455 
HORSES IN ANCIENT TIMES. 
horseman. Immense numbers of these animals were reared in 
the plains of Assyria and Persia. We read in some author ot no 
less ‘than 150,000 feeding on one vast plain near tire Caspian 
Gates. The Nyssean horses, which the kings of Persia used in 
their expeditions, were celebrated as the finest in the world. In 
Greece, the art of riding horses, and most probably the arrival or the 
horse himself, did not long precede the Trojan war. The story ot 
the Centaurs, semi-human horses and semi-equine men, as Uvul 
calls them, warrants the inference that horses then first ma e 
their appearance in Thessaly, if not in Greece. These people lived 
about a century before the Trojan war; for Chiron, who was 
their chief, was the preceptor of Achilles. As the poor Mexicans 
at the first appearance of the Spanish cavalry ran on in a Inght, 
conceiving that man and horse were but one animal, so the 
people of Thessaly fled, panic struck, at the sight of the double- 
shaped incomprehensible monster that charged them. It is 
almost certain that these Centaurs were a tribe of Pelasgi, or 
emigrants from Phrygia, and the southern shores ot the Puxine 
Sea! 5 which were occupied at an early period by a colony ot 
Egyptians, planted there by Sesostris in his Phrygian and 
Scythian expedition. Confirmatory of this derivation, is the 
Grecian tradition, as recorded by the antiquaries, thatJy 1 y re ' 
the mother of the Centaurs, cohabited with Saturn in Philyreis, 
an island near the southern shore of the Euxine ; and that from 
that island she emigrated to Thessaly and the mountains of the 
Pelaso’i. In this way, one might amuse himself by attempting 
to trace, even from the few data afforded by history, the circuit 
by which horses, with the consequent art of equestrian exercise, 
passed from Egypt, the original and central riding-school of the 
world, into Greece and into Europe. From Egypt they passed 
' into Assyria and Persia ; from Assyria to Cappadocia, Amazonia, 
and Pontus, countries where horses were most reared, most ad¬ 
mired, and, as the most admirable objects in animated nature, 
offered up as sacrifices to the sun. From Pontus they passed, 
with the streams of westward-rushing population, to Phrygia 
and the southern banks of the Propontis; and from thence, with 
«horse-taming” Pelops and the Pelasgi, they migrated into 
Thessaly, and confounded with their novel and terrifying ap¬ 
pearance the simple and aboriginal inhabitants, to whom the 
horse and his rider” seemed a monster outlandish and inscru¬ 
table ! It was not customary in these ancient times to shoe 
horses with iron, according to our modern practice; so that a 
strong hoof, “hard as brass” and solid “ as the flint,” was 
reckoned one of the good qualities of a steed. In oriental coun 
tries, the dryness ol the roads rendered this fortification of the 
