Julian the Apostate

Hello, considering he ruled as Roman Emperor for less than two years three hundred sixty one to three hundred sixty three AD, Julian Apostate made an extraordinary impression on history. Christians saw him as a villain who returned the Empire to paganism after Constantine the Great's conversion early that century, while Gibbon was to see that return as a heroic attempt to halt the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

and he was a philosopher emperor, inspired by Marcus Aurelius, writing satires, being written about in turn, leaving a remarkable record. With me to discuss Julian the apostate are James Cork Webster, reader in classics History and liberal arts at King's College London? Leah Nikolai, Assistant Professor in Classics at the University of Cambridge and Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics Trinity College, and Sean Tucker, Professor of Late Roman and Byzantine History at Cardiff University.

Sean Tucker, can you talk to us about the Roman Empire at the time of Julian's birth three thirty one AD? What state was it in?

So by the time Julian is born in three three one or three three two, Constantine has established himself in power. He has been promoting and supporting Christianity. and also dramatically he has refounded the ancient Greek city of Byzantium as Constantinople that was dedicated in three thirty and that's modern day Istanbul and actually Julian was to be the first emperor. to be born in Constantinople.

on the scene as well. So uh Constantine's half brothers and uh their sons are being brought into the imperial system at the time of Constantine's death. So so we have the so called Summer of Blood in three three seven after the death of Constantine and this is when the sons of Constantine eliminate uh a lot of these other members of the family. They want to secure a power for themselves.

His sons are actually quite young, they're sort of in their early twenties, if if that, at this stage, uh so they might have felt threatened by this other branch of the family and they're quite ruthless in eliminating them and in particular it's his son, Constantine's son Constantius II, who's particularly attributed with overseeing these killings.

is Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, who later on would become uh the the Bishop of Constantinople. Now I said uh ironically because we all know that Julian afterwards uh I mean his fame is due to the fact that he tried to restore the traditional Greco-Roman religion, but actually knowing that he was raised as a Christian as a child helps us understand what kind of grasp he had of the religion that at some point he was trying to oppose.

Then afterwards he kept travelling, he kept being moved around we should say, because his cousin Constantius the Second was sending him to other cities. For instance, he sent him a Cappadocia, che era una regione remota, probabilmente perché non voleva Giuliano in contatto con il suo altro fratello, Constanz, che era diventato più potente nel sud. And at the very beginning of his training, Julian goes through the traditional educational path of the Roman elite.

Indirectly, also by the even more famous Rhetorician Laidanius, who was a rival with Echebolius or Julian, was not allowed to take his classes, but he was so passionate. about the teaching of Libanius that allegedly he would have sent his servants to gather to fetch the notes for him so that he could learn from this this master. And then the rejning point happened around Julians

20th year of age, or so he says in his letters. The moment in which he leaves the study of rhetoric following his discovery of philosophy more specifically neoplatonic philosophy which becomes his love his passion for the rest of his life so he begins to travel across greece and asia minor to search for the the perfect master, we could say. And eventually he finds this figure in Maximus of Tyre.

And by this time Julian has already joined the traditional religion, so he is no more a member of the of the church as he was as a child.

And the Neoplatonists, most famously Platinus in the third century and his his disciple Porphyry had uh developed a a sort of more sophisticated version of this theory with sort of multiple transcendental levels emerging, as you say, from the one, but combined it with traditional myth and what we would think of as a sort of traditional religion and with an element of mysticism as well. So it's a sort of uh almost a a univer a grand theory that combines religion, philosophy and myth.

Now so Julian says that it's this moment with Maximus that is sort of the the turning point for him. But he also says elsewhere that as a child he had a you know, he says I had a particular hankering for the sun and for the stars. And so some people have said, Well, that distaste for Christianity

is uh much earlier, is related to Constantius' treatment of his family, and maybe he's a sort of secret pagan from earlier on. I suppose one one thing it's worth adding into that debate about r you know, when he converts is that modern sociology of conversion

suggest that when people look back on their own conversions, they tend to think of it as a sort of light bulb intellectual moment. I was sort of exposed to something and that changed my mind. Whereas actually when you study how people convert, it tends to be a more gradual process

and it really depends on the networks that you're moving in. And I think it's not a coincidence that that period when he's with Maximus is a sort of moment of relative freedom for someone who has had a fairly traumatic, itinerant

controlled childhood and he's moving around Asia Minor in the company of multiple different Neoplatonists and so we might be better to ascribe the conversion to that more general period of of intellectual and personal awakening rather than just the kind of intellectual exposure he gets with Matthew.

He is clearly um philosophically committed to Neoplatonism and to a particularly mystical, even we might say magical version of Neoplatonism. So Maximus W who we've already mentioned is too mystical, too magical, even for some of the other Neoplatonists. He seems to, as part of this,

be a big believer in in the return of sacrifice and mass animal sacrifice which had been in relative decline. So Amianus, for example, jokes that um if Julian had survived there wouldn't have been enough bulls in the empire. Um and he also has a particular

kind of association with the cults of Mithras and Helios as well, which are in some ways versions of a solar monotheism that had been increasingly popular in the third century and that his family as a whole, the Constantinians, had a particular association with.

