps and comforts him, but Patroclus, in his self-effacing loyalty to Achilles, is perhaps a closer every-day companion than his goddess mother can be. Though her ties to humanity through Achilles enable her to feel great pity, grief, and love for a human being, she is fundamentally a goddess, not a mortal, and there is always a great gulf between mortals and those who live forever.³³ It is therefore perhaps not surprising that the son of this goddess is so ‘inhuman’ in some respects, and it is Achilles' essential inhumanness or isolation from the rest of humanity that enables him to withdraw from the fighting more easily than heroes who are integrated into their society—above all Ajax, in his speech at Il. 9.628-39, for whom Achilles' continued withdrawal is incomprehensible. Achilles is the only human who can even attempt to fight the gods without extra divine help (Il. 21.233-85); by the same token, only Achilles can withdraw from normal human bonds. Indeed, his continued and passionate estrangement from the Greeks is only plausible if he remains detached from ordinary human society.

Mothering Achilles seems to be a somewhat thankless task, and in what is shown of this relationship when Patroclus is alive, the caregiving is pretty much one way—Patroclus gives and Achilles takes. Even Patroclus is slightly wary of his charge, telling Nestor that Achilles is ‘terrible’ (δεινόs, Il. 11.654) and apt to blame even the guiltless. His unease is proved justified in Iliad 16.7-10, when his pity for the sufferings of his comrades occasions Achilles' scornful comparison of his tears to those, not merely of a child, but even of a girl child.³⁴ Patroclus' immediate response is conciliatory, and quite different from that of the typical Homeric warrior who is deeply sensitive to any slight:

o 'Αχιλευ̑, Πηλέοs υἱέ, μέγα ϕέρτατ' 'Αχαιω̑ν,
μὴ νεμεσα. τοι̑ον γὰρ ἄχοs βεβίηκεν 'Αχαιούs.
‘Son of Peleus, far greatest of the Achaians, Achilleus,
do not be angry; such grief has fallen upon the Achaians.’

(Il. 16.21-2)

Any anger that he feels is directed towards the sufferings of the Greeks that Achilles' withdrawal is causing, not towards himself. Achilles' simile, which emphasizes the negative associations latent in his mother-bird simile, marks the beginning of the chain of events which will lead to the forced resumption of the ‘mother-bird’ role imposed upon him by the death of his own care-taker.

Although the strength of Achilles' rage at the death of Patroclus shows the depth of his love for him, Achilles shows little explicit warmth or care towards him during his lifetime. In fact, their only direct exchange is Achilles' sarcastic response to his friend's entreaties at the start of Iliad 16.³⁵ This is surely because the narrative demands that Achilles must be a very isolated figure throughout the time of his withdrawal from the Greek army. If he is seen as an ordinary affectionate human being, the vehemence of his refusal to engage in normal relations with his former comrades would seem less plausible. Moreover, Patroclus straddles a very narrow line between loyalty to his friend and loyalty to the rest of the army, and if his relationship with Achilles were to be given as much emphasis as that of Hector with his family, his position as an intermediary between the Greeks and Achilles would be sacrificed. It would be awkward for Patroclus to respond to an Achilles who behaved towards him as devotedly as he behaves towards Achilles with anything other than exclusive loyalty, with the result that his plea on behalf of Achilles' enemies at the start of Iliad 16 would run the risk of seeming unbelievable or hopelessly contrived. Only a Patroclus who unobtrusively cares for Achilles, but is kept in the background until Iliad 16, can successfully maintain this unusually ambiguous status. Meanwhile, however, the poet knows that Achilles' love for Patroclus will ultimately be the driving force that brings him back on the battlefield, and thus I suggest that his choice of similes in Books 9, 16, and 17 is a manifestation, the tip of the iceberg, of the underlying theme of Achilles' love for Patroclus that he has had to keep dormant throughout the earlier part of the poem.³⁶

