Although both Greeks and Trojans were accomplished charioteers, riding on horseback was, we are told, so rare and curious an exhibition in ancient Greece that only one single reference is found in the poems of Homer. According to Gladstone, equestrian exercise was “the half-foreign accomplishment of the Kentauroi,” who were fabulously half-man and half-horse: similarly, in most ancient Ireland there are no riders on horseback, and the warriors fight invariably from chariots.[432] On the other hand, in Etruria there are found representations of what might be a modern race meeting, and the effect of these pictures upon the early investigators of Etrurian tombs seems to have been most surprising. In the words of Mrs. Hamilton Gray: “The famous races of Britain seemed there to find their type. The racers, the race-stand, the riders with their various colours, the judges, the spectators, and the prizes were all before us. We were unbelieving like most of our countrymen.... Our understandings and imaginations were alike perplexed.”[433]
The verb to canter is supposed to be derived from the pace at which pilgrims proceeded to Canterbury. But pilgrims either footed it or else ambled leisurely along on their palfreys, and the connection between canter and Cantuar is seemingly much deeper than supposed. At Kintyre in Scotland the patron saint is St. Cheiran, who may be connoted with Chiron, the wise and good Kentaur chief; and this connection of Chiron-Kentaur, Cheiran-Kintyre is the more curious, inasmuch as both an Irish MS. and Ptolemy refer independently by different terms to the Mull of Kintyre, as “the height of the horse”.[434]
Fig. 245.—From The Heroes (Kingsley, C.).Fig. 245.—From The Heroes (Kingsley, C.).
The illustration herewith is an early Victorian conception of Chiron, the wise and kindly Kentaur King, and Cantorix, an inscription found on the spectral steeds of Fig. 146, might seemingly without outrage be interpreted as Canto rex, or Song King: in Welsh canto, a song or chant, was gan, and the title tataguen meant “the father of the muse”;[435] according to mythology the walls of Troy were built by Oceanus to the music of Apollo’s lyre.
It would appear probable that Kent, the county of Invicta, the White Horse, was pre-eminently a horse-breeding county, as it remains to this day: part of Cantuarburig is known as Hackington, and in view of the Iceni hackney-coins there is little doubt that horse-breeding was extensively practised wherever the equine Eceni, Cantii, and Cenomagni were established. It is noteworthy that the Icknield Way was known alternatively as Hackington Way, Hackney Way, Acknil Way, and Hikenilde Street.[436]
It is a curious fact that practically the first scratchings of a horse represent the animal as bridled, whence the authorities assume that horses were kept semi-domesticated in a compound for purposes of food: immense collections of horse bones have been discovered, whence it seems probable that horses were either sacrificed in hecatombs or were eaten in large quantities; but the Tartars kept horses mainly for the mare’s milk.
Pliny mentions a horse-eating tribe, in Northern Spain, entitled the Concanni, with which Iberians may be connoted the Congangi of Cumberland, whose headquarters were supposedly Kendal: the western point of Carnarvonshire is named by Ptolemy Gangani, and the same geographer mentions another Gangani in the West of Hibernia. The Hibernian Ganganoi, situated in the neighbourhood of the Shannon, worshipped a Sengann whose name is supposed to mean Old Gann: we have illustrated the earthwork wheel cross of Shanid (ante [p. 55]), and have suggested the equation of Sen Gann with Sinjohn. In all probability the fairy known in Ireland as Gancanagh, who appears in lonesome valleys and makes love to milkmaids, is a survival of the Gangani’s All Father. The name Konken occurs among the kingly chronology of Archaic Britain; the most ancient inscribed stone in Wales is a sepulchral stone of a certain Cingen: the Saxon name Cunegonde is translated as having meant royal lady.
The French cancan, an exuberant dance which is associated with Paris, the city of the Parisii, may be a survival from the times of the Celtiberian Concanni: Paris was the Adonis of the Hellenes, or Children of Hellas, and it is not unlikely that the lament helas! or alas! was the cry wailed by the women on the annual waning of the Solar Power. At Helstone in Cornwall—supposed to be named from hellas, a marsh—there is still danced an annual Furry dance of which the feature is a long linked chain similar to that of the French farandole: if faran, like fern, be the plural of far, it follows that the furry and the farandole were alike festivals of the Great Fire, Phare, Fairy, Phairy, or Peri; the Parisii who settled in the Bridlington district are by some scholars assigned to Friesland.
Persia, the home of the peris, is still known locally as Farsistan, whence the name Farsees or Parsees is now used to mean fire worshippers: the Indian Parsees seem chiefly to be settled in the district of India, which originally formed part of the ancient Indian Konkan kingdom, and the probabilities are that the Konkani of the East, like the Cancanii of the West, were worshippers of the Khan Khan, or King of Kings.