The Horse in History

After directly helping on the progress of the world and the development of civilisation almost from the time when, according to Nehring's interesting studies, the wild and primitive horses of the great Drift began to exhibit distinct differences in make, shape and individual characteristics, the horse has reached the limit of its tether.

For with the dawn of the twentieth century, and the sudden innovation of horseless traffic, any further influence that it might have exercised upon the advancement of the human race comes rapidly to a close.

That the horse's reign is over—though it is sincerely to be hoped that horses will be with us still for many years—the statistics issued recently by our Board of Agriculture in a measure prove. For in those statistics it is stated that the number of horses in the United Kingdom decreased during last year alone by no less than 12,312, and later statistics show that the decrease still continues.

In the following pages, therefore, the writer has striven to trace the progress of the horse from very early times down to the present day mainly from the standpoint of the effect its development had upon the advancement of the human race. For this reason though a selected number of the most famous horses that lived in the centuries before Christ, and between the time of Christ and the period of the Norman Conquest, and that have lived within the last nine centuries, have been mentioned, the horses of romance and mythology have for the most part been passed over.

Every effort has been made to obtain information that is strictly accurate, a task of no small difficulty owing to the mass of contradictory evidence with which the writer has found himself confronted in the course of his researches. To the best of his ability he has winnowed the actual facts from the mass of fiction that he has come upon in the writings of some of the earlier historians, and to some extent in records, manuscripts and private letters of more recent times to which he has had access.

B. J. T.

BOODLE'S CLUB, 1908.

CONTENTS

PART I

FROM VERY EARLY TIMES TO THE CONQUEST

CHAPTER I

PAGE Rameses; early Egyptian chariots—Horses of Babylon and of Libya—Erichthonius; horse of Job; horses of Solomon—Early circus riding—Dancing horses of the Sybarites; the Crotonians' stratagem—Homer's “Iliad”; Menesthus; early wagering—Patroclus; Achilles; Euphorbus; Hyperenor—Horses and chariots of the Thracians—Ancient Greeks and horsemanship; decline in the popularity of war chariots; inauguration of cavalry—Xenophon on horsemanship—White horses 1

CHAPTER II

Increasing interest in horses—Herodotus; Thucydides; war chariots of the Persians—Horses represented on coinage—Wooden horse of Troy—The Parthenon frieze; Greek art—Plato; white horses—The procession of Xerxes; horses and men sacrificed—The horse of Darius—Horse racing introduced among the Romans—Xenophon and Simo—Early horseshoes, bits and bitting; ancient methods of mounting 23

CHAPTER III

Xenophon disliked the “American” seat—Cavalry organised by the Athenians—Cost of horses twenty-three centuries ago—Aristophanes; Aristotle; Athenians' fondness for horse racing—Alexander the Great; Bucephalus—Story of Bucephalus; his death—Famous painters of horses: Apelles, Pauson, Micon—Mythical flesh-eating horses of Diomed—Hannibal's cavalry of 12,000 horse—Coins—Posidonius; horses of the Parthians, Iberians and Celtiberians 45

CHAPTER IV

Virgil on the points of a horse—Cæsar's invasion—Abolition of war chariots—Precursor of the horseshoe—Nero's 2000 mules shod with silver; Poppæa's shod with gold—The Ossianic and Cuchulainn epic cycles; Cuchulainn's horses—The Iceni on Newmarket Heath; early horse racing in Britain—Horses immolated by the Romans; white horses as prognosticators—Caligula's horse, Incitatus; Celer, the horse of Verus; the horse of Belisarius 67