Between their squadrons
were youths wearing small helmets and swinging an ashen javelin in each
hand. The long files of the heavy infantry marched behind. All these
traders had piled as many weapons upon their bodies as possible. Some
might be seen carrying an axe, a lance, a club, and two swords all at
once; others bristled with darts like porcupines, and their arms stood
out from their cuirasses in sheets of horn or iron plates. At last the
scaffoldings of the lofty engines appeared: carrobalistas, onagers,
catapults and scorpions, rocking on chariots drawn by mules and
quadrigas of oxen; and in proportion as the army drew out, the captains
ran panting right and left to deliver commands, close up the files, and
preserve the intervals. Such of the Ancients as held commands had come
in purple cassocks, the magnificent fringes of which tangled in the
white straps of their cothurni. Their faces, which were smeared all over
with vermilion, shone beneath enormous helmets surmounted with images
of the gods; and, as they had shields with ivory borders covered with
precious stones, they might have been taken for suns passing over walls
of brass.
But the Carthaginians manoeuvred so clumsily that the soldiers in
derision urged them to sit down. They called out that they were just
going to empty their big stomachs, to dust the gilding of their skin,
and to give them iron to drink.
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