Vice sits next to virtue in horses too

Taming a horse. Unmixed virtue is rare among men, and so also among horses. Next to the good things sits a grudging vice, so that the fine may not appear clean. One man is eloquent but not grave; another generals but is not temperate; someone is brave, but being a braggart he did not keep beauty unstained for himself; and another in another thing both has the advantage and misses. The fine and the bad in horses are like that: swift but lustful, hunters but hard-mouthed, walkers but violent. Some will not take riders; others shake them off. Some rub against walls or plants. Some are mischief-makers by nature, others have been made so by their owners. They bite and kick and stand off and rear, either hating or despising their masters. I can tell of many, each destroyed in a different disaster and form of evils under horses.

The arts of colt-tamers, as far as they can, either check or correct the vices: scant food for the violent, castration for the lovers, muzzles for the biters, wolf-bits for the hard-mouthed, blows for the disobedient. But what would a man do against the one that has stood off, and has chosen to obey in no way, toward nothing, either of commands or of lessons? Just as the wildest beasts, taken full-grown, are not tamed, but even if for a little they seem to have become handy they still do not forget the former savagery, so also this creature is hard to turn once vice has grown old in it.

Since then blow and threat and art and feeding are weak toward such things, let a vice of nature be corrected by an art of nature. Let a writing also tame him — a writing he will not fear, will not suspect, and wearing which he will be broken. In the hollow of the hoof of the front left foot, with the left hand, engrave with a bronze graver, on a sixteenth-day moon, a threat of a Roman command. The writing has a necessity of obedience. It lies in the pentagon whose numeral is blank in the lock, in which have been written the signs of the high diatonic: phi and digamma.