An epithet is a term or phrase used to characterize the nature of a character, an object, or an event. Homer's poetics include other noticeable devices that may seem odd to a modern reader. Realizing his return is like catching sight of land. Her life has been, in effect, lost at sea without her husband. Penelope is like the shipwrecked sailors. 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). Instead, in The Odyssey, the similes intensify the experience for the reader. First, the later poem has fewer similes, and, for the most part, they do not expand the already vast world of the story. In The Odyssey, Homer uses the epic simile differently. Second, the simile also, as Schein puts it "expand(s) the universe of the poem and the range of experience it comprehends." 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. The Odyssey, on the other hand, covers much of the known (and some of the unknown) world of the time. The Iliad is confined geographically in ways that The Odyssey is not it deals primarily with the Trojan War. 15-16) neatly distinguishes between the similes of The Iliad and The Odyssey. 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) An epic simile sometimes extends the comparison to expansive proportions. 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. One of the devices used most effectively by Homer is the epic simile. Translations, for obvious reasons, generally cannot mimic the metric foot of the epics and remain true to content and themes. In Homer's epic poetry, composed in Ancient Greek, it is the length of the sound that counts, not the emphasis as is usually the case in contemporary English poetry. However a line is composed, the last metrical foot usually is a spondee (BEEEEAT BEEEEAT). A spondee has two long sounds (BEEEEAT BEEEEAT). A dactyl is a metrical foot consisting of a long sound followed by two short sounds (BEEEEAT beat-beat). The first five feet may be made up of either dactyls and/or spondees. Homer composed The Odyssey in a meter known as dactylic hexameter, which gives the epic its elevated style. In The Odyssey, Homer employs most of the literary and poetic devices associated with epics: catalogs, digressions, long speeches, journeys or quests, various trials or tests of the hero, similes, metaphors, and divine intervention. This site is designed for Attic Greek, but the principles of accentuation are the same for Attic and Homeric (Epic) dialects, and the drills give you enough information to be able to deduce correct accentuation.Composed around 700 bc, The Odyssey is one of the earliest epics still in existence and, in many ways, sets the pattern for the genre, neatly fitting the definition of a primary epic (that is, one that grows out of oral tradition). There are also notes on metrical terms.Īccents (Donald J.After you submit your scansion, notes will appear to point out irregularities, like correption and synesesis.Drag the long and short marks to each syllable and then check your work.Scroll down to select Homer and log in.Hexameter Company Once you register, you can practice scanning random lines of the Iliad (or lines of a number of Latin authors as well). If you make a mistake, it will offer hints about metrical features of the line in case an irregularity stumped you. For each line you can either type ‘u’ for short and ‘- ‘ (hyphen) for long, or use ‘l’ and ‘s’. Use this website (created Mavis Murdock, Mount Holyoke College, ’22) to practice scanning any of the lines in Iliad Book 1.
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