Alexander was just getting his beard when the
death of the Tyanean put him in a bad way, since it
coincided with the passing of his beauty, by which
he might have supported himself. So he abandoned
petty projects for ever. He formed a partnership
with a Byzantine writer of choral songs, one of
those who enter the public competitions, far more
abominable than himself by nature—Cocconas, Cocconas comes from κόκκων (modern Greek κουκουνάρι), pine-kernel, seed, nut. Cf. Anth. Pal, 12, 222. I
think, was his nickname,—and they went about the
country practising quackery and sorcery, and “trimming the fatheads”—for so they style the public in
the traditional patter of magicians. Well, among
these they hit upon a rich Macedonian woman, past
her prime but still eager to be charming, and not
only lined their purses fairly well at her expense,
but went with her from Bithynia to Macedon. She



 

came from Pella, a place once flourishing in the time
of the kings of Macedon but now insignificant, with
very few inhabitants.

 

There they saw great serpents, quite tame and gentle, so that they were
kept by women, slept with children, let themselves
be stepped upon, were not angry when they were
stroked, and took milk from the breast just like
babies. There are many such in the country, and
that, probably, is what gave currency in former days
to the story about Olympias; no doubt a serpent of
that sort slept with her when she was carrying
Alexander. The story was that Alexander was the son of Zeus, who had visited Olympias in the form of a serpent. So they bought one of the reptiles,
the finest, for a few coppers;
 

and, in the words of
Thucydides: ‘Here beginneth the war!” Thucydides ii, 1. 
As you might have expected of two consummate
rascals, greatly daring, fully prepared for mischief,
who had put their heads together, they readily
discerned that human life is swayed by two great
tyrants, hope and fear, and that a man who could
use both of these to advantage would speedily enrich
himself. For they perceived that both to one who
fears and to one who hopes, foreknowledge is very
essential and very keenly coveted, and that long ago
not only Delphi, but Delos and Clarus and Branchidae, had become rich and famous because, thanks
to the tyrants just mentioned, hope and fear, men
continually visited their sanctuaries and sought to
learn the future in advance, and to that end sacrificed
hecatombs and dedicated ingots of gold. By turning
all this round and round in conference .with one



 

another and keeping it astir, they concocted the
project of founding a prophetic shrine and oracle,
hoping that if they should succeed in it, they would
at once be rich and prosperous—which, in fact, befell
them in greater measure than they at first expected,
and turned out better than they hoped.
 

Then they began planning, first about the place,
and next, what should be the commencement and
the character of the venture. Cocconas thought
Chalcedon a suitable and convenient place, close
to Thrace and Bithynia, and not far, too, from Asia Asia here and elsewhere in this piece refers to the Roman province of Asia—western Asia Minor. 
and Galatia and all the peoples of the interior.
Alexander, on the other hand, preferred his own
home, saying—and it was true—that to commence
such a venture they needed “fat-heads”’ and simpletons to be their victims, and such, he said, were the
Paphlagonians who lived up above Abonoteichus, who
were for the most part superstitious and rich; whenever a man but turned up with someone at his heels
to play the flute or the tambourine or the cymbals,
telling fortunes with a sieve, as the phrase goes, Proverbial for cheap trickery. Artemidorus (Drean-book 1, 69) says that “if you dream of Pythagoreans, physiognomonics, astragalomants, tyromants, gyromants, coscinomants, morphoscopes, chiroscopes, lecanomants, or necyomants, you must consider all that they say false and unreliable; for their trades are such. They do not know even a little bit about prophecy, but fleece their patrons by charlatanism and fraud.” Oneiromants may of course be trusted! The few allusions to coscinomancy in the ancients give no clue to the method used. As practised in the sixteenth—seventeenth century, to detect thieves, disclose one’s future wife, etc., the sieve was either suspended by a string or more commonly balanced on the top of a pair of tongs set astride the joined middle fingers of the two hands (or of two persons); then, after an incantation, a list of names was repeated, and the one upon which the sieve stirred was the one indicated by fate. Or the sieve, when suspended, might be set spinning; and then the name it stopped on was designated. See, in particular, Johannes Praetorius, de Coscinomantia, Oder vom Sieb-Lauffe, etc., Curiae Variscorum, 1677. 




 

they were all agog over him on the instant and
stared at him as if he were a god from heaven.
 
There was no slight difference of opinion between them on that score, but in the end Alexander
won, and going to Chalcedon, since after all that
city seemed to them to have some usefulness, in the
temple of Apollo, which is the most ancient in
Chalcedon, they buried bronze tablets which said
that very soon Asclepius, with his father Apollo,
would move to Pontus and take up his residence at
Abonoteichus. The opportune discovery of these
tablets caused this story to spread quickly to all
Bithynia and Pontus, and to Abonoteichus sooner
than anywhere else. Indeed, the people of that
city immediately voted to build a temple and began
at once to dig for the foundations. Then Cocconas
was left behind in Chalcedon, composing equivocal,
ambiguous, obscure oracles, and died before long,
bitten, I think, by a viper.