But in what manner? On their backs or drawn behind them in the glittering Thracian chariot? Opinions are divided. Euripides assumed that the latter formed part of the booty,[101] yet the Homeric expressions rather imply that it was left _in statu quo_. They are not, on the other hand, easily reconciled with the supposition of an escape on horseback from the scene of carnage. This, none the less, was almost certainly what the poet meant to convey, and his unfamiliarity with the art of riding was doubtless the cause of his conveying it badly.[102] Homeric heroes, as a rule infringed only by this one exception, never mounted their steeds; they used them solely in light draught. Equitation was indeed known of as a branch in which special skill might be acquired; but for the ignoble purpose of popular, perhaps venal, display. Thus the performance of leaping from one to the other of four galloping horses, brought in to illustrate the agility with which Ajax strode from deck to deck of the menaced Thessalian ships,[103] excites indeed astonishment, but astonishment of the inferior kind raised by the feats of a clown or a circus-rider. The passage has found a curious commentary in a faded painting on a wall of the ancient palace at Tiryns, representing an acrobat springing on the back of a rushing bull.[104] He is unmistakably a specimen of the class of performer to which the nimble equestrian of the Iliad belonged. Footnote 101: _Rhesos_, 797. Footnote 102: Eyssenhardt, _Jahrbuch für Philologie_, Bd. cix. p. 598; Ameis’s _Iliad_, Heft iv. p. 38. Footnote 103: _Iliad_, xv. 679. Footnote 104: Schuchhardt and Sellers, _Schliemann’s Excavations_, p. 119.