Ancient Greek Horsemanship

By J. K. Anderson

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1961.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520326453

J. K. Anderson

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Ancient Greek Horsemanship

ANCIENT GREEK

HORSEMANSHIP

By J. K. Anderson

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles

1961

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

Cambridge University Press

London, England

© 1961 By The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 61-6780

Designed by Rita Carroll

Printed in the United States of America

In Memory of

T. J. DUNBABIN

PREFACE

Most of the questions that this book, discusses were suggested to me by the scholar to whose memory it is dedicated. If I have failed to answer them as well as I might have done under his guidance, the fault is my own and not that of the many friends who, by reading and criticizing preliminary drafts or by placing their knowledge at my disposal in other ways, have greatly improved this final version and saved me from many errors.

First and foremost, I must thank Professor G. R. Manton of the University of Otago for his help from the very beginning of the work. Miss Sylvia Benton, Miss D. H. F. Gray, and Mr. H. Wynmalen took great pains over the earlier versions, which were much improved by their criticisms. I must also thank Mr. Wynmalen for permission to quote passages from his books, Equitation and Dressage. To Mr. D. E. L. Haynes, Mr. R. D. Barnett, Mr. J. Boardman, and Mr. R. M. Cook I owe thanks not only for their advice on particular points but for making available to me the means of further study while I was in England. Professors D. A. Amyx, J. Fontenrose, A. E. Gordon, W. C. Helmbold, and W. K. Pritchett of the University of California have been most generous in giving time to my problems, and Professor H. R. W. Smith has helped me by his encouragement and advice. Dr. Marian Stewart and Mr. W. Hastie of Dunedin advised me on technical matviii Preface

ters. Mr. Max E. Knight of the University of California Press, Editorial Department, has shown himself indulgent to my foibles, but firm in rebuking error. I am most grateful to him and his colleagues.

The many persons and institutions that have helped me with the illustrations are thanked separately in the notes to the plates.

Much of the work on this book was done while I was on leave from the University of Otago, to whose Council I express my gratitude. To the Regents of the University of California I am indebted for a research grant covering the many expenses incidental to the preparation of the final manuscript.

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

I HORSES IN PREHISTORIC GREECE

II BREEDS OF HORSES

III HALTERS AND EARLY BITS

IV LATER BITS AND BRIDLES

V HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE BIT

VI SADDLE-CLOTHS, DRESS, AND OTHER ACCESSORIES

VII STABLE MANAGEMENT

VIII SCHOOLING AND ORDINARY EQUITATION

IX FURTHER USES OF THE HORSE

X ADVANCED EQUITATION

XI ECONOMICS OF HORSE KEEPING

XII MILITARY EQUIPMENT AND TACTICS

APPENDIX

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PLATES

INDEX

I

HORSES IN

PREHISTORIC GREECE

The horse, as the soothsayers told King Croesus of Lydia, is a warrior and a foreigner, and it is as an invader that he appears in Greece. Wild horses were unknown in the countries round the Mediterranean, and to the early inhabitants of Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, but were hunted for food by primitive man in northern Europe and on the steppe of southern Russia and Siberia. Three main types are sometimes distinguished: ¹

1) A breed from northern Europe and the western steppe, small but spirited, with fine legs and head, and elegantly seton tail.

2) Przewalski’s horse, which still survives in small numbers in Central Asia, distinguished by its heavy build, low head carriage, and generally coarse appearance.

3) A west European cold-blooded or forest breed, whose blood may run in many of the heavier horses of the present day.

From the steppe country knowledge of the horse penetrated to the Iranian plateau.² At Rana Ghundai in Baluchistan horse bones and teeth have been found in sufficient numbers to suggest not only that the horse was already domesticated but that the site itself may possibly have been a camping ground for nomad riders.³

