These, now and then, are enabled to respond; but speaking horses should be reserved for emergencies. They occur, for instance, with undue profusion in modern Greek folk-songs. Not every notorious klepht lurking in the thickets of Pindus, but only some hero towering to the clouds of fancy, should, rightly considered, possess an animal so exceptionally endowed. The lesson is patent in the Iliad. Homer’s instinctive self-restraint and supreme mastery over the secrets of artistic effect are nowhere more conspicuous than in his treatment of the horses of Achilles. ‘Thessalian steeds and Lacedæmonian women’ were declared by an oracle to be the best Greek representatives of their respective kinds. In Thessaly was the legendary birthplace of the horse; there lived the Lapiths—if Virgil is to be believed—the first horse-breakers: Fræna Pelethronii Lapithæ, gyrosque dedere Impositi dorso, atque equitem docuere sub armis Insultare solo, et gressus glomerare superbos.[114] There, too, the Centaurs were at home; the Thessalian cavalry became historically famous; the Thessalian marriage ceremony long included the presentation to the bride by the bridegroom, of a fully caparisoned horse;[115] and the noble equine type of the Parthenon marbles is still reproduced along the fertile banks of the Peneus.[116] Thence, too, of old to Troy Fair Pheretiades The bravest mares did bring by much; Eumelus managed these, Swift of their feet as birds of wings, both of one hair did shine, Both of an age, both of a height, as measured by a line, Whom silver-bowed Apollo bred in the Pierian mead, Both slick and dainty, yet were both in war of wondrous dread.[117] Footnote 114: _Georg._ iii. 115-17. Footnote 115: Geddes, _Problem of the Homeric Poems_, p. 247. Footnote 116: Dodwell, _Tour in Greece_, vol. i. p. 339. Footnote 117: _Iliad_, ii. 764-67 (Chapman’s trans.). Only, indeed, a fraud on the part of Athene prevented the mares of Eumelus from winning the chariot-race against the heaven-descended ‘Trojan’ horses of Diomed; and the Muse, solemnly invoked as arbitress of equine excellence, declared them the goodliest of all ‘the steeds that followed the sons of Atreus to war,’ save, of course, the incomparable Pelidean pair. Xanthus and Balius were the wedding-gift of Poseidon to Peleus. The sea-god himself had been a suitor for the hand of the bride, the silver-footed Thetis; but, on its becoming known that the son to be born of her marriage was destined to surpass the strength of his father, something of an Olympian panic prevailed, and a mortal bridegroom was, by the common determination of the alarmed Immortals, forced upon the reluctant goddess. Of this unequal and unhappy marriage, the far-famed Achilles was the ill-starred offspring.