POMPEII. 8,3 



ino- that the Roman horses' or mules' shoes were fastened 

 on without nails driven through the horny parts of the 

 hoof as at present. A contrary conclusion may be in- 

 ferred from several passages in the poets ; and the figure 

 of a horse in the Pompeii battle-mosaic leaves little doubt 

 on the question.' ' 



As this writer, however, does not quote the passages 

 from the poets which lead to the inference that shoes 

 were applied by means of nails, and as the authenticity of 

 the details in the Pompeii battle-mosaic, which represents 

 the defeat of Darius by Alexander, rests entirely on the 

 authority of a coloured engraving, the horse-shoe supposed 

 to be seen on the foot of a Satrap's charger is, we can 

 scarcely doubt, of the same age as the copyist — a very 

 modern affair, and as likely to prove the antiquity of the 

 present method of shoeing as the presence of shoes with 

 immense calkins on the feet of St Paul's horse in the 

 painting by Lebrun, now in the Louvre ; or the virtuoso 

 in Dr Johnson's ' Rambler,' who possessed ' a horse-shoe 

 broken on the Flaminian Way,' It must not be forgotten 

 that another artist, in a print of Aristotle, carefully put a 

 modern pen into the fingers of the illustrious Greek 

 writer. When the engraving of the Pompeii mosaic was 

 drawn and published, shoeing had been long known in 

 Italy, Some years ago, while workmen were excavating 

 on the site of that buried town, the ruins of an inn were 

 reached, and in it were found the bodies of cars, with iron 

 rings for fastening horses to the wall ; bones of horses in 

 the stables were also discovered, but no s/ioes.^ 



' Kitto's Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature. 



■" Having placed myself in communication vvilh Her Majesty's Con- 



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