216 APPENDIX. 



Gratii Cyncg. Petronios (sic fama) canes, volucresque Sicambros, 



vs. 201. 



El pictani macula Vertraham delige falsa. 



L. VI r. 



Janus Vlitius considers the Sicambrian to be the Gallo-Belgic 

 hound of more modern days, and identical with the Ovidian canis 

 Gallicus : but the latter is more probably the Vertraha of Gratius, 

 the oveprpayos of the younger Xenoplion. The Sicambrian people, 

 Strabo strictly speaking, were Germans, and not Belgians; as they dwelt 

 on the eastern, or Germanic side of the Rhine. 



On first comparing the different types of the Oppianic Canes Ve- 

 natici with those of the Latin Cynegetica, I was misled by the 

 authority of annotators to an admission that the type, so particularly 

 described by the Greek poet in his first book, firiKebavov Kparepdv 

 Sifias, K. T. X. vs. 401. ad vs. 412. was of the sagacious hound, the 

 Petronian or such-like. But this interpretation, in addition to the 

 want of resemblance of the picture to the supposed original, implies, 

 in a notorious copyist of his predecessors' labours and a keen ob- 

 server of natural history, the entire omission of the swiftest of the 

 canine tribe, the canis Gallicus or Vertragus ; which, if known by 

 fame in the age of Gratius, alluded to by him in his Cynegeticon, 

 accurately portrayed by Ovid as to his style of running, and subse- 

 quently, and more minutely, by the younger Xenophon, could not, 

 under any balance of probabilities, have been lost to the sporting 

 world, between the time of Arrian and that at which Nemesian 

 flourished : — by the latter of whom the greyhound is most beautifully 

 depicted, and the mode of initiating greyhound puppies in the hare- 

 course detailed with the hand of a master. I am, therefore, on more 

 mature reflection, inclined to consider the passage referred to de- 

 scriptive of the greyhound type, the third class of ancient hounds, 

 the family of pedibiis celeres.^ That Rittershusius makes no allusion 



1. If the appropriation of the Oppianic portrait to the Vertragus of Arrian alone 

 be deemed too scrupulously exclusive, — inasmuch as it leaves the Spartan hound of 

 Xenophon undescribed by the Greek poet, — I will allow that preference of the Celtic 

 type to all others may have influenced my decision ; and am willing, with the 

 reader's approval, to admit tlie hound of Lacedaenion into a participation of the honour 

 bestowed on the Vertragus. 



