"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 Pi