but rather, as the facts show, they were more benevolent in those days. But the title ‘happy’ belongs still more to the Arabian Sea, for from it come the pearls which that country sends us. And by the lowest reckoning India, China and the Arabian peninsula take from our empire 100 million sesterces every year—that is the sum which our luxuries and our women cost us; for what fraction of these imports, I ask you, now goes to the gods or to the powers of the lower world?

XLII. In regard to cinnamomum and casia^a aCinnamon and casia. fabulous story has been related by antiquity, first of all by Herodotus, that they are obtainedIII. 111. from birds’ nests, and particularly from that of the phoenix, in the region where Father Liber was brought up, and that they are knocked down from inaccessible rocks and trees by the weight of the flesh brought there by the birds themselves, or by means of arrows loaded with lead; and similarly there is a tale of casia growing round marshes under the protection of a terrible kind of bats that guard it with their claws, and of winged serpents—these tales having been invented by the natives to raise the price of their commodities. However, there goes with them a story that under the reflected rays of the sun at midday an indescribable sort of collective odour is given off from the whole of the peninsula, which is due to the harmoniously blended exhalation of so many kinds of vapour, and that the first news of Arabia received by the fleets^b of Alexander the Great was carried by these odours far out to sea—all these stories being false, inasmuch as cinnamomum, which is the same thing as cinnamon, grows in Ethiopia, which is linked by intermarriage with the Cave-dwellers.