Borean Horses

In Book 20 of the Iliad, Aeneas faces Achilles on the battlefield. Before combat is joined, Aeneas boasts about his lineage, which he traces back to King Dardanus himself:

Δάρδανον αὖ πρῶτον τέκετο νεφεληγερέτα Ζεύς, κτίσσε δὲ Δαρδανίην, ἐπεὶ οὔ πω Ἴλιος ἱρὴ ἐν πεδίῳ πεπόλιστο πόλις μερόπων ἀνθρώπων, ἀλλ᾽ ἔθ᾽ ὑπωρείας ᾤκεον πολυπίδακος Ἴδης. Δάρδανος αὖ τέκεθ᾽ υἱὸν Ἐριχθόνιον βασιλῆα, ὃς δὴ ἀφνειότατος γένετο θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων: τοῦ τρισχίλιαι ἵπποι ἕλος κάτα βουκολέοντο θήλειαι, πώλοισιν ἀγαλλόμεναι ἀταλῇσι. τάων καὶ Βορέης ἠράσσατο βοσκομενάων, ἵππῳ δ᾽ εἰσάμενος παρελέξατο κυανοχαίτῃ: αἳ δ᾽ ὑποκυσάμεναι ἔτεκον δυοκαίδεκα πώλους. αἳ δ᾽ ὅτε μὲν σκιρτῷεν ἐπὶ ζείδωρον ἄρουραν, ἄκρον ἐπ᾽ ἀνθερίκων καρπὸν θέον οὐδὲ κατέκλων: ἀλλ᾽ ὅτε δὴ σκιρτῷεν ἐπ᾽ εὐρέα νῶτα θαλάσσης, ἄκρον ἐπὶ ῥηγμῖνος ἁλὸς πολιοῖο θέεσκον. [Iliad 20:215–9]

In the beginning Dardanus was the son of cloud-gathering Zeus, and he founded Dardania, for Ilion was not yet established on the plain for men to dwell in, and her people still abode on the spurs of many-fountained Ida. Dardanus had a son, king Erichthonios, who was wealthiest of all men living; he had three thousand mares that fed by the water-meadows, they and their foals with them. Boreas grew enamoured of them as they were feeding and covered them in the semblance of a dark-maned stallion. Twelve filly foals did they conceive and bear him, and these, as they sped over the fertile plain, would go bounding on over the ripe ears of wheat and not break them; or again when they would disport themselves on the broad back of Ocean they could gallop on the crest of a breaker. [Samuel Butler’s 1898 translation, slightly modified]

Aeneas goes on to explain that Erichthonios was the father of Tros — founder of the city that bore his name, Troy — and Tros ‘had three noble sons, Ilos, Assarakos, and Ganymede who was comeliest of mortal men; wherefore the gods carried him off to be Zeus’ cupbearer, for his beauty’s sake, that he might dwell among the immortals.’ The Trojan royal line of came down from Ilos (whence ‘Ilium’) whose son, Laomedon, was the father of Priam; but Aeneas announces that his own family line descends from Ilos’s brother Assarakos. Priam had fifty sons, but all were killed, which is how Aeneas inherits the mantle of Troy (in Vergil’s Aeneid he takes the surviving Trojans to Rome, and founds a new empire).

Having laid all this out, Aeneas wraps-up with: ‘Such do I declare my blood and lineage, but as for ἀρετὴ, Zeus gives it or takes it as he will, for he is lord of all’ (Ζεὺς δ᾽ ἀρετὴν ἄνδρεσσιν ὀφέλλει τε μινύθει τε/ὅππως κεν ἐθέλῃσιν: ὃ γὰρ κάρτιστος ἁπάντων). Then the two heroes fight, with Achilles of course prevailing — Aeneas is only saved from death by the intervention of Poseidon who, with an eye on Aeneas’ fate and destiny, whisks him invisibly away before Achilles can land the killing blow. Ἀρετή [aretḗ] means, roughly, ‘glory’ — reputation, fame, celebrity — but is also the word for virtue, manliness, prowess, excellence. It also means rank, distinction, and was sometimes used as a title: as we might say, ‘your excellency’ or ‘your worship’. Werner Jaeger notes that ‘the root of the word is the same as aristos, the word which shows superlative ability and superiority, and aristos was constantly used in the plural to denote the nobility’ [Jaeger, Paideia; the Ideals of Greek Culture, (OUP 1945)1:5]. From aristos we get our word aristocracy: literally rule by the aristoi, the most excellent, the best, the highest born — rule by αἱ ᾰ̓ρεταί. It’s interesting that Aeneas lays out his aristocratic lineage, his ἀρετὴ, in order to stress his personal and familial worth as an opponent of the mighty Achilles, only to conclude that, actually, ἀρετὴ is in the gift of Zeus, who bestows it or denies it as he wishes. In a sense I suppose this is a way of saying that nobility in a familial, inheritance sense comes, ultimately, from God. Aeneas, like Achilles, is more than mortal — his mother is Aphrodite, just as Achilles’ is Thetis.

I’m most interested, though, in the horses: Aeneas breaks off what is otherwise a dry list of names, father and sons, to tell Achilles about them. They are initially introduced as evidence of the great wealth of his ancestor King Erichthonios. This name in this context has puzzled scholars, for it is an Athenian, not a Dardanian, moniker. 19th-century Homeric scholar Walter Leaf notes: ‘the appearance of the purely Attic hero Erichthonios in a Trojan genealogy is startling. Fick has suggested with great probability that the passage is of Attic origin, and dates from about 610 C.B., when the Athenians were endeavouring to gain a footing at Sigeion; we know from Strabo (xiii. p. 604) that they claimed kinship with the Trojans on the ground of this community of mythical ἀρχηγέται [rulers], and it is quite possible that political considerations may have brought this passage into the text.’

