374 HUNTING. 



Oppian." Several of the most splendid similes of 

 Homer are taken from hounds in chase ; and it is 

 in the manly character of Achilles that we chiefly 

 recognise him as his hero. 



The Romans at one time discouraged hunting 

 amongst the upper orders of society, from the fear 

 of its becoming a passion which might divert them 

 from their essential duties. But here they com- 

 mitted an error ; for, aware of its beneficial effects 

 in forming their people for war, they substituted 

 public exhibitions of animals destroying each other 

 in an amphitheatre, which could only have harden- 

 ed the heart, without advantage to either body or 

 mind. Yet we find many of their emperors en- 

 couraging hunting, and many of their best writers 

 extolling it. The learned and polished Hadrian was 

 so passionately addicted to hunting, and also to 

 horses and dogs, that he erected monuments to the 

 memory of the latter, and built a city on the spot 

 on which he had killed a w41d boar, after a desperate 

 encounter with him, and which he called by a word 

 which, being interpreted, signifies " Hadrian's 

 chase."*"* Amono^st the celebrated writers of the 

 Augustan age, we may mention two, who, not 

 being themselves sportsmen, could only have made 

 sporting a subject for their pens, from a sense of 

 the benefits arising from it. Virgil makes his 

 young Ascanius a sportsman as soon as he is able 

 to sit his horse ; and he also makes him, at a very 

 early age, the first in the fight {primum bello,) as 

 he had been the first in the field. In the speech 

 addressed to him by the bold Numanus, which cost 



