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[1] Meanwhile, Julian was preparing a campaign against the Persians, which he had long before planned with lofty strength of mind, being exceedingly aroused to punish their misdeeds in the past, knowing and hearing as he did that this savage people for almost three score years had branded the Orient with the cruelest records of murder and pillage, and had often all but annihilated our armies.
[2] He was inflamed besides with a twofold longing for war, first, because he was tired of inactivity and dreamed of clarions and battle; and then, exposed as he had been in the first flower of his youth to warfare with savage nations, while his ears were still warm
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with the prayers of kings and princes who (as it was believed) could more easily be vanquished than led to hold out their hands as suppliants, he burned to add to the tokens of his glorious victories the surname Parthicus.
[3] But his idle and envious detractors,
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seeing these mighty and hasty preparations, cried out that it was shameful and ruinous that through the exchange of one man for another
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so many untimely disturbances should be set on foot; and they devoted all their efforts to putting off the campaign. And they repeatedly said, in the presence of those who they thought could repeat to the emperor what they had heard, that if he did not conduct himself with more moderation in his excessive prosperity and success, like plants that grow rank from too great fertility, he would soon find destruction in his own good fortune.
[5] But Julian, being a man of uncommonly high spirit, no less carefully considered the importance of his campaign, and used every effort to make corre- sponding preparations.
[6] 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
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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
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that deserved punishment rather than indulgence; especially the Petulantes
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and the Celts, whose wilfulness at that time had passed all bounds.
[7] 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 might be found.
[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;
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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
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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,
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should be moved to another place, under the same ceremonial with which the Athenians had purified the island of Delos.
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Res Gestae. Ammianus Marcellinus. John C. Rolfe (Translator). Cambridge, MA. 1935-1940.
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