The Essays, vol 8 | Page 6

flaming truncheons, would produce a common inconvenience to the whole crowd:
"Magnum stridens contorta Phalarica venit, Fulminis acta modo."
["The Phalarica, launched like lightning, flies through the air with a loud rushing sound."--AEneid, ix. 705.]
They had, moreover, other devices which custom made them perfect in (which seem incredible to us who have not seen them), by which they supplied the effects of our powder and shot. They darted their spears with so great force, as ofttimes to transfix two targets and two armed men at once, and pin them together. Neither was the effect of their slings less certain of execution or of shorter carriage:
["Culling round stones from the beach for their slings; and with these practising over the waves, so as from a great distance to throw within a very small circuit, they became able not only to wound an enemy in the head, but hit any other part at pleasure." --Livy, xxxviii. 29.]
Their pieces of battery had not only the execution but the thunder of our cannon also:
"Ad ictus moenium cum terribili sonitu editos, pavor et trepidatio cepit."
["At the battery of the walls, performed with a terrible noise, the defenders began to fear and tremble."--Idem, ibid., 5.]
The Gauls, our kinsmen in Asia, abominated these treacherous missile arms, it being their use to fight, with greater bravery, hand to hand:
["They are not so much concerned about large gashes-the bigger and deeper the wound, the more glorious do they esteem the combat but when they find themselves tormented by some arrow-head or bullet lodged within, but presenting little outward show of wound, transported with shame and anger to perish by so imperceptible a destroyer, they fall to the ground."---Livy, xxxviii. 21.]
A pretty description of something very like an arquebuse-shot. The ten thousand Greeks in their long and famous retreat met with a nation who very much galled them with great and strong bows, carrying arrows so long that, taking them up, one might return them back like a dart, and with them pierce a buckler and an armed man through and through. The engines, that Dionysius invented at Syracuse to shoot vast massy darts and stones of a prodigious greatness with so great impetuosity and at so great a distance, came very near to our modern inventions.
But in this discourse of horses and horsemanship, we are not to forget the pleasant posture of one Maistre Pierre Pol, a doctor of divinity, upon his mule, whom Monstrelet reports always to have ridden sideways through the streets of Paris like a woman. He says also, elsewhere, that the Gascons had terrible horses, that would wheel in their full speed, which the French, Picards, Flemings, and Brabanters looked upon as a miracle, "having never seen the like before," which are his very words.
Caesar, speaking of the Suabians: "in the charges they make on horseback," says he, "they often throw themselves off to fight on foot, having taught their horses not to stir in the meantime from the place, to which they presently run again upon occasion; and according to their custom, nothing is so unmanly and so base as to use saddles or pads, and they despise such as make use of those conveniences: insomuch that, being but a very few in number, they fear not to attack a great many." That which I have formerly wondered at, to see a horse made to perform all his airs with a switch only and the reins upon his neck, was common with the Massilians, who rid their horses without saddle or bridle:
"Et gens, quae nudo residens Massylia dorso, Ora levi flectit, fraenorum nescia, virga."
["The Massylians, mounted on the bare backs of their horses, bridleless, guide them by a mere switch."--Lucan, iv. 682.]
"Et Numidae infraeni cingunt."
["The Numidians guiding their horses without bridles." --AEneid, iv. 41.]
"Equi sine fraenis, deformis ipse cursus, rigida cervice et extento capite currentium."
["The career of a horse without a bridle is ungraceful; the neck extended stiff, and the nose thrust out."--Livy, xxxv. II.]
King Alfonso,--[Alfonso XI., king of Leon and Castile, died 1350.]-- he who first instituted the Order of the Band or Scarf in Spain, amongst other rules of the order, gave them this, that they should never ride mule or mulet, upon penalty of a mark of silver; this I had lately out of Guevara's Letters. Whoever gave these the title of Golden Epistles had another kind of opinion of them than I have. The Courtier says, that till his time it was a disgrace to a gentleman to ride on one of these creatures: but the Abyssinians, on the contrary, the nearer they are to the person of Prester John, love to be mounted upon large mules, for the greatest dignity and grandeur.
Xenophon tells us, that the Assyrians were fain to keep their horses fettered in the stable, they were so fierce