, because AEsculapius was the
son of Apollo, and Apollo is the leader of the Muses, and the great
prince of literature."

Besides this, after setting out in delicate Ionic, he drops, I know
not how, into the most vulgar style and expressions, used only by
the very dregs of the people.

And here I must not pass over a certain wise man, whose name,
however, I shall not mention; his work is lately published at
Corinth, and is beyond everything one could have conceived. In the
very first sentence of his preface he takes his readers to task, and
convinces them by the most sagacious method of reasoning that "none
but a wise man should ever attempt to write history." Then comes
syllogism upon syllogism; every kind of argument is by turns made
use of, to introduce the meanest and most fulsome adulation; and
even this is brought in by syllogism and interrogation. What
appeared to me the most intolerable and unbecoming the long beard of
a philosopher, was his saying in the preface that our emperor was
above all men most happy, whose actions even philosophers did not
disdain to celebrate; surely this, if it ought to be said at all,
should have been left for us to say rather than himself.

Neither must we here forget that historian who begins thus: "I come
to speak of the Romans and Persians;" and a little after he says,
"for the Persians ought to suffer;" and in another place, "there was
one Osroes, whom the Greeks call Oxyrrhoes," with many things of
this kind. This man is just such a one as him I mentioned before,
only that one is like Thucydides, and the other the exact
resemblance of Herodotus.

But there is yet another writer, renowned for eloquence, another
Thucydides, or rather superior to him, who most elaborately
describes every city, mountain, field, and river, and cries out with
all his might, "May the great averter of evil turn it all on our
enemies!" This is colder than Caspian snow, or Celtic ice. The
emperor's shield takes up a whole book to describe. The Gorgon's
{35} eyes are blue, and black, and white; the serpents twine about
his hair, and his belt has all the colours of the rainbow. How many
thousand lines does it cost him to describe Vologesus's breeches and
his horse's bridle, and how Osroes' hair looked when he swam over
the Tigris, what sort of a cave he fled into, and how it was shaded
all over with ivy, and myrtle, and laurel, twined together. You
plainly see how necessary this was to the