do not wash the walls of it. After this, it would be to no purpose,
my dear Philo, for me to assure you that I am not from Parthia, nor
do I belong to Mesopotamia, of which this admirable historian has
thought fit to make me an inhabitant.

What he tells us of Severian, and which he swears he heard from
those who were eye-witnesses of it, is no doubt extremely probable;
that he did not choose to drink poison, or to hang himself, but was
resolved to find out some new and tragical way of dying; that
accordingly, having some large cups of very fine glass, as soon as
he had taken the resolution to finish himself, he broke one of them
in pieces, and with a fragment of it cut his throat; he would not
make use of sword or spear, that his death might be more noble and
heroic.

To complete all, because Thucydides {41} made a funeral oration on
the heroes who fell at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, he
also thought something should be said of Severian. These
historians, you must know, will always have a little struggle with
Thucydides, though he had nothing to do with the war in Armenia; our
writer, therefore, after burying Severian most magnificently, places
at his sepulchre one Afranius Silo, a centurion, the rival of
Pericles, who spoke so fine a declamation upon him as, by heaven,
made me laugh till I cried again, particularly when the orator
seemed deeply afflicted, and with tears in his eyes, lamented the
sumptuous entertainments and drinking bouts which he should no more
partake of. To crown all with an imitation of Ajax, {42} the orator
draws his sword, and, as it became the noble Afranius, before all
the assembly, kills himself at the tomb. So Mars defend me! but he
deserved to die much sooner for making such a declamation. When