Odyssey 3.455 · Book 3, lines 455–458
The blood, the thigh-pieces, the fat
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τῆς δʼ ἐπεὶ ἐκ μέλαν αἷμα ῥύη, λίπε δʼ ὀστέα θυμός, αἶψʼ ἄρα μιν διέχευαν, ἄφαρ δʼ ἐκ μηρία τάμνον πάντα κατὰ μοῖραν, κατά τε κνίσῃ ἐκάλυψαν δίπτυχα ποιήσαντες, ἐπʼ αὐτῶν δʼ ὠμοθέτησαν.
And when the black blood had flowed out of it, and the life left the bones, at once they cut it up; straightway they cut out the thigh-pieces, all in due order, and covered them with fat, making a double fold, and laid raw flesh upon them.
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The setting
The heifer has been slaughtered. Homer now gives the fixed Homeric sacrifice sequence in miniature: the blood drained, the god's thigh-pieces cut out and wrapped in fat, and raw flesh laid on top for the fire.
A note on this passage
This is the technical heart of the sacrifice, told in the same fixed words the poem uses at every altar. The blood is let, life leaves the carcass, the beast is jointed, and the thigh-bones are cut out κατὰ μοῖραν, ‘in due measure,’ wrapped in a double layer of fat and topped with strips of raw meat — the portion that will be burned for the god.
The undercurrent is exactness as piety. The gods get the bones and fat; the worshippers keep the meat — an arrangement the poem never questions and Hesiod traces back to Prometheus's trick on Zeus. What matters here is that everything be done ‘according to portion.’ μοῖρα, the word for a share of meat, is the same word as a share of fate: to divide the victim rightly is to keep faith with the order of things.
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