Talk:Bucephalus

Comments

Info in box currently says "Height Black with a white star" - obviously that should be "Markings" instead of "Height," but I don't know how to edit the box in the lead of the article. Also note that this coloring (as described in the beginning of "The taming of Bucephalus" section and accompanying image "Alexander taming Bucephalus") does not match the depiction "portrayed in the Alexander Mosaic" in the "Alexander and Bucephalus" section. --Apegrrl (talk) 13:04, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

Any guide to pronunciation? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.220.127.37 (talk) 02:42, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Good article.

 -Nice,August 4,2005 at 3:55 PM.

Interesting & Informative.

A horse devouring flesh? What kind of bullshit is that? -Alex, 74.133.188.197 08:57, 29 June 2006 (UTC).

Not bullshit at all. See this. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.200.79.243 (talk) 00:26, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

In "The Greek Riding Horse" by M.H Morgan (a companion to his translation of Xenophon's "The Art of Horsemanship"), the author refers to Bucephalus as being "of the best Thessalian breed, black with a white star and very large". He references Plutarch's, "Life of Alexander" for this.

Buciphalas: It is reported that the word Buciphala is derived from the Greek words ‘Bous’ which means ox and Kephale’ which means ‘head’.This interpretation does not seem to be satisfactory as the head of the great horse does not resemble the head of an ox in any of its pictures. But the derivation of this word from Sanskrit appears to be more appropriate. The word is closer to the two Sanskrit words – Puchchi and Phala. Puchichi which is also called Bu:chi means ‘one which has a tail’- a bird. Busi also appears to be closer to the Sanskrit word ‘ Pakshi’ , one which has wings-a bird. The word Phala means ‘forehead ‘ in Sanskrit. It looks as though the forehead of the horse was covered with the mask of a bird such as an an eagle, so that when the horse jumped upon his foes it looked like an eagle pouncing on its prey. Actually in his first encounter with the horse Alexander noticed that the horse was getting uncontrollable because of shadows and the surrounding crowd. Perhaps he later used to cover the forehead of the horse with a leather bag which looked like the head of an eagle, thereby preventing it from seeing in any direction except straight ahead and also causing confusion among the enemy horses. Perhaps with a bird- like head, upright mane and with a tail raised upwards it must have caused panic among the other horses.

“Alexander knew that horses as prey animal often feared shadows. So he lead him by the reins in all directions letting the horse see the movement of the sun and shadows , making it feel that there was nothing to fear in this strange field surrounded by strangers."I The word puchi in Tamil language and bUchi in Telugu language means an insect which can fly. There is an ancient nursery song in Telugu in which a mother tries to make her baby stop crying, by calling out for the ‘buchi-man’ ( perhaps a fellow who used to jump over walls and roof tops by attaching wings and a long tail to his body and kidnap little children. The song goes like this-“O, Buchi man come here, weave a basket and take this child away in your basket”. In Hindi language’ Panchi’ means a bird. According to Wikipedia Buciphala Changula is a species of a sea- duck which is also called as the Golden eye.The word Puchi occurs in the name of the country Compuchia also.The Sanskrit connection is more plausible because Aristotle the learned teacher of Alexander was greatly influenced by Sanskrit Philosophy and Sanskrit literature and Alexander himself was the son of a Naga woman whose racial origins are in the Eastern Himalayas. Ref.I. WWW.Pathos.org-The legend of BuciPhalus banda krishna satyanarayana — Preceding unsigned comment added by Banda.krishna (talk • contribs) 07:02, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

Alexander's best friend ( = Hephaestion?)

"The only other person to ride Bucephalus after Alexander tamed him was his best friend." -- I.e., Hephaestion? -- 201.50.251.197 15:14, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

It is false, only Alexander rode Bucephalus. It didn't let any other man ride him, so I've erased that sentence. --Bucephala 20:28, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Alternate description

I've seen depictions of Bucephalus with a horn (like a unicorn) and/or a tail like a peacock. There is a legend that Bucephalus fought his cousins, the wild unicorns, along with Alexander. ...At least that's what I've read, and I read some of this in The Enchanted World: Magical Beasts by TIme Life Books. Is there any truth to these legends? Should they be included? 24.14.198.8 18:04, 25 June 2007 (UTC) Chris G.

