Years before immersing myself in Luis Segalá y Estalella’s Spanish rendering of the Iliad, I had already been moved by the exquisite summary José Martí wrote for La Edad de Oro. Its simplicity, its scandalous beauty, is devastating.

With one of its passages in mind, I want to comment on a painting housed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Painted by Henri Regnault in 1868, it depicts the charioteer Automedon struggling to restrain Xanthus and Balius, the immortal, majestic horses of Achilles. They are frantic over the death of Patroclus. They grasp human emotion and know the news will devastate the Achaean. And not only that.

The scene Martí narrates is disarming in its clarity:

“(...) Patroclus forgot Achilles’ command not to drive too close to the walls. Invincible Apollo awaits him at the foot of the ramparts, climbs onto the chariot, stuns him with a blow to the head, casts to the ground Achilles’ helmet—never before touched by earth—shatters Patroclus’ spear and rends his breastplate so that Hector might strike him. Patroclus fell, and the divine horses wept.”

Let us turn to the source.

“Sing, O goddess, the wrath of Achilles son of Peleus.”

With that verse, laden with dark foreboding, begins the classical version of the monumental Iliad. Its emotional terrain is intense, tragic, profoundly human. It is marked by wrath, wounded honor, loss, fleeting glory, and the constant shadow of death. Its scenes brim with a proud anguish, filial love, and divine fury. A poetic world where no one escapes fate and heroes fight knowing they will never see their children again.

In one way or another, deeply or superficially, we are all familiar with these stories—stories that, above all, and as that first verse suggests, speak of the love, the grief, and the fury of Achilles. Lamentably, when we think of Achilles we think of Brad Pitt. And as Pitt as Brad may be, he reduces Achilles to a petulant blond with martial skills. That is not enough to embody a demigod with 99.23% immortality. A personal opinion.

The painting.

What an obsession the Greeks had for accomplishing their greatest feats stark naked. Honestly. Barely swathed in a couple of meters of fabric—tunics, according to the Hellenists. Automedon appears astonishingly neat, pale, and immaculate for a man who has spent nearly a decade gripping the reins of Achilles’ sacred beasts.

His horses are—appear—glorious. Inconsolable, beyond reason. They are overtaken by emotions far deeper than mere rage or loss. They neither obey nor allow themselves to be soothed. Automedon does not master them; he barely survives them. His taut body becomes the emblem of spontaneous resistance in the face of emotional chaos. And not only his own.

The death of Patroclus, Achilles’ loss, has unleashed a fury that surpasses the theatre of war and spills over the very fabric of nature. Mourning transformed into volcanic wrath. The irrational, for a moment, eclipsing the rational.

There is a literary device, generously extended into visual language: metonymy. To name one thing through a close association. To say “I am reading Cervantes,” when Cervantes is a man, not a book—that kind of rhetorical figure. Achilles’ horses summon his presence implicitly, his telluric character, through associative metonymy. They are so bound to him—by their divine origin, their fame, their role in war—that they evoke him without showing him.

Barely restrained by Automedon’s straining arm, these ungovernable horses conjure in my mind the image of a legendary hero born from the very radiance they emit. From such horses, such an Achilles. Look at their muscles straining against the skin, their curling manes streaming in the wind. Their eyes, dark as a midnight sky, carry a grief that is not animal but divine—a pain impossibly alive.

The scene corresponds to Book XIX of the Iliad. Achilles will return to battle, and his adored steeds, Xanthus and Balius, recoil in vast distress, knowing the shadow that fell upon warm Patroclus will soon overtake their master. These are horses, offspring of Zephyr, the god of the wind, who whispers to them by divine commission that death is near. A pictorial moment steeped in foreboding, which, despite its ominous air, conveys both epic force and elegy, power and fate. If I had to define them in two words: they are the horses of cataclysm.

When I saw the work and read its title, I could think only of the eloquent figurative ellipse: the hero’s absence making him more powerful precisely because he does not appear, but is intuited through the surge of ungovernable energy. A poetic way to invoke him through what he owns: the horses, as one might also use the sword or the shield. A resource frequent in epic poetry and, visually, in narrative art. Odysseus’ bow, later on, for instance.

A second thought, more mischievous: picturing the Achilles imagined by Henri Regnault. I suspect he omitted him because his hand trembled and his fevered brow broke into a mist of sweat.

What is it that artist and work together might be saying?

That Automedon may stand for the individual struggling to master forces beyond his reach. The horses are not mere animals—they embody instinct, trauma, and an inescapable fate. In their tension we hear the moment when a human being realizes he cannot govern nature, not even his own, and yet cannot stop trying. The drama of self‑awareness: to know oneself bound and still persist, because stubbornness is also part of being human. And what is that, if not the endless attempt to tame the wild colts on our road toward death, often through mud and fire?

P.S.

Jung, at this point, would ask for the floor: “What I see are archetypes rising from the collective unconscious: the fallen hero, the sacred beasts, the faithful servant’s presence.”

What else do you see, if you look closely? Me, of course, oozing content… don’t you think?

You have witnessed a representation that does not represent the great Achilles. An absence we feel like the imagined winds of an oncoming hurricane—the kind that, even in calm, makes us hammer boards across our windows. But there are plenty of Achilles. Some, as we will see in a second post… fit to hang on a single nail.