RIG IX OF THE DONKEY. 787 



Xerxes against the Greeks. The markets of Tyre, in the time of Eze- 

 kiel, were supplied with mules by the people of Togarma, or Armenia. 



According to Diodorus, Alexander, after the siege of Persepolis, 

 brought from Babylon, Mesopotamia, and Susiana, a multitude of pack 

 and draught mules and three thousand camels, with which to take away 

 the treasure from that city ; and, when the body of Alexander was 

 taken from Babylon to Egypt, " four tongues were fixed to the chariot, 

 and to each tongue a train of four yokes, each yoke composed of four 

 mules, the whole forming a team of sixty-four mules selected for their 

 vigor and spirit." Homer furnishes a number of evidences of the an- 

 tiquity of the existence of mules in Asia Minor and Greece, and in one 

 place declares them superior for certain purposes to oxen. 



Not only do we possess fewer ancient facts respecting asses and 

 mules than respecting horses, because their part in history has been 

 less important, but the historical documents on asses and mules per- 

 mit us to trace their past further back in the East than in the West, 

 and this is easily explained. In the first place, the habit of preserving 

 the memory of facts arose earlier in the East than in the West ; and, 

 in the second place, our facts relative to the Western ass are derived 

 chiefly from the Latin authors, whose references are less exact, because 

 they were apt to include in a lump under the designation of jumenta 

 all the kinds of pack and draught animals, horses, asses, mules, oxen, 

 and camels, that composed the baggage-trains of the armies whose 

 exploits they related. 



It is, nevertheless, true that the domestication of the European ass 

 must have dated from a very ancient time ; it must have followed 

 very shortly the importation into the Hispano-Atlantic center of the 

 use of dolmens and arms of polished stone. M. Boucher de Perthes 

 has found in the peats of the Somme, some fifteen or sixteen feet 

 below the level of the stream, an equoid skull, which M. Sanson has 

 recognized as that of an African or Nilotic ass. The animal to which 

 it belonged, or one of its ancestors, must have been taken there by 

 man. 



Only a few documents support the probability that mules existed in 

 Southwestern Europe in very ancient times. Varro says that the sen- 

 ator Axius bought a stallion-ass for four hundred thousand sestertise, 

 or $16,800. Columella's treatise on agriculture bears witness to the 

 importance of work with mules among the Romans. This accounts 

 for the high prices that were sometimes paid for particular stallions, 

 for the species was neither rare nor new in Italy. The earliest men- 

 tion of a mule in Rome, with a definite date, is that of the animals 

 that drew the chariot in which Tullia rode over the body of her father 

 Tullius after he was assassinated, b. c. 534. 



The histories of the Roman wars contain several incidents in which 

 mules appear to have been used in the army on a large scale, and of 

 stratagems in which they were made to play a prominent part : as 



