Hiero the Tyrant and Other Treatises (Penguin Classics) by Xenophon Page A

the hunted.
    [18] This is not a difficult principle to grasp if you think about it. Even wild animals, which are less intelligent than human beings, put it into practice. Kites, for instance, have the ability to seize anything left unprotected and withdraw to a place of safety before being caught; wolves prey on anything which has been left alone and unguarded [19] and steal things from nooks and crannies. And suppose a dog sets out after a wolf and catches up with it: if the wolf is stronger it attacks the dog, but if it is weaker it tears off as much of its haul as it can and retreats. Again, sometimes, when wolves are not put off by watch-dogs, they organize themselves into two groups, one of which drives off the watch-dogs, while the other carries out the raid. That is how they [20] get their provisions. If wild beasts can plunder with such intelligence, surely a human being may be expected to display greater skill, given that animals themselves actually fall victim to human expertise.

ON HORSEMANSHIP
(De Re Equestri)
INTRODUCTION
    Plato’s Socrates once implied that a man whose nature was functioning as harmoniously and purposefully as a horse’s would be an excellent man (
Republic
352e ff.). Xenophon, never entirely unmindful of practicalities, would have added that for a horse to fulfil its natural function required the addition of the human touch. Whether Xenophon himself wrote
On Horsemanship
is more than a little doubtful, but in content and sentiment it is no less certainly Xenophontic. Indeed, an attempt is made to represent the two treatises as companion pieces (12.14). But whereas
How to Be a Good Cavalry Commander
is written ostensibly for the attention of the publicly appointed official,
On Horsemanship
is written for the
idiotes
, or layman. A similar contrast of readership may be drawn between the more privately oriented
Estate-manager
and the publicly addressed
Ways and Means
.
    A passing reference is made here (11.10) to a commanding phylarch or hipparch, but leadership is not this treatise’s key theme. Successful, that is orderly and disciplined, management of military horseflesh is. The arrangement and exposition of the treatise render the medium in complete harmony with its message. In order to appreciate the finer points, the present-day reader needs to keep in mind throughout certain essential differences between ancient and modern equitation. Greek horses were smaller (by perhaps some two hands on average than the average cavalry charger early this century), stockier, more cob-like than those we are used to seeing or riding. Stallions were not gelded, which did nothing to assuage their tendency – shared by the mares – to bite. Nor did the rider operate with such seemingly indispensable modern aids to balance and control as stirrups and saddle. The horses for their part went unshod.
    The nature of the beast meant that the horse was a hugely expensive commodity; the price most commonly paid for a horse in the fourth century was up to three hundred times the average daily wage of a skilled worker. The expense was especially magnified by a climate and terrain generally lacking in extensive lush pastureland. Only the seriously rich could hope to maintain a horse, let alone a stable or stud, and the horse correspondingly functioned as an obvious status symbol marking out the elite and often aristocratic few. It followed that even fewer Greeks could afford to own let alone breed racehorses – hence the quite prodigious extravagance implied by Alcibiades’ boasting that he had entered no less than seven teams of four-horse chariots at the Olympics of (probably) 416: this was the ‘blue-riband’ event of the Games (cf.
Hiero
11.5), and Alcibiades not only won the first prize but had four of his teams in the first seven finishers. Small wonder that he commissioned Euripides to write a commemorative and celebratory ode, besides exploiting his triumph shamelessly for political purposes. The young