Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Rome (Yesterday's Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page A

handed on year after year, and when the legion has to fill up the ranks to war strength, the whole framework is there ready. Moreover, he has done away with all the variety of weapons that used to be seen in the days when each citizen soldier brought his own equipment. Now the State provides the soldier's kit and weapons, and all the men of each particular unit of the service are equipped alike.
    Here, then, is Marius's force of 32,000 men drawn up in battle array, ready to be inspected by the famous Consul himself, to whose staff we shall take the liberty of joining ourselves. As we ride up to the iron ranks we see that the habit of having regimental mascots is at least as old as the time of Marius, and that the goats and bears and monkeys that our soldiers love to take with their regiments could be matched in the Roman army. High over the legions two great vultures circle in the air, and many a legionary gives an upward glance of recognition and satisfaction, when his centurion is not looking, to the big birds wheeling and screaming overhead. For the soldiers caught these two last year, just before they fought and beat the Teutones; and when they had made friends with them by feeding them well, they put brass collars round their necks and let them go. Ever since, the great birds have followed the legions, and the men have grown to look upon them as the luck of the army and the sign of victory.
    The light-armed troops and the cavalry are stationed on either wing, and, as we ride along, we pass them first, though we need not pay so much attention to them. Instead of the little troop of inefficient native Roman cavalry that used to go with each legion, and be invariably beaten off the field in each battle, we have now a very different force. Wide on the wing are drawn up the light Numidian Horse, fierce sun-burnt lancers and bowmen from North Africa, on light, wiry Moorish horses—the most dangerous light cavalry in the world, as the Romans have often found to their cost. Next to them come the heavy Ligurian Horse, lancers and swordsmen, with helmets, breast and back plates, and shields; heavy men and heavy horses to charge other cavalry, or break up shaken infantry. Between them and the infantry of the line are the ranks of Balearic slingers, with their leathern slings, whose bullet, either of lead or of clay mixed with blood and goat's hair, can crush in helmet or corselet and shatter the bone behind. Beside them are the famous Cretan bowmen, who have a perpetual feud with the other islanders over the question whether the sling or the bow is the more efficient weapon. To-morrow they will have a good chance of settling it against the ranks of the Cimbri.
    Now we have passed the wing of light armed troops, and here, in the centre, are the grim iron ranks that have so often trampled to victory through rivers of blood and over piles of dead. You may get rather a shock as you look at them at first. You expected—did you not?—to see a wall of iron, shield to shield right along the line. Here is something very different. The close-ranked, shoulder-to-shoulder way of fighting was never the Roman way, and is now less so than ever before. It was the Macedonian, with his long twenty-one-foot sarissa, or pike, who stood jammed tight against his next man, with pike after pike from the files behind sticking out in front of him, till his phalanx looked like a great steel-clad porcupine. The Roman fighter always liked open order, with a fair space round about him to swing his arm for the cast of the pilum, or javelin, with which he began the fight, and the cut and thrust of the deadly thirty-inch sword, short but heavy, with which he hewed his way to victory.
    Each legion is now composed of 6,000 men, of whom 3,600 are heavy infantry, instead of the various smaller numbers that were once in use. The legion is divided into ten cohorts, which take the place of our battalions, and each cohort is subdivided into three maniples, corresponding