from which they get their name; the fleas are as large as twelve elephants. The Volplaneurs are infantry, to be sure, but they fly in the air without wings. As to the manner of their flight, they pull their long tunics up through their girdles, let the baggy folds fill with wind as if they were sails, and are carried along like boats. For the most part they serve as light infantry in battle. It was said, too, that the stars over Cappadocia would send seventy thousand Sparrowcorns and five thousand Crane Dragoons. I did not get a look at them, as they did not come, so I have not ventured to write about their characteristics, for the stories about them were wonderful and incredible.[1]
These were the forces of Endymion. They all had the same equipment—helmets of beans (their beans are large and tough); scale-corselets of lupines (they sew together the skins of lupines to make the corselets, and in that country the skin of the lupine is unbreakable, like horn); shields and swords of the Greek pattern. When the time came, they took position thus; on the right wing, the Vulture Dragoons and the king, with the bravest about him (we were among them); on the left, the Grassplumes; in the centre, the allies, in whatever formation they liked. The infantry came to about sixty million, and was deployed as follows. Spiders in that country are numerous and large, all of them far larger than the Cyclades islands. They were
- ↑ Compare the reticence of Herodotus (1, 193), Thucydides (3, 113, 6), and Tacitus (Germ. 46).
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