Sorin Anghel: REPLAY: The Power of the Horse or the Horse-Power?

Chronicles describe the shock felt by the natives in contact with the first conquistadors who landed in Western India: the shining armors, the fire weapons, but mainly animals the likes of which they have never seen before: the horses were reason enough to make the newcomers supernatural beings!... The same must have happened thousands of years before, when the first habitants came off of Greece’s coasts. In their long exodus through asian steppes, they had probabily met tribes that had already tamed The Horse, and the excitement towards this novelty must have been so powerful that that moment had been immortalised in legends.

The Centaur is the mix of some very powerful feelings, provoked by the contact with exceptional riders, fast and fearless fighters, as must have been the inhabitants of the endless steppes. From those same places would rush towards Europe, after a few centuries, other Centaurs, as handy in the arts of horseriding: the Huns, the Mongols, the Tatars...

All of mankind’s history would be related to the Horse’s gallop. A powerful cavalry could decide the fate of a battle. The fall of Troy is due to the most expensive horse in the world: The Trojan Horse!... Drunken by what seemed like a tribute brought by the resigned besiegers, the Trojans accept the Wooden Horse, signing their own death sentence... Later on, Virgil would be exclaming in „Aeneid”: Timeo danaos et dona ferentes! („Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!”)... Another very expensive horse is recorded in history by William Shakespeare: „A horse, my kingdom for a horse!” seems to have been yelled by Richard the IIIrd when fate had turned its back on him... Even the End of the World will be announced by the forthoming of The Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse...

Even after the role of the noble steed in man’s evolution today has become almost symbolic, the relationship between man and horse seems hard to decipher: the power of the four-wheeled fireballs that cross frantically the Earth’s highways are reffered to as Horse-Powered!!!...