xpensive care necessary to bring
one alive to Rome.

Besides these enormous animals he practiced archery on the huge long-
horned bulls from the forests of Dacia and Germany; on the bisons from the
same regions, beasts with heavy shoulders, low rumps and small horns,
parallel to each other, curving downwards over the brows; on the big stags
from these far-off forests, or any sort of stags! And on two varieties of
African antelope not much inferior in size to stags or bulls. He very
seldom needed a third arrow to put an end to any beast of these kinds, not
often a second arrow, and, actually, killed hundreds, even thousands,
neatly and infallibly with his first shot. All these animals he shot from
the _podium_, often leaning on the coping, his right knee on it, generally
standing, his feet wide apart, the toes of his right foot against the
coping wall; for, as with sword or spear or club, he also shot left-
handed.

Prom the arena itself, standing on the sand on which they scampered about,
he shot multitudes of smaller animals: wild ponies, wild asses, striped
African zebras, gazelles, and at least a dozen varieties of small African
antelopes, for which there are no special names in Latin or even in Greek.
The antelopes and gazelles, although they ran quicker than hares, he never
missed and seldom did he fail to kill with one arrow whatever animal he
aimed at. He never, to my knowledge, missed even the incredibly speedy
wild asses.

Nor did he ever miss an ostrich, though he shot both from the _podium_ and
the sand these birds, which are swifter than even the wild asses. He shot
at them with arrows made specially after a pattern of his own, with
crescent-shaped heads set on the shaft with the two horns of the crescent
pointing forward, the inner curve sharpened to a razor edge. Shooting at
an ostrich racing at top speed he never failed to decapitate it with one
shot, invariably severing its neck about a hands-breadth below its head.

He also killed with javelins or arrows wolves, hyenas, bears, lynxes,
leopards, panthers, tigers and lions. But when killing such dangerous and
ferocious animals he took his stand on a platform, the floor of which was
about three yards square and elevated about that distance above the sand,
constructed well out in the arena so that he could shoot down in any
direction on beasts rushing towards or past the platform or driven past it
or towards it. He slaughtered incredible multitudes of th