And Achilles led them now in a throbbing chant of sorrow,
laying his man-killing hands on his great friend’s chest,
convulsed with bursts of grief. Like a bearded lion
whose pride of cubs a deer-hunter has snatched away,
out of some thick woods, and back he comes, too late.
and his heart breaks but he courses after the hunter.
hot on his tracks down glen on twisting glen –
where can he find him? – gripped by piercing rage.
– Homer
The Iliad, Book 18, lines 367-374. Achilles mourns the death of his close friend Patroclus. Gripped by rage and in an epic simile compared to a lion whose pride of young have been snatched away by a hunter, he vows revenge against Hector.