Given these constraints on the narrative, I suggest that the similes of mutual care between Achilles and Patroclus provide details that cannot be dwelt on while Patroclus is alive. Just as the similes expand specific details in the battle narratives, so this series of similes expands aspects of their relationship that cannot be spelled out while Patroclus is alive or until Achilles knows that his friend is dead. In Iliad 9, the ‘mother bird's’ ungrateful nestlings are wearing her out, she cannot lay her burden aside. Achilles himself has temporarily ‘gone against nature’ by abandoning his role as care-taker to the Greek army and Patroclus, but he will not be allowed to abandon it permanently. Just as it would not be natural for a mother bird to abandon her nestlings deliberately, so in time it will be clear that the obduracy Achilles shows to the Greek army is not natural or possible for a mortal: Hera and Athena can wage their unrelenting campaign against the Trojans (Il. 4.30-54, 24.25-30), but Achilles must be compelled to forgive Agamemnon (and ultimately Priam). In the simile of the little girl and her mother, Achilles' position is viewed from the other side, and it expresses not only the burden laid on him by the Greek army, but also the burden of living up to Patroclus and his dependency. This loss of his own ‘mother figure’ forces him violently back into his role of mother or protector to the Greeks now that Patroclus is no longer able to benefit from it. The mother bird cannot abandon its young, Hector cannot abandon his role as Troy's champion in spite of its effects on his family (Il. 6.447-9), and Achilles is not allowed to give up his role as the champion of the Greeks: the hero's obligation of ‘care-giving’ in all its complexity is ultimately impossible to abandon, and it seems that Achilles is punished for deliberately defying expectations of the hero.

Once he takes up his burden again, Achilles is wracked with guilt that he has failed to look after either Patroclus or the Greek army (Il. 18.102-4). The mother bird, the caregiver who ought to be on hand all the time for a child, has failed; by his absence, the lion has lost his cubs. Patroclus is not the only one of these ‘cubs’. Achilles realises that Patroclus' death—which he calls worse than the death of his father or son (Il. 19.321-7)—means his own death and the vulnerability of his old father and young son without his protection.³⁷ Ajax had said that even a father whose child has been killed is willing to accept compensation (Il. 9.632-3): now, owing to his refusal to accept earlier compensation, Achilles' ‘mother’ is also his murdered ‘child’.

Achilles is in fact surrounded by surrogate fathers and sons in the Iliad, and he fails nearly all of them. Patroclus is both parent and son to him, while Phoenix (Il. 9.485-95) is explicitly portrayed as Achilles' former nurse (Il. 9.487-9) and Achilles as the son that he was unable to have (Il. 9.494-5). Achilles' ultimate decision to stay and fight for glory at Troy means that he will fail his father and son. At the climax of the poem, he finds—if briefly, if incompletely—a last surrogate father in Priam,³⁸ who is paradoxically the one father figure that he does not entirely fail. Already at Il. 22.420, Priam compares his old age with that of Peleus, and the comparison is made even clearer in Iliad 24, as he urges the young man whose ‘man-killing’ hands have killed his son to remember his own father as he looks on him (Il. 24.486, 504). Their brief union is expressed in the mutual wonder that each feels for the other (Il. 24.629-32), and in yet another simile—but this time not one of parents and children:

ὡs δ' ὅτ' ἂν ἄνδρ' ἄτη πυκινὴ λάβῃ, ὅs τ' ἐνί πάτρῃ
ϕω̑τα κατακτείναs ἄλλων ἐξίκετο δη̑μον,
ἀνδρὸs ἐs ἀϕνειου̑, θάμβοs δ' ἐχει εἰσορόωνταs,
os 'Αχιλεὺs θάμβησεν ἰδoν Πρίαμον θεοειδέα.
As when dense disaster closes on one who has murdered
a man in his own land, and he comes to the country of others,
to a man of substance, and wonder seizes on those who behold him,
so Achilleus wondered as he looked on Priam, a god-like
man …

(Il. 24.480-3)

