] was warned by a spectre that his house was
about to fall; he went out of it directly, and soon after it fell
down.

The Emperor Julian, the apostate, told his friends that at the time
when his troops were pressing him to accept the empire, being at
Paris, he saw during the night a spectre in the form of a woman, as
the genius of an empire is depicted, who presented herself to remain
with him; but she gave him notice that it would be only for a short
time. The same emperor related, moreover, that writing in his tent a
little before his death, his familiar genius appeared to him, leaving
the tent with a sad and afflicted air. Shortly before the death of the
Emperor Constans, the same Julian had a vision in the night, of a
luminous phantom, who pronounced and repeated to him, more than once,
four Greek verses, importing that when Jupiter should be in the sign
of the water-pot, or Aquarius, and Saturn in the 25th degree of the
Virgin, Constans would end his life in Asia in a shocking manner.

The same Emperor Julian takes Jupiter[303] to witness that he has
often seen Esculapius, who cured him of his sicknesses.

Footnotes:

[299] See Vagenseil _Opera liborum Juvenil._ tom. ii. p. 295, the
Geography of Hubner, and the Geographical Dictionary of la Martiniere,
under the name Hamelen.

[300] Sueton. in Jul. Caesar.

[301] Dio. Cassius. lib. lxviii.

[302] Diogen. Laert. in Simon. Valer. Maxim. lib. xxiii.

[303] Julian, apud Cyrill. Alex.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

OTHER APPARITIONS OF SPECTRES.

Plutarch, whose gravity and wisdom are well known, often speaks of
spectres and apparitions. He says, for instance, that at the famous
battle of Marathon against the Persians, several soldiers saw the
phantom of Thesus, who fought for the Greeks against the enemy.

The same Plutarch, in the life of Sylla, says that that general saw in
his sleep the goddess whom the Romans worshiped according to the rites
of the Cappadocians (who were fire-worshipers), whether it might be
Bellona or Minerva, or the moon. This divinity presented herself
before Sylla, and put into his hand a kind of thunderbolt, telling him
to launch it against his enemies, whom she named to him one after the
other; at the same time that he struck them, he saw them fall and
expire at his feet. There is reason to believe that this same goddess
was Minerva, to whom, as to Jupiter Paganism attributes the right to
hurl the thunderbolt; or rather that it wa