It would appear, indeed, that in all ages white animals were looked upon as sacred in a sense, for in parts of India the white elephant is deemed sacred to this day, and in parts of Persia the white ass. Then, in the fifth century B.C., the nomad Scythians, whose territories lay chiefly to the north of the River Don, owned immense herds of horses. These they used principally for food, while the milk of the mares they drank and made domestic use of in other ways, a practice long in vogue among the Turko-Tartaric tribes of Central Asia, and said to be still in vogue with them in remote regions.
Bearing upon early Persia is rather a well-known story that on the death of the famous Smerdis the seven princes who were his possible successors agreed to confer the throne upon the owner of the horse that should be the first to neigh when they all met on the following day. The groom of Prince Darius having been told of this, had recourse to a clever ruse, for on that same evening he led his master's horse to the exact spot where the horses were all to meet on the day following, and there showed the horse a mare. Upon arriving at this spot next day the horse, as we are told, “neighed furiously,” so that Darius won his kingdom!
We know that Hiero, King of Syracuse, who flourished towards the end of the third and during the beginning of the second century, B.C., won the great Olympic crown with his good horse Phrenicus. In simple language Tacitus describes how the people of Thurii—the city built on the ruins of Sybaris about the year 443 B.C.—first taught horse racing to the Romans.
Although towards the end of the second century B.C., bareback riding was still quite common, a covering of some sort for the horse's back was becoming much more popular among the Greeks despite the adherence to bareback riding by the jockeys at the principal festivals. Atiphanes, the “gentle humourist,” whose plays were performed in public for the first time towards the close of the second century B.C., alludes to “coverlets for a horse,” this being probably one of the first references we have to saddles among the early Greeks.
And now we come to Xenophon, one of the most finished of horsemen among the ancient Greeks, and apparently a true lover of horses. With the exception of an individual named Simo, or Simon, who wrote before Xenophon's time, there had not existed a man with deep and practical knowledge of horses or horsemanship, and the care of horses, who was able to write lucidly upon these subjects until Xenophon wrote with so much success his own exhaustive work.
Xenophon speaks of Simo—who, according to Suidas, was by birth an Athenian—on more than one occasion. Xenophon, however, did not hold Simo in high esteem, as we may gather from the former's tone of condescension when he states that though Simo wrote with some knowledge of horses, yet that he entertained an exalted opinion of himself that was unpardonable.
A PORTION OF THE PARTHENON FRIEZE, EXECUTED BY PHIDIAS ABOUT THE YEAR 440 B.C.