(Context follows:)
Too much might be made out of the fact that Homer calls the Trojans
"hippodamoi." It's a fairly general heroic epithet in Homer-- a quick
glance at LSJ shows that the word is used of Agamemnon (the dream at the
beginning of Iliad 2 calls Agamemnon "heudeis Atreos huie daïphronos
hippodamoio" = "You are sleeping, horse-taming son of wise Atreus"), among
many another hero (and heroine-- see the name of Pirithous' wife, Iliad
2.742).
Two weak and totally unsatisfying alternate suggestions:
The horse (as gift to Athena) may be a horse (as opposed to a rabbit or a
large wooden badger) because Athena is a sea-goddess, so some have argued
(see the Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2nd ed., entry "Athena"). If Poseidon
is closely associated with horses (and he is) so might Athena be. (The OCD
2 claims that Poseidon's association with horses proves that he is not in
origin a sea-god; the OCD 2 might be right, but the ancient storytellers
may not have seen it that way.)
There is some support for this in the (post-Homeric?) legend about the
scattering of the Greek fleet by Athena. Also, in Vergil, the cover story
for the construction of the horse is that it is an offering to Minerva to
aid their trip home:
votum pro reditu simulant; ea fama vagatur
Aen. 2.17
If you think that one's bad, try this: Hecate, Artemis and Athena may all
be survivals an ancient mother goddess. Hecate and Artemis are especially
associated with giving victory in horse races. (Hecate is also supposed to
have been appeared as part-horse; see a fun little book by J.E. Lowe "Magic
in Greek and Latin Literature" [Blackwell, 1929], ch. 4 sec. 1.) So the
offering to Athena may be a horse because of her (masked) associations with
the Mother goddess.
If this could be accepted, it certainly enriches Vergil's descriptions of
the horse and its belly, pregnant with armed men.
Huc delecta virum sortiti corpora furtim
includunt caeco lateri, penitusque cavernas
ingentis uterumque armato milite complent.
Aen. 2.19ff
... scandit fatalis machina muros,
feta armis.
Aen. 2.237f
It's a long stretch from Athena as a Bronze Age mother-goddess to Vergil's
Minerva, of course, but if we like this interpretation we can console
ourselves that evidence may have survived to the Augustan period that we
don't have, or maybe we have evidence that we haven't interpreted properly.
JM("Marophilic")P
At 2:51 PM -0400 4/5/99, RANDI C ELDEVIK wrote:
>As someone has already pointed out, "horse-taming" is a Homeric epithet
>for the Trojans, and in reality the plains of Asia Minor were a great
>place for raising horses. Use of horses was probably the key factor
>enabling expansion of the proto-Indo-Europeans thousands of years ago;
>in bygone times generally, horses and ships were the two things necessary
>for military aggression and conquest. This doesn't always have to mean
>chariot warfare as in Homer, nor does it have to mean the charges of
>knights on horseback that we see in the high middle ages, but even when
>infantry is tactically very important (as in the Roman Empire), horses are
>crucial for transport, etc. Horses = tactical advantage = victory; that
>is the symbolism, I think, especially for a land-based power like the
>Trojans (as opposed to the seafaring Achaeans). The wooden horse seemed
>to be a concession by the Achaeans that the power of the horse-taming
>Trojans had won out. Very subtle and clever!
>Randi Eldevik
>Oklahoma State University
>
>On Sat, 3 Apr 1999, Catherine H Tate wrote:
>
>> Fellow subscribers,
>> I asked my professor the other week why did the Greeks build a huge
>horse;
>> why not a huge statue of Niki or some other figure? He researched and
>came
>> up with that this was a good figure for a seige engine. I still want to
>> know if their is some significance in a horse,like the sign given by Juno
>> that a spirited head of a horse would mark the foundation for Carthage.
>Is
>> there a reason to be found as to why the "Trojan Horse"? Why not another
>> image? Somewhere there must be a little something that explains why a
>> horse? Did the Trojans rever horses?
>> Curious and must be more than a good model for a
>seige engine,
>>
>>
>> Kimber
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