CHAPTER IV.HOMERIC HORSES.

Thegreater part of the Continent of Europe, including Britain, not then, perhaps, insulated by a ‘silver streak,’ was prehistorically overrun with shaggy ponies, large-headed and heavily-built, but shown by their short, pointed ears and brush-tails to have been genuinehorses, exempt from leanings towards the asinine branch of the family. This, indeed, would be a hazardous statement to make upon the sole evidence of the fragmentary piles of these animals’ bones preserved in caves and mounds; since even a complete skeleton could tell the most experienced anatomist nothing as to the shape of their ears or the growth of hair upon their tails. We happen, however, to be in possession of their portraits. For the men of that time had artistic instincts, and drew with force and freedom whatever seemed to them worthy of imitation; and among their few subjects the contemporary wild horse was fortunately included. With his outward aspect, then, we are, through the medium ofthese diluvialgraffiti, on bone-surfaces and stags’ antlers, thoroughly familiar.

It was that of a sturdy brute, thirteen or fourteen hands high, not ill represented, on a reduced scale, by the Shetland ponies of our own time, but untamed, and, it might have been thought, untameable. The race had not then found its true vocation. Man was enabled, by his superior intelligence, to make it his prey, but had not yet reached the higher point of enlisting its matchless qualities in his service. Horses were, accordingly, neither ridden nor driven, but hunted and eaten. Piles of bones still attest the hippophagous habits of the ‘stone-men.’ At Solutré, near Mâcon, a veritable equine Golgotha has been excavated; similar accumulations were found in the recesses of Monte Pellegrino in Sicily; and Sir Richard Owen made the curious remark that, evidently through gastronomic selection, the osseous remains of colts and fillies vastly predominated, in the débris from the cave of Bruniquel, over those of full-grown horses.[87]

87.Phil. Trans.1869, p. 535.

The descent of our existing horses from the cave-animals is doubtful, Eastern importations having at any rate greatly improved and modified the breed. Wild horses, indeed, still at the end of the sixteenth century roamed the slopes of the Vosges, and were hunted as game in Poland and Lithuania;[88]but theymay have beenmuzins, or runaways, like the mustangs on the American prairies. Nowadays, certainly, the animal is found in a state of aboriginal freedom nowhere save on the steppes of Central Asia, in the primitive home of the race. There, in all likelihood, the noblest of brute-forms was brought to perfection; there it was dominated by man; and thence equestrian arts, with their manifold results for civilisation, were propagated among the nations of the world. They were taught to the Egyptians, it would seem, by their shepherd conquerors, but were not learned by the Arabs until a couple of millenniums later, the Arab contingent in Xerxes’ army having been a ‘camel-corps.’ The Persians, indeed, early picked up the habit of riding from the example of their Tartar neighbours; yet that it was no original Aryan accomplishment, the absence of a common Aryan word to express the idea sufficiently shows. The relations of our primitive ancestors with the animal had, at the most, reached what might be called the second, or Scythian stage, when droves of half-wild horses took the place of cattle, and mares’ milk was an important article of food. The aboriginal cavalry of the desert belonged, on the other hand, to the wide kinship of Attila’s Huns, who, separated from their steeds, were as helpless as swans on shore. The war-chariot, however, was an Assyrian invention, dating back at least to the seventeenth centuryB.C.It quickly reached Egypt on one side, India on theother, and was adopted, some time before the Dorian invasion, by the Achæans of the Peloponnesus. Mycenæan grave-stones of about the twelfth century are engraven with battle and hunting scenes, the actors in which are borne along in vehicles of essentially the same construction with those brought before us in the Iliad. They show scarcely any variation from the simple model developed on the banks of the Tigris; yet there was no direct imitation. Homer was profoundly unconscious of Ninevite splendours. He had no inkling of the existence of a great Mesopotamian monarchy far away to the East, beyond the rising-places of the sun, where one branch of his dichotomised Ethiopians dwelt in peace. Nevertheless, the life that he knew, and that was glorified by him, was touched with many influences from this unknown land. If some of them filtered through Egypt on their way, acquaintance with the art of charioteering certainly took a less circuitous route. For the third horse of the original Assyrian team was never introduced into Egypt, and was early discarded in Assyria itself. He figures continually, however, in Homeric engagements, running, loosely attached, beside the regularly yoked pair, one of whom he was destined to replace in case of emergency. The presence, then, of this ‘silly,’ or roped horse,[89]παρήορος ἵππος, demonstratesboth the high antiquity, and the Anatolian negotiation, of the loan which included him.

