Gleaming Cohorts

This morning, I suddenly thought of the opening lines of Byron's "The Destruction of Sennacherib," as mediated by James Thurber.  They gallop memorably along in anapestic tetrameter:

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;

Thurber reports the complaint of some self-help guru that people just weren't reading these lines properly: "when a suspicious-minded investigator tested them, quite a number turned out to suppose that the Assyrian's cohorts were an article of wearing apparel" (75).

Thurber's rejoinder is a delightful defense of this misreading:

What the second line means is simply that the cohorts' articles of wearing apparel were gleaming in purple and gold, so nothing much is distorted except the number of people who came down like the wolf on the fold.  The readers who got it wrong had, it seems to me, as deep a poetic feeling [...] as those who knew that a cohort was originally one of the ten divisions of a Roman legion and had, to begin with, three hundred soldiers, later five hundred to six hundred.  Furthermore, those who got it wrong had a fine flaring image of one Assyrian coming down valiantly all alone, instead of with a couple of thousand soldiers to help him, the big coward. (75-76, bold emphasis added)

That bit in bold is a contender for Best Literary Criticism Ever, as far as I'm concerned.

But it turns out Terry Pratchett has also played with a similar misreading of "cohorts" in Byron's poem.  For example, in ch. 6 of Going Postal:

A voice behind [Moist] said: ‘The Postman came down like a wolf on the fold / His cohorts all gleaming in azure and gold... ’ 

[...] He turned to Miss Dearheart. 

‘When I was a kid I always thought that a cohort was a piece of armour, Miss Dearheart,’ he said, giving her a smile. ‘I used to imagine the troops sitting up all night, polishing them.’

And in Feet of Clay, there's a reference to "Stronginthearm's Armour Polish for Gleaming Cohorts."

A brief google search confirms that Wodehouse riffs on these lines as well at various times in multiple books, but it doesn't look like his characters necessarily mistake the meaning of "cohorts."  For example, in Bertie Wooster Sees It Through, Bertie at one point complains that Stilton "was once more in the position of an Assyrian fully licensed to come down like a wolf on the fold with his cohorts all gleaming with purple and gold."  (Later, he reflects that Stilton's demeanor "was that of an Assyrian who, having come down like a wolf on the fold, had found in residence not lambs, but wildcats, than which, of course, nothing makes an Assyrian feel sillier.")

(Another Wodehousian twist: "With the nippiness of a lamb in the fold on observing the approaching Assyrians...." - The Code of the Woosters.)

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I suspect the substitution of "a wolf" for "the wolf" is probably quite common.  But  "a wolf" suggests a mere everyday simile (the Assyrian approaches just like any wolf would), whereas "the wolf" suggests more of an iconic encounter, maybe even the Platonic ideal of wolf-sheep encounters, the Wolf all sheep fear.

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Thurber, James. “Miscellaneous Mentation.” Let Your Mind Alone! And Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces, 1st Perennial Library ed., Harper & Row, Publishers, 1976, pp. 72–79.