Feb
10th
2019
A myth I read last night, presented without comment. · 10:24am Feb 10th, 2019
"Glaukos is most notable for the hideous manner of his death. He was in the habit of feeding his horses on human flesh so as to make them race more aggressively, but when he took them to Iolkos, to take part in the funeral games of King Pelias, they were deprived of their usual fare, so they tore Glaukos himself to pieces and devoured him. For generations after this Glaukos's ghost, known as Taraxippos ('Horse-Frightener') haunted the stadium at Corinth where the Isthmian Games were held, and terrified the horses as they raced."
--Jenny March, The Penguin Book of Classical Myths.
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Daedalus Aegle · 385 views
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Highlights the importance of giving your horse an appropriate diet. A risk strangely not mentioned by most Horse and Pony Care books.
Were these related to the man-eating mares of Diomedes and Hercules?
5010781
Also it's a haunted house ghost story for horses.
They were not related to those, no. At least not that I've read so far. That bit was from the story of Bellerophon. Glaukos was his father.
The taraxippos has actually been mentioned in the MLP comics. Apparently Daring Do encountered it, presumably somewhere in the ruins of the ancient minotaur maze-citadel of Cowrinth. I knew it was a spirit devised to explain horses suddenly taking fright for no discernable reason, but I didn't realize it was the soul of a specific man.
5010787
Wow, really? I must have missed that detail. What issue was this?
ETA: Found it, it was issue #41.
5010788
Issue #41 of the main line, Rainbow Dash's Very Bad Day, on the second-to-last page.
ETA: Missed Daedalus's ETA.
Leaving off side-canon for a moment...
Taraxippus is one of Equestria's many boogeyponies, though one whose name has fallen out of favor in the last few centuries. Parents of unruly children who wouldn't eat their alfalfa would tell stories of Taraxippus, who comes in the night to give wayward, hungry foals such a fright, they'd eat their own leg, or their brother, or their parents. And then where would they be? (One can see why Celestia preferred to phase the legends out of the common myths.)
But, like so many mythical creatures of Equestria, the Pony-Frightener is real, a ghostly minotaur with a visage so terrifying, few remember their encounters with him. Why, when young Princess Twilight Sparkle met him, she was scared out of her...
No, wait, that's not what it says. Apparently, after an initial startle when he snuck up on her in her castle's library, she was completely nonplussed by his appearance. Baffled, the spirit asked her why she wasn't afraid of being forced to eat another pony, to which she replied, "I've had lunches at the CHS cafeteria. Do you have any idea what they serve in those burgers? Because I sure don't."
Taraxippus has not been sighted in Equestria for quite some time since.
...Huh. Well then.
Definitely needs some adaptation into pony horror stories.
5010793
Really, it was dumb and lazy of me to ask in the first place rather than just google it right away
About the (sic)ness, I'm guessing the difference has to do with whether you go by the Greek or Latin. On a similar note, I've noticed a few modern books have switched from "Uranus" to "Ouranos", presumably to avoid the giggling problem.
5010800
*Applause*
So here's another myth I just read, about the conception of Herakles. Herc's mother, Alkmene, is betrothed to one Amphitryon. But Alkmene's father forbids them from consummating the marriage until the murder of Alkmene's nine brothers by pillagers is avenged. So Amphitryon has to go on a long quest to find and kill these bandits. But just as he's done and on his way home to his beloved, that's when Zeus beats him to the punch, disguised as him, and spends the night (which he makes three times as long, just for leisure) with Alkmene. So when Amphitryon does come home his wife has already heard all about his victory and thought he was there already.
All of that was just background to my actual point, which was this: guess who gets stuck with the unappealing task of explaining to Amphitryon what really happened? None other than Tiresias, the blind seer of Thebes, one of the earliest wizard mentor archetypes in literary history, who I have discussed previously. As in Oedipus Rex, it falls to him to explain to angry men the tangles in their family trees. Dude needs to find a better job.
5010875
Yeah, poor Tiresias seems to get the short end of the stick a lot of times! I have a facsimile of Samuel Pepys' copy of Ovid's Metamorphosis. At the part where Hera turns Tiresias into a snake for settling a bet between Zeus and herself in Zeus' favor, there is a bit that says, "Thus the folly of angering a woman with power is shown." In the margin, old Pepys has written a large and bold, N.B. There's a story behind that, I'm sure.
