They lived on their islands in caves or in the hollow spaces between huge masses of rock, and they were taught to use the sling while mere children. Their fathers set their bread some distance from them, and would not let them eat it until they had brought it down with a pebble. Their passion was drunkenness, and woman their strongest appetite. In combat they turned with scorn from prisoners who would bring high ransom to capture the women, and they not infrequently would exchange six strong slave men for a single slave woman. On the islands they were unfamiliar with gold and silver; the elders divining the evils of money, had prohibited the importation of coins, and the Balearic slingers in the service of Carthage, unable to carry their earnings to their country, spent their wages in drink or flung them generously into the hands of the loose and wretched women who followed the army. Their traditional customs amused the Saguntines. At their weddings, so said those who had visited the islands, it was customary for all the guests to embrace the bride in advance of the husband, and at funerals the corpse was beaten until the bones were crushed and converted into a shapeless mass which they forced into a narrow urn and buried under a heap of stones. Their slings were terrible. They hurled to great distances balls of sun-baked clay, conical at their ends, and bearing grotesque inscriptions dedicated to the one who received the blow, and in battle they flung stones weighing a pound with such force that the highest tempered armor failed to resist them. In the rear of this warlike crowd ragged women of all colors scattered through the champaign; lean, naked children who did not know their parents; the parasites of war, who marched at the tail of the army to revel in the spoils of victory; females who at night lay down in one extreme of the camp and arose on the opposite in the morning, and, aged in the prime of their youth by fatigue and blows, died forsaken by the roadside; youngsters who looked upon all the soldiers of their race as their fathers, bearing on their backs on long marches the firewood or the flesh-pot of the warriors, and, in moments of fiercest struggle, when the fighting was hand to hand, they slipped between the adversaries' legs and bit them like rabid cur-dogs.