Yale (2023) h/b 168pp £18.99 (ISBN 9780300256642)
For a short-lived emperor dying young has pluses and minuses. For biographers it’s all about the ‘what ifs’, but your time in office can be too easily pigeon-holed. In Julian’s case there is much more than speculation: he himself wrote extensively and well, and there’s plenty of contemporary and near-contemporary writing about him. His nineteen months in the purple, in which he tried to reverse Constantine’s official adoption of Christianity, saw the historians conveniently label him as Julian the Apostate.
Too conveniently, as Philip Freeman’s succinct new biography, makes out. Had he not died at the age of 32, Julian might well have gone on to be one of the more successful later emperors. Though a serious student of philosophy and remarkably young when first named ‘Caesar’ (junior emperor), he proved himself a more than capable commander in Gaul: in five years hard campaigning he successfully drove the Alamanni back across the Rhine.
Becoming emperor in November AD 361 he at once cut back the imperial bureaucracy, scaled back taxes and tried to re-invigorate local government. Ascetic and bookish, he spurned the family bloodletting of his predecessors. Had he reigned for twenty or thirty years instead of just 19 months, he might have emulated Augustus or one of the Flavians in bringing tolerance, administrative competence and political stability to an empire already under pressure at its edges.
So how did Julian end up reviled as an apostate? Was he always anti-Christian?
F. takes a very balanced approach. He underlines Julian’s intensive philosophical under-pinning: this was an emperor who had read at length, studied at length, and kept up correspondence with the leading philosophers of the day. Yes, he appears to have been moralistic, mirthless and priggish. But he had the learning and intellectual ability: in different circumstances he might have successfully nurtured and navigated the relationship between Christianity and his earlier strong belief in neo-platonism.
What’s clear from F.’s elegant account is that Julian didn’t set out to reverse Constantine’s policy in its entirety. He was careful at first not to encourage persecution nor to oppress Christian clerics: he saw the danger of creating martyrs (‘I do not want Galileans killed’). But, by the time he came to power, the Christian church was becoming well-established, especially in the big towns and cities of the empire, with bureaucratic power and privileges to match.
The temples and shrines were being neglected. Julian, wanting a better balance, issued an early edict aimed at pagan restoration and revival. He tried to unify the different pagan cults in his writings, and he also urged them to copy Christianity’s organisational success and its strong role in welfare. But the rather cerebral paganism that he promoted lacked Christianity’s growing mass appeal. Christians were now to be found throughout Roman society, including in the army.
Within a few weeks Julian was gone from his capital anyway, heading east to deal once again with the Persian threat, a challenge faced by so many of his predecessors. On that long campaign journey, if his religious tolerance was genuine, it was quickly and sharply tested: he found strong pro-Christian sentiment in cities across Arabia—Antioch, Jerusalem, Caesarea, Bostra and Edessa. With his own army he became much less tolerant and more oppressive, insisting that his troops performed pagan sacrifices and beheading Christian centurions who refused.
We cannot be certain whether he would have turned completely on Christianity. In the end, the fatal mistakes he made were military, splitting his forces and getting caught, like so many before him (and a few after him), in the middle of Mesopotamia. On his retreat from Ctesiphon, he was ambushed and, failing to put on his heavy armour, took a spear to the liver.
Within a generation the pagan cause was wholly lost. Despite Symmachus’s famous plea for mutual tolerance (ad tam grande secretum uno itinere non posset advenire), the Altar of Victory was eventually removed from the Senate, and Theodosius closed the temples. Julian’s fate was to end up as a symbol of godless evil in art and literature for over a thousand years: a tragic figure raging against the pagan dying light, or worse a traitor to God and oppressor of the faith.
With the Renaissance, however, his reputation recovered strongly. Montaigne regarded him as a philosopher of true virtue, Voltaire as an ideal ruler, and Gibbon as an early hero of the enlightenment. Later, the poet Cavafy admired his romantic but doomed struggle against the power of the church. Cavafy’s twelve ‘Julian’ poems, well worth revisiting, perhaps sum up our fascination with him. Julian was in one sense trying to deny the present and recapture a perfect past. But that past was already gone, not least as its Greek culture was absorbed by the Roman empire. The paganism to which Julian wanted to return lacked the more sophisticated power of Christianity, despite all its contradictions, to pursue its own salvation. As F. explains so well, Julian, in fact one of the better educated and deeper thinkers of the 4th century emperors, was caught in the spotlight trying to bolt an already open door. A fascinating study of a fascinating ruler.
Sir Michael Fallon
Founder of the Parliamentary Classics Group