Ancient rhetoricians appear to have had no technical term referring precisely to the figure now commonly called a ‘simile’. Although they recognized that some comparisons were introduced by words corresponding to ‘like’ and ‘as’, the distinction between these similes and other modes of comparison seems not to have been precisely correlated with any set of rhetorical terms. When similes appear in the literary treatises as illustrations of such common terms as εἰκών and similitudo, they are often in the company of other illustrative examples which do not correspond to the modern definition of simile.

of the four major terms of comparison – εἰκών, παραβολή, imago, and similitudo – no one of them refers appreciably more to a particular form of comparison, such as simile, than do the other three.