Odyssey 4.534 · Book 4, lines 534–537
Cut down like an ox at the manger
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τὸν δʼ οὐκ εἰδότʼ ὄλεθρον ἀνήγαγε καὶ κατέπεφνεν δειπνίσσας, ὥς τίς τε κατέκτανε βοῦν ἐπὶ φάτνῃ. οὐδέ τις Ἀτρεΐδεω ἑτάρων λίπεθʼ οἵ οἱ ἕποντο, οὐδέ τις Αἰγίσθου, ἀλλʼ ἔκταθεν ἐν μεγάροισιν.
And him, knowing nothing of his doom, Aegisthus led up and cut him down, when he had feasted him, as a man cuts down an ox at the manger. And not one of the son of Atreus's companions was left, of those who followed him, nor one of Aegisthus's, but they were slain in the halls.
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The setting
The welcome is a slaughter. Aegisthus brings the unsuspecting king in, feasts him, and kills him — and both his followers and Aegisthus's own men die together in the hall.
A note on this passage
The welcome ends in butchery. Aegisthus brings the king in, feasts him, and kills him mid-hospitality — and Homer reaches for the plainest, most humiliating image he has: a man cutting down an ox at its feeding-trough. No duel, no honor; a beast killed while it eats.
The ox-simile is the wound in the passage. The commander of all the Greeks at Troy, the sacker of cities, dies the death of penned livestock, unarmed and unaware. And the slaughter runs both ways — the king's companions and Aegisthus's own men fall together in the hall. This is the anti-nostos against which the whole Odyssey is measured: the homecoming that is not survival but a trap sprung at the table. It is the fate Odysseus must not walk into.
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