Res Gestae

When the corpse of the deceased emperor had been washed and placed in a coffin, Jovianus, who was at that time still an officer in the bodyguard, was ordered to escort it with regal pomp to Constantinople, to be interred beside his kinsfolk.

And as he sat in the carriage that bore the remains, samples of the soldiers’ rations (probae, as they themselves call them) were presented to him, as they commonly are to emperors,[*](The emperors took pains to see that the soldiers were well fed. Cf. Spartianus, Hadr. 11, 1; Lampridius, Alex. Sev. xv. 5.) and the public courier-horses were shown to him, and the people thronged about him in the customary manner. These and similar things foretold imperial power for the said Jovianus, but of an empty and shadowy kind, since he was merely the director of a funeral procession.

While Fortune’s mutable phases were causing these occurrences in a different part of the world, Julian in the midst of his many occupations in Illyricum was constantly prying into the entrails of victims and watching the flight of birds, in his eagerness to foreknow the result of events; but he was perplexed by ambiguous and obscure predictions and continued to be uncertain of the future.

At length, however, Aprunculus, a Gallic orator skilled in soothsaying, afterwards advanced to be governor of Gallia Narbonensis, told him what would happen, having learned it (as he himself declared) from the inspection of a liver which he had seen covered with a double lobe.[*](Cf. Pliny, N.H. xi. 190; Suet. Aug. 96.) And although Julian feared that it might be a fiction conformable to his own desire, and was therefore troubled, he himself saw a much more evident sign which clearly foretold the death of Constantius. For at the very moment when that emperor died in Cilicia, a soldier who lifted Julian with his right hand to mount his horse slipped and fell to the ground; and Julian at once cried in the hearing of many: The man has fallen who raised me to my high estate.

But although he knew that these were favourable signs, yet as if standing fast upon his guard he remained within the confines of Dacia, and even so was troubled with many fears. For he