Most people to-day are familiar with the elephant at the Zoo, and it is curious to recall that this vast, flabby-looking creature was first seen by Western men as a terrible and well-nigh irresistible weapon of war. When Alexander's men refused to follow him beyond the river Hyphasis in 326 b.c., one of the chief causes of their fear was a rumour that the people on the other side owned a squadron of ‘particularly large and courageous elephants’—six thousand of them, says Plutarch: and the Macedonians had recently seen all they wanted of elephants in their battle against Porus on the river Hydaspes. They had done their best against them, and indeed had won the day; but it had been a grim business. ‘The elephants’, we are told, ‘employed their massive bulk and their great strength in terrifying fashion; some men perished when they were trampled under foot, weapons and all, and their bones crushed to pieces; others were caught up in the elephants' trunks, lifted high in the air and dashed back to earth—and came to a shocking death. And many men were instantly killed on being gored by the beasts' tusks, and pierced clean through the body.’

These random jottings, the fruit of a recent re-reading of the poems of Martial, will not, it is earnestly hoped, be regarded as an attempt to appraise the work of the poet as a whole, though they may perhaps take as their starting-point Martial's critical estimate of his own epigrams.

The historical landscape of the Greeks was bounded to the north by the Scythians, a fierce race renowned for milking mares (Hesiod Fr. 55 Rzach), for drinking wine without water (Hdt. vi. 84; Athenaeus 427 a–c), and for living not in fixed houses but in house-wagons, the Mongol yurt (Aeschylus, Prom. Vinct. 709 sq.; Hdt. iv. 46). Plato mentions them along with the Thracians as representatives of those in whom the spirited part of the soul predominates, meaning that they acted with indomitable energy but without their actions being guided by reason (Rep. 435b). The Athenians, quick to espy anyone's good points, employed them as policemen (Aristoph. Thesm. 1017, Lys. 451).

TheNew English Dictionary defines the word ‘motto’ as being ‘originally a word, sentence or phrase attached as a legend to an “impresa” or emblematical design and serving to explain or emphasize its symbolic import’. A wider definition of the word follows, in which two epithets are prominent—‘short’ and ‘appropriate’. The rightness of the former is emphasized by the etymology of the word under discussion. Indeed, the very word ‘motto’ is of modern use, since our forefathers preferred to speak of their ‘word’. This certainly is a caveat against undue prolixity. Of the mottoes listed below, most consist of four or fewer words.