The Ocean God gave Peleus a chariot team "Dapple" and "Dun" by name, both with great flowing manes, "swift as the winds, the horses that the harpy, Podarge bare to the West Wind as she was grazing on the meadow beside the stream of Oceanus." Peleus lent the team to his son Achilles. Then Achilles' charioteer was killed in battle, and the horses mourned. "Hot tears," says Homer, "flowed from their eyes to the ground as they mourned for their charioteer." The fellow used to oil their manes, poor dears. They wept from the eyes, and not, as modern horses do, from the nostrils. But then you see they were not ordinary horses, because their mother was a harpy (_vide_ books on Unnatural History), and their sire was the West Wind. They were foaled on the shores of the Western ocean: Dapple of the woods, Dun of the grass lands. And Pegasus was a Bay from Africa. So one finds in the oldest myths of the Hellenes record of the three primary stocks from whom all modern breeds are descended. To these Hellenes the hearth, the log cabin and the mother were sacred, the bases of all religion. The hearth became an altar, the cabin a glorious temple of white marble, the mother a goddess whose statue was ivory and {117} her robes of massive gold. Outside their holy faith nothing was taken very seriously, and the people had special delight in nonsense animals. The centaur or man-horse was a prime favourite, and they did not worry over his stable management, a most revolting job. The man mouth would refuse the forage urgently required by the horse-body, and if they compromised on oats as porridge, even that would pall. Still centaurs would be gentle, and less likely to butt, than the buck unicorn of our own mythology. The Centaur Cheiron indeed was not only gentle but the eminent headmaster of the earliest public school. Solving the diet question with fish, game, fruit and wine, he lived to a good old age. For a people of so lively a mind as the Greeks, progress was rather slow in the use of horses. Supposing the siege of Troy to have happened about 1000 B.C. they were solely dependent on chariotry in war while King Solomon had 12,000 cavalry. Three centuries later the Greek colonists of African Cyrene, that "city of fair steeds and goodly chariots," sent home shipments by direct sea trade of desert Bays for breeding. With the improvement of the horse stock four-horse chariots began to compete in the Olympic {118} Games of B.C. 680. By B.C. 640 the ridden horse had become of consequence enough to share the great honours of the Olympiad, but still the tactical use of cavalry was delayed. Greece is a small rough country much broken by sea channels, and no more suitable than Scotland for the effective use of the mounted arm in war. So, even as late as the Battle of Marathon, the Persian Horse found the Hellenic army afoot; not until the fifth century was the Greek Cavalry of any consequence. [Sidenote: Hellenic horsemen]