AVERAGE SPAN OF LIFE 53 



ride, drive his horses, dream of them all night. ..." 

 And so on. 



This gives us, to start with, an idea of the de- 

 gree of popularity that horse racing had attained 

 in Greece at about this time, for Pheidippes is 

 meant to be a character drawn from life and 

 typical of the young punters of the period. 



Later we learn that the money for which the 

 father is being sued had, in the first instance, 

 been borrowed to pay for a ''starling-coloured 

 horse " — whatever kind of weird creature that may 

 have been. Possibly " fleabitten " is intended, 

 for the geographer, Strabo, speaks of "the starling- 

 coloured horses of the Parthians " and of the 

 people of Northern Spain, and it is known that 

 plenty of those horses were of the colour that we 

 should term to-day " fleabitten." 



Aristotle is the next to enlighten us to some 

 extent upon the growing fondness of the Greeks 

 for horses, especially for race horses and war 

 horses. He tells us too that about the average 

 span the horses in his time — the middle of the 

 second century B.C., 384 to 322 — lived was 

 eighteen to twenty years, though a few were 

 said to have reached five and twenty, and even 

 thirty, and a very few indeed to have died at fifty. 



Whether the custom that then prevailed of feed- 



