Rather a risky proceeding and one from which we may conclude that bold Erichthonius would have flouted the axiom promulgated recently by the more prudent members of a well-known coaching club that “no team ought to be driven faster than ten miles an hour, upon an average”!
Though allusions to the horse are made repeatedly in the Bible, they give us little or no insight as to the horse's influence upon the nations and their development. The notorious steed of Job that when among the trumpets exclaimed “Ha! Ha!” and then winded the battle afar off and fretted itself unduly upon hearing “the thunder of the captains and the shouting” has been described by several writers, but no two descriptions appear to tally.
Solomon, according to the “Book of Kings,” must have owned quite a large stud, for we read that he had horses brought out of Egypt, and that a chariot came up and went out for six hundred shekels of silver, a horse for a hundred and fifty, “and so for all the kings of the Hittites, and for the kings of Syria, did he bring them out.” The Hittites, whom Professor Jensen assures us were Indo-Europeans, are also shown to have had horses when they made their way into Northern Palestine, probably at some period prior to 1400 B.C., but trustworthy information about the horses and how the Hittites treated them is not obtainable.
As for the horses in the Mycenean Period—the Bronze Age of Greece—the monuments of that epoch bear testimony to the esteem in which they were held. The indigenous people of Greece were presumably the Pelasgians, and these monuments remain to bear testimony that such a people once existed.
In a like manner do the gravestones of the Acropolis of Mycenæ bear indisputable evidence, for upon three of them at least are to be seen sculptured in low relief a chariot, a pair of horses, and a driver, the date of this particular sculpture being approximately the fourteenth century B.C.
It seems practically beyond dispute that before the year 1000 B.C. no people rode on horseback except the Libyans, though chariots must have been used quite 2000 years before that. Yet by the time Homer wrote his poems horsemanship was becoming common amongst a section of the Greeks.
Indeed by that time feats of skill on horseback upon a par with the antics we see performed to-day in circuses were at least known, and probably they were often watched and greatly liked. Listen, for instance, to the following Homeric simile—the translation is almost literal:—
“As when a man that well knows how to ride harnesses up four chosen horses, and springing from the ground dashes to the great city along the public highway, and crowds of men and women look on in wonder, while he with all confidence, as his steeds fly on, keeps leaping from one to another.”