In the Thirteenth Iliad, the closeness of this relationship is naïvely brought into view. The occasion was a pressing one. Nothing less was contemplated than the affording of surreptitious divine aid to the hard-pressed Achæan host; and the ‘shining eyes’ of Zeus, whose interdict was still in full force, might at any moment revert from the Thracians and Hippomolgi to the less virtuous Greeks and Trojans. Everything, then, depended upon promptitude, and Poseidon accordingly, in the absence of his consort Amphitrite, did not disdain to act as his own groom. Himself he harnessed to his brazen car the ‘bronze-hoofed’ coursers stabled beneath the sea at Ægæ; himself wielded the golden scourge with which he urged their rapid passage, amid the damp homage of dutiful but dripping sea-monsters, to a submarine recess between Tenedos and Imbros: 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.’ Footnote 96: _Iliad_, xiii. 29, 30. (Translation by R. Garnett, _Universal Review_, vol. v.) Footnote 97: _Ib._ xiii. 17-22. 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.