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[9] The furious madness of this onset [p. 387] so angered our army that it could not brook it, and as the savages hotly menaced the emperor (as was said), they took the form of a wedge (an order which the soldier's naive parlance calls “the pig's head,”) 1 and scattered them with a hot charge; then on the right our infantry slaughtered the bands of their infantry, while on the left our cavalry poured into the nimble squadrons of their cavalry.
1 Vegetius, iii. 19, says that the soldiers gave the name caput porcinum to the cuneus, a V-shaped formation, with the apex towards the enemy. It was the opposite of the forceps, or forfex (xvi. 11, 3).
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- A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), EXE´RCITUS