108 THE HORSES OF PREHISTORIC [CH. 



Thracians did not bury slaves and horses with their chiefs, 

 whilst the Scythians did both. But there is nothing in the 

 ancient statements 1 respecting the Thracian funeral customs to 

 hinder us from believing that the Thracians might occasionally 

 so honour a great chief inasmuch as concubines were regularly 

 put to death and all kinds of victims were offered. On the 

 other hand, as the Scythians did not use chariots in the time 

 of Herodotus, it is most unlikely that they would have resumed 

 their use in the centuries after Christ, when all other peoples 

 had taken to horseback. 



The monuments of the Bronze age of Greece, commonly 

 termed the Mycenean period, furnish the earliest evidence of the 

 use of chariots and horses in that country. These monuments 

 are the relics of the Pelasgians, who were the indigenous 

 people of Greece, and also the close congeners of the Illyrians 

 and Thracians; and the grave-stones of the acropolis of Mycenae, 

 on three of which are sculptured in low relief a man driving a 

 two-horse chariot with four-spoked wheels (Fig. 47), may be 

 placed in the fourteenth century B.C. 



The Homeric poems furnish us with very copious evidence 

 from at least 1000 B.C. respecting the method of employing 

 horses, their breeding, their management, and their colours, 

 not only for Greece itself, but also for Thrace and Asia Minor. 

 We shall first examine the evidence for Thrace. 



That the Thracians used chariots in war is shown by the 

 episode of the slaying of Rhesus the Thracian king and twelve 

 of his best men. Dolon, the Trojan spy, when captured by 

 Odysseus and Diomede, said that if they desire "to steal 

 into the throng of the Trojans, lo, there be those Thracians, 

 new-comers, at the furthest point apart from the rest, and 

 among them their king Rhesus, son of Eioneus. His be the 

 fairest horses that ever I beheld, and the greatest, whiter than 

 snow, and for speed like the winds. And his chariot is 

 fashioned well with gold and silver, and golden is his armour 

 that he brought with him, marvellous, a wonder to behold 2 ." 



1 Herod, v. 4 ; Pomponius Mela, n. 2, 18 ; Solinus, x. 28. 



2 II. x. 433 sqq. (Lang, Leaf, Myers). 