88.Hehn and Stallybrass,Wanderings of Plants and Animals, pp. 38-39.

89.The word ‘silly’ thus applied is evidently cognate with the GermanSeile= Greek σειρὰ, a rope, from the rootswar, to tie. So in theAncient Mariner, the ‘sillybuckets on the deck’ are the buckets attached to a rope. Similarly, the third horse was sometimes called by the Greeks σειραφόρος, ‘drawing by a rope.’

The fertile plains of Babylonia probably furnished the equine supplies of Egypt and Asia Minor during some centuries before the Nisæan stock,[90]cultivated in Media, acquired its Hellenic reputation. So far as can be judged from ancient vase-paintings, the horses of Achilles and Hector were of pure Oriental type. They owned the same points of breeding—the small heads, slender yet muscular legs, and high-arching necks, the same eager eye and proud bearing, characterising the steeds that shared the triumphs of Asurbanipal and Shalmaneser. The same quasi-heroic position, too, belonged to the horse in the camp before Troy and at Nineveh. He shared, in both scenes of action, only the nobler pursuits of man, and was exempt from the drudgery of servile work. The beasts of burden, alike of the Iliad and of the sculptures of Khorsabad and Kouyunjik, were mules and oxen, not horses. Equine co-operation was reserved for war and the chace—for war alone, indeed, by the Homeric Greeks, who appear always to have hunted on foot. This was inevitable. Modes of conveyance, were they drawn by Sleipnir or Areion, would have been an encumbrance in pursuing game through the thickets of Parnassus, or over the broken skirts of Mount Ida.

90.Blakesley’sHerodotus, iii. 106.

Only the chief Greek and Trojan leaders rode in chariots. Their possession was a mark of distinction, and conferred the power of swift locomotion, but was otherwise of no military use. Their owners alighted from them for the serious business of fighting, although glad, if worsted or disabled, to fall back upon the utmost speed of their horses to carry them out of reach of their foes. This fashion of warfare, however, had completely disappeared from Greece proper before the historic era. Only in Cyprus, chariots are heard of among the paraphernalia of battle in 498B.C.[91]None figured at Marathon or Mantineia; brigades of mounted men had taken their place. Cavalry, on the other hand, had no share in the engagements before Troy.

91.Herodotus, v. 113.

The definiteness of intention with which Homeric epithets were bestowed is strikingly evident in the distribution of those relating to equestrian pursuits. That they have no place worth mentioning in the Odyssey, readers of our last chapter will be prepared to hear; nor are they sprinkled at random through the Iliad. Thus, while the Trojans collectively are frequently called ‘horse-tamers,’hippodamoi—a designation still appropriate to the dwellers round Hissarlik—the Greeks collectively are never so described.[92]They could not have been, in fact, without some degree of incongruity. For manyof them, being of insular origin and maritime habits, knew as much about hippogriffs as about horses, unless it were the white-crested ones ruled by Poseidon. And the poet’s close instinctive regard to such distinctions appears in the remarkable circumstance that Odysseus and Ajax Telamon, islanders both, are the only heroes of the first rank who invariably combat on foot.

92.Mure,Literature of Ancient Greece, vol. ii. p. 87.

