And the sea’s face was parted with a smile, And rapidly the horses sped the while.[96]
There he himself provided ambrosial forage for their support during his absence on the battle-field, taking the precaution, before his departure, of attaching infrangible golden shackles to the agile feet that might else have been tempted to stray. Yet all this pains was taken for the mere sake of what must be called ‘swagger.’ Poseidon, calmly seated on the Samothracian height, was already within full view of the plain and towers of Ilium, when
Sudden at last He rose, and swiftly down the steep he passed, The mountain trembled with each step he took, The forest with the quaking mountain shook. Three strides he made, and with the fourth he stood At Ægæ, where is founded ‘neath the flood His hall of glorious gold that cannot fade.[97]
And the journey westward was deliberately made for the purpose of fetching an equipage which proved rather an embarrassment than an assistance to him. ‘But for the honour of the thing,’ as an Irishman remarked of his jaunt in a bottomless sedan-chair, he ‘might just as well have walked.’
_Iliad_, xiii. 29, 30. (Translation by R. Garnett, _Universal Review_, vol. v.)
Not without reason, then, was equestrian skill associated with Poseidonian lineage. Nestor himself was an enthusiastic horse-lover; yet the Pylian breed was none of the best; and he anxiously warned his son Antilochus, preparatory to the starting of the chariot-race commemorative of Patroclus, that he must supply by finesse for the slowness of his team. Poseidon himself, he reminded him, had been his instructor; and no less, it may be presumed, of his brother Thrasymedes, whose feats in this direction, however, are summed up in the laudatory expression bestowed on him in common with Diomed.
The connoisseurship of this latter, on the contrary, is perpetually in evidence. As king of ‘horse-feeding Argos,’ he knew and prized what was best in horseflesh, and counted no risk too great for the purpose of securing it. His brilliant success accordingly, in the capture of famous steeds, rendered the original inferiority of his own a matter of indifference. It served, indeed, only to quicken his zeal to replace them by force or fraud with better. And it fell out most opportunely that, just at the conjuncture when the protection of Athene rendered him irresistible, Æneas, temporarily allied with the Lycian archer Pandarus, undertook the hopeless task of staying his victorious career. The Dardanian hero was driving a matchless team, ‘the best under the dawn or the sun’; and he found leisure, notwithstanding the celerity of their onset, to extol their qualities to his companion, while Diomed recited the to him familiar tale of their pedigree to his charioteer, Sthenelus. They were of the race of those with which the ransom of Ganymede had been paid by Zeus to Tros, King of Phrygia, his father, and were hence known distinctively as _Trojan_ horses. Their possession was regarded as of inestimable importance.