The Horse in History. Basil Tozer
shows that even in the centuries before Christ there was truth in the popular platitude that nothing succeeds like success!
Then and there Bucephalus was bought for Alexander, and from that time until its death, from wounds received in a battle fought against the Indian king, Porus, the horse remained Alexander's favourite charger and companion.
A remarkable peculiarity about this animal was that though subsequently it came to allow the grooms to ride it bareback, yet when it had on one of the cloths that at that period did duty for a saddle it would allow only Alexander to mount it. As one writer neatly says: “When others tried to mount the horse with the cloth on they invariably had to take to their heels to save themselves from his.” It is further recorded that when Alexander wished to mount, Bucephalus would crouch of its own accord to enable its master to get on more easily.
Alexander took Bucephalus with him on his famous expeditions into the East, and on one occasion, in Hyrcania, the horse was stolen. The king “thereupon became terrible to see, so great was his rage.” At once an edict was issued that unless the horse were returned to him without delay he would “carry fire and sword throughout the country—north and south, east and west, sparing neither men nor women, nor, if need be, even the smallest children.”
A chronicler of the period, commenting upon this, drily observes that when Alexander's determination became known, “the horse was returned in a hurry!”
“Thus,” remarks Arrian, the great historian, “the horse must have been as dear to Alexander as Alexander was terrible to the barbarians.” As he here employs the word “barbarian” in its offensive signification he evidently despised the people of Hyrcania because they had sense enough to return the stolen horse instead of waiting with their kith and kin to be slain or tortured!
In the descriptions of almost all the great victories won by Alexander the Great, allusion is made to his favourite steed. We are told by Gellius that in the battle that practically witnessed the death of Bucephalus the king had pressed forward recklessly into the thick of the fight, and apparently right into the enemy's lines, and had thus become “the mark for every spear”—a statement which, if literally true, points to an enemy made up of singularly inept marksmen.
“More than one spear,” he goes on, “was buried in the neck and flanks of the horse, but, though at the point of death, and almost drained of blood, he succeeded with a bold dash in carrying the king from the very midst of the foe, and then fell, breathing his last tranquilly now that he knew his master was safe, and as comforted by the knowledge as if he had had the feelings of a human being.”
There is something about the concluding sentence that leads to the belief that Gellius must have been either remarkably imaginative, or else of a more romantic nature than the majority of his contemporaries have given him credit for being. The last line in particular is very precious. After reading it can one feel astonished at Alexander's enthusiasm having carried him to the length of causing him to build a city to the memory of the noble steed, a city to which he gave the name Bucephala?
The handsome bronze discovered in Herculaneum is popularly supposed to represent the figures of Alexander and Bucephalus. The work probably of Lysippus—whom Alexander himself ordered to produce a scene representing a fight during the great battle of Granicus—it is extremely interesting.
A pleasing anecdote told of Alexander and Bucephalus, and more likely to be true than are the majority of the tales that are related of this horse and its owner, is to the effect that upon one occasion the king went to inspect a portrait of himself mounted on his favourite charger, that the distinguished painter, Apelles, had just completed.
Nettled at Alexander's scant praise of his work—for we are told the picture was so lifelike that even Bucephalus neighed when first he saw it—Apelles turned to the king with the rebuke:
“I fear me, your Majesty, that your horse is a better judge of painting than his noble master.”
What retort the king made is not recorded, but the story recalls one of a similar nature related of the famous artist, Pauson, who when ordered to produce a picture of a horse rolling on its back, sent to his patron a picture of a horse galloping madly through a cloud of dust.
In a great rage the patron sent for Pauson, and, upon his arrival, “began to storm and rave,” at the same time demanding to know what had made him commit a blunder so egregious. Without replying, Pauson walked up to the picture and turned it upside down, when, to the vast amusement of the hitherto irate patron, there appeared a perfect picture of a horse rolling on its back on a dusty plain.
Of the famous artist, Micon, it is related that he once incurred the criticism of the rider, Simon, who, upon looking at one of his pictures, remarked drily that never in his life before had he seen a horse that had eyelashes on its lower lids!
It seems certain that in the centuries before Christ the steeds bred in Thessaly were among the most highly prized, though the horses of several other breeds—such, for instance, as the Argive, the Arcadian, the Epidaurian and the Arcananian—possessed great courage and exceptional power of endurance.
PERSIANS FIGHTING WITH ELEPHANTS AGAINST THE ROMANS, ABOUT THE TIME OF PYRRHUS, 280 B.C.
This picture has been wrongly attributed to Raphael
In the very early times Thessalian horses were used largely for charioteering. Allusion is made repeatedly in the classics to these Thessalian animals, stress being laid upon their symmetry, or what to-day we should term their make and shape. The mythical mares of King Diomed of Thrace, the tyrant whose grim humour, we are told, led him to feed his horses on the strangers who visited his kingdom, were alleged to be of the breed of Thessaly, a statement made indirectly in the description of Hercules' conquest of the tyrant and his subsequent “casting of the tyrant's quivering carcass to his own horses to be devoured.”
Spenser alludes to this incident in the fifth book of his “Faerie Queene,” in the following lines:—
“Like to the Thracian tyrant who, they say,
Unto his horses gave his guests for meat,
Till he himself was made their greedy prey,
And torn to pieces by Alcides great.”
Other mythical horses of the Thessalian breed were those of Achilles, of Rhesus, and of Orestes in Sophocles' stirring description of the race in Electra.
It seems safe to say that until about the fourth century B.C. the Romans also did not use saddles, at least saddles with trees. That somewhere about this period, however, they began to adopt what we should call to-day saddlecloths, and that these were kept in place by a strap or bandage in the nature of a girth that passed beneath the belly, appears to be certain.
For some unknown reason this girth is more often than not omitted on the works of art that represent horses of that period. Some of the animals of the Parthenon frieze lead us to believe that on occasions horses were still made to crouch when about to be mounted, though it is not probable they crouched voluntarily, as Bucephalus did. From impressions on the Parthenon frieze we may also conclude that the mounting block was not unknown in the centuries before Christ.
A good idea of the exact stamp of horse harnessed to the war chariots of those centuries may be obtained by inspecting the bronze horse of the quadriga from the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the date of the Mausoleum being 331–341 B.C.—the building took ten years to erect. This bronze is to be seen in the British Museum.
Hannibal's must have been the army the best provided with cavalry down to the year 218 B.C., for in that year Hannibal advanced into Italy with no less than 90,000 foot and some 12,000 horse, many of the latter being native horses mounted by Numidians who persisted still in scorning to use either saddle or bridle, though the cavalry division, which consisted of Spaniards, employed bridles of an elaborate pattern.
How wholly superior Hannibal's cavalry proved to be to the Gallic horsemen