One of the devices used most effectively by Homer is the epic simile. A simile is a figure of speech in which two unlike things or concepts are shown to be similar, for poetic purposes, often through the use of the words "like" or "as." For example, we might say that a girl's hair is like sunshine or that her breath is rank as an old gym sock. An epic simile sometimes extends the comparison to expansive proportions. One relatively short example in The Odyssey appears when Odysseus and his men blind the Cyclops: "as a blacksmith plunges a glowing ax or adze / in an ice-cold bath and the metal screeches steam / and its temper hardens — that's the iron's strength — / so the eye of the Cyclops sizzled round that stake!" (9.438–41)
Seth L. Schein (Reading the Odyssey, 1996, pp. 15–16) neatly distinguishes between the similes of The Iliad and The Odyssey. The Iliad is confined geographically in ways that The Odyssey is not; it deals primarily with the Trojan War. The Odyssey, on the other hand, covers much of the known (and some of the unknown) world of the time. Because of this, Homer's similes in The Iliad perform two functions: First, as with most similes, they help to clarify or deepen the reader's experience of something, such as a mood, an event, an object, or thought. Second, the simile also, as Schein puts it "expand(s) the universe of the poem and the range of experience it comprehends."
In The Odyssey, Homer uses the epic simile differently. First, the later poem has fewer similes, and, for the most part, they do not expand the already vast world of the story. Instead, in The Odyssey, the similes intensify the experience for the reader. Schein and others cite the simile that Homer creates when he appropriately compares Penelope's delight, upon realizing her husband's return, to that felt by shipwrecked sailors who catch sight of shore: "Joy, warm as the joy that shipwrecked sailors feel / when they catch sight of land." (23.262–63 in Fagles). Penelope is like the shipwrecked sailors. Her life has been, in effect, lost at sea without her husband. Realizing his return is like catching sight of land.
