In the Mahâbhâratam,[625] the god Indras appears in the form now of a horseman, now of a horse. It is, moreover, upon such a heroic horse that the young Utañkas flees from the king of the serpents, after having recovered from him the queen's earrings, which the king of the serpents had stolen. In this legend reference is made to several myths; to that of the hero in the infernal regions, to that of the hero-thief, and to the legend of the horse which saves the fugitive hero, the same as the hero who leads away the horse.
In the Vishṇu P.,[626] we have Kapilas, a form of Vishṇus, or of the solar hero (inasmuch as he is of a reddish colour, or else of the evening sun), who carries off the horse destined for the açvamedhas, that is to be sacrificed. (In other words, the solar horse, the horse which was meant for the sacrifice, escapes from it, in the same way as, in the preceding chapter, we have seen the bull escape into the forests.) In the Râmâyaṇam,[627] the horse destined for the sacrifice is, on the contrary, carried off by a serpent (i.e., the monster of night ravishes the evening sun, whilst, in the western sky, the fire is being prepared for his immolation). The sons of Sagaras (the clouds of the heavenly ocean, the word sagaras meaning sea), make a noise like thunder, searching for the horse that had been carried off from them. They find it near the god Vishṇus or Kapilas (here the sun himself, the solar horse itself, carried off into the cloudy ocean of night); believing him to be the ravisher, they assail him; Kapilas (or the solar horse), full of indignation, burns them to ashes. Their nephew, Aṅsumant (he who is furnished with rays, the radiant sun of morning), on the contrary, delivers the horse out of the forest. In the evening he is reconducted back to the place of sacrifice, on the golden pavement, after having made the journey round the world.[628] In the same way as we have seen, in the preceding chapter, that the bull or the cow is touched or struck as an augury of fruitfulness and abundance, in the Râmâyaṇam,[629] Kâuçalyâ touches the horse (a stallion) in order to be fruitful, as he desires to have sons (putrakâmyayâ), and the king and queen smell the odour of the burnt marrow or fat of the horse, as a talisman which may work for them the gratification of a like wish.[630] Of course we must always refer the legend to the myth of the solar horse, which, even when sacrificed, makes itself fruitful, so that it may rise again in the morning in a new and young form. And we can easily prove that the horse of the açvamedhas was a mythical horse, since the açvamedhas was originally a celestial ceremony, seeing we read in the Ṛigvedas how the swift heroic horse destined to be sacrificed was born of the gods, and how the Vasavas had adorned it with the colours of the sun.[631] We saw a short time ago how in the Ṛigvedas itself it is now the Açvinâu, and now Agnis who give the heroic steed to the predestined youth. Agnis, moreover, who gives a horse to the hero, is himself now a handsome red horse, and now an excellent ghṛidhnus,[632] a word which means the ravisher, as well as the vulture (as a bird of prey). The thief plays a principal part, even in the Vedic myths. In the war between the demons and the gods, described at length in the first book of the Mahâbhâratam, there is a continual strife between the two sides as to who will show himself the most skilful in stealing the cup which contains the ambrosia. And the horse's head which, according to Hindoo cosmogony, is born in the very production of the ambrosia with the mythical gem, the horse's heads of Dadhyańć and of Vishṇus, which are found in the ambrosia [through the mouth of which (Vaḍavamukhas) it is necessary to pass in order to enter hell, where one hears the cries and howls of the tormented, who inhabit the water[633]], shows us how already in the myth the legend of the theft of the earrings (the Açvinâu), or of the queen's gem (the sun), or of the treasure, must be united with the theft of the horse (the sun itself), as it seems to be united in the legend of Utañkas, before quoted, in which Utañkas flees upon the divine horse as he carries away from hell the earrings of the queen, which another skilful thief, the king of the serpents, had, in his turn, stolen from him. (Herodotos already knew the story of the skilful thief who robs the king's treasure and obtains the king's daughter to wife; he applies it to the king of Egypt, Rampsinitos.)
