IF THE EMPEROR JULIAN HAD NOT EXISTED, GORE VIDAL WOULD have had to invent him, not merely write a slightly scandalous and excellent novel about him.1
Julian is so useful, as hero or villain, that we should be suspicious of him—and pay close attention to what made him tick. This is the old story about him: orphaned and raised by a clergyman, he went off to university studies in the still pagan city of Athens and there fell in love with the old ways in philosophy and religion. Concealing his sympathies, he made his way to the throne, threw off his mask of conventionality, and took on the hero’s task of restoring religion and culture to the ways of old. Cut down too soon on a battlefield, he left his task undone and others soon smothered his memory. Young, witty, wise, skeptical, passionate! It is likely only the profound conservatism of the American film industry that has kept him, in Vidal’s near-screenplay-quality version, from becoming a hero of modern cinema. Plays about him by Ibsen, Kazantzakis, and Regis Debray attest to the appeal Julian has for modern sensibilities. Perhaps this portrait is too perfectly molded to our contemporary tastes to be accurate.
Julian was Constantine’s nephew, his father a much younger half brother to the emperor. Julian’s mother, Basilina, was a well-connected bride for a prince, related somehow to the same Eusebius of Nicomedia we have seen at the side of Constantine in his later years. Julian himself was born in 331 or 332 and thus was too young to have any useful memory of the great emperor in the family. He saw family only through the lens of murder.
We saw the rivalry that ensued when Constantine died and left his realms to be divided among his three sons, Constantine, Constantius, and Constans. Constantius’s subsequent murder of the surviving kin of Constantine spared Julian and his half brother, Gallus, as they were considered too young to kill—Gallus, about twelve; Julian, only six or seven. Initially brought up by Basilina’s mother and supervised by Eusebius of Nicomedia, when the latter died they were put away to a remote imperial estate in central Asia Minor, there to be looked after by a local bishop in gilded exile. The six years there brought Julian to advanced adolescence at a critical time for the empire.
Constantius and Constans had maintained an equable balance of power, but revolt in the west cost Constans his life and in 350, Constantius found himself sole emperor, childless, heirless, and, because of his purge, short on relatives. He summoned Gallus, now a thug of twenty-five, to court, invested him in the purple, and left him to govern the east while he, Constantius, went west to deal with the uprising. Constantius was successful, Gallus—who proved to be a brute without imagination—less so. Julian at this moment might have escaped attention.
Still considered young enough to be harmless, Julian found himself first in the capitals of Nicomedia and Constantinople, receiving a firm religious education in the style of the prevalent Arianizing Christianity of court circles. He remained under imperial supervision for the next few years, while undertaking a serious study of philosophy. In 354, Constantius had Gallus executed and turned his attention to Julian (now in his early twenties), summoning him to appear at his court in Milan. Constantius was unimpressed with what he saw and, after some skeptical examination, let Julian have his way and go off to Athens for further studies. There his associates included the future Christian bishops of distinction we know as Saints Basil and Gregory Nazianzen, acquaintances likely made already during Julian’s exile in their home province of Cappadocia. Julian would have made as plausible a bishop as they and a quiet appointment as such in a remote city would have been a good way to remove him from the temptations of power. We are also told that he was at this time taking an active interest in traditional religion and had himself initiated to the mysteries of Eleusis.
Here pause and consider how our own expectations are swaying this story. For many in Julian’s world, participation in Christian services and an interest in philosophy and traditional religious practices was neither forbidden nor of much interest. The most eager Christians struggled to claim the exclusive devotion of their followers, but with only moderate success. A generation later, Synesius of Cyrene would settle comfortably into a bishopric with an education very similar to Julian’s.2 Such men could be satisfied with the new Christian god as long as he prevailed, but were not deeply attached and surely not easily shocked or distracted if someone maintained a broader range of religious interests. Constantius continued most of the restrictions and constraints that Constantine had placed on traditional practices, but that was an inconvenience and foible of the throne, not something people read as a great turn in history. Julian had his idiosyncrasies, which his enemies and idolizers love to dwell on, but he was far more normal than legend can let him be.
If Julian was distinctive in any particular way, it was for that Christian upbringing, at court and in Cappadocia. Julian would be the first man ever to come to the throne of the Roman Empire with a long and deep experience of Christianity, closely supervised by bishops. Whatever he believed and practiced when he came to the throne, he brought his Christianity along with him as well. When he came to places where traditional religion was practiced, he saw it with an eye tutored by Christians. Conceiving traditional culture as holistic paganism, as if it had essential features that differentiated it from Christianity: that lesson Julian had learned well from his Christian teachers. In that fundamental way, Julian was always a Christian.
