Preller, _Griechische Mythologie_, Bd. ii. p. 405, 3te Auflage.
It was pitch dark as the adventurers traversed the marshy land about the Simoeis; but the rise, with heavy wing-flappings, of a startled heron on their right, dispelled their misgivings, and evoked their pious rejoicings at the assurance it afforded of Athene’s protection. Their next encounter was with Hector’s emissary, the luckless Dolon, a poor creature beyond doubt, vain, feather-headed, unstable, pusillanimous, yet piteous to us even now in the sanguine loquacity that merged into a death-shriek as the fierce blade of Diomed severed the tendons of his throat. He had served his purpose, and was contemptuously, nay treacherously, dismissed from life. But the temptation suggested by him was irresistible. Instincts of cupidity, keen in both heroes, had been fully roused by his account of the splendid and unguarded equipment of the newly-arrived leader of a Thracian contingent to the Trojan army. As he told them:
King Rhesus, Eionëus’ son, commands them, who hath steeds, More white than snow, huge, and well shaped; their fiery pace exceeds The winds in swiftness; these I saw, his chariot is with gold And pallid silver richly framed, and wondrous to behold; His great and golden armour is not fit a man should wear, But for immortal shoulders framed.[100]
Now Odysseus and Diomed both loved plunder; each in his own way was of a reckless and dare-devil disposition; and one at any rate was a passionate admirer of equine beauty. They accordingly did not hesitate to follow up Dolon’s indications, which proved quite accurate. The followers of Rhesus were weary from their recent journey; Diomed had no difficulty in slaying a dozen of them in ranks as they slept, and so reaching the king, whose premonitory nightmare of destruction was abruptly dissolved by its realisation. The coveted horses tethered alongside having been meanwhile secured by Odysseus, swiftly conveyed the exultant raiders back to the Achæan ships.
But in what manner? On their backs or drawn behind them in the glittering Thracian chariot? Opinions are divided. Euripides assumed that the latter formed part of the booty,[101] yet the Homeric expressions rather imply that it was left _in statu quo_. They are not, on the other hand, easily reconciled with the supposition of an escape on horseback from the scene of carnage. This, none the less, was almost certainly what the poet meant to convey, and his unfamiliarity with the art of riding was doubtless the cause of his conveying it badly.[102] Homeric heroes, as a rule infringed only by this one exception, never mounted their steeds; they used them solely in light draught. Equitation was indeed known of as a branch in which special skill might be acquired; but for the ignoble purpose of popular, perhaps venal, display. Thus the performance of leaping from one to the other of four galloping horses, brought in to illustrate the agility with which Ajax strode from deck to deck of the menaced Thessalian ships,[103] excites indeed astonishment, but astonishment of the inferior kind raised by the feats of a clown or a circus-rider. The passage has found a curious commentary in a faded painting on a wall of the ancient palace at Tiryns, representing an acrobat springing on the back of a rushing bull.[104] He is unmistakably a specimen of the class of performer to which the nimble equestrian of the Iliad belonged.