In the third millennium B.C. the clay tablets of Mesopotamia occasionally mention the horse, under the name of ass of the mountains, and the periphrasis shows not only the writers’ comparative unfamiliarity with horses but the source from which such knowledge as they had of them was derived.⁴ Not until the second millennium was well advanced did the horse become common in southwestern Asia. Its introduction coincided with invasions by warrior nations, speaking related Indo-European languages, Hittites in Asia Minor, Mitanni in Armenia, Kassites in Babylonia, and Aryans in northwestern India. In Egypt the horse has been connected with the invasions of the Hyksos (whoever they were—probably Asiatic Semites), but a skeleton recently found at Buhen in the Sudan is believed by its excavators to date from the end of the Middle Kingdom and would certainly seem to be older than the first sack of the fortress in about 1675 B.C. In Greece and at Troy horse bones appear in quantity during the middle Bronze Age (after about 1800 B.C.), when the mainland was controlled by an invading people who spoke an early form of Greek, the ancestors of Homer’s Achaeans.⁶

These Greek horses seem certainly to have been descended from the first group. The earliest pictures of them were found in the Shaft Graves at Mycenae, the tombs of a dynasty that reigned from about 1650 to 1550 B.C. One gold signet * shows an archer hunting a stag from a chariot pulled by two wildly galloping ponies with manes and tails Hying in the wind. Slightly later pictures suggest a smoother, more polished animal, but clipping and grooming can make a great difference to a newly broken horse, and I cannot accept as proved the view that these represent an improved breed.⁷ The pictures on sealstones and signet rings are naturally very small, and though there are larger reliefs on tombstones, which show heroes in chariots pursuing foemen on foot,⁸ these are carved in too crude a style to allow firm pronouncements about details. At least it would seem that the horses generally had fine legs and smooth coats. Their heads are small and fine, their tails well set on. The high carriage of the head and neck that is so characteristic of the horses of classical Greece is already evident; it may be in part the result of the primitive method of harnessing, with a collar pressing upon the windpipe.⁹

From the mainland of Greece the horse reached Crete during or shortly before the fifteenth century B.c. On clay tablets containing records from the last period of the palace at Knossos (ca. 1400 B.c.) horses are associated with chariots and corslets for warriors,¹⁰ and as these Linear B tablets (unlike the Linear A, which date from a time earlier than the introduction of horses) are written in a form of Greek, it would seem that there too horses came with fighting men speaking an IndoEuropean language, who may have owed to their war chariots their power to rule a people far more advanced in the arts of civilization.

Meanwhile in Egypt and Mesopotamia, in Syria and Asia Minor, the main strength both of the new invading nations and of the old-established powers lay in two-horse chariots, which carried, beside the driver, an archer or spearman, and sometimes also a shield bearer. These chariots charged in squadrons, drawn up in regular lines, and the soldiers fought from their vehicles, without dismounting. The monuments of the Pharaohs of Egypt show the horses of the time excellently (Plates i, 2¿). They are small but finely bred, spirited, and carrying their heads high, generally dish-faced (with a concave profile), with beautiful heads, legs, and tails. The Egyptian monuments, which are careful to distinguish the dress, arms, and physical characteristics of the various nations of Asia and Africa show no difference between the horses of the Egyptians and those of their Asiatic enemies, such as the Hittites, which makes it unlikely that at this time African and Asiatic breeds were distinctly recognized. Nor can we distinguish on the monuments any obvious physical difference between chariot- and riding-horses. Riding, indeed, is rarely represented, and seems to have been quite unimportant militarily. Horsemen are occasionally seen among the chariots, hastening with messages to laggard divisions of the army, or fleeing, perhaps on loose chariot horses caught and mounted in the confusion of the rout, but they do not play any effective part in the fighting. At least the art of riding was not unknown —indeed there are a few other mounted figures from Egypt and Syria which are older than any representations of horse- drawn chariots in those countries.¹¹

