Only the chief Greek and Trojan leaders rode in chariots. Their possession was a mark of distinction, and conferred the power of swift locomotion, but was otherwise of no military use. Their owners alighted from them for the serious business of fighting, although glad, if worsted or disabled, to fall back upon the utmost speed of their horses to carry them out of reach of their foes. This fashion of warfare, however, had completely disappeared from Greece proper before the historic era. Only in Cyprus, chariots are heard of among the paraphernalia of battle in 498 B.C.[91] None figured at Marathon or Mantineia; brigades of mounted men had taken their place. Cavalry, on the other hand, had no share in the engagements before Troy. Footnote 91: _Herodotus_, v. 113. The definiteness of intention with which Homeric epithets were bestowed is strikingly evident in the distribution of those relating to equestrian pursuits. That they have no place worth mentioning in the Odyssey, readers of our last chapter will be prepared to hear; nor are they sprinkled at random through the Iliad. Thus, while the Trojans collectively are frequently called ‘horse-tamers,’ _hippodamoi_—a designation still appropriate to the dwellers round Hissarlik—the Greeks collectively are never so described.[92] They could not have been, in fact, without some degree of incongruity. For many of them, being of insular origin and maritime habits, knew as much about hippogriffs as about horses, unless it were the white-crested ones ruled by Poseidon. And the poet’s close instinctive regard to such distinctions appears in the remarkable circumstance that Odysseus and Ajax Telamon, islanders both, are the only heroes of the first rank who invariably combat on foot. Footnote 92: Mure, _Literature of Ancient Greece_, vol. ii. p. 87. The individual Greek warriors singled out for praise as ‘horse-tamers’ are only two—Thrasymedes and Diomed. The choice had, in each case, readily discernible motives. Thrasymedes was a son of Nestor; and Nestor, through his father Peleus, was sprung from Poseidon, the creator and patron of the horse. This mythical association resulted from a natural sequence of ideas. The absence of the horse from the ‘glist’ring zodiac’ is one of many proofs of his strangeness to Eastern mythology; but the neglect was compensated in the West. His position in Greek folk-lore, according to Dr. Milchhöfer,[93] indicates a primitive confusion of thought between winds and waves as cause and effect, or rather, perhaps, tells of the transference to the sea of the cloud-fancies of an inland people. However this be, horse-headed monsters are extremely prevalent on the archaic engraved stones found numerously in the Peloponnesus and the islands of the Ægean; and these monsters—winged, and with birds’ legs—represent, it would seem, the original harpy-form in which early Greek imagination embodied the storm-winds— Footnote 93: