[For context: Alexander the Great has picked a spot for the city foundations of Alexandria, and is busy marking out the city boundaries and thoroughfares.]
He [Alexander the Great] strode about the ridge at a breathless pace, marking-chalk in hand, equerries and surveyors panting along behind him.
[…]
Presently Alexander ran out of chalk, and helpful attendants provided him with baskets of barley-meal that had been intended for the workers’ rations. Full of town-planning zeal – what the workers had to say about it is not recorded – the king scattered flour by the handful, wherever the fancy took him. His main object appears to have been a quasi-ritual outlining of the city-wall. Presently flocks of hungry gulls and other birds descended en masse and made short work of this unexpected feast, till every last grain was devoured.
Alexander, being superstitious to a degree, was seriously alarmed, and at first regarded the incident as an unfavourable omen for his project. But that ingenious seer Aristander quickly reassured him. The city, he foretold, would have ‘most abundant and helpful resources and be a nursing mother to men of every nation.’
Source:
Green, Peter. “Intimations of Immortality.” Alexander of Macedon: 356-323 B.C.: A Historical Biography. Univ. of California Press, 2005. 276. Print.
Further Reading:
Alexander III of Macedon / Ἀλέξανδρος ὁ Μέγας (Alexander the Great)
Αρίστανδρος ο Τελμησσεύς (Aristander of Telmessos)
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