Where such gems stand? Or did some god your high attempts accost,
And honoured you with this reward? Why, they be like the rays
The sun effuseth.[[106]]
[106]. Iliad, x. 545-47 (Chapman’s trans.).
The Thracian pair, moreover, are the only white horses mentioned in the Iliad. All the rest were chestnut, bay, or brown. One of those reft from Æneas by Diomed, was sorrel, with a white crescent on the forehead;[[107]] Achilles, or Patroclus for him, drove a chestnut and a piebald; a pair of rufous bays drew the chariot of Asius. No black horse appears on the scene; nor can we be sure that the ‘dark-maned,’ mythical Areion was really understood to be of sable tint. Admiration for white horses was not spontaneous among the Greeks. It sprang up in the East as a consequence of their figurative association with the sun. The Iranian fable of the solar chariot drawn by spotless coursers, carried everywhere with it, in its diffusion west, south, and north, an imaginative impression of the sacredness of such animals.[[108]] They were chosen out for the Magian sacrifices;[[109]] they were tended in Scandinavian temple-enclosures, and their neighings oracularly interpreted;[[110]] a white horse was dubiously reported by Strabo to be periodically immolated by the Veneti in commemoration of Diomed’s fabulous sovereignty over the Adriatic;[[111]] and it became a recognised mythological principle that superhuman beings should be, like the Wild Huntsman of the Black Forest, Schimmelreiter. ‘White as snow’ were the steeds of the Great Twin Brethren; white as snow the ‘horse with the terrible rider’ in Raphael’s presentation of the Vision that vindicated the sanctity of the Jewish Temple; Odin thundered over the mountain-tops on a pallid courser; and it was deemed scandalous presumption in Camillus to have his triumphal chariot drawn to the Capitol after the fall of Veii by a milk-white team, fit only for the transport of an immortal god.
[107]. Ib. xxiii. 454.
[108]. Hehn and Stallybrass, Wanderings of Plants and Animals, pp. 53-54.
[109]. Herodotus, vii. 114.
[110]. Weinhold, Altnordisches Leben, p. 49.
[111]. Geography, lib. v. cap. i. sect. 9.