There is nothing alive more agonized than man
of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.

– Homer

The Iliad, Book 17, lines 515-516. Zeus says this out of pity for the horses of Achilles’s chariot, who are weeping over the death of Patroclus. The father of the gods is referring here to the powers of fate, lamenting the fact that the gods gave these immortal beasts to a mortal doomed to death, Achilles.