The Horse in History. Basil Tozer
into Northern Palestine, probably at some period prior to 1400 B.C., but trustworthy information about the horses and how the Hittites treated them is not obtainable.
As for the horses in the Mycenean Period—the Bronze Age of Greece—the monuments of that epoch bear testimony to the esteem in which they were held. The indigenous people of Greece were presumably the Pelasgians, and these monuments remain to bear testimony that such a people once existed.
In a like manner do the gravestones of the Acropolis of Mycenæ bear indisputable evidence, for upon three of them at least are to be seen sculptured in low relief a chariot, a pair of horses, and a driver, the date of this particular sculpture being approximately the fourteenth century B.C.
It seems practically beyond dispute that before the year 1000 B.C. no people rode on horseback except the Libyans, though chariots must have been used quite 2000 years before that. Yet by the time Homer wrote his poems horsemanship was becoming common amongst a section of the Greeks.
Indeed by that time feats of skill on horseback upon a par with the antics we see performed to-day in circuses were at least known, and probably they were often watched and greatly liked. Listen, for instance, to the following Homeric simile—the translation is almost literal:—
“As when a man that well knows how to ride harnesses up four chosen horses, and springing from the ground dashes to the great city along the public highway, and crowds of men and women look on in wonder, while he with all confidence, as his steeds fly on, keeps leaping from one to another.”
There are two references at least in Homer to “four male horses yoked together,” but the practice of driving four-in-hand certainly was not common in the eighth century B.C., or probably until long after. The above reference, however, to feats of skill performed on horseback, recalls to mind a story, probably more or less true, that has to do with the luxurious people of Sybaris, in Southern Italy.
In the early centuries before Christ, so it is related, this people trained all its horses to dance to the sound of music, to the music of flutes in particular. The inhabitants of Croton having heard of this, and being sworn enemies of the Sybarites, determined to take advantage of the information and attempt to conquer their foe with the aid of strategy.
For this reason they provided all the musicians in their own army with flutes in place of trumpets and the other instruments they had been in the habit of using, and then without delay declared war upon the Sybarites.
The latter, to do them justice, responded at once, in spite of the condition of lethargy to which the life of luxury they had been leading was supposed to have reduced them. No sooner did they approach the Crotonian lines, however, than “a great part of the army,” as we are told, “set up a merry tune,” which had the effect of stampeding the Sybarites' horses, for “they instantly threw off their riders and began to skip and dance.”
As a natural consequence the Sybarite army was taken at a disadvantage and quickly routed with great slaughter, “very many horses being killed during the engagement, to their owners' dismay and grief.”
This strange story may be in a measure exaggerated, but probably it is based on truth, in which case it proves that the Greeks of Magna Græcia at any rate made use of cavalry before the rest had attempted to do so. Also we know that in the year 510 B.C. the Crotonians destroyed Sybaris entirely.
The Assyrians too, at about this period, evidently had well-appointed cavalry, for Ezekiel speaks of their being “clothed in blue, captains and rulers, all of them desirable young men, horsemen riding upon horses,” and goes on to give particulars which, in so far as they relate to the mode of life in vogue with these desirable young men, are calculated to shock the susceptibilities of prudish persons, and to amuse others.
In the light of the Higher Criticism Homer's “Iliad” is believed to have been written by various hands, and incidentally the Criticism throws useful light upon the horse in his relation to the history of the nations known to have flourished in the very early centuries before Christ.
One need not here describe such steeds as Agamemnon's mare, swift Æthe, that was given to him by his vassal, Echepolus of Sicylon, and subsequently driven in the chariot race by Menelaus; or Phallas, the horse of Heraclios; or the horses of the Pylian breed of which Homer speaks at length; or Galathe, Ethon, Podarge or any of the other steeds of which Priam's eldest son, “magnanimous and noble Hector,” was so justly proud. Also the horses of mythology do not possess great interest for the majority of modern readers other than classical scholars.
That Homer himself, however, had sound knowledge of the qualifications which go to make up what in latter-day English we probably should term a “finished charioteer” is shown by the following rather well-known lines that here are translated almost literally:—
“But he who in his chariot and his steeds
Trusts only, wanders here and there
Unsteady, while his coursers loosely rein'd
Roam wide the field; not so the charioteer
Of sound intelligence; he, though he drive
Inferior steeds, looks ever to the goal
While close he clips, not ignorant to check
His coursers at the first, but with tight rein
Ruling his own, and watching those before.”
Menesthus, emphatically one of the finest of the many fine riders spoken of in the “Iliad,” or, as Homer himself describes him, “foremost in equestrian fame,” is typical of the horsemen of that period.
In the “Iliad” too we find what I believe I am right in stating to be the first direct historical allusion to wagering on horse races. But the medium current on racecourses in those days was not coin. The odds apparently were laid in “kitchen utensils”—as a lad with whom I was at school once construed the line, to his subsequent discomfiture—namely, cauldrons and tripods.
Such, at least, we are led to infer from the paragraph in the twenty-third book of the “Iliad,” which, according to William Cowper's blank verse translation, edited by Robert Southey, runs somewhat as follows:—
“Come now—a tripod let us wager each,
Or cauldron, and let Agamemnon judge
Whose horses lead, that, losing, thou mayst learn.”
Or more euphoniously, as Lord Derby has it:
“Wilt thou a cauldron or a tripod stake
And Agamemnon, Atreus' son, appoint the umpire
To decide whose steeds are first?”
The cauldrons and tripods referred to were of course of great value, and, as trophies, highly prized by competitors in the races and other competitions calling for a display of skill and daring.
There is another allusion in the “Iliad” to the presentation of a tripod as a great reward for valour. It occurs in the eighth book, and the passage goes more or less like this:
“Let but the Thunderer and Minerva grant
The pillage of fair Ilium to the Greeks,
And I will give to thy victorious hand,
After my own, the noblest recompense,
A tripod or a chariot with its steeds,
Or some fair captive to partake thy bed.”
I recollect how at school this passage, with several others, used to be rigorously excluded when Homer was being construed, with the result that Kelly's famous “Keys to the Classics” used afterwards to be produced surreptitiously, and the “censored” lines turned carefully into English.
From what Homer tells us elsewhere, and from additional sources, we may conclude that of all the races that bred horses and took just pride in them in the early centuries before Christ the Thracians were probably the most renowned.
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