Note 125 — Chapter X · SYRIA AND THE LAND OF THE NABATAEANS.

The extract of Photius from the romance of Jamblichus, c. 17, which erroneously makes the author a Babylonian, is essentially corrected and supplemented by the scholion upon it. The private secretary of the great-king, who comes among Trajan’s captives to Syria, becomes there tutor of Jamblichus, and instructs him in the "barbarian wisdom," is naturally a figure of the romance running its course in Babylon, which Jamblichus professes to have heard from this his instructor; but characteristic of the time is the Armenian court-man-of-letters and princes’ tutor (for it was doubtless as “good rhetor” that he was called by Sohaemus to Valarshapat) himself, who in virtue of his magical art not merely understands the charming of flies and the conjuring of spirits, but also predicts to Verus the victory over Vologasus, and at the same time narrates in Greek to the Greeks stories such as might stand in the Thousand and One Nights.