5010931
I'm not halfway through the Twelve Labours but already there are multiple star signs which were creatures Herakles killed by accident while out doing something else, which the gods then raised up to the heavens to become constellations.
That sounds like the beginnings of a story with the Washouts and a doping scandal...
5010968
"Princes? Can I ask you a question?"
"Certainly Twilight. What is on your mind?"
"Well I was stargazing with Mistmane last night and she mentioned something interesting."
"Oh?"
"Well you see, their constellations that they knew? They were all but one fish and mice! What was going on Princess?"
"Well you see Twilight when Luna and I were still young fillies, it was though that giving us pets would help teach us compassion, and patience, and responsibility; help us temper and modulate our power around mortals as it were. It was a... difficult... few decades that was..."
"Princess?"
"Oh we learned our lessons and took it all to heart. Eventually. There were several... false starts that we have immortalized with constellations"
"False starts?"
"Well let us just say that there is a reason Philomena is fire-proof and Tiberius is nocturnal."
"Oh. What about that last one? 'Namo' I think it was?"
"Ah. Nemo the Yahoo. You will have to ask Cadance about that one. It involves her and her granddam Diomedes. I am not at liberty to share that story."
5010968
Memorials? Or sort of like those kill makers on fighter planes?
5011025
A bit of both? The first one was during the fight against the hydra, when "a giant crab added further difficulties by coming to the aid of the Hydra and nipping Herakles' foot, so he killed it", which I interpret to mean that he stomped on it while his hands were otherwise occupied. (It clearly can't have been all that giant if it only nipped on his heels.) Nonetheless, "Hera was so pleased with the crab's efforts that she immortalized it in the stars as the constellation Cancer".
The second was during the hunt for the Erymanthian Boar, which reads almost like a farce where Herakles, while ostensibly there to hunt a wild boar, destroys the Centaur nation totally by accident, by means of a communal jar of wine and a quiver of poisoned arrows. It ends with the great centaur sage Cheiron being turned into the constellation Sagittarius to make up for Herakles' blunder.
5011012
Jenny March has a marvelously deadpan prose style. The final of the Twelve Labours was to descend into the underworld and bring back Cerberus himself. The key sentence goes like this:
"Finally Herakles came face to face with Hades himself, Lord of the Underworld, who gave him permission to take Kerberos back to earth for a short time, so long as he mastered him without using weapons."
It reads as if Herakles basically asked the God of Death if he could take his dog for a walk, and the God of Death said yes, provided he made sure to treat him gently because frankly Herakles is kind of a brute and the God of Death really loves his dog.
5011054
Now I have this barmy image in my head of Hades, all Dark Souls Nito-like, fawning over Cerberus and talking baby-talk like the stereotypical bleach-blonde woman with the leopard-print tights and her pink jumper'd purse Chihuahua...
5011080
I once read that in ancient Greek "Cerberus" means "spotted".
Hades named his dog Spot.
5011082
"For your twelfth task Hercules, I want you to take your uncle's dog Spot for walkies and bring him here, OK?"
5011096
Basically yes. Or how about this: there's a gang of kids in the neighborhood, including the new kid Herc and the sneaky but cowardly leader Eurystheus. Eurystheus says Herc can't be in the gang unless he goes up to the weird creepy house at the end of the road, where this spooky old guy who never goes out lives, and brings back the huge scary dog who lives in the yard there and barks loudly at everyone who comes near.
What Eurystheus doesn't realize is that the spooky old guy is Herc's uncle, so Herc has no problem walking up and banging on the door and asking if he can borrow Spot for a bit. And while the two of them aren't super close Hades isn't going to start a big fight with his brother, and just tells him not to beat him or do something stupid like that.
5010787 5010800
Update: later on the book tells of another unrelated myth which also features a man,
PelopsMyrtilos, who is killed in a convoluted situation involving a chariot race, and who also becomes a Taraxippos. "Dude gets killed during the games and his spirit haunts the place and scares the horses" is in fact a recurring motifUpdate to the update: Pelops was the killer, Myrtilos was the man whose ghost haunted the stadium.
5014570
Plenty of D&D undead have rather specific requirements for the death that creates them. "Killed by horses in a stadium" fits right in with, say, "digested by a monster and spat back out." Clearly these are actually ancient RPG sourcebooks, just like the Voynich Manuscript.
5014574
There is certainly a lot of continuity between the two forms of media, to be sure.