Cassius Dio, like most historians from ancient Rome, included ethnographic descriptions of foreign civilizations, whether they had firsthand knowledge of them or not. In the first excerpt, he reports on the residents of Pannonia (roughly modern day Hungary) whom he had governed earlier in his career:

[T]hey are the most wretched of men. . . . They cultivate neither olives nor wine, except a very little and very bad at that, because they live most of their lives in the harshest winter . . . but they are considered the bravest men of whom we know. For they are spirited and murderous. . . . This I know, not just because I heard it or read about it, but I learned it also from experience when I governed them.

In the second excerpt, he describes the residents of Scotland, whom he could never have seen himself: They live...