JULIAN 769 resolved to weaken liis power. A threatened invasion of the Persians was made an excuse for withdrawing some of the best legions from the Gallic army. Julian recognized the covert purpose of this, yet proceeded to fulfil the commands of the emperor. A sudden movement of the legions themselves decided otherwise. At Paris, on the night of the parting banquet, they forced their way into Julian s tent, and, proclaiming him emperor, offered him the alternative either of accepting the lofty title or of instant death. Julian accepted the empire, and sent an embassy with a deferential message to Constantius. The message being contemptuously disregarded, both sides prepared for a decisive struggle. After a march of unexampled rapidity through the Black Forest and down the Danube, Julian reached Sirmium, and was on the way to Constantinople, when he received news of the death of Constantius at Mompsocrene in Cilicia (361). Without further trouble Julian found himself everywhere acknow ledged the sole ruler of the Roman empire. Julian had already made a public avowal of paganism, of which he had been a secret adherent from the age of twenty. It was no ordinary profession, but the expression of a strong and even enthusiastic conviction ; the restora tion of the pagan worship was to be the great aim and controlling principle of his government. His reign was too short to show what precise form the pagan revival might ultimately have taken, how far his feelings might have become embittered by his conflict with the Christian faith, whether persecution, violence, and civil war might not have taken the place of the moral suasion which was the method he originally affected. He issued an edict of universal toleration ; but in many respects he used his imperial influence unfairly to advance the work of restora tion. In order to deprive the Christians of the advantages of culture, and discredit them as an ignorant sect, he forbade them to teach rhetoric. The symbols of paganism and of the imperial dignity were so artfully interwoven on the standards of the legions that they could not pay the usual homage to the emperor without seeming to offer worship to the gods ; and, when the soldiers came forward to receive the customary donative, they were required to throw a handful of incense on the altar. Without directly exclud ing Christians from the high offices of state, he held that the worshippers of the gods ought to have the preference. In short, though there was no direct persecution, he exerted much more than a moral pressure to restore the power and prestige of the old faith. Having spent the winter of 361-2 at Constantinople, Tulian proceeded to Antioch to prepare for his great expedition against Persia. His stay there was a curious . episode in his life. Strange to say, it is doubtful whether his pagan convictions or his ascetic life, after the fashion of an antique philosopher, gave most offence to the so-called Christians of the dissolute city. They soon grew heartily tired of each other, and Julian took up his winter quarters at Tarsus, from which in early spring he marched against 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 treacher-
- ous advice of a Persian nobleman, he desisted from the
isiege of that great city, and set out to seek the main army tof the enemy under King Sapor. After a long and useless march into the interior he was forced to retreat, when he found himself enveloped and harassed by the whole Persian army, in a waterless and desolate country, and at the hottest season of the year. The Romans repulsed the enemy in many an obstinate battle. In one of these, however, 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, like Socrates in the prison, he is said to have addressed to his afflicted officers. Jovianus was chosen emperor by the army, which was extricated from its perilous situation only by a very disadvantageous treaty. From Julian s unique position as the last champion of a dying polytheism, his character has ever excited interest and been the subject of debate. Authors such as Gregory of Nazianzus have heaped the fiercest anathemas upon him ; but a just and sympathetic criticism, like Neander s, has found many noble qualities in his character and ample excuse for his leanings to a philosophic paganism. In his childhood he had seen his nearest kinsmen massacred by the heads of the new Christian state; till the age of twenty-five he held his life on sufferance, and passed it in obscurity under the most rigid and suspicious surveillance. The only sympathetic friends he met were among the heathen 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, and still further purified by the moral influence of the Christianity which it rejected. 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 un -self- conscious spontaneity of a Greek. He could never be at rest; he never could hold his tongue ; 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 govern ment 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, and in this respect he little pleased the taste of a judge like Gibbon. 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." Julian wrote several works, including (1) Letters, eighty-three of which are preserved in the edition of Heyler, Mainz, 1828 (most of these are addressed to men of letters) ; (2) Orations, nine in num ber ; (3) Kaiffapes 4) S.v^6ffwv, a satirical composition, in which the dead Csesars appear at a banquet prepared in the heavens, and have to endure the caustic wit of old Silenus ; (4) Avnox^os *) Mto-oTTuyuv, ajcu $ esprit on the inhabitants of Antioch, in which also his own person and mode of life are jocularly handled. The most important of his works, the Ka-ra Xpurriavwv, has been lost, except the fragments preserved in the refutation by Cyril, latest edition by Neumann, 1881. The best edition of his entire works used to be that of Spanheim, Leipsic, 1696 ; the most recent is that of Hertlein in the Teubner series, Leipsic, vol. i. in 187f>. Of the primary sources for Julian s life and character the most important are his own works ; the trustworthy and impart ial historian of the period, Ammianus Marcellinus, v. 8-xxv.; the letters and orations of Julian s much esteemed friend Libanius ; and the orations of his severest critic, Gregory of Nazianzns. The impression which Julian s career produced on the Christians of the Kast is XIII. --97
