Were we to follow down the pages of Greek history, we should but repeat the same story over and over. We should, for example, see Alexander the Great balked at the banks of the Hyphasis, and forced to turn back because of inauspicious auguries based as before upon the dissection of a fowl. Alexander himself, to be sure, would have scorned the augury; had he been the prey of such petty superstitions he would never have conquered Asia. We know how he compelled the oracle at Delphi to yield to his wishes; how he cut the Gordian knot; how he made his dominating personality felt at the temple of Ammon in Egypt. We know, in a word, that he yielded to superstitions only in so far as they served his purpose. Left to his own devices, he would not have consulted an oracle at the banks of the Hyphasis; or, consulting, would have forced from the oracle a favorable answer. But his subordinates were mutinous and he had no choice. Suffice it for our present purpose that the oracle was consulted, and that its answer turned the conqueror back. One or two instances from Roman history may complete the picture. Passing over all those mythical narratives which virtually constitute the early history of Rome, as preserved to us by such historians as Livy and Dionysius, we find so logical an historian as Tacitus recording a miraculous achievement of Vespasian without adverse comment. "During the months when Vespasian was waiting at Alexandria for the periodical season of the summer winds, and a safe navigation, many miracles occurred by which the favor of Heaven and a sort of bias in the powers above towards Vespasian were manifested." Tacitus then describes in detail the cure of various maladies by the emperor, and relates that the emperor on visiting a temple was met there, in the spirit, by a prominent Egyptian who was proved to be at the same time some eighty miles distant from Alexandria.