“After the battle,” Ammianus continues, “three days being passed in repose, that each might cure his own or his neighbour’s wounds, intolerable want of victuals began to afflict us; and the burning both of corn and green crops having reduced men and horses to the extremity of distress, a large part of the provisions brought by the chief officers of the army for their own use was distributed to the indigent soldiery. And the emperor, who, in place of delicacies prepared with regal luxury, satisfied his hunger under a small tent, with a scanty portion of meal and water, which even the labouring common soldier would have disdained; careless of his own safety, performed whatever services were required in the tents of his poor comrades. Then having withdrawn awhile to an anxious and uncertain repose, devoted not to sleep, but to some literary work, written in the camp, and under the tent–skins, in emulation of Julius Caesar, in the dead of night, while deeply meditating upon some philosopher, he beheld, as he acknowledged to his friends, that vision of the genius of the empire which he had seen in Gaul, when about to reach the dignity of Augustus,[206] pass sorrowfully from the tent in mourning habit, his head and horn of abundance covered with a veil. For a moment he was fixed in amazement; yet, superior to all fear, he commended futurity to the gods. As he rose from his lowly couch, to supplicate the powers of heaven with the rites deprecatory of misfortune, a blazing torch appeared to flash across the sky, and vanished, leaving him filled with horror lest it were the star of Mars which thus openly menaced him.”[207]