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For him (Patroclos) Automedon led the fast-running horses under
the yoke, Xanthos and Balios, who tore with the winds' speed,
horses stormy Podarge once conceived of the west wind
and bore, as she grazed in the meadow beside the swirl of the Ocean.
In the traces beside these he put unfaulted Pedasos
whom Achilleus brought back once when he stormed Eetion's city.
He, mortal as he was, ran beside the immortal horses.
The Death of Sarpedon:
Once again Sarpedon threw wide with a cast of his shining
spear, so that the pointed head overshot the left shoulder
of Patroklos; and now Patroklos made the second cast with the brazen
spear, and the shaft escaping his hand was not flung vainly
but struck where the beating heart is closed in the arch of the muscles.
He fell, as when an oak tree goes down or a white poplar,
or like a towering pine tree which in the mountains the carpenters
have hewn down with their whetted axes to make a ship-timber.
So he lay there felled in front of his horses and chariots
roaring, and clawed with his hands at the bloody dust; or as
a blazing and haughty bull in a huddle of shambling cattle
when a lion has come among the herd and destroys him
dies bellowing under the hooked claws of the lion, so now
before Patroklos the lord of the shield-armoured Lykians
died raging, and called aloud to his beloved companions:
"Dear Glaukos, you are a fighter among men. Now the need comes
hardest upon you to be a spearman and a bold warrior." |