When the stag, in the fable, flees in the forest, his high horns betray him; when the bull flees, he fears that his horns may betray the fugitives; even the mane of the solar hero takes the name of horns. The Vedic hymn describing the horse destined for the sacrifice, represents it as having golden horns, and feet as rapid as thought (like the stag), whose horns (or whose mane, like the hair of the biblical Absalom, who revives again in the legendary tradition of Mediæval Europe under an analogous form), stretching here and there, are caught in the trees of the forest.[634] Here, therefore, we have the swift-footed animal, whose mane and horns are entangled to the trees. Another Vedic hymn presents to us the hero Tugras lost in the sea, who embraces a tree, and is saved by means of it.[635] In popular stories, the hero is often saved upon a tree, either because the thieves or the bear cannot see him, or because he is thus able to see the horizon; the tree brings good luck to him, now because by letting something drop or making a noise, he terrifies the thieves, now because he cheats the cowherds, whose cattle he wishes to possess himself of, by appearing now upon one tree, and now upon another; whereupon the cowherds begin to dispute about his identity, one affirming that it is the same person, another that it cannot be; they therefore hastily go back to inspect the first tree, and leave the cattle unguarded, upon which the hero-thief descends from the tree, and drives them away before him (this occurs in Afanassieff; the enemy of robbers is generally himself an exceedingly skilful thief; Kereçâçpa was no less a cunning thief than Mercury, the god of robbers, who discovers the deceit of others, because he is himself so expert a deceiver). In the nineteenth Mongol story, which is of Hindoo origin, the young hero, after having discharged his pious filial duties at the tomb of his father, mounts a fiery horse, while he seizes the branch of a tree. The tree is uprooted, and with it the horse and the hero massacre the army of the king, whose daughter the hero wishes to marry. In the Russian story[636] which narrates the adventures of Little Thomas Berennikoff, blind of an eye, the miles gloriosus, Little Tom, after killing an army of flies, begins to boast of the heroism he had shown in overthrowing, by himself, a whole army of light cavalry. He meets with two real heroes, Elias of Murom and Alexin Papović (son of the priest), who, on hearing him narrate his achievements, immediately own and honour him as their elder brother. The valour of the three is soon put to the proof; Elias and Alexin show themselves to be true heroes; at last it comes to Little Tom's turn to make proof of his valour; he kills a hostile hero whilst his eyes are shut, and then endeavours to ride his horse, but cannot. It is a hero's horse, and can be ridden only by a hero. At length he fastens the horse to an oak-tree, and climbs up the tree in order to leap from it upon the horse's back. The horse feels the man on his back, and plunges so much that he roots up the whole tree, and drags it after him, carrying Tom away into the heart of the Chinese army. The Chinese are struck down by the oak-tree and trodden under foot by the furious charger, and those who are not killed are put to flight. (The mythical wooden horse which proved so fatal to the Trojans appears to be a mythical variety of this horse with the tree so fatal to the Chinese.) The Emperor of China declares that he will never make war again with a hero of Little Tom's strength. Then the King of Prussia, an enemy of the Chinese, gives, in gratitude to Tom, and as a reward for his valour, his own daughter to wife. It is remarkable that, in the course of the story, Alexin once observes to Elias that the horse which Little Tom had brought from his house showed none of the characteristic qualities of a hero's horse. Alexin, as the priest's son, is the wise hero; Elias, the strong one, who had conceived a high opinion of his new colleague, Little Tom, seriously answers that a hero's strength consists in himself, and not in his horse. However, the development of the story shows that Alexin was right; without the fiery horse of the dead hero, Tom would not have dispersed the Chinese.
Thus, in a Vedic hymn,[637] we read that Indras, when he removes himself from his two horses, becomes like to a weak and wearied mortal; when he yokes them, he becomes strong. The enemies in the battles cannot resist the charge of the two fair-coloured horses of the god Indras;[638] and not only this, but one part alone of the divine horse is sometimes sufficient to give assurance of victory to the hero-god. Another hymn[639] sings, "A horse's tail wert thou then, O Indras;" that is, when Indras vanquished the monster serpent. It is with the head of the horse Dadhyańć that Indras discomfits his enemies.[640] The horse of the Açvinâu, which kills the monster serpent, has already been referred to in these pages. The solar horse Dadhikrâ, the same as Dadhyańć, in another hymn of the Ṛigvedas,[641] is celebrated as a swift falcon, luminous, impetuous, who destroys his enemies like a hero-prince, who runs like the wind. His enemies tremble, terrified by him, as by the thundering sky; he fights against a thousand enemies—invincible, formidable, and resplendent. Finally, the horses of the god Agnis are said to vanquish the enemies with their fore-feet.[642]
When Añgadas wishes to fight with the monster Narântakas, in the Râmâyaṇam,[643] he strikes with his fist the head of his great and swift-footed horse, and then with another blow he smites the monster in the chest, and kills him.
In the seven adventures of Rustem, related by Firdusi, the hero's horse fights against the monster, and drives him away, while the hero sleeps.
It is said of Bucephalus, the horse which Alexander the Great alone was able to tame—so called because he had, it would seem, on his head protuberances similar to the horns of a bull (we saw not long since how the mane of the solar horse is spoken of as horns in the Vedic hymns)—that he several times saved Alexander in battle, and that, though mortally wounded, in an engagement in India, in the flank and head, he still summoned up strength enough to flee away with extraordinary swiftness and save his master, and then died. Pliny, quoting Philarcus, says that when Antiochus was slain, the warrior who had killed him endeavoured to ride his horse, but that the latter threw him on the ground, and he expired.
Of Pêgasos, the winged horse which bore the hero Bellerophon over the waters, and by means of whom that hero won his glorious victories, we know that the warrior-goddess Pallas wore the effigy upon her helmet.
Suetonius writes of the horse of Julius Cæsar that it had almost human feet, with toes ("pedibus prope humanis, et in modum digitorum ungulis fissis"), from which the aruspices prognosticated to Cæsar the empire of the world; this horse, like Bucephalus, and every heroic courser, would bear no other rider than its master—the great conqueror.
The horse Baiardo, in Ariosto, fights the enemies with its feet. The hippogriff of Ariosto has, moreover, the privilege of being winged like Pêgasos, and of walking on air, like the Tatos of the Hungarians. The name of Falke, given to the horse of the Germanic and Scandinavian hero Dietrich or Thidrek (Theodoricus), induces us to believe that it too had the same winged nature.