escussion, the Italian scudo, and the English escocheon, are evident derivations from the Latin scutum, and the equivalent word clypeus is derived from the Greek verb γλυφειν, TO ENGRAVE. But those sculptured devices were regarded as the peculiar ensigns of one individual, who could change them at pleasure, and did not descend hereditarily like the modern coat of arms.

A few references to the shields here alluded to may not be unacceptable. Homer describes the shield of Agamemnon as being ornamented with the Gorgon, his peculiar badge; and Virgil says of Aventinus,[29] the son of Hercules—

“Post hos insignem palmâ per gramina currum,
Victoresque ostentat equos, satus Hercule pulchro
Pulcher Aventinus: clypeoque, insigne paternum,
Centum angues, cinctamq: gerit serpentibus hydram.”
Æneid. vii, 655.

“Next Aventinus drives his chariot round
The Latian plains, with palms and laurels crowned;
Proud of his steeds he smokes along the field,
His father’s hydra fills his ample shield.”
Dryden, vii, 908.

The Greek dramatists describe the symbols and war-cries placed upon their shields by the seven chiefs, in their expedition against the city of Thebes. As an example, Capaneus is represented as bearing the figure of a giant with a blazing torch, and the motto, “I will fire the city!” Such ensigns seem to have been the peculiar property of the valiant and well-born, and so far they certainly resembled modern heraldry. Virgil, speaking of Helenus, whose mother had been a slave, says,

“Slight were his arms—a sword and silver shield;
No marks of honour charged its empty field.”[30]

Several of our more recent writers, while they disclaim all belief of the existence of armorial bearings in earlier times, still think they find traces of these distinctions in the days of the Roman commonwealth. The family of the Corvini are particularly cited as having hereditarily borne a raven as their crest; but this device was, as Nisbet has shown,[31] merely an ornament bearing allusion to the apocryphal story of an early ancestor of that race having been assisted in combat by a bird of this species. The jus imaginum of the Romans is also adduced. In every condition of civilized society distinctions of rank and honour are recognized. Thus the Romans had their three classes distinguished as nobiles, novi, and ignobiles. Those whose ancestors had held high offices in the state, as Censor, Prætor, or Consul, were accounted nobiles, and were entitled to have statues of their progenitors executed in wood, metal, stone, or wax, and adorned with the insignia of their several offices, and the trophies they had earned in war. These they usually kept in presses or cabinets, and on occasions of ceremony and solemnity exhibited before the entrances of their houses. He who had a right to exhibit his own effigy only, was styled novus, and occupied the same position with regard to the many-imaged line as the upstart of our own times, who bedecks his newly-started equipage with an equally new coat of arms, does to the head of an antient house with a shield of forty quarterings. The ignobiles were not permitted to use any image, and therefore stood upon an equality with modern plebeians, who bear no arms but the two assigned them by the heraldry of nature.

The patricians of our day to a certain extent carry out the jus imaginum of antiquity, only substituting painted canvas for sculptured marble or modelled wax; and there is no sight better calculated to inspire respect for dignity of station than the gallery of some antient hall hung with a long series of family portraits; in which, as in a kind of physiognomical pedigree, the speculative mind may also find matter of agreeable contemplation. The jus imaginum doubtless originated in the same class of feelings that gave birth to heraldry, but there is no further connexion or analogy between the two. It is to hereditary shields and hereditary banners we must limit the true meaning of heraldry, and all attempts to find these in the classical era will end in a disappointment as inevitable as that which accompanies the endeavour to gather “grapes of thorns or figs of thistles.”