Riding on horseback was yet little practised, though it appears to have been not unknown. Some centuries, however, passed before it was generally applied in Greece to military purposes; the mountainous ruggedness of the country preventing any extensive use of cavalry, except among the Thessalians, whose territory was a large plain. But in the Homeric armies no chief was without his chariot, drawn generally by two, sometimes by three horses; and these chariots of war make a principal figure in Homer’s battles. Nestor, forming the army for action, composes the first line of chariots only. In the second he places that part of the infantry in which he has least confidence; and then forms a third line, or reserve, of the most approved troops. It seems extraordinary that chariots should have been so extensively used in war as we find they were in the early ages. In the wide plains of Asia, indeed, we may account for their introduction, as we may give them credit for utility: but how they should become so general among the inhabitants of rocky, mountainous Greece, how the distant Britons should arrive at that surprising perfection in the use of them which they possessed when the Roman legions first invaded this island, especially as the same mode of fighting was little if at all practised among the Gauls and Germans, is less obvious to conjecture. The combat of the chiefs, so repeatedly described by Homer, advancing to engage singly in front of their line of battle, is apt to strike a modern reader with an appearance of absurdity perhaps much beyond the reality. Before the use of fire-arms, that practice was not uncommon when the art of war was at its greatest perfection. In Cæsar’s _Commentaries_ we have a very particular account of an advanced combat, in which, not generals indeed, but two centurions of his army engaged. The Grecian chiefs of the heroic age, like the knights of the times of chivalry, had armour apparently very superior to that of the common soldiers; which, with the skill acquired by assiduous practice amid unbounded leisure, might enable them to obviate much of the seeming danger of such skirmishes. Nor might the effect be unimportant. Like the sharp-shooters of modern days, a few men of superior strength, activity, and skill, superior also by the excellence of their defensive armour, might prepare a victory by creating disorder in the close array of the enemy’s phalanx. They threw their weighty javelins from a distance, while none dared advance to meet them but chiefs equally well-armed with themselves: and from the soldiers in the ranks they had little to fear; because, in that close order, the dart could not be thrown with any advantage. Occasionally, indeed, we find some person of inferior name advancing to throw his javelin at a chief occupied against some other, but retreating again immediately into the ranks: a resource not disdained by the greatest heroes when danger pressed.