Page:Horse shoes and horse shoeing.djvu/64

 hoof for a cavalry not shod was an indispensable condition. It appears that the Parthian horses, bred in the plains of Mesopotamia, were not provided with shoes, and this fact alone explains why, in the wars with the Romans, the Parthian armies, almost entirely formed of cavalry, and always victorious in their sandy deserts, melted away or suddenly disappeared when they had pursued their adversaries into the mountainous and volcanic regions of Armenia, which are covered with obsidian and sharp stones; it was simply because the Parthian or Persian horses were not shod. The absence of a protection to the horn explains why—and I believe that this fact has not yet been remarked or appreciated at its just value—the Ten Thousand Greeks, in their retreat after the battle of Cunaxa, and of Mark Antony and Julian, falling back on Armenia and its mountains after their defeat in the plains, were able to escape from the numerous Persian and Parthian cavalry which incessantly pursued them.’

If the Greeks were unacquainted with the art of attaching a rim of metal or other hard substance to the part of the hoof brought into contact with the ground, it might be expected that the Romans who imitated them so closely in equestrian matters would not, at any rate for some time, be in a position to devise anything of the kind; and that, as a consequence, the utility of the horse must have been as limited as with the Grecians. And such would appear to be the fact. When nearly all the arts had attained a high degree of perfection, the one in question, which would have been of the greatest