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Another man, my dear Philo, is also quite ridiculous: he had never set a foot outside Corinth nor even left home for Cenchreae; he had certainly not seen Syria or Armenia; yet he began as I recall as follows: “Ears are less trustworthy than eyes. I write then what I have seen, not what I have heard.” And he has seen everything so keenly that he said that the serpents of the Parthians (this is a banner they use to indicate number—a serpent precedes, I think, a thousand men), he said that they were alive and of enormous size; that they are born in Persia a little way beyond Iberia; that they are bound to long poles and, raised on high, create terror while the Parthians are coming on from a distance; that in the encounter itself at close quarters they are freed and sent against the enemy; that in fact they had swallowed many of our men in this way and coiled themselves around others and suffocated and crushed them. He himself had been an eyewitness of this, he said, making his observations, however, in safety from a tall tree. He was quite right in not meeting the beasts at close quarters: we should not now have such an excellent historian, who off-hand did great and glorious deeds in this war; for he faced many a battle and was wounded near Sura, obviously in a walk from Cornel Hill to Lerna. He read all this to an audience of Corinthians who knew for a fact that he had not even seen a battle painted on a wall. In fact he had no knowledge of what weapons or engines were like or of the words “regiments” or “muster-rolls.” A lot he cared if he spoke of a movement in column as a transverse battle-line and a frontal movement in line as a movement in column!