The individual Greek warriors singled out for praise as ‘horse-tamers’ are only two—Thrasymedes and Diomed. The choice had, in each case, readily discernible motives. Thrasymedes was a son of Nestor; and Nestor, through his father Peleus, was sprung from Poseidon, the creator and patron of the horse. This mythical association resulted from a natural sequence of ideas. The absence of the horse from the ‘glist’ring zodiac’ is one of many proofs of his strangeness to Eastern mythology; but the neglect was compensated in the West. His position in Greek folk-lore, according to Dr. Milchhöfer,[93]indicates a primitive confusion of thought between winds and waves as cause and effect, or rather, perhaps, tells of the transference to the sea of the cloud-fancies of an inland people. However this be, horse-headed monsters are extremely prevalent on the archaic engraved stones found numerously in the Peloponnesus and the islands of the Ægean; and these monsters—winged, and with birds’ legs—represent, it would seem, theoriginal harpy-form in which early Greek imagination embodied the storm-winds—

93.Die Anfänge der Kunst in Griechenland, pp. 58-61.

Boreas and Cæcias and Argestes loud—Eurus and Zephyr with their lateral noise,Sirocco and Libecchio.

Boreas and Cæcias and Argestes loud—

Eurus and Zephyr with their lateral noise,

Sirocco and Libecchio.

The horse-headed Demeter, too, was one of the Erinyes, under-world dæmonic beings of windy origin, merging indeed into the Harpies. The Homeric Harpy Podarge, mother of the immortal steeds of Achilles, was, moreover, of scarcely disguised equine nature; while the colts of Ericthonius had Boreas for their sire.

These, o’er the teeming cornfields as they flew,Skimm’d o’er the standing ears, nor broke the haulm,And, o’er wide Ocean’s bosom as they flew,Skimm’d o’er the topmost spray of th’ hoary sea.[94]

These, o’er the teeming cornfields as they flew,

Skimm’d o’er the standing ears, nor broke the haulm,

And, o’er wide Ocean’s bosom as they flew,

Skimm’d o’er the topmost spray of th’ hoary sea.[94]

94.Iliad, xx. 226-29 (Lord Derby’s translation).

So Æneas related to Achilles; not perhaps without some touch of metaphor.

The figure of speech by which the swiftest of known animals was likened to a rushing tempest, lay ready at hand; and a figure of speech is apt to be treated as a statement of fact by men who have not yet learned to make fine distinctions. Upon this particular one as a basis, a good deal of fable was built. The northern legends, for instance, of the Wild Huntsman, and of the rides of the blusterous Odin upon an eight-legged charger equally at homeon land and on sea; besides the story of the strong horse Svadilfaxi, personifying the North Wind, who helped his master, the icy Scandinavian winter, to build the castle of the Asar. The same obvious similitude was carried out, by southern imaginations, in the subjection of the horse to the established ruler of winds and waves, who is even qualified by the characteristically equine epithet ‘dark-maned’ (κυανοχαίτης.)[95]The attribution, however, to Poseidon of a more or less equine nature may have been immediately suggested by the resemblance, palpable to unsophisticated folk, of his crested billows to the impetuous advance of galloping steeds, whose flowing manes and curving lineaments of changeful movement seemed to reproduce the tossing spray and thunderous charge of the ‘earth-shaking’ element.

95.Cf. Geddes,Problem of the Homeric Poems, p. 207.

In the Thirteenth Iliad, the closeness of this relationship is naïvely brought into view. The occasion was a pressing one. Nothing less was contemplated than the affording of surreptitious divine aid to the hard-pressed Achæan host; and the ‘shining eyes’ of Zeus, whose interdict was still in full force, might at any moment revert from the Thracians and Hippomolgi to the less virtuous Greeks and Trojans. Everything, then, depended upon promptitude, and Poseidon accordingly, in the absence of his consort Amphitrite, did not disdain to act as his own groom.Himself he harnessed to his brazen car the ‘bronze-hoofed’ coursers stabled beneath the sea at Ægæ; himself wielded the golden scourge with which he urged their rapid passage, amid the damp homage of dutiful but dripping sea-monsters, to a submarine recess between Tenedos and Imbros:

And the sea’s face was parted with a smile,And rapidly the horses sped the while.[96]

And the sea’s face was parted with a smile,

And rapidly the horses sped the while.[96]

There he himself provided ambrosial forage for their support during his absence on the battle-field, taking the precaution, before his departure, of attaching infrangible golden shackles to the agile feet that might else have been tempted to stray. Yet all this pains was taken for the mere sake of what must be called ‘swagger.’ Poseidon, calmly seated on the Samothracian height, was already within full view of the plain and towers of Ilium, when

Sudden at lastHe rose, and swiftly down the steep he passed,The mountain trembled with each step he took,The forest with the quaking mountain shook.Three strides he made, and with the fourth he stoodAt Ægæ, where is founded ‘neath the floodHis hall of glorious gold that cannot fade.[97]

Sudden at last

He rose, and swiftly down the steep he passed,

The mountain trembled with each step he took,

The forest with the quaking mountain shook.

