knew that his master was not living’ (Guðrúnarkviða B 5). In several of the
Russian byliny a hero speaks to the horse he is riding and receives a reply.^70 In
a Serbo-Croat poem there is at least a one-sided dialogue. Halil speaks to
his horse; ‘it was a beast and could not speak, but it understood all he said’
(SCHS ii, no. 16. 285–90; cf. no. 30. 488ff.). The Nart heroes of Ossetic legend
converse with their horses, who are capable of giving them good advice and
information (Sikojev (1985), 200, 227, 231, 303–7). There are similar episodes
inSassountsy David (158 f., 262, 267 f.).
ChariotsThe horses that are on speaking terms with humans are normally ridden
horses. The Iliad passage is exceptional in that Xanthos is a chariot horse. It
is typical of the Indo-Iranian, Greek, and Irish traditions that horses are not
ridden but serve in pairs to pull chariots in which warriors travel about with a
charioteer and ride to battle.
Despite the concurrence of far western with eastern evidence, this cannot
be an early Indo-European practice, because, as I have noted elsewhere, the
chariot with spoked wheels, light enough to be drawn at speed by horses, was
not invented until shortly before 2000 . It first appears in the Sintashta
culture of the southern Urals. Chariot warfare spread widely in the Middle
East in the first half of the second millennium and progressively into central
Europe. The usefulness of chariots in battle was that they served as mobile
platforms for archers, who discharged showers of arrows at the enemy and
made a rapid withdrawal. After some centuries effective counter-tactics were
found, and this form of warfare went out of fashion.^71
It was typical of Vedic India, and the Indian epics, despite many fantastic
elements, still give a more faithful picture than the Homeric tradition.
Chariots are a constant feature of Homeric battle scenes, but their earlier
function is more or less forgotten and they serve essentially as transport and
escape vehicles for heroes who fight with spears and sword. Classical accounts
of Gaulish and British chariot tactics are very similar to the Homeric.^72 In the
Irish texts too chariots are much mentioned, but there is no archery and it
(^70) Chadwick (1932), 54. 28ff., 84. 114ff., 112. 322ff.
(^71) Cf. Robert Drews, The End of the Bronze Age (Princeton 1993), 104–34; EIEC 627 f., 633;
P. Raulwing in Meid (1998), 523–46; id., Horses, Chariots and Indo-Europeans (Archaeolingua,
series minor, Budapest 2000); M. A. Littauer and J. H. Crouwel, Selected Writings on Chariots,
Other Early Vehicles, Riding and Harness (Leiden 2002).
(^72) On chariots in the Indic texts see Drews (as n. 71), 125; Brockington (1998), 176–8, 405 f.;
on the Britons, Caes. Bell. Gall. 4. 33; Gauls, Diod. 5. 29. 1–3 (Posidonius fr. 169 Th.); Prop. 4. 10.
39–44.
468 12. Arms and the Man