XIII.
§ 1. During this period the Isaurians, who had been tranquil for some time after the transactions already mentioned, and the attempt to take the city of Seleucia, gradually reviving, as serpents come out of their holes in the warmth of spring, descended from their rocky and pathless jungles, and forming into large troops, harassed their neighbours with predatory incursions; escaping, from their activity as mountaineers, all attempts of the soldiers to take them, and from long use moving easily over rocks and through thickets.
2. So Lauricius was sent among them as governor, with the additional title of count, to reduce them to order by fair means or foul. He was a man of sound civil wisdom, correcting things in general by threats rather than by severity, so that while he governed the province, which he did for some time, nothing happened deserving of particular notice.
[102] Patroclus, the companion of Achilles.
[103] The Trojan war. See the account of the pestilence, Homer Il. i. 50.
[104] i.e., λοιμώδης, from λοιμὸς, pestilence. Pandemic means "attacking the whole people." Epidemic, "spreading from individual to individual."
[105] Ammian alludes to the expedition of Ulysses and Diomede related by Homer, Il. viii.
[106] Ammianus is wrong here; it was only the Thebans who were called Σπαρτοὶ, from σπείρω, to sow, because of the fable of the dragon's teeth sown by Cadmus; the Athenians, who claimed to be earthborn, not called Σπαρτοὶ, but αὐτόχθονες.
[107] A quotation from the description of the foot-race in Virgil, Æn. v. 320.
[108] Salankemen, in Hungary.