Three strides he made, and with the fourth he stood

At Ægæ, where is founded ‘neath the flood

His hall of glorious gold that cannot fade.[97]

And the journey westward was deliberately made for the purpose of fetching an equipage which proved rather an embarrassment than an assistance to him.‘But for the honour of the thing,’ as an Irishman remarked of his jaunt in a bottomless sedan-chair, he ‘might just as well have walked.’

96.Iliad, xiii. 29, 30. (Translation by R. Garnett,Universal Review, vol. v.)

97.Ib.xiii. 17-22.

Not without reason, then, was equestrian skill associated with Poseidonian lineage. Nestor himself was an enthusiastic horse-lover; yet the Pylian breed was none of the best; and he anxiously warned his son Antilochus, preparatory to the starting of the chariot-race commemorative of Patroclus, that he must supply by finesse for the slowness of his team. Poseidon himself, he reminded him, had been his instructor; and no less, it may be presumed, of his brother Thrasymedes, whose feats in this direction, however, are summed up in the laudatory expression bestowed on him in common with Diomed.

The connoisseurship of this latter, on the contrary, is perpetually in evidence. As king of ‘horse-feeding Argos,’ he knew and prized what was best in horseflesh, and counted no risk too great for the purpose of securing it. His brilliant success accordingly, in the capture of famous steeds, rendered the original inferiority of his own a matter of indifference. It served, indeed, only to quicken his zeal to replace them by force or fraud with better. And it fell out most opportunely that, just at the conjuncture when the protection of Athene rendered him irresistible, Æneas, temporarily allied with the Lycian archer Pandarus, undertook the hopeless task of staying his victorious career. The Dardanian hero was driving amatchless team, ‘the best under the dawn or the sun’; and he found leisure, notwithstanding the celerity of their onset, to extol their qualities to his companion, while Diomed recited the to him familiar tale of their pedigree to his charioteer, Sthenelus. They were of the race of those with which the ransom of Ganymede had been paid by Zeus to Tros, King of Phrygia, his father, and were hence known distinctively asTrojanhorses. Their possession was regarded as of inestimable importance.

That was the day of glory of the son of Tydeus, whom ‘Pallas Athene did not permit to tremble.’ Destiny waited on his desires. His spear sent Pandarus to the shades; Æneas was barely rescued by the maternal intervention of Aphrodite, who came off by no means scatheless from the adventure. Above all, the Dardanian ‘messengers of terror’ were led in triumph across to the Achæan camp. They did not remain there idle. On the following day, Nestor was invited to admire their paces, as they carried him and their new master beyond the reach of Hector’s fury, the fortune of war having by that time effectively changed sides. Their subsequent victory in the Patroclean chariot-race was a foregone conclusion. For their Olympian connexions would have made their defeat by clover-cropping animals of ordinary lineage appear a gross anomaly; and the horses of Achilles, as being immortal and invincible, were expressly excluded from the competition.

The night-adventure of Diomed and Odysseus, narrated in the Tenth Iliad, is unmistakably an after-thought and interlude. To what precedes it is in part irrelevant; with what follows it is wholly unconnected; nor is it logically complete in itself. The interpolation is, none the less, of respectable antiquity, going back certainly to the eighth centuryB.C.; it has high merits of its own, and could ill be spared from the body of what it is convenient to call Homeric poetry. Its admission, to be sure, crowds into one night performances enough to occupy several, but this superfluity of business scarcely troubles any genially disposed reader; nor need he grudge Odysseus the three suppers—one of them perhaps better described as a breakfast—amply earned by his indefatigable services in the epic cause, and counterbalanced by many subsequent privations. The point, however, to be specially noted by us here, is that in the ‘Doloneia’—as the tenth book is designated—equestrian interests, its extraneous origin notwithstanding, are paramount.

