CHAPTER II. 

 The Greek Cavalry. 



SECTION I. ATHENIAN AND THESSALIAN CAVALRY. 



The Greeks were not the first people to employ 

 cavalry in war. The want of pasture, the rocky and 

 mountainous character of the country, and its general 

 inadaptability to the use of the horse, naturally led 

 them to depend at first entirely upon their infantry, 

 and prevented for a long period that extensive use of 

 horsemen which was so common at an early age among 

 the Scythians, Persians, and Assyrians. 



The earliest war of which mention is made in Greece, 

 that of the seven chiefs against Thebes, in 1225 B.C., is 

 so evidently a mere fiction that no useful information 

 can be obtained from the records of it. The evidence, 

 as far as it goes, however, shows that cavalry were not in 

 use at that period. The next war in the order of time 

 of which we have any historical account is the siege of 

 Troy, which occurred forty years later, about 1184 B.C. 

 Homer has given a very full and detailed account of 

 this war, and enables us clearly to understand the arms 

 and method of warfare of his age. He shows us plainly 

 that although the Greek chieftains had adopted the 

 chariot as an engine of war, and used it in the same 

 manner as their opponents, yet that cavalry proper 

 were entirely unknown as a military force to both the 

 contending armies. 



It is a most probable conjecture that the war chariot 

 was an invention of the inhabitants of Asia Minor, or 



