So intense is the Homeric realisation of the hero’s superhuman powers, that they scarcely excite surprise. And his belongings are on the scale of his qualities. None but himself could wield his spear; his armour was forged in Olympus; his shield was a panorama of human life; his horses would obey only his guidance, or that of his delegates. Not for common handling, indeed, were the ‘wind-swift’ coursers born of Zephyr and the Harpy on the verge of the dim Ocean-stream. Themselves deathless and invulnerable, they were destined, nevertheless, to share the pangs of ‘brief mortality.’
Sunt lachrymæ rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt.
For they had a yoke-fellow of a different strain from their own, captured by Achilles at the sack of the Cilician Thebes, and killed by Sarpedon in the course of his duel with Patroclus. And they had to endure worse than the loss of Pedasus. Patroclus, whose gentle touch and voice they had long ago learned to love, fell in the same fight, and they stood paralysed with grief, and unheeding alike the blows and the blandishments of their authorised driver, Automedon.
They neither to the Hellespont would bear him, nor the fight, But still as any tombstone lays his never-stirréd weight On some good man or woman’s grave, for rites of funeral, So unremovéd stood these steeds, their heads to earth let fall, And warm tears gushing from their eyes with passionate desire Of their kind manager; their manes, that flourished with the fire Of endless youth allotted them, fell through the yoky sphere, Ruthfully ruffled and defiled.[118]
_Iliad_, xvii. 432-40 (Chapman’s trans.).
A northern companion-picture is furnished by Grani mourning the death of Sigurd, whom he had borne to the lair of Fafnir, and through the flames to woo Brynhild, and now survived only to be immolated on his pyre. The tears, however, of the weeping horses in the Ramayana and Mahabharata flow rather through fear than through sorrow.
The final appearance of the Pelidean steeds upon the scene of the Iliad reaches a tragic height, probably unequalled in the whole cycle of poetical delineations from the lower animal-world. Achilles, roused at last to battle, and gleaming in his new-wrought armour, cried with a terrible voice as he leaped into his car—