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[8] 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; 1 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 2 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, 3 should be moved to another place, under the same ceremonial with which the Athenians had purified the island of Delos. 4

1 Not the one at Delphi, but a spring at Daphne, a suburb of Antioch.

2 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.

3 Caesar Gallus, in order to purify the place from pagan superstition, had caused the remains of martyrs to be brought there.

4 First under Peisistratus (Hdt. i. 64) and again in the sixth year of the Peloponnesian war (Thuc. iii. 104, 1)

Ammianus Marcellinus. With An English Translation. John C. Rolfe, Ph.D., Litt.D. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1935-1940.

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