The world of the ancient Greeks did not arise ex nihilo but developed from earlier cultures, which are harder to evaluate because of their extreme age. The last century or more of research has, however, proven that most of the languages of Europe, the Near East, and India all descend from a common language, Proto-Indo-European (PIE), and that the various cultures of the Indo-European (IE) world, including the Greek, descend in some way from that of the speakers of that language. Although the world of the prehistoric IE peoples is very difficult to study, linguistic and archeological research allows us significant insights, and thanks to that research we know much more about the prehistory of Greek culture than we did even a short time ago. My intention here is not to contribute directly to that study itself, however, but rather to investigate certain facets of the earliest recorded Greek poetry in ways that draw on that research meaningfully and, I hope, innovatively. Specifically, my work is a literary analysis of the treatment of horses and horsemanship in early Greek poetry that incorporates elements of what has been revealed about prehistoric treatment of horses to explain unique and heretofore puzzling elements of Greek verbal art.

I begin this study with a review of Homeric equine formulas, focusing on ὠκέες ἵπποι. My analysis of the special position of this phrase in Homeric poetry grows out of an evaluation of our evidence for its existence in pre-Homeric poetry, from the distant ancestors of the Greeks to Greek poets who lived just before the advent of alphabetic writing. I work to show how certain prehistoric developments in the phrase affected its proliferation in Homer and to reveal its relationship to several seemingly disparate equine formulas. Chapter 1 con-cludes with a study of the word κλυτόπωλος, a somewhat perplexing epithet of Hades, the origin of which is, I believe, inextricably bound to the deep history of the these formulas, as well as the history of Homeric horse formulas generally.

In Chapter 2 I turn to horses themselves and to their relation to epic heroes. There I focus not only on the similarity of treatment accorded to them in epic verse but also on the fact that they share with humans a unique relationship to the gods: they can descend from the immortals, and they are capable of deriving semi-divine status from them. This extreme similarity of horses and humans, at a deeply ontological level, has parallels elsewhere in the IE world and reflects inherited ideology that ought to color our analysis of Homeric horses. I strengthen this assertion with a survey of evidence for horse sacrifices in the IE world that testify to a long tradition of thinking of humans and horses in uniquely similar ways.

In Chapter 3 I examine Greek lyric comparisons of horses and humans, which, unlike epic comparisons, often involve both male and female subjects and frequently have erotic overtones. After discussing the phenomenon itself I again turn to our evidence for horse sacrifices, which testify to a long cultural history of using horses to think about sex and power. I ultimately suggest that the sexual element of the symbology of the horse provides a key to understanding the metapoetic deployment of the image of the charioteer in Greek poetry.

Finally, in Chapter 4 I address the role of chariots in Greek and Indian marriage myths. This analysis reveals methodological distinctions between equine phenomena that are directly inherited from the parent culture and those that evolved independently but can still be meaningfully understood through an appreciation of inherited poetic practice.

My argument primarily concerns early Greek poetry, but it would be useful first to foreground certain key details about the study of horses that have been revealed in the fields of linguistics and archaeology. Horses and horsemanship have, in fact, long held a central position in investigations of IE history, especially those concerning the homeland of the PIE speakers, [1] and the justification for this position is vouchsafed by archeological, religious, and poetic evidence. There are, however, certain long-standing debates concerning whether Indo-Europeans were the first to domesticate the horse, when this domestication occurred, to what purposes horses were first put, and what the significance of horse domestication is for an understanding of the Indo-European homeland and expansion. The difficulty of scholarly consensus on these questions need not preclude the present discussion, because my argument does not depend on any of the more contentious or uncertain elements of the subject.

The foundations upon which my work does stand should be made clear at the outset of this study. These assumptions are, I believe, beyond serious dispute and constitute sufficient basis on which to build an argument. The most elemental of these is simply that the PIE community was itself aware of the horse and that the horse was not individually encountered by each of the descendant IE communities in subsequent cultural phases as use of the domesticated horse spread throughout Eurasia. This assumption rests primarily on the linguistic evidence of a shared equine vocabulary among several descendant IE languages. The PIE h₁ék̑u̯os, ‘horse’, yielded Hieroglyphic Luwian a-su-wa, Sanskrit aśva, Avestan aspa, Tocharian A yuk, Tacharian B yakwe, Greek ἵππος, Latin equus, Venetic eku, Anglo-Saxon eoh, Gaulish epo-, and Old Irish ech, as well as Lithuanian ashvienis (stallion), Old Church Slavic ehu-skalk (horse-groomer), and Mitanni a-as-su-us-sa-an-ni (horse-trainer). [2] Had these cultures encountered horses individually, after the dissolution of the PIE community, they would have created their own innovative terms for the animal, which they did not do, or borrowed vocabulary from the same communities from whom they acquired knowledge of the animal itself. If they had borrowed this vocabulary, even if they had borrowed it from other IE languages, this would be clear linguistically. For example, the English word “marshal,” descends from the borrowed Frankish word “marahskalk” and displays clear English phonetic development on top of old Frankish phonetic development. Hence, it is discernible as a borrowing, even though it was borrowed long ago from a related language. This is not the case, however, with IE equine vocabulary. These words, then, individually descend from the same PIE word, reconstructable as *h₁ék̑u̯os. [3] The simple presence of horses in the Proto-Indo-European society may, therefore, be taken for granted.

