Similes In The Odyssey

John Milton’s bee simile in Book Two of Paradise Lost, is rooted in the epic tradition. Homer, Vergil and Dante look to the nature of bees in order to understand the human condition and an ideal society. Bees are described by these poets as unified, loyal to their king and hive, hard workers, untainted by carnal desires, and righteous in their ability to love. Milton alludes to the characteristics given by the poets before him in a complex simile that explains the beginning of Satan’s Pandemonium. Homer’s The Iliad first presents a bee simile in Book II where Nestor, The King of Pylos, leads an army of Achaeans to an assembly to discuss the war against the Trojans:

Just as tribes of swarming bees emerge from some hollow rock, constantly

Each tribe comes from their ship like a “cluster” of bees comes from one flower and another “cluster” comes from another. Milton uses the same word, “clusters”, to describe the army of devils that awake from their fall and begin to rise as an army: “In clusters: they among fresh dews and flowers”. By claiming that the devils are in clusters, Milton is alluding to Homer’s use of the word to signify the coming together of individuals. To explain the individuality of the devils, Milton also portrays them as bees coming from various flowers in the spring, just as Homer does to show the Achaean tribes coming from their various ships. While the bees in both The Iliad and Paradise Lost may choose to fly in different clusters around flowers, they eventually come together in a large swarm. Homer’s bees are coming together as a unified body to attend an assembly: “marched out in companies their many tribes to the place of assembly”. At the assembly, the soldiers will no longer be divided into their tribes, and instead unified under the rule of Agamemnon. So too will the devils be united together as they make an assembly to, “…expatiate and confer/Their state affairs.” The devils were once individual angels who have fallen from heaven, but are now a structured

A Trojan soldier, Asius, explains to his company that the Achaean’s retreat inside their city walls will only make them stronger because they have a powerful loyalty to home:

But they, like wasps of nimble waist or bees that have made their nest in a rugged path and leave not their hollow home, but remain, and in defence of their young ward off hunters, so these men, though they are but two, are not minded to give ground from the gate till they either slay or are slain.

Homer attributes the virtue of loyalty to the nature of bees, and by explaining that the Achaeans are like bees in their loyalty to home, he is explaining that they have a quality of devotion. Not only are the bees loyal to their hive, but loyal to a hive that rests “in a rugged path” where abandonment may be an easier course of action than defense. Yet the bees remain despite the difficulty of defending the hive. The Achaeans are under attack, and such an attack is their “rugged path” but they will not yield to the enemy. The devil’s in Paradise Lost establish their “straw-built citadel” in a place of chaos, and so they are like Homer’s bees who have placed their hive in an unfavorable spot. By describing the citadel as “straw-built” there is a sense of frailty that makes it seem as if it could bee easily destroyed. But the devils choose to have their assembly and carry out their duties in such a location, even if it may be better to