Menesthus, emphatically one of the finest of the many fine riders spoken of in the “Iliad,” or, as Homer himself describes him, “foremost in equestrian fame,” is typical of the horsemen of that period.
In the “Iliad” too we find what I believe I am right in stating to be the first direct historical allusion to wagering on horse races. But the medium current on racecourses in those days was not coin. The odds apparently were laid in “kitchen utensils”—as a lad with whom I was at school once construed the line, to his subsequent discomfiture—namely, cauldrons and tripods.
Such, at least, we are led to infer from the paragraph in the twenty-third book of the “Iliad,” which, according to William Cowper's blank verse translation, edited by Robert Southey, runs somewhat as follows:—
“Come now—a tripod let us wager each,
Or cauldron, and let Agamemnon judge
Whose horses lead, that, losing, thou mayst learn.”
Or more euphoniously, as Lord Derby has it:
“Wilt thou a cauldron or a tripod stake
And Agamemnon, Atreus' son, appoint the umpire
To decide whose steeds are first?”