The high status of horses in that society is also to be assumed, although I am aware that this assertion, despite its prevalence in scholarly tradition, lacks definitive archaeological verification. [4] Even without such archeological evidence, however, the likelihood of such a status is strongly suggested by such phenomena as the frequency of words for horse utilized in Indo-European personal names, such as Indic Aśva-cakra, Avestan Vīśt-āspa, Greek Hippo-lytus and Phil-ippos, Gaulish Epo-pennus, and Old English Eo-maer, to list but a few. There also exists a pair of so-called Indo-European Divine Twins, who are frequently and specially associated with horses and who appear in wide enough manifestation in the religious systems of Indo-European cultures to justify the assumption that the figures themselves, as well as their hippological associations, are of genuine Proto-Indo-European antiquity. [5] The Greek Dioskouroi (known as the λεύκιπποι, bright horses), the Anglo-Saxon Horsa and Hengist (Horse and Stallion), the Indic Aśvins (horsemen), and the Lithuanian Dieva dēli (sons of the sky) furnish the clearest evidence of this fact. [6] I believe that these facts render secure the assumption that horses were in the parent culture a symbol of high social status. Prehistoric Indo-European artistic treatment of horses is also remarkably consistent cross-culturally, especially in the particular treatment of horse heads and legs, [7] and the special place of horses in kurgan graves of the Yamnaya culture, identified by Gimbutas as an, if not the, early Indo-European people, may also lend credence to this assumption. [8]

Finally, the domesticated status of horses is assumed as well. The domestication of horses, at first as a food source and then for the purpose of riding, has been proven convincingly by Anthony. [9] He shows this through the age-slaughter patterns of horses evident at Neolithic sites; the consistency of age of death reflects the selected slaughter of kept animals rather than animals procured by hunting, [10] and he reveals evidence of bitwear in some horses as proof of riding. [11] This conclusion is strengthened by the presence of horse bones in kurgan graves alongside those of sheep and dogs, animals known to have been domesticated. [12] The Indo-European horse sacrifice, a kingship ritual which is documented in Indic, Irish, and perhaps Roman sources, and which is widely thought to have been the principal PIE kingship ritual, [13] also requires a domesticated horse. [14]

A final set of concerns that often attend IE horse research regard the purpose to which these domesticated horses, provided that they were indeed domesticated, were put and, specifically, whether they were used as draught animals. The conclusion that the Proto-Indo-Europeans had wheels and wagons is rendered beyond doubt by the linguistic evidence: English wheel, Greek κύκλος, and Sanskrit cakram all derive from the same PIE word *ku̯eku̯lo– (an apparently reduplicated nominal derivative of *ku̯el-, ‘to turn’, perhaps connoting some-thing like a “turny-turn,” which perhaps reflects the repetitive nature of the thing described [15] ). Additionally, Latin rota, Irish roth, German rad, and Lithuanian ratas all also mean ‘wheel’ and derive from the PIE root *ret- ‘to roll’. [16] The PIE root *u̯egh- yielded English wagon, Greek (ϝ)όχος, Latin vehiculum, Lithuanian veźimas, Sanskrit vāhana, and Avestan vāśa. The words axle and nave are also widespread and traceable to PIE. [17] Current archaeological evidence, however, does not permit the conclusion that horses were used in the drawing of these chariots, since no harness suitable for horses, rather than oxen, is known to have been invented before the breakup of the PIE speakers, however that event is to be understood or dated. [18] It is probable, then, that the domesticated horse was kept by the IE peoples for some time as a food and as a riding animal without being put to the harness. This assumption need not, however, have significant impact on the current discussion—most of the argumentation in this work deals with horses themselves and not with the chariots which they draw. When my argument does address charioteering itself, as occurs in the third and fourth chapters, I adduce what I think is a new argument, that poetic depictions of charioteers throughout the IE world evolve independently, and subsequent to the breakup of the IE community, but in logical and stable ways from treatments of horses that predate the use of the yoke.

Finally, as we turn our attention to the real subject of this work, the oral treatment of horses in oral Greek poetry, I should mention a potential complication that arises necessarily from my source material. This difficulty lies in the fact that many of my assumptions about prehistoric Indo-European poetic practice rely on evidence provided by Greek, Indian, and Iranian languages. The potential difficulty here lies in the fact that some linguists believe that these languages belong to a subgroup within the Indo-European language family, in other words, that they share a common ancestor that was itself a descendant of Proto-Indo-European. [19] If this is true then some of my assumptions about poetic practice in the parent culture would need to concern that common parent rather than the parent of the entire Indo-European language family. Even if that is the case it is not impossible for those conclusions to pertain to the culture of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European as well, but it would be difficult to verify. It would, however, only complicate some intermediate steps in my argument and would not alter the ultimate conclusions offered here regarding Greek verse.