By Laurence Totelin
In the seventh century BCE, Semonides of Amorgos wrote his now
infamous poem on the races of women, each one worse than the next. The
mare-woman is perhaps my favourite, the ultimate high-maintenance lady:
Another type a horse with a splendid mane begat.
She turns up her nose at all kinds of work and toil.
She would never touch a mill, nor a sieve
Would she ever lift, nor would she throw dung out of the house,
Nor, for fear of the soot, would she near the oven
Ever sit. Only out of necessity will she make love to her husband.
She washes off the dirt every day,
Twice, sometimes three times; then she anoints herself with perfumes
She always wears her mane combed loose,
Abundant as it is, and strewn with flowers.
What a beauty to look at, she is that woman
For others; for her owner she is a pain,
Unless he is a king or a sceptre bearer
Who can delight in such pleasures.
[Semonides fragment 7, 57-70]
Now Semonides was describing human women here, but he may as well
have been berating an actual mare. For in antiquity horses in general,
and mares in particular, were considered rather troublesome, especially
in their sexual habits. Centaur women flanking Aphrodite on a Roman mosaic, Tunisia. Photograph by Giorces available on Wikimedia Commons
According to Aristotle, horses were the most salacious of animals
after men, but unlike civilised Greeks, they had no revulsion for
incest:
Horses will mounts their mothers and
their daughters. In fact, a herd of horses is not considered perfect,
unless horses copulate with their own offspring. [Aristotle, Enquiry into Animals 6.22, 576a18-20]:
In some regions, mares left without a stallion, were said to imagine
the pleasures of love and conceive ‘wind-foals’, with the help of the
west wind (this story is often repeated in ancient literature, see for
instance Vergil, Georgics 3.269-275; Columella, On Agriculture 6.27.4-7). Other mares fell in love with themselves:
There is a rare, but remarkable, form
of madness that overcomes mares. If they see their reflection in water,
they are seized with a vain love, and as a result, they forget to forage
and they become lost to this wasting love disease. [Columella, On Agriculture 6.35]
However, when breeding was required, mares turned cold. They often had to be tied to submit to the stallion (Varro, On Agriculture 2.7.8; Pliny the Elder, Natural History
10.179). And the only way to get a mare to submit to an ass in
mule-breeding was to clip her mane, because a long mane made her ‘proud
and high spirited’ (Pliny, Natural History 10.179). No wonder
then, that the ancients developed love pills to regulate equine desire.
The Roman agronomists recommended squill, crushed to the consistency of
honey in water, to be smeared on the genitals of the mare; while the
stud was made to smell her genital scent (Columella, On Agriculture 6.27; Varro, On Agriculture 2.7.8). The Greek Hippiatric treatises, beside similar herbal remedies, have slightly more complicated concoctions: Horse
carrying a nude woman. Detail from a mosaic at the Baths of Caracalla,
Ostia. This photograph by Hubert Steiner is available on Wikimedia
Commons.To incite horses to sexual intercourse… the right testicle of a
cock; place it in the skin of a ram and hang to the neck of the horse;
or the dried right testicle of a deer; reduce to powder and make it
drink with milk-honey. For frequent and unpainful sexual intercourse…
The flesh of a skink (lizard) in sweet-smelling mixed wine; inject into
the animal… [Hippiatric treatise of Cambridge 10.6 and 15, ninth century CE]
The animals whose testicles were sacrificed to the greater good of
horse breeding were, of course, not chosen at random: both the cock and
the deer were known for their sexual vigour. Nor was the right testicle
an arbitrary choice: the right side was believed to be involved in the
production of males.
Such fanciful and expensive aphrodisiacs may never been used on
actual mares, but it is significant that they are recorded. Horses were
time-consuming and costly animals to keep–animals whose possession was
indicative of social standing, very much like Semonides’ beautiful
horse-woman, kept entertained by luxurious flowers and perfumes.
