WHITE HORSES 21 



To return again to the question of harness, 

 we have it on the authority of Herodotus that 

 "the Greeks learned from the Libyans to yoke 

 four horses to a chariot," and we know already 

 that before the time of Herodotus, who wrote 

 in the fifth century B.C., the Greeks had found 

 Libyans riding astride horses and driving some- 

 times two - horse and occasionally four - horse 

 chariots. At that time — about 632 B.C. — the 

 Greeks w T ere planting Cyrene. 



White horses were in ancient days at all times 

 largely in demand among the people of the 

 various nations ; and while Pindar alludes inci- 

 dentally to white horses being ridden by the 

 Thessalians in his time, Sophocles, writing half-a- 

 century or so later, describes a Thessalian chariot 

 that was drawn by white horses. 



One of the regions in which white horses were 

 bred, probably in great numbers, was the banks 

 of the Caspian where the River Bug flows from 

 it, for Herodotus states clearly that "around a 

 great lake from which the River Hypanis (called 

 now the Bug) issued, there grazed wild white 

 horses." Those particular animals possibly may 

 have been in reality only tarpans in their winter 

 coats, and not actually horses. The point has 

 been argued more than once,^ but has never 

 been quite settled. A white horse famous to- 

 wards the close of the fifth or early in the 

 fourth century was Kantake, of the notorious 



