Laudator Temporis Acti

Homer, Odyssey 20.25-30 (tr. George Herbert Palmer):

As when a man near a great glowing fire turns to and fro a sausage, full of fat and blood, anxious to have it quickly roast; so to and fro Odysseus tossed, and pondered how to lay hands upon the shameless suitors, he being alone, and they so many.

ὡς δʼ ὅτε γαστέρʼ ἀνὴρ πολέος πυρὸς αἰθομένοιο,
ἐμπλείην κνίσης τε καὶ αἵματος, ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα
αἰόλλῃ, μάλα δʼ ὦκα λιλαίεται ὀπτηθῆναι,
ὣς ἄρʼ ὅ γʼ ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα ἑλίσσετο, μερμηρίζων
ὅππως δὴ μνηστῆρσιν ἀναιδέσι χεῖρας ἐφήσει
μοῦνος ἐὼν πολέσι.

W.B. Stanford ad loc.:

The comparison here between O.'s restless tossing and rolling on his bed and the way in which a haggis or black pudding (see on 18, 44) is turned (on a spit) when being roasted over a fire, is vivid and apt. Some literary snobs have found it uncourtly, even uncouth, and have tried to excise it or explain it away (e.g. Mme Dacier's attempt to prove that O. is compared to the man who is roasting, not to the pudding: see further in Pierron). Those who find a touch of burlesque in it are also, I think, wrong: H., as Bothe emphasizes, is aiming above all, at ἐνάργεια, vividness, here: he is not bound by the Augustan canons of taste nor daunted by the principle expressed (as many think) in Horace's warning (Ars Poetica 128): Difficile est propria communia dicere. On the other hand he is not bound necessarily to call a spade a spade either: cp. on 17, 300.