Hippocrates mid his Epoch. 59 



Ctesias was, like Hippocrates, one of the Asclcpiades, but he 

 belonged to a family that had settled at Rhodes. He had fol- 

 lowed the army of the Ten Thousand, and after being made pri- 

 soner in that expedition, had become physician to Artaxerxes, 

 at whose court he resided seventeen years. On his return to 

 Greece, he published a history of Persia and Assyria, which he 

 said he had taken from the archives of Ecbatan, and an account 

 of India, which was also borrowed from Persian writers. 



In the latter work, of which there remain only a few frag- 

 ments preserved by Photius, we find several facts in natural 

 history. Mention is made of the elephant, an animal with which 

 the Greeks were not acquainted until after the conquests of 

 Alexander ; the parrot, and the facility which that bird had for 

 pronouncing words. Lastly, the bamboo is spoken of, which 

 the author describes as a reed so thick that two men could 

 scarcely clasp it. 



Ctesias does not confine himself to such exaggerations as 

 this, but is full of absurd stories. However, we should not 

 consider as entirely false all the extraordinary recitals which 

 are met with in his book, many of them being founded on dis- 

 torted traditions, or on erroneous figures. As an example of 

 the latter, we may mention the history of the mauticore, an ani- 

 mal with the head of a lion, three rows of teeth, and the tail of 

 a scorpion. It is evident that Ctesias, in this case, had de- 

 scribed as a real animal the symbolical one whose figure he had 

 seen represented on the monuments of Persepolis. His descrip- 

 tion of the unicorn is in like manner founded on the rhinoceros' 

 figures which occur often in these sculptures. As to disfigured 

 natural facts, they also may be pretty frequently recognised. 

 Thus, it is judged that it is not with oil, but with naphtha, 

 that the surface of certain lakes is covered ; that it is not gum- 

 lac but amber, that certain rivers carry in their waters at de- 

 terminate periods. In a similar manner may be explained the 

 history of insects and flowers that dye purple ; that of white 

 and horned wild asses, &c. But we also meet with fables 

 which arc entirely without foundation, and which it were useless 

 here to repeat. These fables, perhaps, more eagerly received 

 than the true descriptions given by Ctesias, infect almost all the 

 works that have since appeared. 