In Greece chariotry can never have been developed on the same scale as in Asia and Egypt. Both the Egyptian archers and the Hittite spearmen deployed their chariots in long lines and charged at the gallop, and the plains of Greece are too small to allow such tactics to be copied on a large scale. The hills, which divide the plains into small pockets and cover most of the country, are steep and rocky and generally impracticable to horses (especially to unshod ones). A system of stone-paved roads through the passes linking the Argive plain with the open country about the Isthmus of Corinth was built by the kings of Mycenae, but though chariots could travel along these highways, and the similar ones that doubtless existed elsewhere, they could not turn aside from them to manoeuvre or deploy for action. And the system of horse breeding required wide stretches of pasture. Large herds of mares were left running loose in the water meadows, and the stallions were admitted to them as required. There are few parts of Greece (especially in the east) where good grazing is available all year. Generally the sun burns up the grass throughout the rainless summer. Moreover, land used for pasture must be taken from other crops. So once the horse had been introduced to Egypt and Mesopotamia, the kings of these fertile, well- watered countries were soon in a position to supply their neighbours, who lacked pasture on which to build up their studs. Horses reared on these good pastures might be expected to show, over several generations, an increase in size over their ancestors from the steppes. (I understand that the Arab horses now bred in England are appreciably larger than those of Arabia, though their blood remains pure.) Larger, better-fed horses would be better able to carry riders, but harder to control.

In the late fifteenth century B.c. Hattusilis II, king of the Hittites, asked the Kassite king of Babylon for young horses of superior size—young, because the winter cold of the Anatolian plateau to which they were going would kill off old horses.¹² But the horse had been a stranger in Mesopotamia in the third millennium B.c., and even three hundred years earlier the traffic in horses had been in the other direction; there are very plain indications that the art of fast chariot driving with horses was introduced from Anatolia into North Syria. ¹³ Hat- tusilis’s request therefore no more proves the existence of a superior native Mesopotamian breed than Solomon’s purchase of horses from Egypt in the tenth century B.C. proves that Africa was the original home of the best horses in the world.¹⁴

Horses imported from the plains to the Anatolian plateau would need to be acclimatized. The process is perhaps described in the famous book of Kikkuli of Mitanni, found written on clay tablets at the Hittite capital,¹⁶ which gives detailed day- by-day instructions for bringing chariot horses into condition over a course of several months, beginning with severe fasting and physicking, and continuing by a gradual process of building up, with exercise appropriately regulated at the various stages.

If the Hittites looked to Mitanni for instruction in horsemastership, the Achaean princes of Greece may in their turn have looked to the Hittites, whose court they may even have visited in order to be taught, though the evidence on this point is far from conclusive.¹⁸ At least the monuments make it clear that, like the kings of Egypt and Asia, they put their trust in chariots. Riding seems to have been unimportant, and uninteresting to the artists of the period, though a mounted warrior, seated awkwardly on his beast’s rump (but the suggestion that it may be a donkey is rejected) is represented by a crude clay statuette of about 1300 B.c., found at Mycenae.¹⁷

It has been questioned whether the horse and the war chariot reached Greece simultaneously. There is, after all, a gap of perhaps two centuries between the invasion of the horsetaming Achaeans at the beginning of the middle Bronze Age and the earliest pictures of chariots. And there are no remains of horse gear and chariot fittings to bridge the gap—bits, ter- rets, or linch pins, such as we might expect to be made of metal or other enduring materials. It has therefore been suggested that the horse (not in Greece alone, but throughout the Middle East) was ridden ¹⁸ or used as a pack animal¹⁹ by the invaders who brought it. In Egypt and Mesopotamia, perhaps in Crete too,²⁰ sledges and carts drawn by oxen and asses had long been used, both in war and peace, and the superior animal brought by the invaders is supposed to have been combined with the wheeled vehicle of the civilized world to produce the new chariotry, whose use spread through Asia Minor to Greece.

The pack-horse theory I find unattractive. The horse (unlike the ass and mule) was seldom used as a mere beast of burden in later antiquity. Moreover, from Greece to India the Indo-Europeans succeeded in establishing themselves as masters over peoples far superior numerically, and in many respects culturally. The increased strategic mobility provided by the pack horse (to a tribe accompanied by women, children, and babes in arms?) is not enough to account for this. Some new weapon, conferring a tactical advantage, is needed to explain the conquest of superior numbers backed by the arsenals of fenced cities. The want of definite remains of horse gear is unimportant. As M. S. F. Hood points out, and as will be shown in later chapters, the equipment of primitive riding is, after all, rudimentary, and may be made solely of rope or rawhide. In any case, in Hungary the horn cheekpieces of bits have been found in association with horse bones in contexts dating from the late third millennium B.C.²¹

