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