Chap. 42.] 
CINKAMOMUM. 
137 
below.^® It is the luxury which is displayed by man, eyen in 
the paraphernalia of death, that has rendered Arabia thus 
happy;" and which prompts him to burn with the dead 
what was originally understood to have been produced for the 
service of the gods. Those who are likely to be the best 
acquainted with the matter, assert that this country does not 
produce, in a whole year, so large a quantity of perfumes as 
was burnt by the Emperor N"ero at the funeral obsequies of 
his wife Poppsea. And then let us only take into account 
the vast number of funerals that are celebrated throughout the 
whole world each year, and the heaps of odours that are 
piled up in honour of the bodies of the dead ; the vast quanti- 
ties, too, that are offered to the gods in single grains ; and yet, 
when men were in the habit of offering up to them the salted 
cake, they did not show themselves any the less propitious ; 
nay, rather, as the facts themselves prove, they were even 
more favourable to us than they are now. Eut it is the sea of 
Arabia that has even a still greater right to be called happy," 
for it is this that furnishes us with pearls. At the very lowest 
computation, India, the Seres, and the Arabian Peninsula, 
withdraw from our empire one hundred millions of sesterces 
every year — so dearly do we pay for our luxury and our 
women. How large a portion, too, I should like to know, of 
all these perfumes, really comes to the gods of heaven, and the 
deities of the shades below ? 
CHAP. 42. (19.)^ — ClNJS'AMOMirM.^^ XYLOCINlirAMIJM. 
Pabulous antiquity, and Herodotus^^ more particularly, have 
related that cinnamomum and cassia are found in the nests of 
certain birds, and principally that of the phoenix, in the dis- 
tricts where Father Liber was brought up ; and that these sub- 
stances either fall from the inaccessible rocks and trees in 
which the nests are built, in consequence of the weight of the 
pieces of flesh which the birds carry up, or else are brought 
down by the aid of arrows loaded with lead. It is said, also, 
36 Because its perfumes were held in such higli esteem, for burning on 
the piles of the dead. This, of course, was done primarily to avoid the 
offensive smell. 
The hark of the Cinnamomum Zeylanicum of the modern naturalists, 
the cinnamon-tree of Ceylon. 
28 B. iii. 
