Produced by David Widger
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazilitt
1877
XLVIII. Of war-horses, or destriers.
XLIX. Of ancient customs.
L. Of Democritus and Heraclitus.
LI. Of the vanity of words.
LII. Of the parsimony of the Ancients.
LIII. Of a saying of Caesar.
LIV. Of vain subtleties.
LV. Of smells.
LVI. Of prayers.
LVII. Of age.
I here have become a grammarian, I who never learned any language but byrote, and who do not yet know adjective, conjunction, or ablative. Ithink I have read that the Romans had a sort of horses by them called'funales' or 'dextrarios', which were either led horses, or horses laidon at several stages to be taken fresh upon occasion, and thence it isthat we call our horses of service 'destriers'; and our romances commonlyuse the phrase of 'adestrer' for 'accompagner', to accompany. They alsocalled those that were trained in such sort, that running full speed,side by side, without bridle or saddle, the Roman gentlemen, armed at allpieces, would shift and throw themselves from one to the other,'desultorios equos'. The Numidian men-at-arms had always a led horse inone hand, besides that they rode upon, to change in the heat of battle:
"Quibus, desultorum in modum, binos trahentibus equos, inter acerrimam saepe pugnam, in recentem equum, ex fesso, armatis transultare mos erat: tanta velocitas ipsis, tamque docile equorum genus."
["To whom it was a custom, leading along two horses, often in the hottest fight, to leap armed from a tired horse to a fresh one; so active were the men, and the horses so docile."—Livy, xxiii. 29.]
There are many horses trained to help their riders so as to run upon anyone, that appears with a drawn sword, to fall both with mouth and heelsupon any that front or oppose them: but it often happens that they domore harm to their friends than to their enemies; and, moreover, youcannot loose them from their hold, to reduce them again into order, whenthey are once engaged and grappled, by which means you remain at themercy of their quarrel. It happened very ill to Artybius, general of thePersian army, fighting, man to man, with Onesilus, king of Salamis, to bemounted upon a horse trained after this manner, it being the occasion ofhis death, the squire of Onesilus cleaving the horse down with a scythebetwixt the shoulders as it was reared up upon his master. And what theItalians report, that in the battle of Fornova, the horse of CharlesVIII., with kicks and plunges, disengaged his master from the enemy thatpressed upon him, without which he had been slain, sounds like a verygreat chance, if it be true.
[In the narrative which Philip de Commines has given of this battle, in which he himself was present (lib. viii. ch. 6), he tells us of wonderful performances by the horse on which the king was mounted. The name of the horse was Savoy, and it was the most beautiful horse he had ever seen. During the battle the king was personally attacked, when he had nobody near him but a valet de chambre, a little fellow, and not well armed. "The king," says Commines, "had the best horse under him in the world, and theref