Sentence: They also collected all the weapons that had been left behind or had fallen into the canal—the cannons, arquebuses, swords, spears, bows and arrows—along with all the steel helmets, coats of mail and breastplates, and the shields of metal, wood, and hide. Page: 180
Word: harquebus or arquebus Definition:
a matchlock gun invented in the 15th century which was portable but heavy and was usually fired from a support
Sentence: The Roman republican army was not merely a machine. Its real strength lay in the natural élan of the tough yeoman infantry of Italy, the hard-nosed rustics who voted in the local assemblies of the towns and demes of Italy and were every bit as ferocious as the more threatening-looking and larger Europeans to the north. Page: 118
Sentence: The terror of war does not lie in the entirely human reaction of tribal cultures to bloodletting—screaming and madness in giving and receiving death, fury of the hunt in pursuit of the defeated, near hysterical fear in flight—but rather in the studied coolness of the Roman advance, the predictability of the javelin cast, and the learned art of swordsmanship, the synchronization of maniple with maniple in the carefully monitored assaults. Page: 118
Word: maniple Definition:
a subdivision of the ancient Roman legion; one third of a cohort, consisting of either 60 or 120 men