It is well known that the reversal of roles between the simile and the narrative, so that Priam is the murderer and Achilles the king, binds the two men together,³⁹ but the simile also incorporates the stories of Patroclus and Phoenix:⁴⁰ when Phoenix nearly kills his father, he is compelled to flee to Peleus who receives and loves him as a father would (Il. 9.444-84); Patroclus, while still a child, kills a man and is also taken in and cared for by Achilles' father (Il. 23.85 f.). Thus this simile combines all of Achilles' care-givers within the figure of the old enemy king, and when Achilles weeps (Il. 24.511-12), it is both for Patroclus and his father. Just as repentance and acceptance were possible for Phoenix and Patroclus through Peleus, now Peleus' son must accept Priam in order to live up to his father, and he does so by seeing Priam as his father and by equating his loss of his ‘son’ with Priam's loss of Hector. This blending of roles is foreshadowed by Achilles' preceding speech (Il. 24.525-33) in which he stresses the uniformity of human suffering.

The Iliad is full of parent-child relationships which have been fatally damaged by war. Simoeisius, who is one of the first to fall, is programmatically said to ‘be unable to return his parents' care’ (Il. 4.474-9): Achilles fails to return his friend's care, except in what he can do for his body when it is too late to do anything more.⁴¹ Thus the notable number of similes relating to parental care that cluster round Achilles and Patroclus in the last third of the Iliad are used both to expand details of a relationship that is incompletely portrayed in the narrative and they are one of the ‘tips of the iceberg’ that are intimately connected to one of the most far-reaching and important themes of the Iliad—that of love and cooperation between human beings that runs as a vital counterpoint below the surface of the darker themes of violence and destruction which are more immediately obvious, yet which occasionally—as in the Hector and Andromache scene, and above all in Iliad 24—take precedence over these.

Notes

1. All translations are from The Iliad of Homer, translated by R. Lattimore (Chicago, 1951).

2. Narrative Semiotics in the Iliadic Tradition (Indiana, 1987), 183 n. 1.

3. For some representative statements, se H. Fraenkel, ‘Essence and Nature of the Homeric Similes’ in G. M. Wright and P. V. Jones, Homer: German Scholarship in Translation (Oxford, 1997), 113; C. M. Bowra, Tradition and Design in the Iliad (Oxford, 1950), 157; M. Coffey, ‘The Function of the Homeric Simile’, AJP [American Journal of Philology] 78 (1952), 113-52; C. Moulton, Similes in the Homeric Poems (Gottingen, 1977); M. Edwards, Homer, Poet of the Iliad (Baltimore and London, 1987), 102-10.

4. As C. R. Beye states in Ancient Epic Poetry: Homer, Apollonius, Virgil (Cornell, 1993), 109.

5. For some suggestions and explorations of the effects produced by similes, see A. J. Podlecki, ‘Some Odyssean Similes’, G&R [Greece & Rome] 18 (1971), 81-90; S. E. Bassett, ‘The Function of the Homeric Simile’, TAPA [Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association] 52 (1921), 132-47; Fraenkel, op. cit., 104-5; D. H. Porter, ‘Violent Juxtaposition in the Similes of the Iliad’, CJ [Classical Journal] 1972, 11-21; R. P. Martin, ‘Simile and Performance’ in Written Voices, Spoken Signs: Tradition, Performance and the Epic Text, edited by E. Bakker and A. Kahane (Harvard, 1997), 138-66.

6. For a full discussion of this type of juxtaposition, see Porter, op. cit., who comments (19): ‘The grimness and bloodiness of the battlefield are inevitably rendered darker and more tragic by the constant brief glimpses we get in the similes of a world where … shepherds tend their flocks and small children play.’

7. Fraenkel, Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy (New York and London, 1972), 54.

8. Similes are even sometimes described as the ‘lyric’ element in Homer: Beye, op. cit., 109; Bassett, op. cit., 134. Martin even argues that the poet might even have used a different form of delivery for them.

