Persia. At the head of a powerful and well-appointed army he advanced through Mesopotamia and Assyria as far as Ctesiphon, near which he crossed the Tigris, in face of a Persian army which he defeated. Misled by the treacherous advice of a Persian nobleman, he desisted from the siege, and set out to seek the main army of the enemy under Shapur II. (q.v.). After a long, useless march he was forced to retreat, and found himself enveloped by the whole Persian army, in a waterless and desolate country, at the hottest season of the year. The Romans repulsed the enemy in many an obstinate battle, but on the 26th of June 363 Julian, who was ever in the front, was mortally wounded. The same night he died in his tent. In the most authentic historian of his reign, Ammianus Marcellinus, we find a noble speech, which he is said to have addressed to his afflicted officers. Soon after his death the rumour spread that the fatal wound had been inflicted by a Christian in the Roman army. The well-known statement, first found in Theodoret (fl. 5th century), that Julian threw his blood towards heaven, exclaiming, “Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!” is probably a development of the account of his death in the poems of Ephraem Syrus.
From Julian’s unique position as the last champion of a dying polytheism, his character has always excited interest. Authors such as Gregory of Nazianzus have heaped the fiercest anathemas upon him; but a just and sympathetic criticism finds many noble qualities in his character. In childhood and youth he had learned to regard Christianity as a persecuting force. The only sympathetic friends he met were among the pagan rhetoricians and philosophers; and he found a suitable outlet for his restless and inquiring mind only in the studies of ancient Greece. In this way he was attracted to the old paganism; but it was a paganism idealized by the philosophy of the time.
In other respects Julian was no unworthy successor of the Antonines. Though brought up in a studious and pedantic solitude, he was no sooner called to the government of Gaul than he displayed all the energy, the hardihood and the practical sagacity of an old Roman. In temperance, self-control and zeal for the public good, as he understood it, he was unsurpassed. To these Roman qualities he added the culture, literary instincts and speculative curiosity of a Greek. One of the most remarkable features of his public life was the perfect ease and mastery with which he associated the cares of war and statesmanship with the assiduous cultivation of literature and philosophy. Yet even his devotion to culture was not free from pedantry and dilettantism. His contemporaries observed in him a want of naturalness. He had not the moral health or the composed and reticent manhood of a Roman, or the spontaneity of a Greek. He was never at rest; in the rapid torrent of his conversation he was apt to run himself out of breath; his manner was jerky and spasmodic. He showed quite a deferential regard for the sophists and rhetoricians of the time, and advanced them to high offices of state; there was real cause for fear that he would introduce the government of pedants in the Roman empire. Last of all, his love for the old philosophy was sadly disfigured by his devotion to the old superstitions. He was greatly given to divination; he was noted for the number of his sacrificial victims. Wits applied to him the joke that had been passed on Marcus Aurelius: “The white cattle to Marcus Caesar, greeting. If you conquer, there is an end of us.”
Bibliography.—The works of Julian, of which there are complete editions by E. Spanheim (Leipzig, 1696) and F. C. Hertlein (Teubner series, 1875–1876), consist of the following: (1) Letters, of which more than eighty have been preserved under his name, although the genuineness of several has been disputed. For his views on religious toleration and his attitude towards Christians and Jews the most important are 25–27, 51, 52, and the fragment in Hertlein, i. 371. The letter of Gallus to Julian, warning him against reverting to heathenism, is probably a Christian forgery. Six new letters were discovered in 1884 by A. Papadopulos Kerameus in a monastery on the island of Chalcis near Constantinople (see Rheinisches Museum, xlii., 1887). Separate edition of the letters by L. H. Heyler (1828); see also J. Bidez and F. Cumont, “Recherches sur la tradition MS. des lettres de l’empereur Julian” in Mémoires couronnés . . . publiés par l’Acad. royale de Belgique, lvii. (1898) and F. Cumont, Sur l’authenticité de quelques lettres de Julien (1889). (2) Orations, eight in number—two panegyrics on Constantius, one on the empress Eusebia, two theosophical declamations on King Helios and the Mother of the Gods, two essays on true and false cynicism, and a consolatory address to himself on the departure of his friend Salustius to the East. (3) Caesares or Symposium, a satirical composition after the manner of Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis, in which the deified Caesars appear in succession at a banquet given in Olympus, to be censured for their vices and crimes by old Silenus. (4) Misopogon (the beard-hater), written at Antioch, a satire on the licentiousness of its inhabitants; while at the same time his own person and manner of life are treated in a whimsical spirit. It also contains a charming description of Lutetia (Paris). It owes its name to the ridicule heaped upon his beard by the Antiocheans, who were in the habit of shaving. (5) Five epigrams, two of which (Anth. Pal., ix. 365, 368) are of some interest. (6) Κατὰ Χριστιανῶν (Adversus Christianos) in three books, an attack on Christianity written during the Persian campaign, is lost. Theodosius II. ordered all copies of it to be destroyed, and our knowledge of its contents is derived almost entirely from the Contra Julianum of Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, written sixty years later (see Juliani librorum contra Christianos quae supersunt, ed. C. J. Neumann 1880). English Translations: Select works by J. Duncombe (1784) containing all except the first seven orations (viii. and the fable from vii. are included): the theosophical addresses to King Helios and the Mother of the Gods by Thomas Taylor (1793) and C. W. King in Bohn’s Classical Library (1888); the public letters, by E. J. Chinnock (1901).
