They are not an army. They are a presence. They have been eating for three years, or it feels that way to Telemachus, who has watched their numbers steadily grow, watched the stores thin to nothing, watched the servants move like ghosts between tables laden with meat and bread and wine that are his birthright. The hall smells like old grease and sweat and something underneath, something rotten. They believe the throne is empty. They sleep on the floors and wake up hungry again. They send a ship to the strait to murder the boy on his way home. They sit on the high seats and call for more wine and treat a beggar like sport. [SPOILER: They are locked in the hall they had made their own. They die with table legs and wine jugs in their hands because the weapons have been quietly moved upstairs. By the end the living step over the dead. The bodies are dragged to the courtyard and the floor scrubbed and sulfur burned through the hall, but the death soaks into the air and no amount of smoke burns that away.]
The Suitors
A hundred-odd noblemen camped in another man's house, eating his meat, courting his wife, hunting his son. The siege from inside.