That the invaders were cavalry is at first sight plausible. History has many examples of settled lands overrun by horsemen from the steppes. But it would seem that heavy fourwheeled carts, drawn by oxen rather than horses, were already known in Central Europe at the end of the third millennium B.c. Their use probably spread from Mesopotamia (where they had been invented in the fourth millennium) through the Caucasus to the steppe country. The invention of the spoked wheel—an essential feature of the light horse-drawn war chariot —to replace the heavy solid or built-up wheel of the old carts, and the development of the chariot itself, may therefore have preceded rather than followed the entry of the horse-taming tribes into southwestern Asia.²² The word yoke itself, with its various cognates in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and the Germanic tongues, suggests that the harnessing of animals (not necessarily horses, and by no means necessarily to war chariots) was familiar to the Indo-Europeans before they dispersed to their widely separated conquests. The Greek and Sanskrit epics tell of chariot-driving gods and heroes, and mention riding only as something rare and exceptional.²³ Finally, if the invaders had possessed an efficient cavalry it is difficult to see why they should have given it up in favour of the chariot. In historical times the universal tendency is in the opposite direction.

My own opinion is that the ponies of the western steppes, being too small to make good cavalry chargers, were not formidable in warfare before the invention of the chariot though they may have been domesticated at an earlier period. It was the chariot that enabled the horse owners to break in upon the settled lands of the Middle East, where plentiful supplies of grain and better pasture were available. Better food enabled larger animals to be developed, over a long period covering many generations. But the larger, better-fed horses were harder to control than their ancestors, and new equipment and a superior technique of riding had to be devised before cavalry could take the place of chariots. There was no sudden revolution caused by the introduction of a new breed of horses, but horses of Central Asiatic type, related to Przewalski’s horse, were in fact brought in from the eighth century B.c. onwards by invaders, who did not drive but rode to battle. The descendants of the different breeds can still be distinguished in the historical period. Evidence for these developments will be presented in the following chapters.

Late in the thirteenth century B.C. new invasions troubled the civilized world. The Hittite power in Asia Minor was violently overthrown and a mixed multitude of nations, refugees and invaders together, fought its way south through Syria. Egypt, threatened both from this quarter and from the west, where other hosts of Land and Sea Peoples were moving along the Libyan coast, was only saved by repeated hard battles, in which chariot-borne archers were one of the chief instruments of victory. Soon afterwards Greece was overrun, according to tradition by the Dorians, a Greek-speaking people from the north, who sacked the palaces of the Achaean kings at Pylos and Mycenae.

The Dorian invasions were followed by a time of confusion and darkness, which lasted until the second half of the eighth century B.c. The Greek world was divided into small independent warring states, hostile to each other and cut off from the empires of the Levant, whose cities, recovering from the disasters of invasion, preserved the civilized tradition that had been lost in Greece. The Greeks were dispersed into miserable rustic villages. The peasants made their own ploughs, their own felt hats and water-proof cloaks, their own boots, and their own waggons—drawn by oxen, for the horse belonged to the nobility, petty squires who in mud-brick hovels or the patched ruins of ancient citadels maintained, by virtue of their weapons and armour, a claim to kingship and divine descent.

One specialized craftsman was supported by the village economy—the blacksmith. The technique of iron working, hitherto obscure, had spread through the Middle East during the upheavals of the late thirteenth and twelfth centuries B.c., and may perhaps have been carried by the invaders and have given them an advantage over the users of bronze. But this one technical advance did not offset the general poverty and decline in standards. Hesiod, writing during the eighth century B.c. in a bleak farm on the Boeotian uplands, laments that he has been born in an Iron Age of labour and misery.²⁴

