[865] The Signa, ensigns, or standards, were different in the legions. The Vexillum, or colours of cavalry, was a square of cloth, also called Pannus (πῆνος). The word is a congener of the Gothic Fana and Fan; the Ang. Sax. Pan; the Germ. Fahne; the French bannière and our banner. Hence, too, Gonfanon = Gundfano. When the Eagle became imperial, and the Vexillum a Labarum with a cross, this standard was splendidly decorated, and led to the French oriflamme. The latter was made of the fine red (silk?) stuff called cendalum, cendal, or sendel.
[866] These ‘light bobs’ were re-organised and regularly established in a.u.c. 541, after the battle of Cannæ.
[867] In fact, it formed phalanx, a word originally meaning a block or a cylinder.
[868] The officer’s was adorned by way of honourable decoration with three (ostrich?) feathers black and scarlet.
[869] The original kilt was the waistcloth, man’s primitive dress in the Tropics and the lower Temperates. It became an article of defence under the Greeks and Romans; and thence it spread over most of Europe. The Maltese long preserved it, and the Fustanella is still worn in Greece and Albania. In Ireland it was ancient, as it is modern in Scotland.
[870] Livy, ix. 35.
[871] Livy, viii. 8.
[872] Pilum, like our ‘pile,’ a congener of the Teutonic Pfeil, is not a Roman invention, and was probably borrowed from the Samnites (Sallust. Cat. 51, 38). The pilum murale, used for piercing walls (Cæsar, B. G. v. 40), was a round or quadrangular shaft of three cubits, with an iron of the same length (Polybius, vi. 23, 9). The pilum was perpetually changing size and proportions; moreover, there were two kinds, the heavy and the light. The figures in the text are those of the Mayence pilum (Jähns, p. 201).
[873] Livy, xxi. 8.
[874] Under Trajan and Septimius Severus the cavalry adopted the iron or bronze Hamata, hooked metal chains, forming a kind of mail-coat, and the Squamata, scales sewn on to linen or leather, Demmin (p. 121) erroneously makes the latter ‘chain-armour,’ and yet his illustration shows the scales.