previous next
47. There were many portents of the victory, but the most remarkable one on record is that which was seen at Tralles. In that city's temple of Victory there stood a statue of Caesar, and the ground around it was itself naturally firm, and was paved with hard stone; yet from this it is said that a palm-tree shot up at the base of the statue.1 Moreover, at Patavium, Caius Cornelius, a man in repute as a seer, a fellow citizen and acquaintance of Livy the historian, chanced that day to be sitting in the place of augury. [2] And to begin with, according to Livy, he discerned the time of the battle, and said to those present that even then the event was in progress and the men were going into action. And when he looked again and observed the signs, he sprang up in a rapture crying: ‘Thou art victorious, O Caesar!’ The bystanders being amazed, he took the chaplet from his head and declared with an oath that he would not put it on again until the event had borne witness to his art. At any rate, Livy insists that this was so.2

1 Cf. Caesar B. C. iii. 105 ad fin.

2 In Book cxi, which is lost.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (Bernadotte Perrin, 1919)
hide References (7 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: