IN spite of the derisive remarks often uttered concerning Xenophon's advice to young riders, and his advice on horsemanship in general and the care of horses, there is much sound sense in plenty of the hints he gave to the Greek riders of three hundred years before Christ, while many of the rules he laid down are as applicable to-day as they probably were then.

His advice on the vexed question of bits and bitting, to take but a single example, is very sound, while his strong objection to allowing horses' legs to be washed frequently is shared by plenty of horse owners at the present time.

Then, the old Athenian apparently disapproved of or disliked what we have come to call the “American” seat on a horse, for he declares that the legs of a man mounted should be almost straight, the body upright and supple.

Attempts have repeatedly been made to trace the life of Xenophon prior to the time when, in 401 B.C., he first joined the army of Cyrus, but in vain. He is, however, known to have been a close friend of Socrates from a very early age, and probably when he wrote the “Anabasis” he was a little over thirty. But when he died, about the year 355 B.C., he was quite an old man.

Historians are almost unanimous in declaring that at Marathon, in 490 B.C., the Athenians were without cavalry, though by that time many of the wealthy citizens undoubtedly owned horses, some of which they most likely used for racing. When, however, the Athenians came to realise what an amount of execution could be done, and to see the execution that was done by the Persians, with the help of cavalry, they set to work to organise in Athens, as quickly as possible, a powerful body of mounted warriors.

How formidable that cavalry later on proved itself to be is well known to all classical scholars, and the more surprising it therefore is that the Greek cavalry should not afterwards have risen to the level of that organised by Macedonians. Indeed, according to more than one historian, the Greek cavalry was employed chiefly to harass an enemy when marching, or to pursue a vanquished and retreating regiment, while one writer at least maintains that the Greek cavalry at best never approached within javelin range of an enemy's line of battle during an attack.

The cost of horses at about this time varied almost as widely as it does now. Thus it was not unusual to pay three minÆ, the equivalent of about fifteen guineas, for quite a common hack—an extraordinarily high price when we bear in mind the purchasing value of money in those days—while for trained war horses, or for race horses, any sum from ten minÆ upward was paid frequently.

Xenophon is known to have given approximately eleven minÆ for a little war horse that, so far as one can ascertain, did not afterwards fulfil expectations, so perhaps it is hardly astonishing to read that some years later the terms “horse owner” and “spendthrift” came to be deemed more or less synonymous.

A list drawn up at about this time of the principal defects to be guarded against when inspecting a horse with a view to purchase is interesting, inasmuch as the points looked upon as faults three and twenty centuries ago are with only a few exceptions deemed to be egregious defects to-day.

The following is the list that was drawn up, so it is alleged, by Pollux:

Hoofs with thin horn (sic); hoofs full, fat, soft and flat—or, as Xenophon termed them, “low-lying”; heavy fetlocks; shanks with varicose veins; flabby thighs; hollow shoulder-blades; projecting neck; bald mane; narrow chest; fat and heavy head; large ears; converging nostrils; sunken eyes; thin and meagre sides; sharp back-bone; rough haunches; thin buttocks; stiff legs, stiff knees.

Though among the horses of the ancient Greeks the hogged mane must at one time have been seen often enough, there does not appear to be in the works of the early writers any direct allusion to the hogging of horses as a regular practice.

Probably if the custom did exist it was on the wane by the time Xenophon began to write. There is evidence to show that in ancient Greece the horses at about this period were rather smaller than those of most other countries of which we have authentic records, a characteristic still noticeable amongst the horses in several parts of modern Greece.

The Greeks almost always used entire horses for all purposes. Even in war they did not employ geldings, a custom that has given rise to the belief that in the centuries before Christ all horses, with the exception of the Libyan steeds, were far more savage than the horses of to-day.

Emphatically we have no reason to suppose that the Greeks made friends and companions of their horses as the Arab race is known to do or to have done, though the fable of Achilles' love for his horse named Xanthus makes a pretty enough story. On the other hand, it is quite possible that Xenophon may have been fond of horses not merely because of the amusement they afforded him or the pleasure he derived from riding and hunting.

For the rest the Greeks, in common with the people of most of the warlike nations in those early days, enjoyed possessing horses mainly because they served to enhance life's pleasure, and were of practical use in war.

Certainly it may be said of Xenophon that he did not preach the doctrine of kindness to horses without himself practising it thoroughly, also that he was ever ready to rebuke severely all who ill-treated their own horses or his.

Apparently the Greeks of about this era did not keep what we should term to-day pleasure horses, though they affected pleasure horses in the sense that they kept race horses. With the death of Xenophon we lose touch, to some extent, with the progress of the horse in history, but the thread is taken up again in the Roman period when Varro, writing in 37 B.C., furnishes certain details that are of interest, Virgil adding to them a little later in his “Georgics.”

After that we find instructive comment in the writings of Calpurnius and Columella in the first century A.D.; in those of Oppian and Nemesian in the third century; and in those of Apsyrtus, Pelagonius and Palladius in the fourth century.

When all is said, Xenophon's information most likely is by far the most trustworthy of any that has been handed down to us, in the same way that his descriptions certainly are the most accurate. Only a few fragments of the book by Simo, written probably about the year 460 B.C., remain; yet even those fragments contain peculiar statements.

Thus in addition to insinuating that Thessaly was the only region famous for horses in the centuries before Christ—an assertion indirectly gainsaid by Xenophon—he didactically remarks that the colour of a horse ought not to be taken into consideration when the animal's qualities are being summed up, a statement that the majority of the early writers openly repudiated, and that, as most of us know, is in every country deemed devoid of truth at the present day.

Though particulars are difficult to obtain, there is reason to believe that the horse named after the Thracian river, Strymon—owing to its having been bred in that vicinity—and that was immolated by Xerxes before his invasion of Greece, was, as usual, a white horse.

By exactly what route horses were introduced into Greece has not been ascertained for certain, but the fact that fossilised remains of horses have not been found in Greece as they have been in many other countries leads to the belief that the horse was not indigenous to the country.

From a very remote period, however, we find horses represented on vase paintings; and from these paintings too we are able practically to prove that the Greeks had not rowels in their primitive spurs, but that the spur consisted of a short goad attached to the heel of the boot by means of a strap passing over the instep and another that passed under the sole, almost as the modern hunting spur is strapped on. Spurs of this kind have been discovered in Olympia, also in Magna GrÆcia, and elsewhere.

With regard to the Greek bits and bridles of a later date, the former apparently had no leverage—certainly they had no curb chain—while the pattern of the bridle seems to have remained unaltered.

As we come nearer still to the time of Christ, we find the young men of Athens growing fonder and fonder of horse racing and taking more pains and spending much time and money in their attempts to improve the breed of horses. And though the soil of Attica was by no means adapted for purposes of horse rearing, it must in justice be said that their attempts met with reward.

Thus it happened that about this time—that is to say towards the close of the third or the beginning of the second century—the comic poet, Aristophanes, who died in 380 B.C., began to inveigh against the increasing popularity of horse racing, and against the spread of gambling consequent thereon.

In his immortal comedy of The Clouds, it will be remembered, he portrays a typical young spendthrift, Pheidippes, and an equally typical indignant father, Strepsiades, both of whom would serve well as latter-day types of men of the same stamp.

The son, when the comedy opens, has lost heavily on the turf and incurred the displeasure, not to say roused the indignation, of his father, in addition to burdening the old man heavily with his gambling debts. Presently the son is sued by Pasion, a characteristic usurer of that period, for the recovery of the entire sum of twelve minÆ.

“For what with debts and duns and stablekeepers' bills,” Strepsiades exclaims in exasperation in the opening lines, addressing his son Pheidippes, who lies asleep before him—“what with debts and duns and stablekeepers' bills which this fine spark heaps on my back, I lie awake the whilst: and what cares he but to coil up his locks, ride, drive his horses, dream of them all night....” And so on.

This gives us, to start with, an idea of the degree of popularity that horse racing had attained in Greece at about this time, for Pheidippes is meant to be a character drawn from life and typical of the young punters of the period.

Later we learn that the money for which the father is being sued had, in the first instance, been borrowed to pay for a “starling-coloured horse”—whatever kind of weird creature that may have been. Possibly “fleabitten” is intended, for the geographer, Strabo, speaks of “the starling-coloured horses of the Parthians” and of the people of Northern Spain, and it is known that plenty of those horses were of the colour that we should term to-day “fleabitten.”

Aristotle is the next to enlighten us to some extent upon the growing fondness of the Greeks for horses, especially for race horses and war horses. He tells us too that about the average span the horses in his time—the middle of the second century B.C., 384 to 322—lived was eighteen to twenty years, though a few were said to have reached five and twenty, and even thirty, and a very few indeed to have died at fifty.

Whether the custom that then prevailed of feeding horses mostly on barley proved beneficial or the reverse in the long run we are not told. Finally we come to Alexander the Great and his renowned Bucephalus, a horse bred, as we are told, by Philoneicus of Pharsalus, a Thessalian.

Bucephalus, or rather Bucephalos, means ox head, or bull head, from which we may conclude that whatever good points Bucephalus may have had—and without doubt he had many—he certainly had not the fine head of a modern hunter or the tapering muzzle of the thoroughbred that nowadays we so much admire.

It has been stated that Bucephalus derived his name from a mark on the left shoulder in the form more or less of a bull's head. As we know, however, that many years before Alexander's Bucephalus was foaled there existed a type of Thessalian horse upon which the same name had been bestowed, the conjecture is probably a false one.

How great the fame of Bucephalus was may be gathered from the fact that of all the horses possessed by the ancient Greeks down to this date he alone is the animal over which they thoroughly “enthuse.” From what we are told in the writings of Aristotle, indeed, and of later historians, Bucephalus must have been quite a tall horse, well shaped, coal-black, with a good shoulder and small ears. Also he had a white star in the middle of his forehead, a mark characteristic of certain Libyan breeds of old.

An unknown writer in the “Geoponics” avers that in the centuries just before Christ many of the best horses had eyes of different colour—what we sometimes term a wall eye, and Americans a China eye—and from his own deductions he concludes that Bucephalus probably had eyes that did not match. There does not, however, appear to be direct evidence that this was so.

Plutarch sets the price paid for Bucephalus by Alexander's father, King Philip, at thirteen talents, while Pliny is of opinion that the price was higher still—namely, sixteen talents.

Now the sum that to-day would be the equivalent of thirteen talents is approximately £3500, and when we bear in mind the prices that in the second century frequently were paid even for the best horses obtainable, and recollect, in addition, that at the time King Philip bought Bucephalus the horse was probably aged—some writers aver that he must have been quite fourteen when Philip bought him—it is not possible to reconcile the statement that a fancy price in any way approaching the sum named could have been paid.

The story of the trial and subsequent purchase of Bucephalus is both pretty and picturesque. More, it would appear to be true in almost every detail. According to Plutarch, whose account probably is the most trustworthy, the horse was first brought before King Philip to be given a public trial, when, to the discomfiture of its owner, it showed itself to be apparently “a fierce and unmanageable beast that would neither allow anybody to mount him, nor obey any of Philip's attendants, but reared and plunged against them all, so that the king in a rage bade them take him away for an utterly wild and unbroken brute.”

At this juncture it was that Alexander—at the time a boy of twelve, and Aristotle not yet his tutor—came upon the scene. We are told that he “leapt suddenly forward and in an access of indignation cried out before the king and everybody assembled that the men attempting to ride the horse were 'clumsy clowns,'” adding, with the self-assurance of precocious boyhood, that “if they were not careful they would spoil the horse entirely.”

Philip at first paid no attention to his son's outburst, deeming it to be childish spleen, but upon the lad's refusing to be quieted he turned to him, suddenly nettled, and demanded in a sharp tone how he dare be so insolent as to criticise his elders. In no way abashed, Alexander retorted that in this instance he certainly did know much better than his elders, and that if his father would allow him he would prove it by himself mounting the horse at once and riding it round the ring.

“And what will you forfeit for your rashness if you are thrown off?” the king inquired, not troubling to conceal his anger.

To which young Alexander retorted with much spirit:

“The price of the horse, by Zeus!”

It is hardly likely that Alexander, rash though he undoubtedly was, would have said this if the price at which Bucephalus was valued amounted to a sum in talents equivalent to thousands of pounds, for King Philip though a just ruler was a stern father, and Alexander must have known that his father would extort the forfeit should he fail to ride the horse.

The lad's reply, we are told, was received with shouts of laughter. This public expression of ridicule it may have been that set the boy upon his mettle, for without further parley he ran out into the arena, ordered his father's attendants aside, and then, grasping the reins, began to pat the horse's neck and “soothe him with soft words.”

For the boy had observed what apparently nobody else had noticed—namely, that the horse grew restive at the sight of its own shadow. Without waiting, therefore, he turned the horse to face the sun, then at once “sprang up and bestrode him unharmed.” Next, gradually and very gently, and using neither whip nor spur, he made Bucephalus move round and round in a circle until the animal no longer feared its shadow and then when it had, as we are told, “given up all threatening behaviour, and was only hot for the course,” he gave the horse its head, “urging him onward by raising his voice and using his heel.”

At the sight of this fine display of horse breaking and horsemanship the spectators, now somewhat abashed at the haste they had been in to jeer, grew silent. But not for long. Presently, as Alexander came galloping back, “full of just pride and pleasure,” the assembled multitude, including the king's attendants, “of one accord raised a great cheer, lifting up their hands from pure joy.”

Philip himself must have been of an emotional nature, for we read that “he said nothing, but wept silently from pure joy.”

Possibly the lad too suffered from “pure joy” at that moment, for upon his dismounting his father advanced with the remark that Macedonia was “not big enough for such a son,” that he “must go look for a kingdom to match him.”

Which 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.

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:—

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 placed by Scipio in the front line of his javelin throwers is well known to students of history. Indeed it was said that Hannibal's horsemen were superior even to the Italian and the Roman cavalry, which was high praise.

Probably from about the year 200 B.C., possibly from an even earlier period, the Romans used spurs, apparently the common prick spurs which remained in vogue until towards the middle of the thirteenth century A.D. Some half-a-century later, or about the year 150 B.C., there were issued in succession a series of Gaulish silver coins, the majority of which bore upon one side the impression of a horseman, though comparatively few showed the chariot at one time so generally represented on coins.

This leads naturally to the inference that the popularity of the chariot was already waning. Chariots, however, continued to appear upon the gold coins made in imitation of the gold stater of Philip II. of Macedon, coins that bore on the face Apollo's head, on the reverse a two-horse chariot.

Exceptionally fine horses, probably with Liberian blood in them, must have been owned by the Iberians and Celtiberians at about the period the Stoic philosopher Posidonius was travelling in Western Europe, and when he incidentally visited Spain—about the year 90 B.C. Posidonius himself remarks that the cavalry of the Iberians was trained to travel over mountains, adding that these horses too would crouch when told to, in order that their riders might mount or dismount with greater ease.

A method to which this cavalry sometimes had recourse consisted in their mounting two men on one animal. Then, in the heat of action, one of the men would fight on foot, the other remaining by to defend him if hard pressed. The same philosopher tells us that the horses of the Parthians and Celtiberians “indeed were superior to all other breeds in fleetness and endurance.”