Page:Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus.djvu/339

 past, when Caesar Maximianus was about to fight Narses, king of the Persians, a lion and a huge boar which had been slain were at the same time brought to him, and after subduing that nation he returned in safety; forgetting that the destruction which was now portended was to him who invaded the dominions of another, and that Narses had given the offence by being the first to make an inroad into Armenia, a country under the Roman jurisdiction.

12. On the next day, which was the 7th of April, as the sun was setting, suddenly the air became darkened, and all light wholly disappeared, and after repeated claps of thunder and flashes of lightning, a soldier named Jovianus was struck by the lightning and killed, with two horses which he was leading back from the river to which he had taken them to drink.

13. When this was seen, the interpreters of such things were sent for and questioned, and they with increased boldness affirmed that this event forbade the campaign, demonstrating it to be a monitory lightning (for this term is applied to signs which advise or discourage any line of action). And this, as they said, was to be the more guarded against, because it had killed a soldier of rank, with war-horses; and the books which explain lightnings pronounce that places struck in this manner should not be trodden on, nor even looked upon.

14. On the other hand, the philosophers declared that the brilliancy of this sacred fire thus suddenly presented to the eye had no special meaning, but was merely the course of a fiercer breath descending by some singular power from the sky to the lower parts of the world; and that if any foreknowledge were to be derived from such a circumstance, it was rather an increase of renown which was portended to the emperor now engaged in a glorious enterprise; since it is notorious that flame, if it meet with no obstacle, does of its own nature fly upwards.

15. The bridge then, as has been narrated, having been finished, and all the troops having crossed it, the emperor thought it the most important of all things to address his soldiers who were advancing resolutely, in full reliance on their leader and on themselves. Accordingly, a signal having been given by the trumpets, the centurions, cohorts, and maniples assembled, and he, standing on a mound of