The legendary Athenian king Erichthonios was born out of unusual circumstances: Apollodorus tells us that Hephaestus, smith of the gods, tried to ravish Athena. She pushed him away, but not before he came on her thigh. ‘Athena, in disgust, wiped his seed away with a scrap of wool (ἔριον, erion) and flung it to the earth (χθών, chthôn) — Erichthonius was born from the semen that fell to the earth.’ After this rather icky start, Erichtonius went on to become an important king of Athens, who introduced his people to the horse-drawn chariot, and was at his death apotheosed into the stars as the constellation ‘The Charioteer’, Auriga. One story is that he was lame, which is why he was obliged to invent the chariot in order to get about. Another of those sacred lamed god/kings Frazer talks so much about in The Golden Bough. The most sacred building on the Acropolis of Athens, the Erechtheum, is dedicated to Erichthonius.

Anyway, here he is, popping up in the Iliad, as a king not of Athens but of Dardania, pre-Troy. Still connected with horses though. Three thousand horses is a lot of horses. As to why Βοreas mates with only twelve of these, rather than the whole herd, I’m not sure — mythographers say that this is a solar calendar thing, which I daresay is true.

Boreas (Βορέας) was the god of the north wind. It used to be believed that mares could become spontaneously pregnant from the blowing wind. Horses in unsheltered locations will often turn their rears towards any strong wind, in order to shield their heads, and from this the idea may have arisen that they were presenting themselves to be, as it were, mounted by the breeze. Here’s Vergil:

Continuoque avidis ubi subdita flamma medullis, vere magis, quia vere calor redit ossibus: illae ore omnes versae in Zephyrum stant rupibus altis, exceptantque levis auras et saepe sine ullis coniugiis vento gravidae, mirabile dictu, saxa per et scopulos et depressas convallis diffugiunt. [Vergil, Georgics 3:271–7]

When the fire [of lust] is kindled in the hot bones of these eager ones they stand on the rocky heights with their heads all turned westward, and take their fill of the breezes there; and, though unmated, they will — amazing to say! — become impregnated by the wind, and go galloping over rugged heights and lowly vales.

One other striking detail: Boreas manifests as a stallion with a dark or black mane. The scholars note that the adjective used here, κυανοχαίτηι, is otherwise uniquely applied to Poseidon (he is described with it in eg Iliad 13.563). And actually ‘black-haired’ is not right, for the κύανο- part is from κύανος, usually taken to be a deep blue colour — it’s where we get our word ‘cyan’. Dark-blue or blue-black hair fits Poseidon, the ocean god, rather better, we might think, than it does the god of the North Wind.

Poseidon was god of three things: the sea, earthquakes and horses. These divinely sired horses run ‘like the wind’ (of course) over cornfields without bending any of the ears of wheat, but also over the ocean. It interests me that — whatever Apollodorus says with his sperm-soaked-wool cod-etymology — the likely derivation of the name Erichthonius is ‘earth-shaker’ (ἐρέχθω, ‘shake’, χθών ‘earth’). There is, in other words, something Poseidonic about this whole episode. After boasting of his descent from this king, Aeneas fights Achilles, is overmastered, and then rescued — by Poseidon. This intervention is itself prompted by Hera: ‘Then the ox-eyed, queenly Hera spoke to him: “Shaker of the Earth [Ἐννοσίγαιος], you must consult your own heart as regards Aeneas, whether you will save him or allow him to be slain, despite all his courage, by Peleus’ son Achilles.”’

I’m struck by the linked contrast, here. These semidivine horses race over the fields of corn without so much as bending a single ear, and dash over the top of the waves, as fast and light as the wind itself. But the connection between earthquakes and horses relies in the way actual horses thunder across the ground when they gallop — three thousand horses all charging at once would certainly shake the earth. It’s as if horses are, at one and the same time, heavy and earth-shaking and light and rapid as air. Heavy horses. Crazy horses.

One thing that puzzles me: all the translations I have seen describe these horses as running over the tops of fields of wheat. Here’s Robert Fagles, for instance:

Then Dardanus had a son in turn. King Erichthonius, and he was the richest man in all the world — three thousand mares he owned, grazing the marshes, brood-mares in their prime, proud of their leaping foals. And the North Wind, lusting once for the herd at pasture, taking on the build of a black stallion, mounted several: swelling under his force they bore him twelve colts. And when they’d frisk on the tilled fields ripe with grain they’d brush the crests of the corn and never snap a stalk, they’d skim the crests of whitecaps glistening foam.

But the word Homer uses, ἀνθέρικος, actually means ‘the flowering stem or stalk of the asphodel plantqe/rwn)’ (καρπός, also present in this passage, can mean ‘grain’ but also ‘fruit’, ‘harvest’ — any kind of crop, in other words). So perhaps we should translate the passage that way. Wheat is a symbol of life, growth, fertility; but the asphodel is, of course, connected with the dead and the underworld. Homer elsewhere describes it as covering the great meadow (ἀσφόδελος λειμών) in the Underworld [Odyssey. 11:539]. It was planted on graves and was connected with Persephone, who sometimes wore a crown or garland of asphodel. ‘The heavy fields of scentless Asphodel,’ wrote Oscar Wilde: ‘the loveless lips with which men kiss in hell’

So perhaps, fittingly for a to-the-death combat, these horses are racing across the tops of a field of asphodel, and over the salt, unplumbed, estranging sea.