Roman Empire (500 BC - 300 AD)
From Slinging.org Wiki
Roman slinger, ca. 66 AD, armed with a shorter sling and wearing a longer sling around his head
Slingers are often described as Peltasts, which is a larger category that includes javelineers and archers.
Roman Sources on the Sling
The Roman military writer Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, who lived in the fourth century AD, listed the sling as one of the weapons of the late Roman army in his book De Re Militari:
- "Recruits are to be taught the art of throwing stones both with the hand and sling. The inhabitants of the Balearic Islands are said to have been the inventors of slings, and to have managed them with surprising dexterity, owing to the manner of bringing up their children. The children were not allowed to have their food by their mothers till they had first struck it with their sling. Soldiers, notwithstanding their defensive armor, are often more annoyed by the round stones from the sling than by all the arrows of the enemy. Stones kill without mangling the body, and the contusion is mortal without loss of blood. It is universally known the ancients employed slingers in all their engagements. There is the greater reason for instructing all troops, without exception, in this exercise, as the sling cannot be reckoned any incumberance, and often is of the greatest service, especially when they are obliged to engage in stony places, to defend a mountain or an eminence, or to repulse an enemy at the attack of a castle or city."
The text sums up the most important advantages the sling had over other ranged weapons: It could be carried without effort and could use stones picked up from the ground as ammunition.
Vegetius is among the earliest authors to mention the staff-sling (called fustibalus in Latin).
Balearic Slingers
The Romans did not train slingers, instead recruiting them from populations with cultural sling use. This included slingers from the Balearic Islands, Rhodes, and others.
The historian Strabo (63/64 BC - AD 24) mentions the balearic islanders as skilled slingers in his work Geographica (Book 3, Chapter 5):
- "But merely because a few criminals among them had formed partnerships with the pirates of the high seas, they were all cast into disrepute, and an over-sea expedition was made against them by Metellus, surnamed Balearicus, who is the man that founded their cities. On account of the same fertility of their islands, however, the inhabitants are ever the object of plots, albeit they are peaceable; still they are spoken of as the best of slingers. And this art they have practised assiduously, so it is said, ever since the Phoenicians took possession of the islands. And the Phoenicians are also spoken of as the first to clothe the people there in tunics with a broad border; but the people used to go forth to their fights without a girdle on — with only a goat-skin, wrapped round the arm, or with a javelin that had been hardened in the fire (though in rare cases it was also pointed with a small iron tip), and with three slings worn round the head, of black-tufted rush (that is, a species of rope-rush, out of which the ropes are woven; and Philetas, too, in his "Hermeneia" says, "Sorry his tunic befouled with dirt; and round about him his slender waist is entwined with a strip of black-tufted rush," meaning a man girdled with a rush-rope), of black-tufted rush, I say, or of hair or of sinews: the sling with the long straps for the shots at short range, and the medium sling for the medium shots. And their training in the use of slings used to be such, from childhood up, that they would not so much as give bread to their children unless they first hit it with the sling. This is why Metellus, when he was approaching the islands from the sea, stretched hides above the decks as a protection against the slings. And he brought thither as colonists three thousand of the Romans who were in Iberia."
