252 THE HORSES OF PREHISTORIC [CH. 



references to intercourse with Libya, we need not be surprised 

 if the practice of yoking four horses abreast had been learned 

 from that land. On the other hand it seems clear that the 

 Achean conquerors clave fast to the practice of the region from 

 whence they had come and continued to use only their national 

 two-horse cars. In the chariot-race at the funeral games of 

 Patroclus there is not even a hint of the use of the four-horse 

 chariot or even of a trace-horse, a fact which contrasts strongly 

 with the constant appearance of the quadriga on the black- 

 figured vases dating from the seventh century B.C., when the 

 four-horse chariot had been reintroduced. 



Not only is it probable that the Greeks first learned the use 

 of the four-horse chariot from Libya, but it is also not unlikely 

 that it was from the same region that they first learned to 

 mount on the back of the horse. Although the Homeric 

 Acheans never normally rode their dun-coloured horses any 

 more than they drove them in teams of four when they raced 

 or w^ent to battle, yet there is at least one simile in the Homeric 

 poems which shows that riding on horseback was by no means 

 unknown to the poet. Thus Odysseus, when his raft w^as shat- 

 tered, " bestrode a single beam, as one rideth on a courser (keles) 

 and stripped him of the garments which fair Calypso gave him^;" 

 and in another simile, in the Iliad, if we do not hear of liding 

 on horseback we have the earliest picture of a circus-rider, — " a 

 man right well skilled in horsemanship, that couples four horses 

 out of many, and hurrying them from the plain towards a great 

 city drives them along the public way, many men and women 

 marvelling at him, and unerringly ever he leaps and changes 

 his stand from horse to horse, while they fly along-." Now 

 when we bear in mind that the first horse ever ridden according 

 to Greek legend was Pegasus, that this famous steed was born in 

 Libya, and that he was obtained there by Perseus, the renowned 

 king of Mycenae, in the Bronze Age, before the coming of the 

 large-limbed, fair-haired Acheans from central Europe, it is not 

 strange that the Greeks of the Homeric (Iron) Age knew that 

 the horse could be ridden as well as driven, although the new 



1 Od. V. 371. - II. XV. 679 sqq. 



