Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.4, 1865).djvu/200

192 ALEXANDER. populous city, and give it his own name. In order to which, after he had measured and staked out the ground with the advice of the best architects, he chanced one night in his sleep to see a wonderful vision; a grey- headed old man, of a venerable aspect, appeared to stand by him, and pronounce these verses : — An island lies, where loud the billows roar, Pharos they call it, on the Egyptian shore. Alexander upon this immediately rose up and went to Pharos, which, at that time, was an island lying a little above the Canobic mouth of the river Nile, though it has now been joined to the main land by a mole. As soon as he saw the commodious situation of the place, it being a long neck of land, stretching like an isthmus between large lagoons and shallow waters on one side, and the sea on the other, the latter at the end of it making a spacious harbor, he said, Homer, besides his other excellences, was a very good architect, and ordered the plan of a city to be drawn out answerable to the place. To do which, for want of chalk, the soil being black, they laid out their lines with flour, taking in a pretty large compass of ground in a semicircular figure, and drawing into the inside of the circumference equal straight lines from each end, thus giving it something of the form of a cloak or cape. While he was pleasing himself with his design, on a sud- den an infinite number of great birds of several kinds, rising like a black cloud out of the river and the lake, de- voured every morsel of the flour that had been used in setting out the lines ; at which omen even Alexander him- self was troubled, till the augurs restored his confidence again by telling him, it was a sign the city he was about to build would not only abound in all things within itself, but also be the nurse and feeder of many nations. He