sleep with the fishes

Meanings

1. To be dead, with one's corpse disposed of in a body of water.

Etymology

The idea of sleeping with fishes first appears in Homer's Iliad (21), in which Achilles threatens (and kills) Lycaon (son of Priam), who will 'sleep with the fishes', in some translations. There was emphasis on the brutality of this method because it meant the body would remain forever unburied akin to an animal (fish). The earliest known exact phrase is from 1833, see the quotation below. The phrase was popularized in the motion picture The Godfather (1972). The 1969 book on which the movie was based includes a large, dead fish wrapped in a bulletproof vest being used to signify that a character is "sleeping on the bottom of the ocean", but not the phrase.