For many readers, the Homeric simile is one of the most appealing aspects of the epic, truly the poetic kosmos, as one scholiast put it. Moreover, these ‘splendid little pictures’ ‘strewn’ throughout the epic (in the words of Madame Roland) seem to be such well-defined, contained, detachable pieces, that they invite treatment for their own sake. The parabolai may be approached as parerga. Such an undertaking would be both challenging and ambitious. After all, if one cannot imagine the Iliad without the similes, can one treat the similes without the Iliad? Any approach must give some thought to the larger vision of the poem. Then there is the issue of the tsunami of secondary literature on every aspect of the epic, and it is not long before one has the experience of the gardener trying to channel water in Book 21. It can be even more dire: one can be ‘swept away by the torrent like a swineherd trying to cross a great river in a storm’ (21.282–3).

R.'s book has a commanding title: Character, Narrator, and Simile in the Iliad. Cambridge University Press highlights three features of the work, making bold claims for its originality. It is said to be ‘the first comprehensive examination of Homer's similes in the Iliad as arenas of heroic competition’ and to provide ‘the first sustained critical examination of similes spoken by characters’. In all, the work claims to offer ‘a new take on the simile's place in the Iliad’. The book's focus may be summed up in one word: agôn. Nietzsche and Burkhardt labelled Greek culture agonistic 140 years ago; Finley and Adkins consolidated the picture of an irredeemably competitive society in the mid-twentieth century, and it is still very much in vogue. R.'s readings rearticulate the Finley orthodoxy (now 60 years old and never unassailable). The work's conceptual framework is derived directly from Parisian structuralism of the 1960s.

For R. the simile is a ‘mechanism’ of competition. (This is symptomatic of the equivocation in the orthodox approach of the last century, where the conception was of the mechanical while its overriding metaphor was always that of the living and the organic.) R.'s analysis proceeds like clockwork from binary opposition. In the structuralist era of ‘the great divide’, praise poetry was opposed to blame poetry; this dichotomy remains entrenched and informs R.'s definition of his subject. In R.'s treatment of similes in the ‘character-text’ (distinguished from the ‘narrator-text’), R. takes up the work of R. Martin, who has specialised in blame and invective. In Martin's view, success is paramount: ‘Speaking to win out – this is the goal of every Iliadic performer’. He concluded that the poet of the Iliad was ‘out to obliterate’ (The Language of Heroes [1989], pp. 220, 238). This may say more about the approach of a certain school; the Iliad knows the pain of obliteration. More immediately relevant to R.'s project, R. Janko generalised, perhaps unwarrantedly, ‘Full similes do occur in speeches, often in reproach or denigration of the enemy’ (The Iliad: a Commentary, vol. 4 [1992], p. 56). R.'s work proceeds from such a generalisation.

Readers have long admired the panoramic range of the similes in the Iliad: views out over the ever-changing sea; unexpected movements from the plain to distant mountain heights; all the stars in the tranquil silence of a clear night sky; fields of wheat sparkling with morning dew; the poor widow persevering in her work for a meagre return; the donkey ignoring the futile blows of boys while he continues to eat to his heart's content. Leaving aside this range, R. proposes to classify similes according to degrees of similarity. In doing so, he states, ‘I am here encouraged above all by Addison's essay on the simile’. This is not the celebrated Addison who translated Perrault's notorious criticism of the Homeric simile as possessing a ‘long tail’, but C. Addison, who in 1993 noted that ‘similes do not all express a uniform, absolute likeness between their two elements' (p. 16 n. 10). Seizing upon this rather banal observation, R. enters upon the calibration and tabulation of the degrees of similarity. In fact, R.'s tables offer only half the story: even if each simile could be formally fixed, it would be not only more and less like, but also less and more different, alike and unlike at the same time. R. does not even consider the possibility of alterity in which ‘My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun’. As so often in the discipline, this work arrives several decades after some very sophisticated rethinking of the questions of identity, difference and classification, and attempts to build upon a very diluted echo of that breakthrough work.

To take this point further, one might note the irony in R.'s embarking on a project to demonstrate that similarity can vary, when he ultimately seeks to reduce the stunning diversity of the Iliad's similes to the uniform rule of the agôn. Upon close consideration, every simile in the Iliad is in some way unique, defying the a priori and the generalisations of its commentators.