References in literature

Bucephalus is referenced in Herman Melville's Billy Budd. There is a Cultural References section, but is this worthy of mention? I understand that if every reference is included, that section will get long. 97.125.50.92 (talk) 07:11, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

True enough; but if you characterize the use Melville makes of his reference to Bucephalus, then it won't be trivial. Does it add to the reader's understanding of Bucephalus? --Wetman (talk) 14:30, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

reference to "named after"

What does it mean that the town of Phalia and or the region of Mandi Bahauddin are named after the horse Bucephalus? 76.87.81.33 (talk) 01:45, 2 September 2011 (UTC)

It means that the modern form of the name "Phalia" is believed by some to originate from "Bucephalus". Whether or not this is really the case would require demonstration of intermediate forms over history. {The poster formerly knopn as 87.81.230.195} 90.200.79.243 (talk) 00:32, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

File:BattleofIssus333BC-mosaic-detail1.jpg Nominated for Deletion

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Can we kill the trivia section?

The "in popular culture" and related sections are getting ridiculously long. Can we just remove them per WP:TRIVIA? Montanabw^(talk) 23:24, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Bucephalus/CommentsTalk:Bucephalus/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

This is a great article!! Bucephalas is one of my favorite horses of history. There is a fantastic book called "I Am The Great Horse" written by Katherine Roberts, that is all about Bucephalas, Alexander the Great, and that time period. I highly suggest reading that book, because it is packed with great information, easy to read, and exciting!

Last edited at 02:32, 16 February 2007 (UTC). Substituted at 10:28, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Why is "Bucephalus" spelled in Cyrillic letters at the beginning?

Shouldn't the name be in Greek? Is this some sort of FYROM prank? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 73.145.132.29 (talk) 07:46, 31 December 2018 (UTC)

Unsourced 2400 year inflation calculation?

So I just took out this parenthetical:

(approximately $182,000 in 2017 dollars)

...which followed "13 talents" in the description of the original sale of the horse. I considered just adding "dubious" or whatever, but after reading the guidelines I felt it really just needed to go. Here are my reasons:

1. The link to the page for "talents" describes a multitude of widely-varying weights (seriously everything from 8.5g to 37kg), and doesn't describe values for any of them. The text doesn't say "talents of gold" or "talents of silver" so...

2. The very concept of trying to adjust inflation from the 4th century BC to the 21st century CE is ridiculous. What, we have an idea of the price in talents of some basket of goods and then normalized that to 2017 dollars? How much did a Toyota Camry cost back then anyway?

3. Even if we had a rough idea of that, the precision is just absurd. We know that it's 182k instead of 178k? We know that's in 2017 dollars and not 2008 dollars? Seriously...

4. There is absolutely no citation here, nor any explanation of how this was calculated. My best guess is somebody assumed a metal, looked up a spot price and did some math. Which is hilariously stupid.

5. In summation, we have basically no concept whatsoever of how much value "13 talents" represented in this story. And it's debatable whether that's even translatable to today's money. How many iPhones was that horse worth? Really?

Maybe if somebody wanted to produce a source of "talents" being used in other transactions and say something like "for comparison this would have bought a small farm at the time" or such that would be fine. But let's not make silly faux-precise inflation calculations across millennia based on unknown units with no citations.

Namesakes of Bucephalus

Father Brown of the public TV series of the same name, rode a bicycle named Bucephalus. 96.82.150.137 (talk) 19:56, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

The Alexander Romance

I've made some changes to the information about the Alexander Romance added to the article in this recent edit. There were two problems with the new material:

(1) Confusion of manuscripts A and L. One of the passages added was this: In the manuscript A, Bucephalus is a man-eating horse (it does not state his origin) which Philip has ordered to be caged. Upon hearing Alexander's voice the horse immediately becomes calm and acknowledges Alexander as his master. Alexander then leaps onto Bucephalus and rides him through the middle of Pella.. The text quoted above attributes this version of the story to manuscript A, but the footnote at the end of the quoted passage attributes it to manuscript L. These two manuscripts differ considerably in form and content. Manuscript A (= Paris Bibl. Nat. gr. 1711) is a representative of the α recension (the earliest surviving form of the romance); manuscript L (= Leiden Vulc. 33) is a representative of the β recension. Since no published source was cited in this paragraph, I'm not sure where the information about the contents of the two manuscripts was drawn from, but some of it is certainly inaccurate. It is incorrect, for example, to write that manuscript A does not mention the origin of Bucephalus; according to A, he was a gift from the rulers of Cappadocia (οἱ τῆς Καππαδοκίας ἄρχοντες, book 1, chap. 13). This detail is omitted from L and the other manuscripts of the β recension, but preserved in the Latin translation known as the Historia de preliis and its derivatives, which is why it shows up in Hebrew version discussed in the next paragraph. In general, what was written here was true of L but not always of A, so I've removed the mention of A from the text and rewritten the paragraph to summarize the story in slightly greater detail, using manuscript L and the β recension as a guide and expanding the footnote to include published sources (Anderson 1930, which is already cited in the article, plus two modern English translations, both of which are based on L). Note that the chapter numbers in the Greek version of the romance are the same for all recensions; they come from Müller's 1846 edition and are retained for convenience in modern texts, which explains why the length of some chapters varies from edition to edition, as parts of the narrative were expanded or contracted in different versions of the romance.

