Another thing very common with these historians is, by way of imitating Thucydides, to make use of his phrases, perhaps with a little alteration, to adopt his manner, in little modes and expressions, such as, “you must yourself acknowledge,” “for the same reason,” “a little more, and I had forgot,” and the like.  This same writer, when he has occasion to mention bridges, fosses, or any of the machines used in war, gives them Roman names; but how does it suit the dignity of history, or resemble Thucydides, to mix the Attic and Italian thus, as if it was ornamental and becoming?

Another of them gives us a plain simple journal of everything that was done, such as a common soldier might have written, or a sutler who followed the camp.  This, however, was tolerable, because it pretended to nothing more; and might be useful by supplying materials for some better historian.  I only blame him for his pompous introduction:  “Callimorphus, physician to the sixth legion of spearmen, his history of the Parthian war.”  Then his books are all carefully numbered, and he entertains us with a most frigid preface, which he concludes with saying that “a physician must be the fittest of all men to write history, 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.