"But down from a mountain swooped this great hook-beaked eagle,
yes, and he snapped their necks and killed them one and all
and they lay in heaps throughout the halls while he,
back to the clear blue sky he soared at once.
But I wept and wailed – only a dream, of course –
and our well-groomed ladies came and clustered round me,
sobbing, stricken: the eagle killed my geese."
– Homer
The Odyssey, Book 19, lines 606-612. Penelope asks Odysseus-the-beggar to interpret a dream she had about twenty geese she kept at her house that ended up being killed by an eagle. The geese and eagle are metaphors for the suitors and Odysseus, he explains to her. The dream foreshadows the suitors’ fate.