The opening situation is that magnificently described at the close of the eighth book, when the ‘dark-ribbed ships’ by the Hellespont seemed to cower before the menacing camp-fires of the victorious Trojans. Indeed, most of those who lay in their shadow would gladly have grasped, before it was too late, at the means of escape they offered. Agamemnon’s fluctuating mind, too, might easily have beenbrought to that inglorious decision; but for the moment, he relieved his restless anxiety by hastily summoning to a nocturnal council a few of the most prominent Achæan chiefs. The somewhat inadequate result of their deliberations was the despatch of a scouting party to the Trojan quarters, Diomed and Odysseus being inevitably chosen for the discharge of the perilous office—inevitably, since in the legend of Troy, these two are again and again coupled in the performance of venturesome, if not questionable, exploits.[98]They had sallied forth unarmed on the sudden summons of the ‘king of men,’ but collected from the sympathetic bystanders a scratch-lot of weapons; and Meriones lent to Odysseus for the emergency a peculiar head-piece of leather lined with felt, and strengthened with rows of boars’ teeth,[99]the like of which, judging from the profusion of sliced tusks met with in Mycenæan graves, was probably familiar of old in the Peloponnesus.

98.Preller,Griechische Mythologie, Bd. ii. p. 405, 3te Auflage.

99.Iliad, x. 261-71.

It was pitch dark as the adventurers traversed the marshy land about the Simoeis; but the rise, with heavy wing-flappings, of a startled heron on their right, dispelled their misgivings, and evoked their pious rejoicings at the assurance it afforded of Athene’s protection. Their next encounter was with Hector’s emissary, the luckless Dolon, a poor creature beyond doubt, vain, feather-headed, unstable, pusillanimous,yet piteous to us even now in the sanguine loquacity that merged into a death-shriek as the fierce blade of Diomed severed the tendons of his throat. He had served his purpose, and was contemptuously, nay treacherously, dismissed from life. But the temptation suggested by him was irresistible. Instincts of cupidity, keen in both heroes, had been fully roused by his account of the splendid and unguarded equipment of the newly-arrived leader of a Thracian contingent to the Trojan army. As he told them:

King Rhesus, Eionëus’ son, commands them, who hath steeds,More white than snow, huge, and well shaped; their fiery pace exceedsThe winds in swiftness; these I saw, his chariot is with goldAnd pallid silver richly framed, and wondrous to behold;His great and golden armour is not fit a man should wear,But for immortal shoulders framed.[100]

King Rhesus, Eionëus’ son, commands them, who hath steeds,

More white than snow, huge, and well shaped; their fiery pace exceeds

The winds in swiftness; these I saw, his chariot is with gold

And pallid silver richly framed, and wondrous to behold;

His great and golden armour is not fit a man should wear,

But for immortal shoulders framed.[100]

100.Iliad, x. 435-41 (Chapman’s trans.).

Now Odysseus and Diomed both loved plunder; each in his own way was of a reckless and dare-devil disposition; and one at any rate was a passionate admirer of equine beauty. They accordingly did not hesitate to follow up Dolon’s indications, which proved quite accurate. The followers of Rhesus were weary from their recent journey; Diomed had no difficulty in slaying a dozen of them in ranks as they slept, and so reaching the king, whose premonitory nightmare of destruction was abruptly dissolved by its realisation.The coveted horses tethered alongside having been meanwhile secured by Odysseus, swiftly conveyed the exultant raiders back to the Achæan ships.

