Kitap 15
3.22
Their habits are in general temperate. But their kings, from the great wealth which they possessed, degenerated into a luxurious way of life. They sent for wheat from Assos in Aeolia, for ChalybonianChalybon was the name of the modern Aleppo, but the wine of Damascus must have possessed the same qualities, and had the same name. The Chalybonean wine, Posidonius says, is made in Damascus in Syria, from vines which were planted there by the Persians. Athenoeus, b. i page 46, Bohn’s Classical Library wine from Syria, and water from the Eulaeus, which is the lightest of all, for an Attic cotylus measure of it weighs less by a drachm (than the same quantity of any other water).
3.23
Of the barbarians the Persians were the best known to the Greeks, for none of the other barbarians who governed Asia governed Greece. The barbarians were not acquainted with the Greeks, and the Greeks were but slightly acquainted, and by distant report only, with the barbarians. As an instance, Homer was not acquainted with the empire of the Syrians nor of the Medes, for otherwise as he mentions the wealth of Egyptian Thebes and of Phoenicia, he would not have passed over in silence the wealth of Babylon, of Ninus, and of Ecbatana.
