OF HORSEMANSHIP. 6i 



moft excellent food. Columella fays it will bear mowing 

 four, if not fix times in the year ; and that nothing is 

 more efficacious to reftore lean and weak horfes to 

 plumpnefs and vigour. There are doubts, however, 

 what the herb i^, which was anciently called Medica, 

 a name given to it from its originally growing in 

 Media. Nemejian recommends ftraw and barley as very 

 nourifhing diet; and it certainly conduces very much to 

 keep horfes in health, fpirits, and wind, and in a Hate 

 of body fit for any kind of labour, as it fupports and 

 ftrengthens, without rendering the animal heavy and 

 corpulent. Eumenes^ as we learn from Plutarch, who 

 wrote his life, being befieged, and not having room to 

 exercife his horfes, fed them with boiled barley, as 

 being more eafy of digeftion. The ancients like wife, 

 on certain occafions, gave their horfes wine to drink, 

 to animate and refrefb them. Thus Homer makes An- 

 dromache give wine to He^or's war-horfes, or, as fome 

 commentators render it, wheat fleeped in wine. It is 

 no uncommon thing with us to give wine and beer to 

 our horfes, in cafe of ficknefs, or where any extraor- 

 dinary exertion of fatigue is required. 



The cloths, or houfings, ufed by the Roman horfe- 

 men are Hill to be fecn upon Trajan's pillar, and many 

 other monuments of Roman antiquity. Stirrups were 

 unknown, and the Roman horfemen were therefore 

 obliged to mount their horfes, and get dov/n, by vault- 

 ing, by the help of horfeblocks, or of a groom called 

 Strator. 



The 



