Ill] AND HISTORIC TIMES 313 



make it equally plain that the excellence of the Gallic horse was 

 due to his Libyan ancestry. Finally, the history of the horses 

 of Greece renders it certain that the best breeds of that country 

 were saturated with the Libyan blood. 



The absence of all mention of any Asiatic horses Parthian, 

 Armenian, Cappadocian, or Arab is the clearest proof that the 

 racing men of the time did not look to Arabia or any other 

 district of Asia for horses of preeminent speed, and this com- 

 pletely corroborates the evidence of Strabo in the first part of 

 the same century that the Arabs neither bred nor kept any 

 horses at all. It is now beyond all doubt that from the dawn 

 of history down to the early centuries of our era the Libyan 

 horse surpassed all others in swiftness, and that no horse was 

 able to compete with him save those of Spain, Gaul, and 

 Greece, which were themselves wholly or in great part sprung 

 from the same blood. 



Of course a very different class of horse from the prize- 

 winners of the circus was required for war, hunting, and other 

 practical purposes, and for such the horses of the Parthians, so 

 highly commended by Strabo, and other good breeds of Asia 

 Minor, Greece, and Italy, which we have shown to have been 

 the result of crossing the Asiatic-European horse with the 

 Libyan, were admirably adapted. 



For the chief breeds of horses in the second century after 

 Christ we have the evidence of Oppian, who flourished about 

 180 A.D. In his treatise on Hunting (Cynegetica 1 ), he says that 

 though each country has its own breed of horses, he will only 

 mention the most important, and then enumerates the Etruscan, 

 Sicilian, Cretan, Mazicean, Achean, Cappadocian, Mauritanian, 

 Scythian, Magnesian, Epeian, Ionian, Armenian, Libyan, Thra- " 

 cian, and Erembian. His enumeration is not according to order 

 of merit or geographical position, but to meet the exigencies of 

 the hexameter metre. The horses of Libya (by which he pro- 

 bably means the Cyrenaica), the Mazicean 2 (Numidian), and 



1 i. 166200. 



2 The Mazices of Oppian are the same Numidian tribe as the Mazaces and 

 Mazices of Caesar and Suetonius, and are to be identified with the Libyan tribe 

 of Maxyes, who, according to Herodotus (iv. 191), lived west of the river Triton. 



