3. It is most singular that, though Homer so loved the horse that he is never weary of using him with his whole heart for the purposes of poetry, yet in all his animated and beautiful descriptions of this animal, colour should be so little prominent. It is said, indeed, that Homer tells us the horses of Eumelus corresponded in colour (ὅτριχες Il. ii. 765); but what the colour was we know not; and the question may also be raised, whether the epithet employed does not more properly indicate similarity in the fineness of their coat. Perhaps the only cases, where colour is distinctly assigned to horses, are the following two:
First, that of the horses of Rhesus. There the colour is the negative one of whiteness, which seems, with its counterpart blackness, to have been so much more present to the mind of Homer than any intermediate colour. These horses were (Il. x. 437) λευκότεροι χιόνος. And afterwards Nestor in a noble line declares them like, not to anything having colour, but to the rays of the sun (Il. x. 547). Thus reappears the old identification in Homer’s mind of light and colour. There is, however, another reason to which it may be suspected that we owe the mention of colour in this instance: namely, that the whiteness is intended to make them visible in the gloom, and thus to assist the capture by night.
The second case is, that of the horse of Diomed in the chariot-race. Here Idomeneus mentions the bay or chestnut colour (Il. xxiii. 454) with the white mark, but then it is the only means of identifying the master, which is essential to his purpose in the speech. Apart from these special reasons, Homer speaks indeed twice of the ξανθὰ κάρηνα of horses; this, however, is of horses in the abstract. Nestor (Il. xi. 680) mentions a set of one hundred and fifty mares all with colour, that is to say, ξανθαί: a new proof of the lax use of the word, as they would hardly be all alike.
Among the four horses of Hector (Il. viii. 185), the two of the Atreidæ (Il. xxiii. 295), and the three of Achilles (xvi. 475) we find only the name Xanthus which is clearly referable to colour: and this is in truth the only colour which, besides white, he ever gives to his horses. For it is more probable that by the name Βάλιος he meant to refer to the effect of light from rapidity of motion: while Αἴθη in Il. xxiii. 409, Αἴθων and Λάμπος (Il. viii. 485) may signify brightness or darkness indeed, but neither of these is colour.
Again, in the magnificent simile of the στάτος ἵππος there is no colour. The three thousand horses of Erichthonius (Il. x. 221) have no colour. The horses of Diomed (Il. v. 257) have none. Nor have the heaven-born horses of Tros, nor those which Anchises bred from them (Il. v. 265. et seqq.). None of the teams for the race in Il. xxiii. have colour. Lastly; Homer abounds in characteristic and set epithets for horses, such as ὠκὺς, ὠκύπους, ποδώκης, μώνυξ, ἐριαύχην, ἀερσίπους, ἐΰσκαρθμος, ὑψήχης, καλλίθριξ, ταχὺς, and others; but none of them are taken from colour.
Yet colour is in horses a thing so prominent that it seems, wherever they are at all individualized, almost to force itself into the description. Let us take two examples allied in their beauty, although separated in birth by twenty-two hundred years. The first is from Euripides, where the Chorus in Iphigenia in Aulide describes the Grecian host before embarcation[847].
ὁ δὲ διφρηλάτας βοᾶτ’
Εὔμηλος Φερητιάδας,
ᾧ καλλίστους εἰδόμαν