The battle theme, which appears in Sassu’s works as early as the end of the 1920s, generally is tied to figures of horsemen engaged in solitary endeavors or fighting each other, as in the case here, inspired by the artist’s reading of myth and the classical world. As with other subjects, once Sassu identified a theme he found stimulating, he returned to it often, almost as though wanting to probe it completely and expose all its facets. The death of Patrocles, Achilles’ inseparable friend, killed by Hector during the Trojan War, returns in various versions, like the ones, albeit quite distant in time, of 1939 and 1979. The frieze-like rhythm of this painting is underlined by the alternation of colors - reds, blacks, whites - which set up a pronounced cadence in a compositional layout tending to the symmetrical.