You're a dark horse

The desired steed of great conquerors, as well as a symbol of strength and courage, the black horse-whether mythological, literary or real-has long galloped across our minds, says 

- Celia Brayfield

THE spell of the black horse was cast at the very beginning of the horse-human partnership. In about 750BC, Homer detailed in the Iliad T a 'swift horse of Adrastus, that was of heavenly stock'. The blisteringly fast, black-maned Arion was the offspring of the goddess Demeter, who had turned herself into a mare to escape the attentions of the sea god Poseidon. In the shape-shifting manner of lovestruck classical deities, Poseidon turned himself into a stallion and so Arion was born, a heroic creature, briefly ridden by Hercules, said to be immortal and, like Anna Sewell's Black Beauty some 26 centuries later, gifted with human speech.

The link between the black horse and the water, reprised in the 20th century in the first Lloyds Bank commercial, emerged at the same time in Breton mythology in the form of Morvarc'h, the beloved mount of Malgven, Queen of the North, who breathed fire and could gallop over the waves. With this special power, he rescued the king of the doomed city of Ys when the sea engulfed it. In Brittany, France, homage is paid to Morvarc'h in the form of equestrian statues, one of which stands proudly on the west façade of Quimper Cathedral.

Synonymous with divinity, true black is the rarest of colours in horses. This black jewel may have been what drew a teenage Macedonian prince to Bucephalus, a black horse said to be unrideable, in 327BC. He bet his father the animal's asking price that he could train it. By talking quietly to the horse and getting him used to his flapping cloak-methods of which Sewell would definitely have approved-he succeeded in gaining his trust.