People in nearly every country tell ethnic jokes about some minority in their nation. English tell Irish jokes, Germans tell Bavarian jokes, and French tell Belgian jokes. I recently discovered the following manuscript (which I have translated from Latin to English) among the papers of one of my distant ancestors who lived during the reign of Trojan. It shows that this is a very ancient human habit, and that the Samnites, Etruscans and Thracians were the butt of jokes in the early Roman Empire, Q: How many Samnites does it take to milk a cow? A. 5, one to hold the udder and four to raise and lower it by the legs. Q. How many horses does a Samnite chariot have? A. Only one. The Samnites have trouble pulling the chariot if they put any more horses in it. Q. What has an I.Q. of 115? A. Thrace. Q. If Romans tell Samnite jokes, and Athenians tell Tracian jokes and Carthagenians tell Numidian jokes, who tells Spartan jokes? A. Nobody. Three slaves , a Gaul, a Thracian and a Samnite escape one night, and the Romans set out after them with bloodhounds. The three slaves reach a woods, and the Gaul is quickly treed by the hounds. He sees the hounds baying about the base of the tree, and thinking quickly, calls out "Hoot, Hoot". The Romans say, "It's just an old owl the hounds smell," and pull the dogs off the tree. Almost immediately the hounds tree the Thracian. Having seen how cleverly the Gaul escaped he calls out "Caw, caw" and the Romans say "Its only a crow the hounds smell," as they pull the dogs away. Shortly thereafter the dogs tree the Samnite. He saw, however, how his two friends escaped, so after thinking for a minute cries out "Moo! Moo! " Back to Table of Contents -- Courier Vol. III #4 To Courier List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1982 by The Courier Publishing Company. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com