Extract from Pope's translation of the Iliad, Book XI, describing Agamemnon's rampage during the third battle:
Wide o’er the field with guideless fury rolls,
Breaking their ranks, and crushing out their souls;
While his keen falchion drinks the warriors’ lives;
More grateful, now, to vultures than their wives!
Unless the meaning of the bolded line is idiomatic, it's lost on me. Is the poet implying that the warriors' souls would like their vanquished corpses, by the action of vultures, to disappear from the battlefields? Wouldn't a burial (or rather, a cremation) serve the purpose more honorably?