in many ways, homeric similes stand apart from their surroundings: “because of its characteristic everyday content the Homeric simile for a moment unites narrator and audience in their world, not that of the heroes, as together they marvel at the mighty deeds of the past.” At the same time, scholarship continues to demonstrate that this distance does not stop similes from making vital thematic contributions to the epics. In the spirit of such inquiries, this study has revealed that his similes are an essential tool in the poet's depiction of his characters as competitors in the Iliad. More precisely, I deployed comparative and narratological approaches to bolster a series of close readings in which I argue that similes both in the character-text and the narrator-text can emerge as mechanisms and sites of competition. By deploying similes (and likenesses), the heroes distinguish themselves as speakers and thereby compete in the linguistic field. This contestation becomes more explicit when a character responds with a simile, most often through processes of reuse and recharacterization, to the previous simile(s) of another character or of the narrator. Similes in the narrator-text also reveal an agonistic orientation. In a sequence of similes, that which follows can be constructed so as to top that which precedes: this move makes all the greater the success of the referent of the capping simile.