Res Gestae

Nevertheless, he drenched the altars with the blood of an excessive number of victims, sometimes offering up a hundred oxen at once, with countless flocks of various other animals, and with white birds[*](A colour of good omen; cf. Juv. xiii. 141, gallinae filius albae; Suet., Galba, 1; Hor., Sat. i. 7, 8, equis albis; etc.) hunted out by land and sea; to such a degree that almost every day his soldiers, who gorged themselves on the abundance of meat, living boorishly and corrupted by their eagerness for drink, were carried through the squares to their lodgings on the shoulders of passers-by from the public temples, where they indulged in banquets[*](I.e. sacrificial feasts.) that deserved punishment rather than indulgence; especially the Petulantes[*](Cf. xx. 4, 2, note.) and the Celts, whose wilfulness at that time had passed all bounds.

Moreover, the ceremonial rites were excessively increased, with an expenditure of money hitherto unusual and burdensome. And, as it was now allowed without hindrance, everyone who professed a knowledge of divination, alike the learned and the ignorant, without limit or prescribed rules, were permitted to question the oracles and the entrails, which sometimes disclose the future; and from the notes of birds, from their flight, and from omens, the truth was sought with studied variety, if anywhere it

While these things were thus going on, as if in time of peace, Julian devoted to many interests, entered upon a new way of consultation, and thought of opening the prophetic springs of the Castalian fount;[*](Not the one at Delphi, but a spring at Daphne, a suburb of Antioch.) this, it is said, Caesar Hadrian had blocked up with a huge mass of stones, for fear that (as he himself had learned from the prophetic waters[*](According to Sozomenus, Church History, v. 19, he threw a laurel leaf into the spring, and, when he took it out, found on it a note, which confirmed his hopes.) that he was destined to become emperor), others also might get similar information. And Julian, after invoking the god, decided that the bodies which had been buried around the spring,[*](Caesar Gallus, in order to purify the place from pagan superstition, had caused the remains of martyrs to be brought there.) should be moved to another place, under the same ceremonial with which the Athenians had purified the island of Delos.[*](First under Peisistratus (Hdt. i. 64) and again in the sixth year of the Peloponnesian war (Thuc. iii. 104, 1))

At that same time, on the twenty-second of October, the splendid temple of the Daphnaean Apollo, which that hot-tempered and cruel king Antiochus Epiphanes had built,[*](According to others, the builder was Seleucus Nicator. Antiochus may have enlarged or embellished it.) and with it the statue of the god, a copy of that of the Olympian Zeus[*](At Olympia, the work of Phidias; of. Pausanias, v. 11, 9.) and of equal size, was reduced to ashes by a

The unexpected destruction of this shrine by so terrible an accident inflamed the emperor with such anger, that he ordered stricter investigations than usual to be made, and the greater church at Antioch to be closed. For he suspected that the Christians had done the deed, aroused by jealousy and unwillingness to see the temple enclosed by a magnificent colonnade.

It was said, however, though on very slight evidence, that the cause of the burning of the temple was this: the philosopher Asclepiades, whom I have mentioned in the history of Magnentius,[*](In a lost book.) when he had come to that suburb[*](Daphne.) from abroad to visit Julian, placed before the lofty feet of the statue a little silver image of the Dea Caelestis,[*](Venus Urania, as worshipped in Syria and Phoenicia) which he always carried with him wherever he went, and after lighting some wax tapers as usual, went away. From these tapers after midnight, when no one could be present to render aid, some flying sparks alighted on the woodwork, which was very old, and the fire, fed by the dry fuel, mounted and burned whatever it could reach, at however great a height it was.

In that year also, just as the winter season was at hand, there was such a fearful scarcity of water that some brooks dried up, as well as springs which had before over- flowed with plentiful jets of water; but later these were restored to their former condition.

Then, on the second of December, just before evening, the rest of Nicomedia[*](Cf. xvii. 7, 1-8.) was wholly destroyed by an earthquake, as well as a good part of Nicaea.