Taraxippus

The Greeks loved horse and chariot racing with a passion that bordered on obsession. The four great Panhellenic games, the athletic festivals that drew competitors from across the Greek world, all featured chariot races as their premier events. At Olympia, the oldest and most prestigious, the games were held every four years in honor of Zeus, and the chariot race was the climax of the competition. At Nemea, the games honored Zeus as well, and the Isthmian games honored Poseidon, the god of the sea who was also the patron of horses. At Delphi, the Pythian games honored Apollo, the god of music and prophecy. Each of these sites had a race-course, a hippodrome, with a long straight track and a sharp turn at each end, marked by posts called termai. The turn was the most dangerous part of the race, where chariots had to slow slightly, swing wide, and then accelerate again, all while competing with other teams for the inside line. It was here, at the turning-post, that the Taraxippus made his presence felt.

The most famous Taraxippus stood at Olympia, on the longer side of the race-course, built into a bank in the shape of a round altar. Pausanias, the Greek traveler and geographer who wrote a detailed description of Greece in the 2nd century CE, described it in his work Description of Greece. He wrote that as the horses ran past the Taraxippus, they were seized by a sudden and terrible fear for no apparent reason, a fear that led to disorder, crashed chariots, and injured charioteers. The drivers, knowing the danger, offered sacrifices and prayed to the Taraxippus to be propitious, to hold back his terror and let them pass safely. But the Greeks disagreed about who or what the Taraxippus actually was. Some said it was the tomb of Olenios, a local hero who had been skilled with horses and whose spirit haunted the place where he died. Others said it was the tomb of Dameon, the son of Phlios, who had accompanied Heracles, the hero forced to complete twelve impossible labors, on his expedition against Augeas and the Eleans, and who had been killed there along with his horse by Cteatus, the son of Aktor. The man and the horse were buried together, and their shared grave became the Taraxippus.

Other traditions gave the Taraxippus an even more dramatic origin. Some said it was the tomb of Myrtilus, the charioteer who had betrayed his master King Oenomaus of Pisa, a city in the region of Elis near Olympia, and who had caused the king's death in a chariot race. Oenomaus had challenged every suitor of his daughter Hippodamia to a chariot race from the temple of Zeus at Olympia to the temple of Poseidon at the Isthmus of Corinth, a race the king always won because his horses were divine. But Pelops, the suitor who would eventually win Hippodamia and father the accursed House of Atreus, bribed Myrtilus to sabotage the king's chariot by replacing the bronze pins of the axles with wax. The chariot collapsed, Oenomaus was dragged to death, and Myrtilus was murdered by Pelops to prevent him from revealing the treachery. Myrtilus was buried near the race-course at Olympia, and his angry spirit became the Taraxippus, frightening the horses of every subsequent race as he had once frightened the horses of Oenomaus. Still others said the Taraxippus was the spirit of Oenomaus himself, punishing racers as he had once punished suitors, or the spirit of Alcathus, another suitor killed by Oenomaus, who was spiteful toward all charioteers because he had lost the race that cost him his life.

At the Isthmian games, the Taraxippus was identified as Glaucus, the son of Sisyphus, the cunning king of Corinth who was punished in the underworld by being forced to roll a boulder up a hill forever, only to have it roll back down each time he neared the top. Glaucus had been killed by his own horses during the funeral games of Acastus, the king of Iolcus who had held contests in honor of his father Pelias. The horses went mad, possibly drinking from an enchanted spring, and tore their master apart. His ghost haunted the Isthmian race-course, frightening the horses of competitors as he had once been frightened by his own. At Nemea, there was no specific ghost, but a red rock at the turning-post that flashed like fire and terrified the horses as they rounded the curve. The Taraxippus was thus both a supernatural entity and a natural phenomenon, the place where the dangers of the track and the fears of the racers merged into a single terrifying presence.

The Roman poet Statius, writing in the 1st century CE, gave the Taraxippus a more monstrous form in his epic Thebaid. He described it as a phantom of terrible visage, endowed with countless terrors, a snake-stressed monstrous effigy that would have frightened even Cerberus, the three-headed guard dog of the underworld, and the Eumenides, the dread goddesses of vengeance who tormented the wicked. When the divine horse Arion, a gift of the gods, saw the Taraxippus, his mane leapt erect, he reared up, and the chariot was overturned, throwing the driver head-over-heels. This literary version made the Taraxippus a creature rather than a place, a demon that could be conjured and sent against enemies. But the practical reality was simpler and more enduring: the Greeks believed that certain places were dangerous not because of physics but because of presence, that the dead did not rest quietly in spots where they had died violently, and that the best defense against such spirits was propitiation, sacrifice, and prayer. The Taraxippus was the ghost of the race-track, the patron demon of the turning-post, and his altars stood at the curves of hippodromes across the Greek world, receiving the offerings of men who knew that skill and courage were not always enough, and that sometimes the horses simply spooked, and the chariot crashed, and the only explanation was the unseen hand of the dead.