Asius the chickpea

I have forty deaths and a dozen similes after that to work through; at the rate of one a day, I'm - not going to be done by the end of May.  But what Oswald does is always interesting.  With Asius for example, she combines the four places he's mentioned in the Iliad, briefly in the Catalog and at some length in book 12 and 13, into 11 stripped-down lines that tell us everything we need.  Asius had great horses; they brought him all the way from Arisbe; but he couldn't leave them behind when he should have, and that's what killed him.

But it's the simile, once again, that really nails it.  It's the simile about beans and chickpeas getting blown away in all directions by the impact and the wind of the winnowing-shovel, and Homer uses it to describe how an arrow bounces off Menelaus' breastplate.   What's it doing here, though?  Once again, subject and object interchange.  In Homer, chickpea = object = arrow, driven by the winnower/Helenos, and bouncing off Menelaus (the subject's) breastplate.  Here, the chickpea = object = Asius, driven by his horses/the winds of fate/ his own foolish error, and bouncing off - well, in some direction, but not under his own control, and to his death.

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