Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Sophie Mills

Critical Essay by Sophie Mills

SOURCE: Mills, Sophie. “Achilles, Patroclus, and Parental Care in Some Homeric Similes.” Greece & Rome 47, no. 1 (April 2000): 3-18.

In the following essay, Mills concentrates on extended similes that recall scenes of parental or mutual care in the Iliad—particularly those associated with Achilles and Patroclus—as they emphasize the poem's countertheme of “love and cooperation between human beings.”

And the two fought it out over Kebriones, like lions who in the high places of a mountain, both in huge courage, and both hungry fight together over a killed deer.

(Il. 16.756-8)

… the flung stones dropped to the ground like snowflakes which the winds' blast whirling the shadowy clouds drifts in their abundance along the prospering earth.

(Il. 12.156-8; cf. Il. 12.278-87)

As when dense disaster closes on one who has murdered a man in his own land and he comes to the land of others, to...
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