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. That was the day of glory of the son of Tydeus, whom ‘Pallas Athene did not permit to tremble.’ Destiny waited on his desires. His spear sent Pandarus to the shades; Æneas was barely rescued by the maternal intervention of Aphrodite, who came off by no means scatheless from the adventure. Above all, the Dardanian ‘messengers of terror’ were led in triumph across to the Achæan camp. They did not remain there idle. On the following day, Nestor was invited to admire their paces, as they carried him and their new master beyond the reach of Hector’s fury, the fortune of war having by that time effectively changed sides. Their subsequent victory in the Patroclean chariot-race was a foregone conclusion. For their Olympian connexions would have made their defeat by clover-cropping animals of ordinary lineage appear a gross anomaly; and the horses of Achilles, as being immortal and invincible, were expressly excluded from the competition.