Read the excerpt from the odyssey. in a smithy one sees a white-hot axehead or an adze plunged and wrung in a cold tub, screeching steam– the way they make soft iron hale and hard—: just so that eyeball hissed around the spike. the use of the epic simile in this excerpt the reader understand that the cyclops only has one eye. how brutal odysseus and his men are. the size of the wooden spear. how hot the spear actually is.