SIMILES

• usually long, and sometimes referred to as extended similes
• 'At that moment I seemed to see the whole of Ilium settling into flames like an ancient ash tree high in the mountains which farmers have hacked with blow upon blow of their double axes, labouring to fell it; again and again it threatens to fall, its foliage shudders and its head trembles and nods until at last it succumbs to its wounds and breaks with a dying groan, spreading ruin along the ridge' (bk 2)
• 'Ancient' - Troy is an ancient city, and it is a whole civilisation, developed over many years which is being destroyed
• 'Ash' - possible link between the ash tree, nymphs called Meliae and the creation of the bronze-age men. If Virgil intended this, it would be a comment on the destruction of Troy, marking the end of a particular era
• 'Ash' - the ash was a common sight in southern Italy, and so would be easily imagined by Virgil's audience
• 'high in the mountains' - Troy was built on a hill
• 'farmers' - Virgil often uses rural subject matter in his similes
• 'double axes' - these are the weapons of the Homeric world as well
• 'its foliage shudders' - the leaves are shaken. The same Latin word for shudders is used elsewhere in book 2, always for extreme fear in humans such as when the monsters attack Laocoon. the tree, and so Troy, is being personified (latin word for foliage also means hair)
• 'its head trembles and nods' - the personification continues, as the tree now has a head. As the tree becomes human, we get the violent image of a person being hacked to death. This brings us closer to the horror of what is happening no just to Troy, the city, but to individual Trojans. The image of a tree reacting to a violent onslaught is used again in bk 4, when Aeneas the oak is battered by the pleas for him to stay in Carthage
• 'wounds' - the personification continues, intensifying the picture of individuals being killed. The word 'wound' is used frequently of the victims of war, and also of Dido in book 4 and 6
• 'spreading ruin along the ridge' - Virgil pans out now from the individual tree to the sight of its impact on other trees on the ridge; at the same time, we move from the individual dying Trojan to the effect of one collapsing building on the city as a whole