Odyssey 3.7 · Book 3, lines 7–8
Nine companies, nine bulls apiece
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ἐννέα δʼ ἕδραι ἔσαν, πεντακόσιοι δʼ ἐν ἑκάστῃ ἥατο καὶ προύχοντο ἑκάστοθι ἐννέα ταύρους.
Nine companies there were, and five hundred men sat in each, and in each place held out before them nine bulls.
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Homer gives the scale of the Pylian sacrifice in exact numbers before the action resumes.
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Homer counts. Nine companies are seated along the beach, five hundred men to a company, nine bulls set out before each — an almost administrative tally of a great civic sacrifice, some four and a half thousand worshippers and eighty-one beasts.
The exact arithmetic is doing quiet work. This is communal piety on a vast, orderly scale — a whole kingdom feasting rightly, in ranks, under its old king. It is the deliberate opposite of what the reader has just left behind on Ithaca, where the suitors devour another man's herds in lawless disorder. Pylos shows Telemachus what a well-governed house looks like.
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