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.