453 
HORSES IN ANCIENT TIMES. 
is made of horses. Neither in the fourth or tenth command¬ 
ments are horses noticed with the other working animals. In 
the enumeration, however, of the Egyptian cattle-property 
affected by the murrain, horses are mentioned in precedence of 
the rest. “ Behold the hand of the Lord is upon thy cattle 
which is in the field, upon the hoi'ses , upon the asses, upon the 
camels, upon the oxen, and upon the sheep. ^ Exod . ix, 3. In 
like manner, in the excellent and very particular descnption 
given by Theocritus of the quadruped stock of Angias, the child 
of the Sun, who lived in the Peloponnesus, horses find no place. 
Even during the Trojan war these animals were only in the 
retinue of princes, and were always associated with cattle, 
or with the glorious forthcoming of kings. Accordingly, we 
find that in all the first descriptions of that animal, ana particu¬ 
larly in that sublime and all-surpassing one in the Book of Job, 
he is depicted with beauty and majesty, as the war steed alone. 
Homer speaks of him always with dignity and admiration ) and 
it is apparent, that in his conceptions, an additional respecta¬ 
bility is conferred upon his princes and his war-grooms by the 
title which he bestows upon them of “ horse-tamers’ 7 and “ horse 
whippets”—a contemptible commendation, according to our 
ideas, associating, as we inevitably do, these epithets with the 
persons and mean employments of grooms of the stable and 
horse-jockeys. The ancient poets and ancient people must have 
connected, however, beauty, majesty, and sublimity, with their 
idea of that animal, not only from his noble shape and gallant 
appearance, but from his singularity, and consequently, high price 
—his being the friend, as it were, and attendant of princes his 
being the terrible yet graceful accompaniment of war—and his 
being never seen, as in our modern times, degraded to the 
familiar yet far more beneficial purposes of draught in our 
streets, and husbandry in our fields. A modem reader, therefore, 
must enter somewhat into the sentiments and feelings of antiquity 
in order to perceive the beauty or propriety of Theocritus s com¬ 
parison of Helen to a horse, or of Solomon’s likening his love “ to a 
company of horses in Pharaoh’s chariots.” The light in which 
the horse is thus considered as an ornament of royalty, or an 
appendage of war, not only ornamental but efficient, is explana¬ 
tory of many passages not only in the Old Testament, but in the 
Greek and Latin classics. In the Psalms of David, 
An horse for preservation is 
But a deceitful thing.—Ps. xxxiii, IT. 
And in Eccles. x, 7, “ I have seen servants on horses.” In 
Deuteronomy, chap, xvii, 16, Moses forbids the Israelites in the 
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