ROMAN CAVALRY SERVICE. 39 



as it ordinarily was, by the state. Subsequently, every person 

 who came into the possession of a fortune of 400,000 asses,^ 

 became, ecc ipso facto, an eques, and was liable to do cavalry 

 duty. A sufficiently absurd plan, one would gay, for the or- 

 ganization of an effective body of troopers ; who, if any troops 

 in the world, require minute drilling, constant exercise, and the 

 closest habitude as well to horsemanship, as to the use of arms. 



The truth is, that the Romans were in no respect an eques- 

 trian people, even while their armies consisted mainly of agri- 

 culturists and tillers of the ground. We find, comparatively, 

 few notices of the horse among their classic writers, and sucli 

 as we do find principally imitated from the early Greek Poets, 

 who wrote of a state of warfare, Asiatic rather than European. 

 From such brief and scattered mentions of the horse, however, 

 as we have, it is to be inferred that the native breed of this 

 animal was of no excellence ; and that it was usual to seek the 

 superior breeds of Calabria and Lucania, where the population, 

 being more or less of Greek origin or connected with the Greeks, 

 had in some degree the equestrian tastes, and perhaps the same 

 strain of blood with their ancestry. 



In no instance had a Eoman consular army, which consisted 

 of two legions, of four thousand two hundred infantry each, 

 above six hundred horse ; a proportion ludicrously inefficient, 

 being exactly as one mounted man to fourteen infantry soldiers ; 

 whereas the true ratio is one cavalry soldier to five footmen — 

 on which basis the famous divisions of JN^apoleon were con- 

 stituted. 



This fact speaks volumes for the poverty of the Romans in 

 horses, and their inaptitude for the service ; and still more does 

 it testify to the same thing, that, when they commanded the 

 alliance of the Latin states, the cavalry of the two contingent 

 Latin legions was double that of the Roman quota. This, how- 

 ever, only raised the cavalry attached to a Roman consular 

 army, in the time of the second Punic war, when the state was 

 making every exertion to resist its most formidable enemy, who 

 commanded the services of the finest horse then existing in the 

 known world, to eighteen hundred horse attached to sixteen 



* The Roman as was a brass coin of the value of a fraction more than a cent. 



