Simile Richard Brooks

Towards the beginning of book 11, Homer uses a simile that struck me as especially conveying. Book 11 marks the beginning of the extended day of battle that lasts several books and takes place all the way from the Greek ships to the Trojan walls. Homer describes the soldiers fighting from daybreak all the way until noon. This time span, in fact,only filled two pages, and nearly 150 more pages concerning the fighting on that very day would follow, but already Homer uses an exceptionally vivid simile to describe the soldiers:

Toward evening, the woodsman turns home,
His hands sore from swinging his axe
And his heart weary from felling tall trees,
And all his desire is for the sweetness of food. (200: 86-89)

The tenors in this simile are the incredibly tired soldiers on both sides of the battle. The vehicle is the weary lumberjacks tired from a day of hard work. This simile is interesting on several levels. For one thing, it invokes touch. The reader can feel how sore one's muscles would be from swinging an axe all day long. Also, the reader can very easily relate to that feeling of utter weariness, and the extreme hunger one feels when his or her body is about to shut down. With this simile, Homer continues a trend that he started much earlier in the book. Many similes in the Iliad are not just about nature, but trees in specific. What strikes me the most about this simile, however, is the image of a lumberjack working. They simply move from one tree to the next in a methodical day of work. I think that is an incredible image to think of. After ten years of constant battle, of simply lining up on the same field day in and day out, and doing the same thing, killing had to become second nature to these soldiers. Killing enemy troops was the same thing as cutting down trees. They just moved on to the next one, barely even thinking about what they're doing anymore.