Change a horse’s coat: drugs, and fire that forges a leopard

Of Africanus: about the complexion of horses. The complexions of horses are various, as their virtues are; and complexion is a piece of good fortune, and a well-set hide is a solemn thing for the animal. Some of them are self-grown; some people craft, changing them toward the better. Some of them are remade with drugs; some are variegated with burnings.

A horse, then, would become black from tawny if plastered with squill with vinegar and pounded pumice; and it would turn out white with the drug boiled. Tawny from white would come to be of lime and litharge, smooth, boiled in water to the thickness of glue, if it were plastered for two hours. If the anointing should remain more hours, it would turn out black from white.

Apart from colors, fire forges the hair into another sight on the animal and falsifies the horse's variegation. A white-starling horse — this is a name for a color — is drawn on in this manner: a round cautery, hollow in the middle, rolled into the circumference of the letter omicron, having been fired, is set on the bound horse by placing and lifting. The circle outside is black; the ancient body remaining from it falsifies a leopard, composed both upon the feet and upon the neck. You might see its face too as of a beast. Fine to inscribe this on a spirited horse, so that it have speed similar to the hide.