ABSTRACT
The Homeric parallel to this episode is the visit of Ulysses and his followers to the Isle of the Sun. Ulysses warns his men against killing the sacred oxen of the Sun for food, but they disobey him when he is asleep. Retribution for this impious sacrilege follows. Ulysses’s ship is struck by a thunderbolt and all lives are lost but Ulysses’s own.
