The oral nature of the Homeric simile

Abstract

Even the similes, the very breath of life of the poetry of Homer, are in many cases, indeed usually, adopted ready-made. Their vividness, their closeness of observation, their air of freshness and spontaneity, are all deceptive. Nearly all of them are taken over from older books, and many of them were originally written to describe some quite different occasion. 8 G. P. Shipp, having demonstrated that the similes show a significantly high proportion of late linguistic forms, takes a middle position when he states:

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