At the end of our journey through the simile worlds of five poems, what have we learned about the simile world of epic poetry more broadly? Which characters and situations can be found in each poem? How do the pain, love, hunger, fear, cold, danger, and so forth experienced by those characters differ across poems, and how do they stay the same? How do similes immerse us in those feelings and experiences? The shape of the simile world resembles that of the mythological tales that form the basis of most epic stories, in that both are defined by the tension between a stable core common to every telling and the details that individual narrators change, omit, or create to tell their own unique version of the tale. To a great extent, the narrative in a traditional medium like epic or about a traditional story like the Trojan War is created by these tensions. And similes, a key feature of the epic genre, are framed by expressions that identify sameness and difference as an explicit focus of our attention.

In the Metamorphoses, Ovid’s simile world becomes a more fragmented and less cohesive place where simile characters from the past may appear rarely or not at all, similes are so short that they often do not achieve the immersive effects typical of the simile worlds of earlier epics, and they do not work hand in hand with the story to bring forward key themes. Some conventional simile features take on different functions in the Metamorphoses, such as the chase similes that describe erotic pursuits instead of battle scenes. Main roles become cameo appearances while minor characters from earlier epics may find themselves at center stage. Yet similes retain many of their familiar qualities, and some of the poem’s most memorable moments are achieved in part with heart-pounding scenes familiar from earlier epics of predators chasing their prey, raging fires, battle scenes, and sailing. Similes help the Metamorphoses both to claim the epic genre for itself and to take that genre to new places it had never been before. The story and the similes tell a tale of constancy and change, of passion rather than battle as the most important arena for human conflict, and of storytelling itself.

The dangers, sorrows, and failures of caretaking figures in the simile world of the Iliad parallel and reinforce the poem’s concern with the costs of poor leadership. Absent or incompetent leaders in the simile world range from shepherds and helmsmen to parents – both human and animal – who fail to keep their charges and children safe. Without effective leaders, both the simile characters and the story characters to whom they are compared are injured, killed, and bereaved. The similes contribute to an epic tale about the sufferings that all leaderless characters endure, whether a shepherd whose cattle are eaten by a lion, the grief of Patroclus over the sufferings of his fellow Greeks, or Trojan forces dying in battle. Even though the Greeks and Trojans are fighting each other, the simile world treats them very much the same. In scenes of battlefield stalemate, clusters of similes regularly bring together the perspectives of different participants and create unity between the warriors on both sides. The similes convey that more unites Greek and Trojan warriors than separates them, including but not limited to the misery they endure because of their leaders’ shortcomings.

A simile in an ancient Greek or Roman epic poem uses the simile form “A is like B” to frame a brief tale about something outwardly unrelated to the poem’s main story. The simile structure asserts a kinship between two things that come from different conceptual domains. Similes tell highly concentrated immersive stories, which invite the reader to experience and not simply to observe the described situation. To do justice to epic similes, they should be studied both within the immediate narrative contexts in which they appear and within the many webs of meaning that they create. Some of these are found within a single poem, while others emerge across multiple poems over time. A detailed reading of Apollonius Argonautica 2.121–29, which compares a fight between the Argonauts and the Bebrycians to wolves stealthily attacking a flock of sheep, sets out the common features of shepherding similes, the ways that similes tell their stories, and the style and approach of the book’s argument. Shepherding similes embody several relationships that bring out a range of themes fundamental not simply to all the poems in this book, but to any exploration of the human experience.

Human beings become scarcer than before in the simile world of the Aeneid, contributing to a tale about the loneliness and sorrow of human beings who struggle to connect with each other or to affect the world around them. Both Aeneas and the characters in the simile world are marked by solitude and isolation. The human characters in the simile world of the Aeneid share few strong ties with other creatures, and they often fail to affect the world around them in ways that their fellows in Greek epic would take for granted. In the story world, similes highlight moments of furor, the overpowering rage that underlies both love and war and threatens not simply Aeneas’ mission to found Rome but also the existence of a rational world order. Similes draw out isolation and overwhelming passion as two poles of emotion in the poem with little in between. They use new storytelling techniques that appear rarely or not at all in the similes of earlier epics, and they often lack an exit expression joining a simile to the story. These features weaken the conventional distinctions between similes and other components of epic narrative.

The simile world of Homer’s Odyssey is teeming with human connections, and family relationships play a central role. This distinctive aspect of the simile world of the Odyssey helps to tell the poem’s tale of human relationships, the burden of sorrow when they are disrupted, and the heroic task of keeping relationships alive through danger, separation, and loss. The Odyssey is not just about Odysseus’ homecoming but also homecoming itself. How do we know when we are truly “home”? What if we reach our home, but we cannot return there? What are the costs of a long absence, both for the person who returns and for those who remain at home? In what way can homecoming be considered a form of heroism? What complex mixture of feelings accompanies a long-awaited return home? The intertwined gladness and sorrow that defines the Odyssey’s tale of homecoming arises from the characters and incidents of the simile world at least as much as from the story of Odysseus and from the process of integrating the two more than from either sort of narrative individually.

Similes in Apollonius’ Argonautica tell two contrasting tales. On the one hand, humans with skilled expertise can exert an exhilarating amount of control over the world around them. The power of knowledge reflects the contemporary culture of Hellenistic Alexandria where new forms of knowledge were sprouting up everywhere. But such skills are largely useless for women, and they fail in the face of human passions. While characters in the simile world of the Argonautica use strategy to overcome danger in a way that is largely out of reach in the Homeric simile world, similes also highlight the intractable power of erotic desire as powerful and deadly as the battlefield of the Iliad. The Argonautica represents the first post-Homeric chapter in the story of epic similes. Simile structures take on a range and variety that previously was found only in the content of the similes. These new forms bring forward simile features that are peripheral in Homeric to reshape the epic genre in ways that reflect the ideas of the Hellenistic period. At moments of powerful emotion in the Argonautica, similes weave “erudition” and “emotion” inextricably together.