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 left in 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 faded painting 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’s Iliad, 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 tragedy Rhesos, ‘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,