All my lovely rapids are crammed with corpses now,
no channel in sight to sweep my currents out to sacred sea –
I’m choked with corpses and still you slaughter more,
you blot out more! Leave me alone, have done –
captain of armies, I am filled with horror!
– Homer
The Iliad, Book 21, lines 246-250. Things become so bloody during the raging Achilles’s killing spree in the river that it becomes clogged up with corpses. A horrified river god Xanthus takes on the form of a man and calls on Achilles to stop the carnage in the river.