Hippoi Athanatoi (The Immortal Horses)

Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Deathless divine horses of tireless speed, fed on ambrosia, whose single stride swallows the horizon as they draw the chariots of the gods across sky, sea, and the tracks of the sun and dawn.
Role in Mythos: They are the living teams of the gods, carrying Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Helios, and the rest across the heavens and the deep, and are occasionally handed to favoured mortals as wedding gifts or war prizes.
Relation to Humans: Mortals almost never see them except as a storm on the horizon or a team gifted to a hero, and such gifts tend to end in grief, since a horse that cannot die must stand and watch its rider fall. When they cross into the mortal world they leave it unmarked, running over the open sea or the standing corn without wetting a hoof or bending a stalk.

The gates of the sky groan open on their own hinges, and a team of horses comes through them at a dead run. Their bridles are gold, their manes stream flat behind them, and where their hooves fall there is nothing but air and the blue-black distance between the earth and the stars. One stride carries them as far as a man on a headland can see across open water. Then another. Behind them the chariot is a small bright thing of gold and silver and iron, and the goddess driving it does not look back.

These are the Hippoi Athanatoi, the immortal horses, and this is the whole of what they exist to do. They pull. Zeus rides behind them, and Hera, and Poseidon over the sea, while the sun and the dawn and the moon each keep their own team to haul their light across the day and the night. The Greeks used a second name for them too, Hippoi Ambrotoi, the divine horses, and neither name bothers to describe them, because everyone already knew what a horse looked like. What mattered were the two words that came after: deathless, divine.

Their breeding runs back to the wind. Most of the immortal horses were reckoned the foals of the four Anemoi, the wind-gods, who in their own right took the shape of stallions and drew the chariot of Zeus across the weather. Others came from Poseidon, who was god of horses before he was god of much else, or from the Harpies, the storm-spirits, one of whose daughters was got with foal by the West Wind as she grazed in a meadow beside the stream of Okeanos. A horse fathered by a wind out of a storm is going to be fast. That was rather the point.

What they looked like was, on the surface, nothing unusual. They were horses, muscled and four-legged and plainly recognisable, and the old painters drew them as horses, harnessed in pairs or fours to the cars of the gods on black-figure jars. The strangeness lived in the detail and the scale. Homer gives Hera’s team gold bridles and has the young goddess Hebe fit the eight-spoked bronze wheels to their iron axle before they set out, as though the animals needed a machine built to the same pitch as themselves. Some of them wore wings. The team of Ares breathed fire from their nostrils as they ran. And their stride was simply wrong for the size of them, each leap eating the horizon, so that the whole distance a mortal eye could measure across the sea was the length of a single bound.

When Hera went to war at Troy she harnessed them with her own hands. Hebe ran the curved wheels onto the axle, the gold yoke was lashed to the silver pole, and the goddess laid the whip across their backs. The gates of heaven, kept by the Hours, groaned apart to let them through, and the team winged out into the gap between the ground and the starry sky without once slackening. Where she finally reined them in, down by the joining of two rivers below Troy, she loosed them from the car, poured a grey mist around them, and the river sent ambrosia growing up out of the ground for them to graze. They ate the food of the gods like grass. That is why they did not die.

Their gifts followed from that diet and that breeding. They were tireless, they were deathless, and they could run across surfaces that had no business bearing them. One of the get of the North Wind was said to gallop over the standing corn without snapping an ear, and over the crests of the sea without so much as wetting the hair above his hoof. Poseidon’s team crossed the deep and the water fell flat before them, dolphins bowing on either hand as they passed. Pegasus carried a man above the clouds to kill a monster. And they were not dumb beasts. Oppian, who watched real horses closely, wrote that of all mortal creatures the horse alone was given a subtle mind, that it knows its own driver and mourns him when he falls in war, and that once a horse broke the silence nature lays on animals and spoke with a human tongue.

That horse was Xanthos, one of the pair the gods gave to Peleus, the team that carried his son Achilles into the last year of the war. Achilles, half out of his mind with grief over the dead Patroklos, turned on his own horses and accused them of abandoning his friend on the field. Hera put a voice in the throat of Xanthos. The horse dropped his head until his mane brushed the ground and told his master the plain truth: they were not to blame, a god had killed Patroklos, and they would carry Achilles the same way soon enough, to his own death, and nothing could be done about it. Then the Furies struck the horse dumb, and he never spoke again.

There is the limit folded inside the gift. The immortal horses have almost no will of their own; they come when the god drives and stand when the god steps down, fed and mist-wrapped and stabled on Olympos between errands. Handed to a mortal, that same deathlessness curdles into something sadder. A horse that cannot die is a strange thing to give a man who can. Xanthos and his brother Balios wept as they stood in their harness over the body of Patroklos, immortal tears running from immortal eyes, unable to follow him down and unable to have saved him, while the war went on around them and they grieved.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Hippoi Athanatoi in Greek mythology?

The Hippoi Athanatoi are the immortal horses of the Greek gods, deathless divine steeds that draw the chariots of the gods across the sky and sea. Their name means “immortal horses,” and they also went by the name Hippoi Ambrotoi, the “divine horses.” They pull the cars of Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, and the gods of the sun, dawn, and moon.

Where did the immortal horses come from?

Most of the Hippoi Athanatoi were the offspring of the four Anemoi, the Greek wind-gods, who themselves took the form of stallions to draw the chariot of Zeus. Others were sired by Poseidon, the god of horses, or descended from the storm-spirits called the Harpies. This descent from wind and storm was used to explain their supernatural speed.

What powers did the immortal horses have?

The Hippoi Athanatoi were tireless and deathless because they fed on the ambrosia of the gods, and a single one of their strides could cover the entire distance a person can see across the sea. They could run over the standing corn without breaking it and across the surface of the ocean without wetting a hoof. Some had wings, and the horses of the war-god Ares breathed fire.

Which immortal horse could speak?

Xanthos, one of the two immortal horses of Achilles, was given a human voice by the goddess Hera and used it to warn Achilles that he was fated to die soon in the war. After delivering this prophecy, Xanthos was struck silent by the Furies and never spoke again. He and his brother Balios were the foals of the West Wind and were first given by the gods to Achilles’ father, Peleus.

Why were the immortal horses a difficult gift for mortals?

Because they could not die, the immortal horses outlived the mortal heroes who received them and were left to grieve their fallen riders. When Patroklos was killed at Troy, the immortal horses Xanthos and Balios stood in their harness and wept, unable to save him or to follow him in death. A deathless horse given to a mortal became a companion doomed to mourn.