Furthermore, part of what makes Achilles special on the battlefield is that he has three horses attached to his chariot—unlike most fighters, who have only two—and that two of his are immortal. At the time of the events of the Iliad he has only recently added the mortal horse, Pedasos, while his permanent team of Xanthos and Balios are the immortal offspring of the Harpy Podarge, an especially appropriate name for the progenitor of famous steeds. Horses, then, share with humans, especially heroic humans, an ontological position unique among living things: they may descend from the gods and maintain some divine capacity derived from them. In the same way that heroes are marked out from the rest of humanity by their divine lineages, so then are their horses. Like the demigods they are descended from immortals, equine or godly, and in some cases capable of inheriting from them immortality themselves, as Herakles did from Zeus and his horse Areion did from Poseidon and Demeter.

This attitude toward horses and heroes is also observable in the narrator of the poem himself. Near the end of the catalogue of ships he asks the goddess for special inspiration so that he may know who the very best of the warriors at Troy were:

Her inspired answer is:

Furthermore, Diomedes upbraids the aged horseman Nestor for being out on the battlefield past his prime by criticizing his horses and by extension Nestor himself:

Nestor’s old age is mirrored in the slowness of his horses while the superiority of Diomedes is reflected in the high quality of his, despite the fact that the horses have only recently been stolen from Aeneas. That the horses did not originally belong to Diomedes is not an issue: his present status as a fighter is perfectly matched by his current steeds, perhaps especially because he has proven his superiority over Aeneas by taking those horses. Diomedes’ superior stature means that the worthier horses are properly his regardless of their provenance.

The relevance of Pedasos’ mortality is made abundantly clear at lines XVI 466–471. While Patroclus is fighting in Achilles’ stead and making use of his horses, Sarpedon throws a javelin at Patroclus:

Pedasos’ purpose, narratologically, is to die. Soon thereafter the immortal horses see Patroclus die as well, and as Zeus observes them shedding tears, he says:

These horses are also closely linked to Achilles’ immortal mother, Thetis, because they were given to Peleus as a gift from the gods when Thetis was forced to marry him. The plight of these immortal horses next to a mortal companion and accompanied by mortal riders recalls the frequent lamentations of Thetis at having been forced to marry a mortal and to bear a mortal child whom she must see die. It is the plight of immortals who are close to morals. The unusual combination of mortal and immortal in Achilles’ chariot team reflects the uneasy identity of Achilles himself, more than human but ultimately not fully divine. Pedasos’ tragic demise foreshadows Achilles’ own impending death as well as that of Patroclus, and we see that the Iliad’s tendency towards comparison of heroes and horses finds its most consistent expression in Achilles, the figure that is both most horse-like and most heroic.

A further similarity of horses to heroes is also revealed by the very first word of the quoted passage, vājin, which is frequently used to describe horses in the Ṛgveda. I have translated the word as “prize-winning” to call to mind Homeric parallels, such as ἀθλοφόρος. The connotations of vājin presumably extend to horse racing, which can itself be a form of symbolic combat, but vāja, from which this adjective is derived, also indicates the loot taken from conquered enemies by a warrior. The Vedic hymn IV.38, to the immortal stallion Dadhikrā, directly compares him to a king, nṛpatiḥ, translated as “lord of men”:

It could be argued, of course, that the evidence presented thus far does not preclude the possibility that these similarities simply reflect a coincidence of internal logic within these societies, i.e. heroes use horses in battle so the comparison of the two is simply natural and any overlap just the result of chance. Given the relationship between these cultures, in history and poetry, this would seem unlikely to me, but to bolster these conclusions one would want to see evidence of some kernel of this phenomenon in the parent culture as well. Since we have no literature from that culture, however, such evidence is inherently difficult to obtain, to say the least. In this particular instance, however, we may be in exceptionally good luck. This is so because of one particular element of IE religious practice that has to do with horses, to which I will now turn.

We must look then to the evidence for this kingly ritual, in which the space between equine and human identity became permeable, an appreciation of which has practical implications for our understanding of the unique treatment of heroes and horses in early Greek epic. The reconstruction of an actual religious ritual, however, is not as straightforward as the reconstruction of a word or phrase, and may not even be possible, because the evolution of a culture’s religion does not progress by consistent or predictable tendencies. Therefore, although it is important here to review the evidence and even discuss at some length certain issues brought up in reconstruction, I will ultimately suggest that we should not try to reconstruct the ritual precisely, but instead examine what our evidence for it allows us to glimpse about the patterns of thought that shaped its formation generally. This, I think, will be more useful for the sort of analysis needed for the study of horses in Greek poetry and will help us avoid certain difficult pitfalls inherent to precise ritual reconstruction.

The minimal, yet reliable deduction that we must work with, then, is that this evidence reflects a kingship ritual involving sex between a royal human and a horse, in which the king is identified with a stallion and the queen with a mare and in which the horse involved is killed at some point. The underlying ritual logic then is that of human/horse ontological overlap on a conceptual and ritualistic level.

