Homer’s description of the Troad as ‘rich in horses’ has been very scantily justified by the results of underground exploration. Few of the animal’s bones were found at Hissarlik, none at the neighbouring Hanai-Tepe.[129] Yet every Trojan at the present day is a born rider.[130] Locomotion on horseback is universal, at all ages, and for both sexes. Priam himself could scarcely now be accommodated with a mule-cart. He should leave the Pergamus, if at all, mounted in some fashion on the back of a steed. Footnote 129: Calvert, in Schliemann’s _Ilios_, p. 711. Footnote 130: Virchow, _Abhandlungen Berlin. Acad._ 1879, p. 62. The author of the Iliad, however, was no equestrian. His knowledge of horses was otherwise acquired. But how intimate and accurate that knowledge was, one example may suffice to show. A thunderstorm, sent by Zeus in tardy fulfilment of his promise to Thetis, caused a panic among the Greeks; the bravest yielded to the contagion of fear; there was a _sauve qui peut_ to the ships. In the wild rout, Gerenian Nestor, aged prop of Greece, Alone remained, and he against his will, His horse sore wounded by an arrow shot By godlike Paris, fair-hair’d Helen’s lord: Just on the crown, where close behind the head First springs the mane, the deadliest spot of all, The arrow struck him; madden’d with the pain He rear’d, then plunging forward, with the shaft Fix’d in his brain, and rolling in the dust, The other steeds in dire confusion threw.[131] Footnote 131: _Iliad_, viii. 80-86 (Lord Derby’s trans.). The most vulnerable point is here pointed out with anatomical correctness.[132] Exactly where the mane begins, the bony shield of the skull comes to an end, and the route to the brain, especially to a dart coming, like that of Paris, from behind, lies comparatively open. The sudden upspringing of the death-smitten creature, followed by his struggle on the ground, is also perfectly true to nature, and suggests personal observation of the occurrence described. Footnote 132: Buchholz, _Homer. Realien_, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 175. Observation, both close and sympathetic, assuredly dictated the brilliant lines in which Paris, issuing from the Scæan gate, is compared to a courser breaking loose from confinement to disport himself in the open. As some proud steed, at well-fill’d manger fed, His halter broken, neighing, scours the plain, And revels in the widely-flowing stream To bathe his sides; then tossing high his head, While o’er his shoulders streams his ample mane, Light borne on active limbs, in conscious pride, To the wide pastures of the mares he flies.[133]