By the beginning of the era of the Saxon kings an Arab steed had come to be looked upon as a recognised royal gift. According to one authority, indeed, Boadicea, the intrepid queen who led the Iceni against the Roman invaders, was greatly attached to her horses.
Most likely she was attached to them, however, only because they helped her so materially in her raids upon her enemies. To pretend that “the sturdy queen,” as one historian nicknames her, harboured anything in the least approaching a sympathetic or a sentimental affection for any particular horse would be the acme of all that is grotesque.
Haydn has the misplaced gallantry to allude to Boadicea as “the heroic queen.” That her good fortune in possessing horses with considerable staying power enabled her to win her great victory at Verulam is now common history. Therefore we read with the more interest that “this relentless queen destroyed London and other places, slaughtering many Romans, but at last she was overcome near London, by Suetonius, and she ended by committing suicide.”
In the second century A.D. the Arabs probably had not begun to breed horses, for at that time we do not hear of Arab horses being held in the high esteem with which they later came to be regarded by the British nation.
Yet even before this, or towards the middle of the first century A.D., the sport of chariot racing had become immensely popular, and the sums spent upon organising the races, training the horses that were to be entered for competition, and in purchasing prizes to be bestowed upon the victors, may justly be said to have been enormous if we bear in mind the purchasing value of the coinage of the period.
That the Romans were given to sacrificing horses to their gods, Pliny the elder has made plain to us. He is said to have written an exhaustive work upon steeds of a certain stamp, but unfortunately the book must have been destroyed in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D., when Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried, and some 200,000 human beings killed, among them Pliny.
As he points out in his “Natural History,” however, the sacrifices of horses took place frequently, especially upon occasions of public solemnity, and he mentions that horses to be immolated were not allowed to be touched even by the Flamen.
Whether or no the Romans habitually sacrificed white horses, after the manner of the Greeks, Illyrians and Persians, is not stated. They did, however, harness white horses to their chariots upon these and other state occasions, and thus we read that when Julius Cæsar returned from Africa the quadriga in which he drove was, by order of the Senate, drawn by milk-white steeds.
Tacitus tells us that on some occasions when a distinguished chief died the dead man's horse was cremated on the funeral pyre beside its master's body, and we know that the superstitious beliefs of the Persians were upon a par with those of their Germanic kinsmen in so far as the immolation of horses was concerned.