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 history, and that we could
not possibly have understood what was going forward without it.

From inability, and ignorance of everything useful, these men are
driven to descriptions of countries and caverns, and when they come
into a multiplicity of great and momentous affairs, are utterly at a
loss. Like a servant enriched on a sudden by coming into his
master's estate, who does not know how to put on his clothes, or to
eat as he should do; but when fine birds, fat sows, and hares are
placed before him, falls to and eats till he bursts, of salt meat
and pottage. The writer I just now mentioned describes the
strangest wounds, and the most extraordinary deaths you ever heard
of; tells us of a man's being wounded in the great toe, and expiring
immediately; and how on Priscus, the general, bawling out loud,
seven-and-twenty of the enemy fell down dead upon the spot. He has