As the so-termed founding of Rome took place during the early Iron Age of Southern Europe, it is probable that the citizens, like their predecessors the Etruscans, originally made their blades of copper and bronze, the leaf-shape being borrowed from the Greeks, as we see it retained by the gladiators. The material would last into the Age of Steel, but even in her early years Rome must have preferred the harder metal. Pliny expressly tells us that Porsena, after his short-lived conquest, prohibited the future masters of the world from using iron except in agriculture; it was hardly safe to handle a stylus. Polybius notes that in his day bronze was entirely restricted to defensive armour—helmets, breast-plates, and greaves. All offensive weapons, swords and spears, were either made of, or tipped with, steel. To this superiority of material we may attribute the Roman successes in the second Punic war (B.C. 218–201), and their conquest of the gallant Gauls, when their foes could oppose nothing better than bronze. They had reason to call a Sword _ferrum_.[904] [Heading: _THE SWORD IN ROME._] The Romans called the Sword Ensis, Gladius, and Spatha. The two former are used as synonyms by Quinctilian,[905] but the first presently became poetical. The derivations are eminently unsatisfactory. Voss would find Ensis in ἔγχος, _hasta_; Sanskritists in _Asi_, a Sword, the Zend _Anh_. Gladius is popularly drawn _a clade ferenda, quasi cladius_ (Varro and Littleton); Voss prefers κλάδον (_ramus_), a young branch, the earliest Sword: to others it appears a congener of the Keltic _Clad_, the destroyer. Of the derivation of ‘Spatha’ I have already treated: Suetonius[906] makes it equivalent to Machaira; but this word and its diminutive Machærium are loosely used. The Roman Sword was, like their other weapons, longer and larger, heavier and more formidable than that of the Greeks.[907] The earliest form, the ‘hero’s arm’ of Virgil and Livy, was a short single-edged cutting weapon of bronze, also called the ‘Gallic Sword,’ because long preserved by that people. It is shown in the arm of the Roman Auxiliary (fig. 276). Another very early, if not the earliest, shape was the leaf, which varied in length from nineteen inches (the blade found at Mayence) to twenty-six inches (the Bingen find). The latter is peculiar; the hilt is ornamented with bronze, and it has a cross-guard. Upon another blade (fig. 277), of which a cast is in the Artillery Museum, Paris, appears the armourer’s mark, _Sabini_ (_opus_). [Illustration: FIG. 274.—1. ROMAN SWORD (19 inches long); 2. GLADIUS.] [Illustration: FIG. 275.—BRONZE TWO-EDGED EARLY ROMAN ENSIS.[908]] [Illustration: FIG. 276.—SWORD OF ROMAN AUXILIARY.] [Illustration: FIG. 277.—ROMAN SWORD (Musée d’Art.).]