But in what manner? On their backs or drawn behind them in the glittering Thracian chariot? Opinions are divided. Euripides assumed that the latter formed part of the booty,[101]yet the Homeric expressions rather imply that it was leftin statu quo. They are not, on the other hand, easily reconciled with the supposition of an escape on horseback from the scene of carnage. This, none the less, was almost certainly what the poet meant to convey, and his unfamiliarity with the art of riding was doubtless the cause of his conveying it badly.[102]Homeric heroes, as a rule infringed only by this one exception, never mounted their steeds; they used them solely in light draught. Equitation was indeed known of as a branch in which special skill might be acquired; but for the ignoble purpose of popular, perhaps venal, display. Thus the performance of leaping from one to the other of four galloping horses, brought in to illustrate the agility with which Ajax strode from deck to deck of the menaced Thessalian ships,[103]excites indeed astonishment, but astonishment of the inferior kind raised by the feats of a clown or a circus-rider. The passage has found a curious commentary in a fadedpainting on a wall of the ancient palace at Tiryns, representing an acrobat springing on the back of a rushing bull.[104]He is unmistakably a specimen of the class of performer to which the nimble equestrian of the Iliad belonged.

101.Rhesos, 797.

102.Eyssenhardt,Jahrbuch für Philologie, Bd. cix. p. 598; Ameis’sIliad, Heft iv. p. 38.

103.Iliad, xv. 679.

104.Schuchhardt and Sellers,Schliemann’s Excavations, p. 119.

The animated story of the Doloneia, however, originated most likely in a primitive nature-parable, symbolising, in one of its innumerable forms, the ever-renewed struggle of darkness with light. The prize carried off by Diomed and Odysseus was, this being so, nothing less than the equipage of the sun; yet the solar horses are, mythologically, scarcely separable from the vehicle attached to them. Our bard, it is true, being wholly intent upon the concrete aspect of the tale he had to tell, felt no incongruity in the disjunction; and he certainly took no pains to perpetuate the traditional shape of his materials. Unconsciously, however, he has allowed some vestiges of solar relationships to survive among the less fortunate actors in his little drama. They can be traced in the wrath of Apollo at the exploit achieved, while he was off his guard, through the assistance of the predatory Athene;[105]and perhaps in the costume of Dolon, who clothed himself, we are told, for his disastrous expedition in ‘the skin of a grey wolf.’ Now the wolf became early entangled, in Aryan folk-lore,with luminous associations. At first, possibly through contrast and antagonism, exemplified in the hostile pursuit, by the Scandinavian animal, of the sun and moon; later, through capricious identification. The lupine connexions of the Hellenic Apollo may be thus explained. They were, at any rate, strongly accentuated; and Dolon wore, in some sense, albeit ignobly, ‘the livery of the burnished sun.’

105.It is worth notice that in the Euripidean tragedyRhesos, ‘Phœbos’ is the watchword for that night.

Manifestly solar, on the other hand, are the snowy horses from across the Hellespont. Nestor, who, characteristically enough, first caught the sound of their galloping approach to the Greek outposts, demanded of their captors in amazement:

How have you made this horse your prize? Pierced you the dangerous host,Where such gems stand? Or did some god your high attempts accost,And honoured you with this reward? Why, they be like the raysThe sun effuseth.[106]

How have you made this horse your prize? Pierced you the dangerous host,

Where such gems stand? Or did some god your high attempts accost,

And honoured you with this reward? Why, they be like the rays

The sun effuseth.[106]

106.Iliad, x. 545-47 (Chapman’s trans.).

The Thracian pair, moreover, are the onlywhitehorses mentioned in the Iliad. All the rest were chestnut, bay, or brown. One of those reft from Æneas by Diomed, was sorrel, with a white crescent on the forehead;[107]Achilles, or Patroclus for him, drove a chestnut and a piebald; a pair of rufous bays drew the chariot of Asius. No black horse appearson the scene; nor can we be sure that the ‘dark-maned,’ mythical Areion was really understood to be of sable tint. Admiration for white horses was not spontaneous among the Greeks. It sprang up in the East as a consequence of their figurative association with the sun. The Iranian fable of the solar chariot drawn by spotless coursers, carried everywhere with it, in its diffusion west, south, and north, an imaginative impression of the sacredness of such animals.[108]They were chosen out for the Magian sacrifices;[109]they were tended in Scandinavian temple-enclosures, and their neighings oracularly interpreted;[110]a white horse was dubiously reported by Strabo to be periodically immolated by the Veneti in commemoration of Diomed’s fabulous sovereignty over the Adriatic;[111]and it became a recognised mythological principle that superhuman beings should be, like the Wild Huntsman of the Black Forest,Schimmelreiter. ‘White as snow’ were the steeds of the Great Twin Brethren; white as snow the ‘horse with the terrible rider’ in Raphael’s presentation of the Vision that vindicated the sanctity of the Jewish Temple; Odin thundered over the mountain-tops on a pallid courser; and it was deemed scandalous presumption in Camillus to have his triumphal chariot drawn to theCapitol after the fall of Veii by a milk-white team, fit only for the transport of an immortal god.