9. For scholars such as C. H. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (Harvard, 1963), 113 ff. and Moulton, connections between similes in widely-separated parts of the Iliad are an important element in their interpretation of the poem. Others such as Martin, op. cit., 140-3 are more sceptical. Beye, op. cit., 8-19 has a judicious and sensible discussion of the problem.

10. See Bassett, op. cit., 144-5; Fraenkel, op. cit., 104-5, 108.

11. For a useful account of the range and sophistication of the similes of the Odyssey, see the article by Podlecki (n. 5), 82.

12. For some other convincing examples of foreshadowing, see Moulton, op. cit., 24-6, 49, 74-5. S. Lonsdale, Creatures of Speech, Lion, Herding, and Hunting Similes in the Iliad (Stuttgart, 1990) makes some very interesting comparisons between the predictive quality and structural similarity of the similes and the omens in the Iliad.

13. Whitman, op. cit., 153 f. Beye, op. cit., 11-16 offers some interesting speculations on the repeated similes and the possible thought processes and subconscious connections that may cause their repetition, often thousands of lines away from one another.

14. G. Zanker, The Heart of Achilles: Characterization and Personal Ethics in the Iliad (Ann Arbor, 1994), 147 notes that the women who are on the periphery of war are the ones who bring out its true meaning. One may also note how many of the parental similes involve females, so that there is a parallel between the function of women in the narrative and that of the similes: they too are peripheral to the narrative, yet they too, by the contrast between their subject matter and that of the main action, help to sharpen the meaning of the narrative.

15. Moulton, op. cit., 101. The wasps of Il. 16.265 (cf. 12.167), and perhaps the birds of Il. 17.755 f., are also portrayed as parents, but the initial point of comparison in these similes is defensive fighting, not the parental love and care of peacetime.

16. For statistics, see Moulton, op. cit., 100.

17. Menelaus is a particularly appropriate protector for Patroclus: both are characterized by their kindness, and they are the two Iliadic characters who are directly apostrophized by the poet. The choice of Menelaus here may therefore derive from Homer's subconscious connection between him and Patroclus: see A. Parry, ‘Language and Characterisation in Homer’ in The Language of Achilles and Other Papers (Oxford, 1989), 301-26.

18. For a discussion of the complex possibilities attendant on linked similes, see Moulton, op. cit., chapters 1 and 2, passim, and for more complex patterns of lion imagery in Iliad 17, cf. 73-4.

19. At Il. 20.164-73, his return to battle is marked by the longest lion simile in the Iliad; the lion imagery of Il. 24.572 hints that Achilles may still be dangerous to Priam.

20. Even the good-natured, and slightly second-rate, hero Menelaus moves in only 55 lines from being a care-giving mother cow (Il. 17.4-5) to a lion who violently devours a cow (Il. 17.61; cf. 665); cf. Moulton, op. cit., 73-4.

21. J. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad (Durham and London, expanded edition 1994), 99-127.

22. R. A. Finlay, ‘Patroklos, Achilleus and Peleus: Fathers and Sons in the Iliad’, CW [Classical World] 73 (1980), 267-73.

23. Cf. also Il. 17.671, 23.252 and 281; even Achilles' immortal horses mourn their much-loved charioteer's death, 17.426 f.: see also M. Lynn-George, ‘Structures of Care in the Iliad,’ CQ 46 (1996), 1-26.

24. Beye, ‘Men and Women in the Homeric Poems’, Ramus 3 (1974), 87-101.

25. The feast given by Agamemnon to the Greek leaders at Il. 9.89 is not merely a generous gesture, but rather a means to reassert his damaged authority among them. For other examples of the connection between food and status, see Il. 12.310 ff.; Od. 7.474 ff.

26. Beye (n. 24), 89.

27. On the connections between women and nurturing, see Beye (n. 24), 89 and M. B. Arthur, ‘The Origins of the Western Attitude toward Women’ in Women in the Ancient World: the Arethusa Papers, edited by J. Peradotto and J. P. Sullivan (Albany, N.Y., 1984), 7-58.

