Still serving you before myself, her husband young and dear.[[113]]
He went on to represent to them the glorious fruits and triumphs of victory, but gave no hint of a penalty for defeat. The absence of any such savage threat as Antilochus hurled at his slow-paced steeds in the chariot-race marks his innate gentleness of soul. He urged only the nobler motives for exertion appropriate to conscious intelligence. Trust in equine sympathy is, indeed, widespread in legend and romance. Even the cruel Mezentius, wounded and doomed, made a final appeal to the pride and valour of his faithful Rhœbus; to say nothing of ‘Auld Maitland’s’ son’s call upon his ‘Gray,’ of the stirrup-rhetoric of Reynaud de Montauban, of Marko, the Cid of Servia, of the Eddic Skirnir starting for Jotunheim, or other imperilled owners of renowned steeds.
[113]. Iliad, viii. 184-190 (Chapman’s trans.).
These, now and then, are enabled to respond; but speaking horses should be reserved for emergencies. They occur, for instance, with undue profusion in modern Greek folk-songs. Not every notorious klepht lurking in the thickets of Pindus, but only some hero towering to the clouds of fancy, should, rightly considered, possess an animal so exceptionally endowed. The lesson is patent in the Iliad. Homer’s instinctive self-restraint and supreme mastery over the secrets of artistic effect are nowhere more conspicuous than in his treatment of the horses of Achilles.
‘Thessalian steeds and Lacedæmonian women’ were declared by an oracle to be the best Greek representatives of their respective kinds. In Thessaly was the legendary birthplace of the horse; there lived the Lapiths—if Virgil is to be believed—the first horse-breakers:
Fræna Pelethronii Lapithæ, gyrosque dedere
Impositi dorso, atque equitem docuere sub armis
Insultare solo, et gressus glomerare superbos.[[114]]
There, too, the Centaurs were at home; the Thessalian cavalry became historically famous; the Thessalian marriage ceremony long included the presentation to the bride by the bridegroom, of a fully caparisoned horse;[[115]] and the noble equine type of the Parthenon marbles is still reproduced along the fertile banks of the Peneus.[[116]] Thence, too, of old to Troy
Fair Pheretiades