107.Ib.xxiii. 454.

108.Hehn and Stallybrass,Wanderings of Plants and Animals, pp. 53-54.

109.Herodotus, vii. 114.

110.Weinhold,Altnordisches Leben, p. 49.

111.Geography, lib. v. cap. i. sect. 9.

Such, too, were the horses of Rhesus; and their evanescent appearance in Homeric narrative tallies with their unsubstantial nature. They sink into complete oblivion after the scene of their nocturnal abduction. Their quondam master could lay claim to scarcely a more solid core of existence. Euripides’ account of his parentage is that he was the son of the River Strymon and of the muse Terpsichore; which, being interpreted, means that he personified a local stream.[112]He obtained, however, posthumous reputation and honours, as a prophet at Amphipolis, as a rider and hunter at Rhodope.

112.Preller,Griech. Myth.Bd. ii. p. 428.

The relations of men and horses are, in every part of the Iliad, systematically regulated and consistently maintained. There is nothing casual about them. Thus, Paris’s lack of a conveyance serves to emphasise his inferiority in the field. He was a craven at close quarters, though formidable as a bow-man, despatching his arrows from the safe shelter of the ranks. For the adventurous sallies rendered possible only by the aid of fleet steeds, he had neither taste nor aptitude.

Hector, on the contrary, was distinguished above all other Homeric warriors by driving four horses abreast—above all Homeric gods and goddesses even, since Poseidon himself, Ares, Heré, and Eos,were content each with a pair. In their case, however, the seeming deficiency was a point of real superiority. For no more than two horses can have been in effective employment in drawing Hector’s chariot, the remaining two being held in reserve against accidents. But Olympian coursers were presumably exempt from mortal casualties, and there was hence no need to provide for the emergency of their disablement. Critics, nevertheless, of the ultra-strict school, taking offence at the unexpected introduction of a four-in-hand, have proclaimed the entire enshrining passage spurious. Perhaps on insufficient grounds; yet as to this there may be two opinions; there can be only one as to its being stirring and splendid.

The formal introduction of the only horses on the Trojan side dignified with proper names, makes an impressive exordium to the lay of Trojan victory after Diomed’s audacious resistance had been turned to flight by the thunder-bolt of Zeus. Hector’s fiery incitements were addressed no less earnestly to his equine servants than to his Lycian and Dardanian allies.

Then cherished he his famous horse: O Xanthus now, said he,And thou Podargus, Æthon, too, and Lampus, dear to me,Make me some worthy recompense for so much choice of meatGiven you by fair Andromache; bread of the purest wheat,And with it for your drink mixed wine, to make ye wished cheer,Still serving you before myself, her husband young and dear.[113]

Then cherished he his famous horse: O Xanthus now, said he,

And thou Podargus, Æthon, too, and Lampus, dear to me,

Make me some worthy recompense for so much choice of meat

Given you by fair Andromache; bread of the purest wheat,

And with it for your drink mixed wine, to make ye wished cheer,

Still serving you before myself, her husband young and dear.[113]

He went on to represent to them the glorious fruits and triumphs of victory, but gave no hint of a penalty for defeat. The absence of any such savage threat as Antilochus hurled at his slow-paced steeds in the chariot-race marks his innate gentleness of soul. He urged only the nobler motives for exertion appropriate to conscious intelligence. Trust in equine sympathy is, indeed, widespread in legend and romance. Even the cruel Mezentius, wounded and doomed, made a final appeal to the pride and valour of his faithful Rhœbus; to say nothing of ‘Auld Maitland’s’ son’s call upon his ‘Gray,’ of the stirrup-rhetoric of Reynaud de Montauban, of Marko, the Cid of Servia, of the Eddic Skirnir starting for Jotunheim, or other imperilled owners of renowned steeds.

