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[5] There was no chalk at hand, so they took barley-meal 1 and marked out with it on the dark soil a rounded area, to whose inner arc straight lines extended so as to produce the figure of a chlamys, or military cloak, the lines beginning from the skirts (as one may say), and narrowing the breadth of the area uniformly. 2 The king was delighted with the design; but suddenly birds from the river and the lagoon, infinite in number and of every sort and size, settled down upon the place like clouds and devoured every particle of the barley-meal, so that even Alexander was greatly disturbed at the omen.

1 Cf. Arrian, Anab. iii. 2, 1.

2 See Tarbell, ‘The Form of the Chlamys,’ Classical Philology, 1906, p. 285.

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