(2) The Hebrew translation. A second paragraph added in the same edit begins like this: In another manuscript Bucephalus is sent to Philip as a colt from a prince in Cappadocia. Here too he is man-eating, but also described as large, handsome, and having a head as round as a circle, which appeared as though gems protruded from his forehead and from the back of his head. "In another manuscript" is an inadequate way of describing the work cited here. This is not just another manuscript of the Greek Alexander Romance; it is an English translation of a 14th-century Hebrew translation of (probably) an Arabic translation of a Latin work usually referred to as the Historia de preliis, which is itself an adapation of an earlier Latin translation of the Greek romance made by a Neapolitan named Leo in the 10th century. The Hebrew translation is a bit of a mess, and the description of the horse reproduced here ("a head as round as a circle, which appeared as though gems protruded from his forehead and from the back of his head") is nonsense, caused by the translator's misunderstanding of the sentence in the Latin text that explains the origin of the name Bucephalus (referring either to a brand in the shape of an ox-head on the horse's shoulder or small horns projecting from his forehead). I've removed the entire paragraph, because I can't see a good reason for the article to perpetuate this particular error, which is confined to the Hebrew version and forms no part of the main stream of medieval Alexander literature. If someone would like to include information from the Latin branch of the tradition, I have no objection, but I'd suggest citing the Historia de preliis itself (the Latin text of version J3 is available here, and there is also a convenient English translation of version J1 by R. T. Pritchard), rather than using this garbled Hebrew derivative. I'm not sure, however, that it adds anything important to the story as told in the β recension of the Greek version, which is already summarized in the preceding paragraph (except perhaps for the detail of Cappadocian origin, and that, as I mentioned above, is already present in Greek manuscript A.)

Courtesy ping to Endlesspumpkin, who seems to have been responsible for these additions. If you disagree, please let me know; I'm happy to discuss. To make up for the removal of your round-headed Bucephalus, I have added an image of a lion-headed Bucephalus, which is equally wacky, but at least intentional, rather than an artifact of translation. This is from Johannes Hartlieb's Histori von dem Grossen Alexander, a 15th-century German version of the Historia de preliis with the addition of some original material. In Hartlieb's account Bucephalus has the forelegs of a deer and the head of a lion (the relevant passage is quoted in Anderson 1930, p. 8, and in Cary's The Medieval Alexander, p. 247), and that is how he is depicted in the accompanying woodcut. I offer it as partial compensation for all the nitpicking above, and for your amusement, because your guide to Tzetzes' commentary on Lykophron made me laugh. Cheers, Choliamb (talk) 17:21, 4 July 2026 (UTC)

This is certainly not nit-picking on your part.

It's long enough ago that I can't clearly remember what my train of thought was. The translation I was using was of L, but supplemented with A. I can only guess that what happened with the A/L mix up is that I lost track of which was which.

I agree that it was an inaccurate way to describe it; trying to explain the genealogy of the sources seemed like it would be too much detail for this page, so I left it at that, as unsatisfying as I found it. I can't remember what led me to the Hebrew translation (the actual page I started editing was the section on the mares of Diomedes on the 12 labours of Heracles page – the implication in some sources that Bucephalas was a descendant of those mares is how I ended up here), but the translation of it I was using didn't contain a commentary, and (as is very obvious) I am not an expert on the Alexander Romance. Removing it is indeed the best solution. Thanks for fixing it all.

I really should finish that guide. Glad in amused you. :) Endlesspumpkin (talk) 11:01, 5 July 2026 (UTC)