The aristocracy, even if they had little more than the peasants in the way of material comforts, were at least free to spend their time in politics, hunting, and war. The chariot dominated the battle field. The heroes of the early epics, which were probably composed during the early Iron Age, though they tell the story of the Trojan War centuries earlier, both in battle and on journeys used small chariots, drawn normally

two horses yoked on either side of a single pole. The chariot carries two men—an armoured warrior, who springs down to fight with sword and spear, and a charioteer, less honoured, though still of noble rank, who carries his superior about the battle field and keeps close to him after he has dismounted in order to bring him safely out of the fight if need be. Warrior and charioteer work together as a team, and only combine with the rest of their side as the result of individual arrangement, often made on the spur of the moment in the midst of battle. Chariots are not drawn up in squadrons with dressed ranks (though tradition may have recalled that in the Bronze Age the men of old sacked cities and fortresses thus. ²⁵ But the most important departure from the system of Asia and Egypt is that, though fighting from the chariot is not unknown, the warrior usually springs down, and a man on foot has the advantage when he attacks one still in his chariot. Such tactics are illustrated on Attic vases of the eighth century B.c.,²⁶ and, in my opinion, persisted in Greece until then. Whether they had already developed in the Bronze Age is a question outside the scope of this work.

For riding there is little evidence either in literature or in art. The epics mention it twice in similes, which fall outside the main narrative and may represent the tradition of the poet’s own day rather than that of the Heroic Age of which he tells,²⁷ and once on a midnight foray chariot horses are mounted and ridden when circumstances do not allow them to be yoked in the usual way.²⁸ Another story in the epic cycle, perhaps composed in the seventh century B.c. but preserved only in the summaries of late antiquity, is frequently illustrated in vase painting from the sixth century B.c.²⁹ onwards. Troilus, prince of Troy, was surprised and killed by Achilles when watering his horses before the gates. He is regularly shown riding one horse and leading another. If he had been going out to battle, the horses would have been yoked to his chariot, but he would not go to the trouble of harnessing them for what he expected to be a minor and uneventful excursion. This is not evidence for the way in which heroes of the Bronze Age behaved, but at least shows that the poetic tradition did not look back to a time when nobody by any chance ever sat astride a horse. Rather the invention of riding was traced to a very remote period, though who was responsible—god, hero, Amazon or half-brute Centaur—remained a matter of dispute among the ancients.

Pictures of ridden horses are rare before about 700 B.c. A vase from Crete (perhaps ninth century B.c.) has a crude but spirited picture of an armed man on horseback, apparently seated sideways.³⁰ But Cretan evidence does not necessarily apply to the Greek mainland; chariot-borne archers, and later horse archers, who shot without dismounting, both well attested in Crete, are foreign to the general Greek tradition. On the mainland from the second half of the eighth century B.c. onwards horsemen appear on vases and metal brooches and on bands of gold ornamented in relief. Some are seen in battle, or riding down fallen opponents, but most are unarmed and follow quietly behind peaceful processions of chariots.³¹ The archaeological evidence thus supports the view that in the prehistoric period of Greece cavalry were generally unimportant, or indeed nonexistent, but it is clearly going too far to say that men never rode, or that their horses were incapable of bearing riders. Rather at this early period men rarely performed on horseback deeds worth commemorating by artists or poets. Troilus’s trivial errand was celebrated for its tragic consequences, not for its own sake.

Of the physical appearance of Greek horses at this time, the geometric vase paintings, which represent them only as conventionalized silhouettes, convey a very inadequate idea. Manes and fetlocks are always emphasized; tails are usually set on high, and the high head carriage noted as characteristic of the Bronze Age horses is still evident. When ridden horses appear on the same vases as chariots they are not distinguished by greater size or anything else, and there is no reason to suppose that they represent a different breed (Plate 2c). Nor is there any obvious difference between ridden and chariot horses in classical art. The Greeks possessed no heavy draught horses, and the same type of animal seems generally to have been used for both riding and driving until the fourth century B.c. or later. The Romans, as will be seen in the next chapter, had more sorts of horses to choose from, and differentiated. To Seneca it is a commonplace that the same animal cannot be a race horse, a riding horse, and a draught horse.³²

Meanwhile in Asia true cavalry, including both lancers and horse archers, was developing, and gradually displacing the old chariotry. Lancers appear on reliefs from the petty Hittite principality of Tell Halaf (tenth century B.c.?). The kings and captains still drive furiously in chariots, but the messengers between them are horsemen, and the cavalry, in the ninth century B.c. still outnumbered by the chariots, are by the time of Ezekiel "captains and rulers clothed most gloriously, horsemen riding upon horses, all of them desirable