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shield-and-sword fighter would have done. In the only passage indeed where the word “archer” occurs in all the divine works of blind Homer, it is used as a term of ridicule. Diomede named Paris, in the Eleventh Book, “An archer, a jokester, a dandy with a lovelock, who gapes after girls”; and “archer” was the hardest name of all. The archer in Homer’s poems skulks behind a comrade’s shield, I repeat, or behind a mound, or a pillar, or a gravestone, and the shield-and-sword man resents his existence, as stealing from the battle (which he never enters) something which is not his. Is this not the truth, you scholars? Malthus, Symmachus, Palaeologus, I appeal to you.’
    They acknowledge that Modestus has neither misquoted nor misinterpreted Homer.
    But Bessas snorts and asks to hear more. ‘Tell us about the Roman warriors of your golden age. They trusted to their legs, did they? Was it perhaps because they were such unskilful horsemen?’
    Modestus’s eye kindles. ‘The infantryman is the acknowledged king of the battle-field. Horses are useful for mounting scouts upon, and for conveying generals and their staff quickly from one point of the battle to another, and for pulling wagons and siege-engines, and – yes, I grant you this — we may allow a small proportion of cavalry to every large body of infantry, in order to disperse the skirmishers of the enemy who, from a flank, may annoy the steadily advancing ranks of our foot-sure legions. But the Romans of old so disdained cavalry-service that, as soon as their conquests permitted them, they compelled subject nations to undertake that menial task for them – as they also ceased to drive the plough themselves or to plant cabbages, entrustingsuch employment to slaves and men of inferior race. Is that not so, Malthus, Symmachus, Palaeologus?’
    They agree that the Romans early came to depend on allied cavalry. But Malthus, in historical honesty and fairness to Bessas, adds: ‘Yet I think that no nation disdains what it excels in. The Roman cavalry were never very skilful. In Spain, on the last occasion that they were employed as a field-force they made a sorry exhibition of themselves; or so we read. Similarly, neither the Greeks nor the Trojans of Homer’s day seem to have been capable archers, according to modern standards. They drew the bowstring back only to their breasts (not to the ear, as the Huns do, or the Persians), and the penetrative effect of their arrows seems only to have been slight. Ulysses was more successful, I grant you; but his archery against the suitors was at close range, and against unarmoured, unsuspecting men.’
    Then Bessas has his say. He speaks slowly and judiciously, being the sort of man whom wine makes cautious, not rash. ‘Modestus, my generous host, you live in a world long dead, shut in that book-cupboard yonder. You have no conception of the nature of modern fighting. In every age there are improvements. In this age we Goths have hit upon a perfected mode of fighting. Now I do not wish to denigrate the successes of the Romans, your ancestors, in olden times – they are undeniable. It is clear that they made a virtue of their deficiency as horsemen by perfecting the discipline of their foot. But clearly their battles were won in spite of their mistrust of horses, not because of it. Had they been natural horsemen and applied their courage and good sense to the evolution of the cavalry arm, they might well have conquered not merely the whole Western world, but India, I believe, and Bactria, and even China, which lies, by land, a year’s travel away. But instead they relied on their infantry, and at last their armies were matched against a brave nation that was also a nation of horsemen – a nation, moreover, that obeyed its chiefs – the Gothic nation – my nation. That was the end of the Roman legions. These Thracian plains, Distinguished