of the original and the elaboration of its plain diction into Elizabethan subtlety and ornateness.

Those who wish to get as clear an insight into the noble lucidness of Homeric poetry (which, none the less, is like a diamond in that it cannot be seen through) as is possible without a knowledge of Greek cannot do better than procure Lord Derby's and William Morris's translations, of which inexpensive editions can be procured.

Butcher and Lang

As for prose translations, they abound, and, though uncouth in proportion to their literal precision, will help the student to follow the Homeric narrative in exact detail. Butcher and Lang's translation of the Odyssey at times rises to prosepoetry. And the curiously matter-of-fact translation in prose (at times too prosaic) by Samuel Butler, the great ironist and author of Erewhon, is an excellent tonic against the conventional "translatorese" which lends an air of unreality to the very real and easily realised life of the Homeric poems. Butler's attempted proof that the Odyssey was written by a woman, none other than the wise and beautiful Nausicaa, must have been begun as an essay in his peculiar irony, but he seems in the end to have persuaded himself of the truth of his fantastical theory.

5

HOMERIC SIMILES

The use of simile in the Homeric poems is a characteristic feature which has been imitated by all makers of the "artificial epic" from Virgil to Milton. The Homeric similes are not mere decorations, like the pictures in an illuminated missal. They are dramatic; that is, they arise out of the action and add impressiveness to what follows, by leading the thoughts of the reader up through some similar, but less familiar, picture to a keener realisation of the wonder or terror or pitifulness of a

Paris had to decide which goddess was the most beautiful-Juno, Minerva, or Venus. He gave the golden apple to Venus, with the natural result that the other two goddesses became his bitter enemies.

scene or an event. They are like the illustrations to a book the inner significance of which has been grasped by the illustrator, who yet allows his imagination to sport with the details of his picture. "Secure of the main likeness," comments Pope, "Homer makes no scruple to play with the circumstances." His similes thus afford a contrast to those in the Old Testament (for example, Job's comparison of the inconstancy of friends to the failure of water in the desert, when springs on which the caravans relied are found to be dry), for the Hebraic similes dispense with non-essential details. The Iliad contains about a hundred and eighty full-length similes, pictures complete in themselves, and the Odyssey only forty. This difference is inevitable, for the Odyssey, though full of marvels and marvellous adventures, has not nearly so many moments of tense excitement-dramatic "thrills" as it were-as the Iliad with its warlike action and movements of armed hosts in a restricted arena. The range of Homeric simile extends from the lowliest to the loftiest matters. Like the Old Testament writers, Homer delights in a homely image; thus, like them, he finds similitudes in the work of the threshing flood and the winnowing fan. The Hebrew chronicler (in 2 Kings xxi. 13) writes: "I will wipe Jerusalem as a man wipeth a dish; wiping it, and turning it upside down"; and Homer finds as homely a similitude, when he compares the obstinate Ajax, beset by enemies, to an ass which has got into a cornfield and is being cudgelled in vain by boys. Sometimes Homer uses a sequence of similes; as when, in a description of the Greeks leaving the quarters by the ships for the place of assembly, they are successively likened to fire devouring a forest (because of their gleaming armour), to a flight of clamouring birds (because of their noise and haste), to innumerable leaves (when they are mustered in a fluctuating mass), to buzzing flies (as an excited hum is heard from the assembly), and to flocks of goats parted by goat-herds (when they are marshalled in divisions by their leaders).

Again, in order to heighten the terror of warlike episodes by contrasting them with small, innocent affairs, he tells us that Apollo throws down the Greek rampart as easily as a child destroys its sand-castle on the sea-beach, or makes Achilles rebuke his comrade Petroclus for weeping like a little girl running by her mother's side and clinging to her dress, and looking up in tears until she is picked up and carried.

Majestical Similes

His more majestical images are suggested by fire-especially, conflagrations in a mountain forest-torrents, snowstorms, lightning, and winds battling together as so often occurs in the land-locked Ægean. A fine example of the majestical simile is found when Minerva invests Achilles with her ægis, thus encircling his head with a golden cloud from which a flame is made to shoot forth. The Rev. W. C. Green's translation of The Similes of Homer's Iliad contains the following fine version of this most striking simile:

As from an island city, seen afar,

The smoke goes up to heaven, when foes besiege:
And all day long in grievous battle strive

The leaguered townsmen from this city wall:
But soon, at set of sun, blaze after blaze,
Are lit the beacon-fires, and high the glare
Shoots up for all that dwell around to see,
That they may come with ships to aid their stress:
Such light blazed heavenward from Achilles' head.

The lion, by the way, provides no fewer than thirty comparisons in the Iliad, the most notable of which likens Ajax, defending the body of Patroclus, to a lion guarding his cubs, glaring in his might and drawing down his brows. These similes are often jewels of history. The image of the beleaguered islandcity, kindling its fiery S.O.S. to bring help from its neighbours, reminds us that it was an age when such raids were common, as