28. At Il. 16.84 and 90, Achilles regards Patroclus' offer to fight in his honour as his right, without argument.

29. For other appraisals of Patroclus' unusual character, see Moulton, op. cit., 102; Finlay, op. cit., 267; Zanker, op. cit., 138-40; K. Crotty, The Poetics of Supplication, (Ithaca, 1994), 55; Parry, op. cit., 312-14.

30. Crotty, op. cit., 58 comments on the ‘mixture of subservience and intimacy’ typical of husbands and wives that characterizes the two men's relationship; cf. also O. P. Taplin, Homeric Soundings (Oxford, 1993) 177; Beye, op. cit., 89. I make no concrete suggestions concerning the question of eroticism in the relationship: what is at issue is the role of the caregiver in all its forms.

31. The two men also play the ‘Hector’ and ‘Andromache’ roles with one another alternately: Achilles' role parallels that of Andromache in urging the man who is fighting for him to exercise restraint in war (Il. 16.87 ff.; cf. Il. 6.431 f., although his motivation is obviously different from hers), but parallels that of Hector in destroying those closest to him. Patroclus is like Andromache in his devotion to his ‘lord’; he is like Hector in the death he meets (Il. 16.855-7; 22.361-3), and like Hector too in his ‘kindness’ (Il. 24.772; cf. 17.204, 21.96, etc.). Structural parallels underline these analogies: at Il. 22.437 ff., Andromache is unsuspectingly going about her business until she suddenly hears the noise that portends Hector's death; at Il. 17.404, Achilles is similarly unsuspecting and remains so until Il. 18.6 f.; cf. also n. 41 below.

32. Thus I disagree with Moulton, op. cit., 101, 104, who claims that Achilles is consistently portrayed as the protector and Patroclus the protected one.

33. For example, her first question to Achilles, asking him why he is crying when Zeus has honoured him so greatly (Il. 18.73-5), seems strikingly heartless, because it emanates from a divine rather than a human view of events. From the divine perspective, both the distinction in worth between gods and humans and the necessity of receiving due honour are highly important (cf. Il. 24.56-62). The gods have made efforts to restore Achilles' honour to him, and thus in their eyes, and those of Thetis, Achilles has been treated generously by Zeus, whatever the human cost.

34. Compare the taunts of Thersites and others at alleged Greek cowardice: 'Αχαιῒδεs, οὐκετ' 'Αχαιοί, ‘you women, not men, of Achaia’ (Il. 2.235); at Il. 7.233 ff., Hector assures Ajax that his grasp of warfare far surpasses that of a woman or feeble boy; cf. Moulton, op. cit., 103 n. 41.

35. So Finlay, op. cit., 272.

36. In a similar vein Beye (n. 4), 64 suggests that the scenes between the two men in Iliad 9 and 16 may be Homer's way of ‘describing the utter psychic intimacy of the two men in order to prepare his audience for the depth of depression and the force of the anger by which Achilles is later gripped’.

37. Compare his tears for Peleus as well as Patroclus at Il. 24.480. Achilles' grief for Neoptolemus is even a muted echo of Andromache's for Astyanax: so Finlay, op. cit., 270.

38. Finlay, op. cit., 273.

39. N. J. Richardson, Commentary on the Iliad, vol. 6 (Cambridge, 1991), 323. In the Odyssey such ‘reverse similes’ are also used, though their effect is rather different, underlining the dangers of the loss of order that threatens to destroy Ithacan society: H. P. Foley, ‘“Reverse Similes” and Sex Roles in the Odyssey’ in Peradotto and Sullivan (n. 27), 59-78.

40. Moulton, op. cit., 115-16; Finlay, op. cit., 269-70.

41. Patroclus' ‘reward’ for his kindness matches that of the gods to Hector in Iliad 24: to both men, a reward for services in life is only given after death, and it is hardly a just compensation, but it is at least some kind of acknowledgement for care taken: cf. Lynn-George (n. 23), 9.