Quote by Geoffrey S. Kirk

“The purpose of a simile is to encourage the listener's imagination by likening something in the narrative of the heroic past to something which is directly within his own experience; and so the majority of Homeric similes are drawn from everyday life. This means, that they, like Akhilleus' shield, give us a view of the world lying beyond the war, the world that existed in the poet's own day and long after him.”

Quote by Geoffrey S. Kirk