Stuff such as the drama of a king feeding a man's son to him as punishment would simply be rendered as 'His son I divided and fed to him, then sent him on his way.' or whatever.
Does anyone have any idea why this is?
You're talking about literature. That's a hard thing to think about if you don't have a specific text in mind. I have a suspicion this particular bit might be drawn from Herodotus, but I think we really need the text to make any useful comments.