BOOK XII. xLi. 83-xLii. 87 



but rather, as the facts show, they were more bene- 

 volent 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 miUion 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 Cinnamon 

 fabulous story has been related by antiquity, and °"'^ '^^^'^' 

 first of all by Herodotus, that they are obtained iii. 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 arrow^s 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 

 Arabiareceived by the fleets ^ 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 Hnked by intermarriage ^vith the Cave- 



63 



