To close the pomp, Aethon, the steed of state,
Is led, the funeral of his lord to wait;
Stripp’d of his trappings, with a sullen pace
He walks, and the big tears run rolling down his face.
In the Iliad, Homer thus renders the emotion of Patroclus’ war horses evinced for that hero:
Restive they stood, and obstinate in woe:
Still as a tombstone, never to be moved
On some good man or woman unreproved
Lays its eternal weight; or fix’d, as stands
A marble courser by the sculptor’s hands.