113.Iliad, viii. 184-190 (Chapman’s trans.).

These, now and then, are enabled to respond; but speaking horses should be reserved for emergencies. They occur, for instance, with undue profusion in modern Greek folk-songs. Not every notorious klepht lurking in the thickets of Pindus, but only some hero towering to the clouds of fancy, should, rightly considered, possess an animal so exceptionally endowed. The lesson is patent in the Iliad. Homer’s instinctive self-restraint and supreme mastery over the secrets of artistic effect are nowhere more conspicuous than in his treatment of the horses of Achilles.

‘Thessalian steeds and Lacedæmonian women’ were declared by an oracle to be the best Greek representatives of their respective kinds. In Thessaly wasthe legendary birthplace of the horse; there lived the Lapiths—if Virgil is to be believed—the first horse-breakers:

Fræna Pelethronii Lapithæ, gyrosque dedereImpositi dorso, atque equitem docuere sub armisInsultare solo, et gressus glomerare superbos.[114]

Fræna Pelethronii Lapithæ, gyrosque dedere

Impositi dorso, atque equitem docuere sub armis

Insultare solo, et gressus glomerare superbos.[114]

There, too, the Centaurs were at home; the Thessalian cavalry became historically famous; the Thessalian marriage ceremony long included the presentation to the bride by the bridegroom, of a fully caparisoned horse;[115]and the noble equine type of the Parthenon marbles is still reproduced along the fertile banks of the Peneus.[116]Thence, too, of old to Troy

Fair PheretiadesThe bravest mares did bring by much; Eumelus managed these,Swift of their feet as birds of wings, both of one hair did shine,Both of an age, both of a height, as measured by a line,Whom silver-bowed Apollo bred in the Pierian mead,Both slick and dainty, yet were both in war of wondrous dread.[117]

Fair Pheretiades

The bravest mares did bring by much; Eumelus managed these,

Swift of their feet as birds of wings, both of one hair did shine,

Both of an age, both of a height, as measured by a line,

Whom silver-bowed Apollo bred in the Pierian mead,

Both slick and dainty, yet were both in war of wondrous dread.[117]

114.Georg.iii. 115-17.

115.Geddes,Problem of the Homeric Poems, p. 247.

116.Dodwell,Tour in Greece, vol. i. p. 339.

117.Iliad, ii. 764-67 (Chapman’s trans.).

Only, indeed, a fraud on the part of Athene prevented the mares of Eumelus from winning the chariot-race against the heaven-descended ‘Trojan’ horses of Diomed; and the Muse, solemnly invoked as arbitress of equine excellence, declared them the goodliest of all ‘the steeds that followed the sons ofAtreus to war,’ save, of course, the incomparable Pelidean pair.

Xanthus and Balius were the wedding-gift of Poseidon to Peleus. The sea-god himself had been a suitor for the hand of the bride, the silver-footed Thetis; but, on its becoming known that the son to be born of her marriage was destined to surpass the strength of his father, something of an Olympian panic prevailed, and a mortal bridegroom was, by the common determination of the alarmed Immortals, forced upon the reluctant goddess. Of this unequal and unhappy marriage, the far-famed Achilles was the ill-starred offspring.

So intense is the Homeric realisation of the hero’s superhuman powers, that they scarcely excite surprise. And his belongings are on the scale of his qualities. None but himself could wield his spear; his armour was forged in Olympus; his shield was a panorama of human life; his horses would obey only his guidance, or that of his delegates. Not for common handling, indeed, were the ‘wind-swift’ coursers born of Zephyr and the Harpy on the verge of the dim Ocean-stream. Themselves deathless and invulnerable, they were destined, nevertheless, to share the pangs of ‘brief mortality.’

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