ᾤχετο δὲ πρὸς θεὸν | κτέατ᾽ ἄγων Τροΐαθεν ἀκροθινίων· | ἵνα κρεῶν νιν ὕπερ μάχας | ἔλασεν ἀντιτυχόντ᾽ ἀνήρ μαχαίρᾳ. | βάρυνθεν δὲ περισσὰ Δελφοὶ ξεναγέται
And he [= Pyrrhos/Neoptlolemos] went to the god | bringing the riches of first-fruit offerings from Troy. | And there a man with a mákhaira smote him | as he got into a quarrel over slices of meat. | And the Delphians, conductors of guests [xenoi], were greatly vexed.
This myth tells about the death of Pyrrhos/Neoptolemos inside the sacred precinct of Apollo. The hero is killed in the course of a quarrel over slices of meat. The death of Pyrrhos /Neoptolemos is tied to rituals of sacrificing sheep at Delphi by way of a special kind of makhaira ‘dagger’. In this case, it is the hero himself who is killed, struck by a man wielding a makhaira. In Pindar Paean 6.117–120, we find a comparable but different version of the myth about the death of Pyrrhos/Neoptolemos: in that version, it is Apollo himself who kills the hero.
What follows is an epitome from Nagy 2011§§67–68:
{§67.} In Nemean 7, which follows the version of the myth as accepted in the island state of Aegina, it is made explicit that Neoptolemos was killed while he was wrangling over honorific portions of sacrificial meat, krea, N.7.42, and in this version the killing was done by a man who wielded a makhaira or ‘sacrificial knife’, N.7.42. As we know from another poetic source, the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, 535–537, the makhaira was the sacrificial implement conventionally used for the ritual slaughter of sheep at Delphi as also for the ritual cutting of portions of the victims’ meat (BA 135 §22n1). In Paean 6, which follows the version of the myth as accepted in Delphi, it is made explicit that the god Apollo himself, within his own sacred precinct or temenos, personally killed Neoptolemos while the hero was wrangling with the god’s amphipoloi ‘attendants’ over timai ‘honors’ that Neoptolemos as the main sacrificer claimed were his due, lines 84–86. In the version of the narrative as Pindar gives it here in Paean 6, the tīmai ‘honors’ are not specified. In Nemean 7, on the other hand, we have seen that the honors are specified as honorific portions of sacrificial meat, krea, N.7.42, and we have also seen that the killing in this version is done not directly by the god Apollo but by a man who wields a makhaira or ‘sacrificial knife’, N.7.42.
{§68.} In both versions, Neoptolemos as the main sacrificer to Apollo at Delphi becomes instead the main sacrificial victim of the god, slaughtered in the god’s own sacred precinct just as sacrificial sheep are slaughtered there. As we see from this shared feature, the two versions of the myth have in common the central idea that the violent death of this hero resulted from a ritual of sacrificial slaughter that went wrong, very wrong. Such an idea is typical of an aetiology, by which I mean a myth that explains and even confirms the stability of a ritual or of some other such institution by narrating a primordial event of instability in the mythical past. An aetiology, in other words, follows a pattern of mythmaking where something goes wrong in a myth and has to be corrected in a seasonally recurring ritual. In such a pattern, the myth functions as the aetiology for the ritual.