Note 190 — Chapter VII

The naive description of Achaia by an Egyptian merchant of Constantius’s time may find a place here:—“The land of Achaia, Greece, and Laconia has much of learning, but is inadequate for other things needful; for it is a small and mountainous province, and cannot furnish much corn, but produces some oil and the Attic honey, and can be praised more on account of the schools and eloquence, but not so in most other respects. Of towns it has Corinth and Athens. Corinth has much commerce, and a fine building, the amphitheatre; but Athens has old pictures (historias antiquas), and a work worth mentioning, the citadel, where many statues stand and wonderfully set forth the war–deeds of the forefathers (ubi multis statuis stantibus mirabile est videre dicendum antiquorum bellum). Laconia is said alone to have the marble of Croceae to show, which people call the Lacedaemonian.” The barbarism of expression is to be set down to the account, not of the writer, but of the much later translator.