When marching from the pacified Western Empire towards a confrontation with his uncle Constantius, Julian halted in Dacia and “busied himself with the inspection of the entrails of sacrifices and with the observation of the flights of birds.” The answers, not for the first time, were “ambiguous and obscure.” Then a Gallic rhetorician, whose speciality was divination from entrails, discovered a liver covered with a double layer of skin, which apparently promised a successful campaign. Quite how and quite why, Ammianus does not tell us. But in any case there was a complication: Julian feared
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