Athens did not have long to work its magic on him. Recalled to court in 355, Julian was sent out to be Constantius’s figurehead on the Gaulish frontier with Germany while the senior emperor attended to business on the Persian front. With no military experience and no expectations to live up to, Julian was bundled off to the front with a team of minders and watchers. Generals would do the work, while Julian represented Constantius and performed the role of a Caesar, or junior emperor.
Julian’s great advantage, and eventually his downfall, lay in his unexpected display of ability in Gaul. He turned out, against all odds for a bookish young man with no military experience, to be shrewd in military matters and, better still, successful in them. The soldiers took to him and he, wisely, to them, for all that he spent his nights reading and writing in his tent, for all that he lived a life considerably more abstemious than might be expected of a general. (His books are well worth reading, from high theology to satire. His Hymn to Helios can be solemnly read as evidence of a solar cult in late antiquity, but those who do so rarely remember to link Julian’s enthusiasm for the sun god with Constantine and Constantius’s affinity for Apollo.) With some early signs of success, this lately bearded boy charmed many. In a campaign of two years, he drove marauders and would-be settlers back across the Rhine, sealing his reputation with an underdog victory at Strasburg in 357.
Perhaps more intelligent and better educated than most, he soon turned his attention to the most difficult matters of civil government, taxation and the enforcement of taxation, a vital necessity for keeping troops provisioned and happy. In short order, he had both improved tax collections and consequently lowered tax rates. By cleaning up corruption, he effected the neat trick of leaving people happier paying taxes than they were before.
Julian was in Gaul for five years, as successful a general and ruler as had been seen in those parts in the fifty years since Constantine and his father had left the region. Success among high-ranking generals could lead in only two directions: the throne or the grave. Julian’s troops were loyal and took it badly when a command came from Constantius on the Persian frontier summoning most of them to join him in a war that had become appreciably hotter. Rumor whispered that Constantius’s move was driven partly by jealousy and a desire to make sure that the young general did not become a real contender for the throne. The inevitable—among Roman armies—consequences followed, with acclamation of a new emperor, reluctance (feigned or not), and eventual acquiescence. By the end of 360, still fighting on the western front, Julian had assumed the title of Augustus and thus claimed equal standing with his cousin. Constantius could have chosen to bless this accession, but he condemned it instead. In 361, with both frontier wars in remission, the two adversaries turned their armies toward each other.
Julian took a northern route, along the frontier and close to the Danube, while sending some of his forces in parallel through northern Italy to alert, recruit, and pacify others. He came as far as his grandfather’s native town of Naissus and paused to watch events elsewhere. Constantius’s forces were coming west, the emperor at their rear, and the first skirmishes had begun at Aquileia, in northeastern Italy.
Then Constantius died. He had made it back to Roman territory from the difficult camp life on the frontier, but fell ill and died before he could confront his cousin. With no realistic alternative, he declared in his will that Julian should succeed him.
Julian had thus sustained his possession of the most important of an emperor’s resources: sheer dumb luck. What could have been a wasting campaign turned into a triumphal procession from the Danube down to Constantinople. It was 361 and Julian was the thirty-year-old master of the universe. Hosting Constantius’s very Christian funeral in Constantinople confirmed Julian’s power.
At this point, still confident in the luck he would call the favor of the gods, Julian began to rely on his education and intelligence to carry him forward. He did several of the things new emperors needed to do, like prosecuting and executing a few of Constantius’s courtiers for corruption. He also pursued ambitious reforms that were probably better left undone. Relying on an old idea of the dignity and independence of the cities and citizens of the empire, he sought to reverse the same “big government” centralization that had made it possible for Diocletian and his successors to bring order back to the huge shapeless empire after half a century of chaos. When Julian took power, the division and redivision of Roman provinces had seen these administrative units grow from 46 two centuries earlier to 121 now with the same or slightly less territory under administration. The tax man was everywhere and the wealth and initiative belonged to the emperor.
What Julian might have tried to do to unsettle this arrangement is largely a matter of speculation, because he remained in Constantinople only five months before beginning in early 362 to make his way east toward the Persian threat—and the opportunity for his own glory.
Julian had a bumpy time in the great city of Antioch, where he paused to gather his forces along the way. His personal style played badly with some there and tetchy displays of imperial crankiness did not help. Within a few months he was horsed again and heading east to defeat the Persians. Great military success in the east would consolidate his power and give his other ambitions vital support. He wasn’t the first Roman general heading in that direction thinking he might become the next Alexander the Great.
