expense of his sanity. "Quos deus vult perdere prius dementat." Now, there is no real evidence for the frenzied megalomania, the "Cäsarenwahn," which the poet attributes to Julian. It is not even certain that his conduct of the Persian expedition was so rash and desperate as it is represented to be. Gibbon (no blind partisan of Julian's) has shown that there is a case to be made even for the burning of the fleet. The mistake, perhaps, lay, not so much in burning it, as in having it there at all. Even as events fell out, the result of the expedition was by no means the greatest disaster that ever befell the Roman arms. The commonplace, self-indulgent Jovian brought the army off, ignominiously indeed, but in tolerable preservation. Had Julian lived, who knows but that the burning of the ships might now have ranked as one of the most brilliant audacities recorded in the annals of warfare?
It would be too much, perhaps, to expect any poet to resist the introduction of the wholly unhistoric "I am hammering the Emperor's coffin," and "Thou hast conquered, Galilean!" They certainly fell in too aptly with Ibsen's scheme for him to think of weighing their evidences. But one significant instance may be noted of the way in which he twists things to the detriment either of Julian's character or of his sanity. In the second scene of the fifth act, he makes Julian contemplate suicide by drowning, in the hope that, if his body disappeared, the belief would spread abroad that he had been miraculously snatched up into the communion of the gods. Now Gregory, it is true, mentions the design of suicide; but he mentions it as an incident of Julian's delirium after his wound. Gregory's virulence of hatred makes him at best a suspected witness; but even he did not hold Julian
