The Essays, vol 8 | Page 6

both with fire and by sling was much
more terrible: they called a certain kind of javelin, armed at the point
with an iron three feet long, that it might pierce through and through an
armed man, Phalarica, which they sometimes in the field darted by
hand, sometimes from several sorts of engines for the defence of
beleaguered places; the shaft being rolled round with flax, wax, rosin,
oil, and other combustible matter, took fire in its flight, and lighting
upon the body of a man or his target, took away all the use of arms and
limbs. And yet, coming to close fight, I should think they would also
damage the assailant, and that the camp being as it were planted with
these 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