Then he sat down apart from the ships and let fly an arrow among them; and a terrible twang came from the silver bow. First he went after the mules and the swift dogs, but then, letting loose a sharp dart at the men themselves, he shot; and the pyres of the dead burned thick, without end.

The god sits down to shoot, like a hunter at a distance. Line 49 is all sound again: deinē de klangē genet’ argyreoio bioio, “a terrible twang came from the silver bow.” The word for bow, bios, differs from bios, “life,” only by its accent. Heraclitus made the pun: “the bow’s name is life, but its work is death” (fragment B48). The plague moves the way sickness moves through a camp, from the animals to the men. Aristotle’s Poetics (1461a) mentions this line: some read ourēas here not as “mules” but as “guards,” the sentries posted outside the camp. The sentence ends on the image that will close so many scenes in this poem: the pyres, crowded together, never going out.