There were two gifts he would never refuse, horses and good weapons.

[27] He also procured chariots, taking them from the enemy or wherever he could find them.
The old Trojan type of charioteering, still in use to this day among the Cyrenaeans, he abolished; before his time the Medes, the Syrians, the Arabians, and all Asiatics generally, used their chariots in the same way as the Cyrenaeans do now.

[28] The fault of the system to his mind was that the very flower of the army, if the picked men were in the chariots, could only act at long range and so contribute little after all to the victory.

Three hundred chariots meant twelve hundred horses and three hundred fighting-men, besides the charioteers, who would naturally be men above the common, in whom the warriors could place confidence: and that meant another three hundred debarred from injuring the enemy in any kind of way.

[29] Such was the system he abolished in favour of the war-chariot proper, with strong wheels to resist the shock of collision, and long axles, on the principle that a broad base is the firmer, while the driver's seat was changed into what might be called a turret, stoutly built of timber and reaching up to the elbow, leaving the driver room to manage the horses above the rim.