It always come back to Homer

I have a problem of seeing Homer everywhere. I am a Homerholic. However, I delighted in seeing the reference to book three of the Iliad in our reading. The beginning of Iliad, book three opens with a simile of the Trojan war cry compared with the sound of cranes as they wage war on the Pygmies. That the allusion is brought up with relation to something like people fleeing rats is interesting. I think that Rutilius is proposing that the ruins were created by war. Book three of the Iliad is the gateway to the greater warfare of the book. Paris duels Menelaus and is saved from death by Aphrodite. Menelaus technically wins, but the war continues. Rutilius by alluding to a simile about war within a poem about war discusses a reality of cities being laid waste by war. The explanation of the citiy’s fall that causes him to smile, citizens chased out by rats, is unrealistic. This reasoning is why he thinks that the place was more likely destroyed by war; it is more congruent with reality.