It’s hard to know what might have happened. As it was, he left Antioch in March 363 and three months later lay dead in his tent, the victim of an abdominal wound in battle that no contemporary physician could heal. Early rumor, opposed by early testimony, thought he might have been killed by one of his own men; later and more sober discussion and report made it clearer that it had been an enemy weapon that reached him; still later legend would try to give credit to his religious opponents. Writing sixty-five years later, the church historian Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus in Syria, claimed that when Julian realized the gravity of his wound, he “filled his hand with blood and cried, ‘You win, Galilean!’”3 Scholars now criticize the strategy and tactics of his fighting, but some credit must be given to the end of his lucky streak. A general fighting in any ancient battle was taking a huge chance with his life, and that chance sometimes had to turn out badly.
When Julian was dead, his philosophical praetorian prefect, Saturninus Secundus Salutius, was offered, but declined the office.4 Instead, a senior officer named Jovian was quickly selected to take the throne, and he led the armies back out of Persia to Antioch and to safety. Jovian died of mischance or malfeasance en route to Constantinople a few months later and another general, Valentinian from Pannonia (roughly modern Hungary), was selected to replace him. He ruled till his death in 375 and his brother and sons ruled after him for another seventeen years. By then, another general, Theodosius the Spaniard, had been selected and had shared rule from 379, dying himself in 395. His dynasty would last halfway through the fifth century. All these men were Christians.
These transitions illustrate the stability now achieved by the military aristocracy. Rome in the fourth century knew how to do its business. What is beyond striking is the mismatch between the ordinariness of this story and the flamboyance of what we think we know about Julian. Did he not struggle to overthrow Christianity? Was it not a struggle to the death? How could that not have affected the succession?
One answer might be simply that the Christians had the power and exercised it coldly in the debate among generals the morning after Julian’s death, but that possibility—itself a sign of the entrenchment that Constantine and Constantius would have had to achieve to make that so—is at least somewhat undermined by the eyewitness testimony (of Ammianus) that holds that the throne was offered to Salutius. If anyone around Julian would be of a mind to continue his campaign in matters of religion, it was Salutius. He not only declined the position, pleading illness and old age, but retained his office as praetorian prefect through Jovian’s reign and into that of Valentinian. If Julian had any support for his supposed campaign of eradication, it is hard to believe that this particular transition story would have played out. Instead all we hear is that when Jovian, some kind of Christian, took command, he consulted the soothsayers before choosing his course. In the circumstances, no one would either have objected or placed much weight on his doing so.
Stay with Ammianus Marcellinus for a moment. An officer and a gentleman, he had had a solid midlevel career in the Roman army, serving in Gaul and in the east with Julian. In retirement he wrote a vivid and incisive history of his own times, modeling himself on Tacitus and incorporating his own eyewitness testimony. (His account of escaping from the city of Amida on the Tigris when it was besieged by the Persians is breathtaking.) His sympathies were not with the Christians, whom he gently and sometimes not so gently lampoons in his history. (Their bishops went to so many conferences via the public system of relay transport for high officials, he said, that the system threatened to break down.) He shows every reasonable sign in his language and his inclinations of sympathy with traditional ways of thinking about religion. He supported Julian as emperor wholeheartedly.
The one thing about Julian that Ammianus demurs at is precisely Julian’s religious enthusiasm, and he demurs strongly. At one point he has an outburst: “but it was really extreme of him to forbid Christians from serving as teachers of rhetoric and grammar—that’s something to be buried in eternal silence!”5 That ban was one of Julian’s faltering steps against Christianity, to which one witty Christian intellectual reacted by writing up the Christian story in traditional genres—epic, tragedy—to make them teachable texts.
Ammianus’s attitude confirms for us that whatever was at stake in 363 at the death of Julian, a die-hard struggle between religions was not it. What Julian was about had everything to do with Julian and his demons and little to do with the wider religious history of his time. If we stay at the level of external and verifiable events, he did try to reverse the campaign Constantine had begun to make Christianity the primary religion of the Roman world. He restored funding to temples and priesthoods and removed privileges from Christian churches and Christians. He undertook to revive specific rituals and temples, not always successfully.
In one case at Antioch, things had gone too far. It wasn’t just that the oracle of Apollo at Daphne, a resort suburb of Antioch famous for its elegance and infamous for its decadence, had ceased speaking. When Julian went to reawaken it, he found that Christians had buried a martyred bishop of a century earlier on the site, rewriting its sacred geography in the same spirit with which the louche Clodius had built a temple on the site of Cicero’s house. When Julian went to restore the old normal, a mob protested and shortly afterward the temple, forcibly reopened, went up in flames. Julian, whose knowledge of the ancient ways seems to have come heavily from books, had misread the place, the people, and the times. If there had been a long lapse in patronage of places like this temple in the third century, and now a long advance of patronage for Christianity, Julian could seem to be a century out of date to his contemporaries. What he faced was not so much hostility or opposition as incomprehension.
