chariots drawn by horses; but at a later period chariots were wholly dispensed with. The officers and the upper classes fought on horseback, and the common soldiers on foot. The regular cavalry were armed with swords and spears. The infantry were composed of two classes, respectively known as the heavy-armed and the light-armed. The heavy-armed infantry usually consisted of citizens, while the light-armed were made up of slaves or of freemen of the lowest rank. The heavy-armed foot soldiers wore helmets of brass or iron upon their heads, and cuirasses and greaves of the same metals upon their breasts and legs. They grasped the sword or spear with the right hand, and carried the buckler or shield on the left arm. They usually fought in a close body, called a phalanx, in which the file was sometimes eight men in depth, and at other times sixteen. The light-armed troops used bows and arrows, javelins and slings, and were considered of so little importance, in comparison with the heavy-armed, that the ancient writers, in describing battles, often said nothing about the light soldiery, in giving the number of troops engaged. The Greeks advanced to meet the enemy at a quick but regular pace, and with a silence only sometimes broken by the sound of the trumpet or the Spartan flute, until the mortal combat was announced by the clash of arms and the groans of the dying. Every citizen between the ages of twenty and sixty was subject to being summoned to the defense of the state, but those of advanced age were exempted from foreign service. The Athenians were accustomed to appointing ten generals to every army, one being taken from each of the ten wards of Attica. At first each of these officers was successively entrusted with the sole command for one day, but the evils in consequence of so injudicious a custom becoming at length apparent, the practice was modified, so far as one of the ten was appointed to the actual command, while the other nine accompanied him as counselors, or remained at home with the honorary title of generals. The Grecian towns were fortified with walls, towers and fosses, or ditches, which made it very difficult to take them by siege in those times, although the places then considered and proved impregnable would have been reduced in less than an hour by our modern artillery. Although the engines of war used by the Greeks were impotent as compared with modern cannon, they had machines by which they were enabled to harass, and frequently to take by storm, places which were very strongly fortified. The chief of these engines were the battering-ram, the moving-tower, the tortoise, the catapult and the balista. The battering-ram was a very large beam of wood, having at the end an iron head, shaped so as to partially resemble that of a ram. Some of these machines were suspended from the roof of a wooden building erected to screen the men who worked them from the missles of the besieged; while others, smaller in size, were carried in the arms of men. They were used to batter down walls, and are said to have been sometimes dreadfully effective. For the purpose of deadening their blows, the besieged were in the custom of lowering bags of wool before those parts of the walls against which they were directed. The moving-tower was a wooden building in the form of an obelisk, and was set on wheels, by means of which it could be pushed forward to the fortifications which were the objects of attack. These towers were from thirty to forty feet square at the base, and were higher than the ordinary walls of fortified towns. They contained a battering-ram in the lower story. In the middle portion they had a drawbridge, which could be lowered in such a way as to enable the assailants to pass over from the tower to the walls. At the top they were filled with soldiers, who hurled javelins and discharged arrows at the defenders of the walls. The tortoise was a kind of wooden house, about twenty-five feet square and twelve feet high. Like the moving-tower, it was set on wheels, by means of which it could be moved forward to the walls. It was |