Alexander
Lucian of Samosata
Lucian, Vol. 4. Harmon, A. M., editor. London: William Heinemann, Ltd.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925.
Then they began planning, first about the place, and next, what should be the commencement and the character of the venture. Cocconas thought Chalcedon a suitable and convenient place, close to Thrace and Bithynia, and not far, too, from Asia[*](Asia here and elsewhere in this piece refers to the Roman province of Asia—western Asia Minor. ) and Galatia and all the peoples of the interior. Alexander, on the other hand, preferred his own home, saying—and it was true—that to commence such a venture they needed “fat-heads”’ and simpletons to be their victims, and such, he said, were the Paphlagonians who lived up above Abonoteichus, who were for the most part superstitious and rich; whenever a man but turned up with someone at his heels to play the flute or the tambourine or the cymbals, telling fortunes with a sieve, as the phrase goes,[*](Proverbial for cheap trickery. Artemidorus (Drean-book 1, 69) says that “if you dream of Pythagoreans, physiognomonics, astragalomants, tyromants, gyromants, coscinomants, morphoscopes, chiroscopes, lecanomants, or necyomants, you must consider all that they say false and unreliable; for their trades are such. They do not know even a little bit about prophecy, but fleece their patrons by charlatanism and fraud.” Oneiromants may of course be trusted !The few allusions to coscinomancy in the ancients give no clue to the method used. As practised in the sixteenth—seventeenth century, to detect thieves, disclose one’s future wife, etc., the sieve was either suspended by a string or more commonly balanced on the top of a pair of tongs set astride the joined middle fingers of the two hands (or of two persons) ; then, after an incantation, a list of names was repeated, and the one upon which the sieve stirred was the one indicated by fate. Or the sieve, when suspended, might be set spinning ; and then the name it stopped on was designated. See, in particular, Johannes Praetorius, de Coscinomantia, Oder vom Sieb-Lauffe, etc., Curiae Variscorum, 1677.)