Budge_Ethiopic_Alexander

THE DREAM OF OLYMPIAS. 1
"the god of Lonya (Libya)."' And Olympias said,
"What will he be like, a young or an old man?"
And Nectanebus answered and said unto her, "He
"will be fair of visage, and noble in stature, and
"without a beard, and he will have [upon his head]
"two rams' horns; indeed he is a fitting [spouse]
"for a woman who is a queen. But behold, in a
"dream thou shalt see him that will sleep with thee."
Then Olympias said unto him, "If I see him in
"a dream and he doeth thus unto me, I will wor-
"ship him^ as a god, and not as a man."
And ^ it came to pass after these things that Nectanebus
Nectanebus went out to the fields, and gathered da^ ,0
certain plants having magical properties which he °'>'"'P'^=knew
of, and he pressed out their juice and pounded
them,'* and made of them a figure of a woman;
and he inscribed upon it the characters of the name^
of Olympias and then cast it into the fire. * And
he laid it down to sleep, and recited incantations
' A"^^ = =
A.'flJP •? compare 6 Tnq Aipurjq Kepaog
TrXouTiiqjopos "A|U|liluv (Meusel, p. 709).
^ The point of the narrative is missed here, but we might
read Ah = for tr-p •
3 See Pseudo-Callisthenes, Bk. i. chap. 5 (Muller, p. 5,
Meusel, p. 709).
^f*^
* The reading of this word is uncertain, for the letters
! are written over an erasure.
5 Literally "the form of her name".
^ In the Latin version (Miiller, p. 6, col. i) Nectanebus
pours the juice of the herbs upon the wax figure "succum
herbarum potentium superfundit"-