A True History (1.1-1.5)

Athletes and those who pay attention to bodily training do not bestow all their care on securing a vigorous condition or on active exercise. They give some of it to the question of seasonable relaxation; in fact, they conceive this to be a very important part of their training. In just the same way I believe it to be fitting for those engaged with literature to relax their minds after a prolonged reading of the more weighty authors, and render them more vigorous for subsequent labor.

And this period of relaxation. would be more profitable for such persons if they should spend it over works which do not merely furnish pastime by their wit and charm, but which exhibit also some clever train of thought. This is the ideal I propose to myself for the following pages. For the novelty of the idea and the charm of the subject will not be their only attraction, nor yet the persuasive, consistent way in which I set forth lies of all sorts, but the fact that each of the events I record is a parody of some of the poets and historians and philosophers of antiquity, who wrote such wonderful and fabulous histories.

Ktesias, the Knidian, son of Ktesiochos, wrote an account of the countries of the Indians and their manners and customs, which he never saw himself or heard of from any one else. And Iambulus, too, wrote an astonishing account of things in the Atlantic Ocean. It is patent to all that he drew on his imagination, but he carried out his design pleasantly enough. Many other writers, too, have chosen the same subjects and written on them, assuming to give an account of their own wanderings and journeys, and the size of the beasts they saw, and the savagery of the people and their strange ways of life. The founder of the sect, the teacher of all this tomfoolery, was Homer's Odysseus, who talked to Alkinous and his people about the servitude of the winds; and one-eyed people who eat raw flesh and live barbarously; yes, and of creatures with a plurality of heads, and of transformations wrought on his companions by drugs. Any amount of such marvels he described to the Phaeacians, as if they were greenhorns.

Now, when I fell in with all these works, I did not greatly blame the men for their lying, because I saw at once that this was the habit of those even who promise to write philosophy. But the

I once made a voyage, setting forth from the Pillars of Hercules into the Western Ocean, with a following wind. The cause of my journey and my object in making it were the restless curiosity of my mind, a yearning for novelties, and a desire to learn what is the boundary of the ocean, and what sort of people dwell on the other side. To this end I stored a ship with a great quantity of provisions, put plenty of water, too, aboard, secured fifty of my comrades who were of my way of thinking, laid in, moreover, a good stock of