Julian had also decided to show his support for traditional religion by authorizing the rebuilding of the temple at Jerusalem, now three hundred years destroyed. This story comes from the usually reliable Ammianus, who nevertheless offers a miracle to explain how the effort came to nothing. When workmen began to dig, “fearful balls of fire burst forth with continuous eruptions near the foundations, burning the workmen and making the place unapproachable.”6 A modern who does not believe, goodness gracious, in great balls of fire has to note that the supposedly pagan source is offering us a story that sounds either very Jewish or very Christian.
Then there was outright competition. Christian churches had become notable for their “charity”—organized redistribution of the resources of kindness and sustenance and money to the disadvantaged members of their community. Such practices went back a long way in Roman fraternal organizations, but with the elevation of Christianity to the rank of a state religion and the flow of riches that came with that, the opportunity to be generous was greater and was noticed. The men of old had been looking to demonstrate how wealthy they were; the churches were looking to demonstrate how kind they were. Julian observed all this with admiration and so began to promote the organization of similar benefactions through traditional religious organizations. This was paganism remade in the image of Christianity—not a bad idea, but hardly a restoration of lapsed tradition.
By this time, Julian should be reminding us of Augustus. Both of them found a political situation that they wanted to remake for their own benefit, both declared a failure of religious loyalty that few others had detected, and both set out to remake religion in the name of restoration—for their own benefit. The simplest way to compare them is to observe that Julian survived two years on the throne after the defeat of his last adversary, Augustus forty-four, and that makes all the difference. Julian further did not recognize how well entrenched religious novelty was and how apathetic traditional devotees tended to be. Had Julian survived the Persian war and returned to make good his claims to restoration, he had a long, potholed road ahead of him.
Julian’s own personal ideas—given that we can approach him so closely—have attracted intense interest for many years, though they are only marginally relevant to his public actions. The reigning scholarly orthodoxy for a century and until quite recently made of him a romantic hero. Some simply lionized him, while others belittled his naïveté and quirks of personality. Most recently, less biographically intense scholars have eschewed speculation to give us a more realistic picture.7
Julian did not believe in the Christian god or attend his services any longer, but the effects of his Christian education and upbringing still determined how he thought about religion. His education consisted of conventional readings in the ancient classics and the ancient philosophers, but these were accompanied by their more recent commentators who had rewritten the ancients into modern dress. The philosopher Iamblichus, in particular, perhaps some kind of descendant of the relatives of Elagabalus, had died around the year of the Council of Nicea. His work interpreted Plato and contemporary neo-Platonism very much in the spirit of Alexandria—that is, of the spirit of Christian philosophical speculation. Neither his hostility toward Christianity nor Christian hostility toward him should conceal just how closely the two schools resembled each other in how they thought about religious ideas.
What the “moderns” of this period shared with Christian intellectuals was a converging sense that philosophical doctrine and religious practice were entwined and that fundamental spiritual forces were to be engaged by that practice. The rising status of the divine was accompanied by disagreement about how best to commune with it. Where the factions differed was on precise matters of doctrine, not least because the Christians acknowledged the authority of special books that no philosopher outside their tradition would deign to respect. They differed as well on questions of which religious practices best connected votaries with the divine powers of the world. Those questions were eminently empirical. That is, and we are still on traditionalist ground here, the true god was one who responded to the call of your worship. The divine practice that Iamblichus favored has come to be called “theurgy,” depending for extraphilosophical guidance on a set of books called the Chaldean Oracles. These commentaries on mystic verse, supposedly from Persian Babylonia, had been increasingly in vogue since they were first circulated in the second century CE and had taken shape mainly in neo-Platonic circles.
Platonic or Christian, divine power loomed larger and scarier than ever before. Right and wrong, truth and falsehood had intruded where a rude pragmatism had formerly sufficed. It was no longer enough to boast of what worked for you (whether or not it worked for your neighbor) and no longer possible to detach philosophical reflection from the realities of the cult—as Socrates had, at the opening of the Republic, when he attended a festival at the Piraeus. Now these things mattered fiercely.
By his every action, Julian paid tribute to the Christianity he never escaped. The old rites he tried to revive were too consciously in competition with Christianity; the organization of cult and service no less so. It made great political theater for him to be seen as a reviver of the old ways, but in every important way he was modern and his revival superficial. It is no wonder that when he was gone, it dried up and blew away as easily as a desert tumbleweed.