Homer's lament belongs to Zeus and the grieving horses
the awful cry of Homer that man was only the saddest of all the beasts of the field
The identifiable passage is Iliad 17.446–447. Zeus, watching Achilles' immortal horses mourn their fallen charioteer Patroclus, reflects on the misery of mortals (17.423–455). Chesterton paraphrases the judgment rather than quoting a particular English translation. His subsequent reference to people creeping on the earth also recalls the passage's description of earthbound living creatures.
The dramatic setting complicates the opposition between human sadness and animal life: these horses themselves grieve, and Zeus regrets having exposed immortal creatures to human suffering. The words express divine pity within a particular scene, not a separately argued doctrine that humans have no dignity. Chesterton extracts their anthropological force to sharpen his contrast with the damaged divine image. The inspected witness is Theoi's transcription of A. T. Murray's 1924 Loeb translation, later than Orthodoxy (1908), so it verifies the ancient passage, not Chesterton's English source. The archaic epic has no single modern-style first-publication date.
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