16
Another of them has compiled a bare record of the events and set it down on paper, completely prosaic and ordinary, such as a soldier or artisan or pedlar following the army might have put together as a diary of daily events. However, this amateur was not so bad—it was quite obvious at the beginning what he was, and his work has cleared the ground for some future historian of taste and ability. The only fault I found was this: his headings were too pompous for the place his books can hold—“Callimorphus, surgeon of the Sixth Lancers, History of the Parthian War, Book so-and-so”—there followed the number of each book. Another thing, his preface was very frigid: he put it like this: it was proper for a surgeon to write history, since Asclepius was the son of Apollo and Apollo was leader of the Muses and lord of all culture; also because, after beginning in Ionic, for some reason I can’t fathom he suddenly changed to the vernacular, using indeed the Ionic forms of “medicine,” “attempt,” “how many,” “diseases,” but taking the rest from the language of everyday, most of it street-corner talk.
