Hiero the Tyrant and Other Treatises by Xenophon & Robin H. Waterfield & Paul Cartledge

Author:Xenophon & Robin H. Waterfield & Paul Cartledge
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: History / Ancient / Greece
ISBN: 9780140455250
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Published: 1997-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

The usual way of getting a good war-horse to put on a grander and [1] more imposing display as it rides by is to pull at its mouth with the bit, spur it on and use a whip on it. These measures actually produce the opposite of the desired splendid effect, so you should avoid them. [2] I mean, when the horse’s mouth is pulled up, it cannot see where it is going, the spur and whip startle it, and the upshot is that the horse gets all agitated and writhes about* – which is the way a horse behaves [3] when it hates being ridden, and is ugly rather than attractive. However, if you teach it to ride on slack reins, to hold its head up high and arch its neck, you will be getting the horse to do exactly what gives it [4] pleasure and delight. You can tell that it enjoys this because when a horse wants to show off in front of other horses (especially female horses) it holds its head up high, arches its neck with a great deal of spirit, prances with supple legs raised high off the ground and lifts its [5] tail. So by making your horse hold itself exactly as it does when it is displaying itself at its best, you are giving people an impression of a horse that enjoys being ridden, and you are making it seem a grand, spirited and imposing animal. I shall now try to explain how, in my opinion, these results are to be obtained.

[6] In the first place, you should have at least two bits.1 One of them should be smooth and have good-sized discs, while the other should be rough and have heavy, small discs. The pimples of the rough bit should be sharp enough to hurt the horse when the bit is inserted into its mouth and make it drop the bit into place; when it is given the smooth one instead, then, it will be such a relief that it will carry out on the smooth bit everything it has been trained to do on the rough [7] bit. A possible problem, though, is that it may find the smoothness of a smooth bit too easy and keep leaning on it; that is why the smooth bit is equipped with large discs, which are designed to force the horse to open its jaws and let the bit drop into place. It is also possible to adapt the rough bit to other kinds of bit so that it acts by either compression or tension.2

[8] Whatever kind of bit you use, it must be flexible. The trouble with a stiff bit is that whichever part of it is actually gripped by the horse, the whole of it is held against the horse’s jaws. Imagine a person picking up a spit: it is the whole spit he picks up, never mind at what [9] point of its length he actually takes hold of it.

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