By the Rev. IF. C. Plenderleath. 13 



and appear to have been persistently retained during very long 

 periods of time. To which I may add the Horse itself as a well- 

 known Thracian Type, of which I show an example from a coin of 

 Maroncea, in that country, which as is judged by that learned nu- 

 mismatologist, Mr. Noel Humphreys, must have been struck some- 

 where about the year 450 B.C. (C. C. Manual, vol. i. p. 43.) 



Horses appear to have from very early days been the objects of 

 religious regard. Cyrus is reported by Herodotus (p. i, § 189) to 

 have had some in his army when marching towards Babylon, and 

 we hear again of the " sacred horses " as passing over the Hellespont 

 immediately before Xerxes himself, in the vii. book of the same 

 history, § 55. At a later period Tacitus says, in his treatise " de 

 moribus Germanorum : " " These people have certain horses, which 

 are kept in their sacred groves, untouched and free from any sort of 

 mortal labour (candidati et nullo mortali opere contacti) ; and when 

 they are harnessed to the sacred chariot, the priest and the king, or 

 the chief man of the city go with them, and observe their neighings 

 and whinnyings. Nor is there any sort of augury to which more 

 importance is attached — not only in the minds of the people, but 

 also in that of the nobles and priests, for they imagine them to be 

 conscious ministers of the Gods-'^ 



Again in Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie, p. 626 (ed. 1844) it is 

 said that the worship of the horse was common to the Celtic and 

 Germanic as well as to the Sclavonic tribes ; and in the saga of Olaf 

 Trygvesson it is reported that Olaf, hearing of the inhabitants of 

 Drontheim having relapsed into the worship of Freyr, sailed himself 

 with an expedition and destroyed their temple. "And when he 

 landed " adds the Chronicler " he found the sacred horses of the 

 God feeding in the precints of the temple." And in connection 

 with this part of the subject I may mention a coin of the Belindi 

 of which a representation is given by the Marquis de Lagoy, on 

 which appears a very singular representation of a horse standing 

 within a distyle temple. This he supposes to have been a type of 

 the Goddess Epona, who is mentioned by Apuleius (Metamorph. III.) 

 which may or may not be the case. (See Archseologia, xxxi., p. 297.) 



S. Bede the Venerable, also speaks of the reverence shewn by our 