There is yet one more ritual that has often been suggested as a survival of the PIE horse sacrifice, that of the Roman Equus October. I have so far omitted it from this discussion because I do not think it is a direct descendant of that ritual, or least it cannot be confirmed as such. Yet it is worth discussing for two reasons. First, since other scholars have included it in their analysis, I ought to explain why I do not. Second, even though I think that it is impossible to prove a relationship to the ritual discussed above, it is nevertheless possible that practices concerning the Equus October still preserve evidence of early ideology regarding horses and humans that will be useful.

Differences between this and the horse sacrifices discussed above are quite apparent. The ritual takes place annually while there is no evidence from the Indian or Irish versions that justifies understanding the PIE ritual as anything but a special occurrence rising out of particular circumstances. There is also no sex, which, it must be admitted, is a salient feature of the other rituals. There is also no real kingship involved. It seems then the Equus October is lacking in almost every requirement for inclusion in the group of IE horse sacrifices that descend from the PIE horse sacrifice. These differences have not, however, prevented scholars from seeing these rituals as related.

This is potentially relevant in Rome and to the Equus Octoberspecifically only because, although there is no evidence of human sacrifice in Rome, there was a certain execution that was modeled on the Equus October. In 46 BC Julius Caesar, once a pontifex maximus, had mutineers decapitated in the Campus Martius and their heads hung up in the Regia, an odd procedure that is reminiscent of the sacrifice. Cassius Dio tells us that this was, in fact, done precisely in the manner of a sacrifice, and the Equus Octoberseems to be the sacrifice that is implied:

I do not claim that this reflects a shared methodology for human sacrifice in Rome and India at all, of course. I only point out that in each case, when a human sacrifice was imagined the logical ritual practice on which to model it was the sacrifice of a horse. The fact that horses occupied an ontological position that was closer to humans than other animals marked horse sacrifice as the most logical paradigm for human sacrifice. Even without direct relation then, the rituals may still testify to a similar ideological connection between horses and humans, an ideological connection that is a genuine inheritance, and that we have seen in our Greek poetic sources as well.

Homer’s need to alter the apparent semantic trajectory of the line grows partially out of the Greek disinclination to eat horse meat, but also coincides with a general unwillingness to sacrifice horses. It may, of course, seem odd that an animal that was once specially marked for important sacrifices becomes particularly unlikely as sacrificial victim. This need not be surprising, however, since it is possible that resistance to sacrificing a particular animal is paradoxically not unlike eagerness to sacrifice a particular animal. Each case reflects a designation of that animal as uniquely sacred. It is not hard to imagine the same reverence for an animal rendering it especially sacrificial in one time period and especially unfit for sacrifice in another. This very phenomenon is, in fact, evident in the transition from Vedic to post-Vedic attitudes toward the sacrifice of cows.

Both in the actual liturgy of the puruṣamedha and in several other notable sacrifices in the PIE world there is a tendency to compare humans to horses. I believe that this preserves an inherited tendency toward the hippomorphizing of humans and anthropomorphizing of horses that is linked to a conceptual overlap of the species that is traceable to prehistoric times and the common culture of the Indo-European peoples. To return to the epic heroes, then, the similarity between horses and heroes reflected in both our Greek and our Vedic Sanskrit sources is not a fully isolated phenomenon, but one special realization of a broader tendency, one that is evident not only in our literary sources but in sacrificial practices continuous from distant antiquity.

The horse sacrifice described in Plutarch’s Life of Pelopidas may bear special testimony to the ideological nexus described above. Since the passage has never, to my knowledge, been analyzed in the light of IE horse sacrifices, I think that it is worthwhile to attempt to examine it through the information presented above. The Greek legends of the Leuktridai and of the sacrifice offered to them on the eve of the Theban battle against the Spartans in 371 BCE contain descriptions of a horse sacrifice that is very infrequently discussed in scholarly studies but incredibly interesting in light of the PIE horse sacrifice and the symbolic logic between humans and horses to which it testifies. It does not, I think, constitute a direct Greek descendant of the famous PIE ritual, but it does reflect categories of ideological inheritance outlined above.

Early in this chapter I attempted to highlight a species boundary that is implicit in early Greek poetry, one that separates humans and horses from other animals. The existence of this boundary has widespread ramifications in Greek literature and informs human and equine poetic comparisons as well as mythical examples of hippomorphism. The fact that many of these phenomena are reflected in the related poetry and culture of India, as well as in other IE cultures, led me to propose that these are not purely Greek developments but instead local outgrowths of an ancient cultural ideology, inherited in Greece and common to other IE cultures. As proof of this I pointed to evidence concerning horse sacrifices in Greece and elsewhere. For in these rituals we find evidence of this phenomenon and proof that it appeared not just in daughter cultures but in the parent culture as well. Not only do we have evidence that an ontological overlap of horse and human was central to the kingly horse sacrifice, but even our human sacrifice texts seem to imagine human sacrifice as modeled on horse sacrifice specifically, in Greece as well as in related cultures. We have good reason to believe, then, that Greek mythic and poetic treatment of horses and humans developed out of inherited cultural tendencies.