ose, showing how "a certain Moorish
cavalier, wandering on the mountains in search of water, lit on some
Syrian rustics, who helped him to a dinner; how they were afraid of
him at first, but afterwards became intimately acquainted with him,
and received him with hospitality; for one of them, it seems, had
been in Mauritania, where his brother bore arms." Then follows a
long tale, "how he hunted in Mauritania, and saw several elephants
feeding together; how he had like to have been devoured by a lion;
and how many fish he bought at Caesarea." This admirable historian
takes no notice of the battle, the attacks or defences, the truces,
the guards on each side, or anything else; but stands from morning
to night looking upon Malchion, the Syrian, who buys cheap fish at
Caesarea: if night had not come on, I suppose he would have supped
there, as the chars {44} were ready. If these things had not been
carefully recorded in the history we should have been sadly in the
dark, and the Romans would have had an insufferable loss, if
Mausacas, the thirsty Moor, could have found nothing to drink, or
returned to the camp without his supper; not to mention here, what
is still more ridiculous, as how "a piper came up to them out of the
neighbouring village, and how they made presents to each other,
Mausacas giving Malchion a spear, and Malchion presenting Mausacas
with a buckle." Such are the principal occurrences in the history
of the battle of Europus. One may truly say of such writers that
they never saw the roses on the tree, but took care to gather the
prickles that grew at the bottom of it.

Another of them, who had never set a foot out of Corinth, or seen
Syria or Armenia, begins thus: "It is better to trust our eyes than
our ears; I write, therefore, what I have seen, and not what I have
heard;" he saw everything so extremely well that he tells us, "the
Parthian dragons (which amongst them signifies no more than a great
number, {45} for one dragon brings a thousand) are live serpents of
a prodigious size, that breed in Persia, a little above Iberia; that
these are lifted up on long poles, and spread terror to a great
distance; and that when the battle begins, they let them loose on
the enemy." Many of our soldiers, he tells us, were devoured by
them, and a vast number pressed to death by being locked in their
embraces: this he beheld himself from the top of a high tree, to
which he had retired for safety. Well it was f