This sounds
incredible, but it is exactly the truth.
As I watched I kept imagining the baking deserts of Libya or the steaming
swamps of Nubia, the shouting hordes of negroes, the many killed by the
beast, its capture, and the infinite and expensive care necessary to bring
one alive to Rome.
Besides these enormous animals he practiced archery on the huge long-
horned bulls from the forests of Dacia and Germany; on the bisons from the
same regions, beasts with heavy shoulders, low rumps and small horns,
parallel to each other, curving downwards over the brows; on the big stags
from these far-off forests, or any sort of stags! And on two varieties of
African antelope not much inferior in size to stags or bulls. He very
seldom needed a third arrow to put an end to any beast of these kinds, not
often a second arrow, and, actually, killed hundreds, even thousands,
neatly and infallibly with his first shot. All these animals he shot from
the _podium_, often leaning on the coping, his right knee on it, generally
standing, his feet wide apart, the toes of his right foot against the
coping wall; for, as with sword or spear or club, he also shot left-
handed.
Prom the arena itself, standing on the sand on which they scampered about,
he shot multitudes of smaller animals: wild ponies, wild asses, striped
African zebras, gazelles, and at least a dozen varieties of small African
antelopes, for which there are no special names in Latin or even in Greek.
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