We have a segment of our writers critique circle Discord that’s exclusively reserved for worldbuilding ideas and this morning we ended up delving into stone slings, the slurs upon them, Swiss arrows, Dutch arrows, and Athletels.

I sort of kicked it off with showing this image of a bullet for a stone sling:

which is marked, in Greek uncial: ΔΕΞΑΙ which means “take that.”

Angus McIntyre (whose personal anecdotes I’ve excised, but who taught me a great deal about this subject this morning). pointed out that this was widespread in the ancient world.

One of the people who talked about this was Mary Beard in SPQR:

In and around the modern town of Perugia, dozens of small sling bullets have been unearthed, deadly lead projectiles … ‘You’re famished and pretending not to be’, reads one message lobbed into the city, where starvation eventually led to surrender. Several others carry brutally obscene messages aimed at predictable parts of the anatomy of their different targets, male and female: ‘Lucius Antonius, you baldy, and you too, Fulvia, open your arsehole’; ‘I’m going for Madam Octavius’ arsehole’; or ‘I’m going for Fulvia’s clitoris’ (landica, the earliest attested use of the term in Latin). The unsettling overlap of military and sexual violence, plus the standard Roman potshot at a receding hairline, is probably typical of the ribaldry found on the legionary front line: part bravado, part aggression, part misogyny, part ill-concealed fear.

— “SPQR”, Mary Beard

Angus also sent me to this piece:

Aerial Insults: The Tradition of Inscribing Lead Sling-Bullets in Antiquity

Aerial Insults: The Tradition of Inscribing Lead Sling-Bullets in Antiquity

Slings are wild. I find it funny that Mary Beard is trying at the end to academically explain the kind of dehumanizing psychology of the frontline troop. As if that has somehow changed and we now live in an enlightened era. As if soldiers haven’t been the same since history began.

To point this out, Angus pointed to Red Shift by Alan Garner. Apparently part of Garner’s story deals with a group of Roman auxiliaries. Rather than invent a “Roman” style of speech for them, he has them talk in Vietnam-era military slang; it really works, and makes a point about the things that soldiers of all eras have in common.

Then we moved on to Swiss arrows or Dutch arrows and I stumbled on this guy:

One fan thought that the “dart” that wounded Faramir in “The Return of the King” was probably a Dutch arrow.

But the spear throwers — the Athletls — are quite remarkable.

In any case, stick that in your story and tell it slant.