"Inhabitants of Antioch," he said almost calmly, restraining himself by a supreme effort, "know that the rioters, and setters on fire of the Temple of Apollo, will be punished without mercy. You scorn my pity? We shall see how you will scorn my anger. The Roman Augustus could blot your town from the earth, so that men should forget that Antioch the great ever existed. But I go forth to war against the Persians. If the gods grant that I return in triumph, woe be to you, rioters! Woe to thee, Nazarene, the carpenter's son!"
And he stretched out his sword above the heads of the crowd.
Suddenly he fancied he heard a voice saying--
"The Nazarene, son of the carpenter, makes ready thy shroud!"
Julian thrilled, turned round, but saw no one. He passed his hand over his eyes. Was it an hallucination? At that moment from the interior of the temple came a deafening noise. Part of the roof had fallen on the statue of Apollo, which reeled from its pedestal. The procession went on its way, taking up again the Psalm--
"_Let those tremble who serve and boast themselves of their idols, And let all gods of the earth bow down before Him!_"
Julian passed the winter in preparations for his Persian campaign. At the beginning of spring, on the fifth of March, he quitted Antioch with an army of sixty-five thousand men. The snow was melting from the mountains. In fruit-gardens the leafless young apricot trees were trimmed with pink blossoms. The soldiery marched gaily to the war as to a festival.
The dockyards of Samos had built a fleet of twelve hundred ships, wrought of enormous cedars, pine, and oak from Taurus gorges, and the fleet had ascended the Euphrates as far as the city of Leontopolis.
By forced marches Julian passed by Hieropolis to Carrhæ, and thence along the Euphrates as far as the southern Persian frontier. In the north, another army of thirty thousand men had been sent out under the generals Procopius and Sebastian. Joined to the forces of the Armenian Arsaces, these were to lay waste Adiabene, Apolloniatis, and traversing Corduene rejoin the principal army on the banks of the Tigris at Ctesiphon.
All had been provided for, combined and planned with ardour by the Emperor himself. Those who understood the plan of campaign were amazed, and not without reason, at its wisdom, simplicity, and greatness of conception.