there slowly came a grand array of women,
all sent before me now by august Persephone,
and all were wives and daughters once of princes.
They swarmed in a flock around the dark blood.
– Homer
The Odyssey, Book 11, lines 258-261. Odysseus uses a bird metaphor to describe the flock of women in the underworld who swarm around the blood from the ram and ewe that he has sacrified. The wives and daughters of princes, they paint a desperate image of starving birds as they come to drink the blood.