Odysseus scanned his house to see if any man
still skulked alive, still hoped to avoid black death.
But he found them one and all in blood and dust…
great hauls of them down and out like fish that fishermen
drag from the churning gray surf in looped and coiling nets
and fling ashore on a sweeping hook of beach – some noble catch
heaped on the sand, twitching, lusting for fresh salt sea
but the Sungod hammers down and burns their lives out…
so the suitors lay in heaps, corpse covering corpse.
– Homer
The Odyssey, Book 22, lines 406-414. Odysseus looks at the bodies of the dead suitors, scanning the house to check if any remain alive, killing them too. An epic simile conveys the horror of the slaughter. The suitors are compared to dead and twitching fish hauled from the sea in nets and piled in a boat. Odysseus is likened to a fisherman and also to the sun god Helios who kills any surviving fish.