Authorities.—1. Ancient: (a) Pagan writers. Of these the most trustworthy and impartial is the historian Ammianus Marcellinus (xv. 8–xxv.), a contemporary and in part an eye-witness of the events he describes (other historians are Zosimus and Eutropius); the sophist Libanius, who in speaking of his imperial friend shows himself creditably free from exaggeration and servility; Eunapius (in his lives of Maximus, Oribasius, the physician and friend of Julian, and Prohaeresius) and Claudius Mamertinus, the panegyrist, are less trustworthy. (b) Christian writers. Gregory of Nazianzus, the author of two violent invectives against Julian; Rufinus; Socrates; Sozomen; Theodoret; Philostorgius; the poems of Ephraem Syrus written in 363; Zonaras; Cedrenus; and later Byzantine chronographers. The impression which Julian produced on the Christians of the East is reflected in two Syriac romances published by J. G. E. Hoffmann, Julianos der Abtrünnige (1880; see also Th. Nöldeke in Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft [1874], xxviii. 263).
2. Modern. For works before 1878 see R. Engelmann, Scriptores Graeci (8th ed., by E. Preuss, 1880). Of later works the most important are G. H. Rendall, The Emperor Julian, Paganism and Christianity (1879); Alice Gardner, Julian, Philosopher and Emperor (1895); G. Negri, Julian the Apostate (Eng. trans., 1905); E. Müller, Kaiser Flavius Claudius Julianus (1901); P. Allard, Julien l’apostat (1900–1903); G. Mau, Die Religionsphilosophie Kaiser Julians in seinen Reden auf König Helios und die Göttermutter (1907); J. E. Sandys, Hist. of Classical Scholarship (1906), p. 356; W. Christ, Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur (1898), § 603; J. Geffcken, “Kaiser Julianus und die Streitschriften seiner Gegner,” in Neue Jahrb. f. das klassische Altertum (1908), pp. 161–195. The sketch by Gibbon (Decline and Fall, chs. xix., xxii.–xxiv.) and the articles by J. Wordsworth in Smith’s Dictionary of Christian Biography and A. Harnack in Herzog-Hauck’s Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie ix. (1901) are valuable, the last especially for the bibliography. (T. K.; J. H. F.)
JÜLICH (Fr. Juliers), a town of Germany, in the Prussian
Rhine province, on the right bank of the Roer, 16 m. N.E. of
Aix-la-Chapelle. Pop. (1900), 5459. It contains an Evangelical
and two Roman Catholic churches, a gymnasium, a school for
non-commissioned officers, which occupies the former ducal
palace, and a museum of local antiquities. Its manufactures
include sugar, leather and paper. Jülich (formerly also Gülch,
Guliche) the capital of the former duchy of that name, is the
Juliacum of the Antonini Itinerarium; some have attributed its
origin to Julius Caesar. It became a fortress in the 17th century,
and was captured by the archduke Leopold in 1609, by the Dutch under Maurice of Orange in 1610, and by the Spaniards in 1622. In 1794 it was taken by the French, who held it until the peace of Paris in 1814. Till 1860, when its works were demolished, Jülich ranked as a fortress of the second class.
Jülich, or Juliers, Duchy of. In the 9th century a certain Matfried was count of Jülich (pagus Juliacensis), and towards the end of the 11th century one Gerhard held this dignity. This Gerhard founded a family of hereditary counts, who held Jülich as immediate vassals of the emperor, and in 1356 the county was raised to the rank of a duchy. The older and reigning branch of the family died in 1423, when Jülich passed to Adolph, duke of Berg (d. 1437), who belonged to a younger branch, and who had obtained Berg by virtue of the marriage