In rough quantitative terms, scholars tend to agree that there are some 240 extended similes in the narrative of the Iliad and 14 in the speeches. Given the claim to a ‘sustained critical examination’ of similes in speeches, one would reasonably expect coverage of those 14 similes. One would expect that, perhaps of all the similes that occur in speeches in the Iliad, the simile of the leaves in Book 6 would be given some analysis. That beautiful simile is one of reflection and demands thought. It is not an incitement to fight. R.'s book begins with a major evasion. He notably defines this comparison as a ‘contention’ and merely cites it as an instance of a particularly close degree of similarity between tenor and vehicle. No more than that. One looks to the end for some treatment of the inseparable and striking comparison Apollo makes of mortals to leaves in Book 21, but this is not treated either, for reasons arbitrarily declared only in the concluding pages.

The major significance of another key simile in the speeches is overlooked. In his anguish in Book 18, Achilles compares strife (Eris) and anger to both honey and smoke, in the ardent wish that, in their sweet destructiveness, they might vanish from existence. The sentiment recalls and endorses the epic's opening epithet for μῆνις, οὐλομένη (ἀπ-όλοιτο 18.107). The poet of the Iliad was taken to task by Heraclitus for this very thought. As a significant example of an extended simile in speech, this should have given R. pause, since his entire conception is, after all, founded upon Eris and the agôn.

In more ways than one, this is a loveless treatment of the Iliad. Thetis' similes for her maternal nurturing of her young son are excluded from consideration. And the laboured interrogation of what it is to say ‘A (is) like B’ completely ignores another moving comparison when a wretched old man calls upon Achilles to give thought to his father, one who is old ‘like me’ (ὥς περ ἐγών) and has no one to protect him (24.486–9). It is even more questionable when a key verb in the Iliad – ϕιλήμεναι – in Achilles' fierce repudiation of any possibility of friendship and love is rendered ‘it is not possible for you and me to strike a deal’ (22.265, my emphasis). On the glaring omissions from R.'s critical examination of similes in speeches, R. states brazenly in the conclusion, ‘Let these questions stand for the opportunity costs of my investigation into similes’ (p. 264). This is not even good business practice. In accepting the ‘opportunity costs’ of this publication, consideration should perhaps have been given to scaling back on the marketing claims.

Since this work is conceived from within the dominant model of sociology, the simile is viewed as serving what is taken to be the single most important goal in all spheres of life – status. At first the Homeric speakers are seen to be relatively well-behaved and simply ‘aim at distinction’. But this bias leads to a presentation of the famous scene of the Teikhoskopia, for example, as a competitive capping session where all the participants ‘try to keep up’ socially (p. 119). After abandoning similes in the speeches when they do not fit his preconceived agonistic schema, R. switches to considering similes generally that are deemed to demonstrate the ‘desire of the characters’ in the epic ‘to dominate the spotlight’ (p. 235). The narrative ‘spotlight’ is ‘something they compete over: they want to be the only one in it and they actively try to keep others from it’ (pp. 234–5). R. takes one more step, which he seems to regard as an unanticipated discovery, but which only demonstrates once more that in the treatment of the agôn there is no principle of μηδὲν ἄγαν: ‘The characters are shown competing not only with each other but also with the narrator’. Finally, in contrast to the Iliad, where the competitiveness reaches a ‘fevered pitch’ (p. 10), R. finds the Odyssey non-competitive. Odysseus, like the Aeschylean Zeus, is the incomparable. There were, let us not forget, many contestants, but they were slain by a Nobody, a wreaker of justice on malefactors.

It was always going to be a demanding task to produce a new approach to the Homeric simile while doing justice to the larger vision of the Iliad. This is not to say that the endeavour is not worthwhile, or that it is impossible. It is hard to say that the work under review will command attention in a crowded field where we find Pelion being piled upon Ossa. Much of this output consists of recycled material that is not really breaking through in any significant way. In time to come, it may well seem that the labours of this period were truly Sisyphean. After all, the Iliad is always ahead of us.