And he was made Caesar in three fifty one, but executed in three fifty four'cause he was seen as a bit of a loose cannon and potentially dangerous. So it's in the aftermath of that that then Constantius II turns to Julian to bring him in as Caesar. He was brought to the court in Milan after the death of Gallus. He was sort of under suspicion because he was Gallus's half brother.

But after about a year th he is then appointed Caesar himself and he is sent to Gaul. And uh some of our sources say he's just meant to be a figurehead, you know, he's meant to represent Constantius the second there. But actually he's very active in Gaul and it turns out, you know, despite being this kind of archetypal student, uh very well educated He seems to be a successful general. He seems keen to make himself popular in Gaul by reducing taxation. He has some clashes

with bureaucrats and and he has a great military victory in three fifty seven, the Battle of Strasbourg. So he becomes very popular in Gaul and actually at the Battle of Strasbourg apparently the troops were already acclaiming him Augustus'cause they're supporting him. And then a few a couple of years later in three sixty, when they're wintering in Paris, the troops are all gathered because Constantius I Second wants to uh transport some troops to the eastern frontier. He needs them in the east.

and the troops are portrayed as being upset about this. Uh so they acclaim Julian as Augustus in in three sixty. spring three sixty, and he accepts this and he tries to get Constantius the Second to kinda recognise this promotion

who has done something similar, like satirize power from a position of power in this way. And in a sense it is also intriguing that he should should choose, uh that Julian should choose satire to speak about his predecessors because if we think about the function of satire and how we usually associate it with the underdog the subordinate the és egy különböző különböző különböző különböző különböző különböző különböző különböző különböző különböző különböző.

as uh if you allow me to use the expression, uh a beauty pageant among Roman emperors, because essentially what happens in this piece is that there is a big banquet in the sky among the gods, and the gods decide to invite also the Roman emperors from the past to join the feast. And while they're feasting all together in the skies, at some point the gods decide to establish which of these emperors has been uh the best in ruling the Roman Empire.

So in the moment in which this question is brought to the scene, you also begin to s to sense actually how behind the the playfulness of the piece there is a fundamental question that Julian is raising here and will continue to raise through his literary production. That is the question of how should we be reading history? And this is the reason why. On the one hand Julian is displaying all his skills.

as a scholar, as an erudite, as a reader of Homer, as a reader of Plutarch. He is bringing in emperors on the scene and he is summoning the best-known features, vices, virtues. He's making all sorts of erudite puns and jokes about them. But on the other hand, he's also using this context to comment on the role of the emperor that he Things has in a sense ruined the Roman Empire. And that is inevitably Constantine. Who is the buffoon of the piece.

and is brought there as a votary of pleasure, as he is defined, and ridiculed and humiliated, and eventually shown to be the very worst of emperors. while Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher ruler, is shown to be the very best.

But th the Caesars, Julian Caesars, it's this curiously self awareness about you know, all of these emperors get roasted essentially, right, by the gods.

that that it there's a focus on criticism even of Augustus and Trajan and Marcus Aurelius and Alexander the Great, the sort of supposed heroes. So there's this kind of extraordinary I th I've always felt extraordinary awareness of your own vulnerability to posterity, that you are, you know, these are all the things that you can be critiqued for.

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So it's more that he's setting an example and maybe if you want to get on in the Roman Empire, you know, you'd want to follow the same religion. So to me it's less polarized and I think what's so interesting about Julian when he becomes emperor and can act

on his religious beliefs. He's had to conceal his paganism. Um he doesn't go down the route of persecution of Christians which previous emperors had done. He he basically says toleration for everybody Though he himself obviously favours, you know, paganism, pagan culture.

Some people think he's actually quite cunning and it's a much more subtle way of undermining Christianity. I mean he's deliberately trying to unpick the relationship between the Roman Empire and Christianity which his which his uh uncle had started.

in the gospels that, you know, not one stone of the temple will remain upon another. So if the temple were to be rebuilt, ostensibly just supporting Judaism, but it would undermine Christian prophecies and claims to religious superiority.

But it is very important to contextualize this self-mockery in which Gillian responds to poems written by the citizens of Antioch, deriding his appearance, and But then, this is just the beginning because the strength of the piece is how progressively Julian turns the table around. e rivela questo per essere una strategia di, in un senso, quello che Giuliano sta facendo è che sta rivelando la sua apparenza non camped, per essere l'apparenza del filosofico reale.

and he is contrasting with that the shaven and refined appearance of the citizens of Antioch, which is indicative of how they live a shallow superficial lifestyle, because they are clinging to Christianity.

who speak in equal and opposite negative terms about how Dunin is is the worst thing to happen to the Empire. I mean I think it is also important to remember and this I think is often not talked about because we think about him as a legitimate emperor but Or Julian is a usurper in some sense. He is he is an emperor who who claims power when there is a legitimate sitting emperor.

And that breeds a certain degree of instability, which Julian kinda gets away with'cause Constantius dies before there is outright civil war. But what most people care about most of the time throughout the Roman Empire is stability because stability enables people's own lives and projects to prosper and instability civil war is in general bad news for everybody except for the individual victors.

in the second century AD, Constantine is also about to embark on a campaign into Persia at the time of his death. So it is a kind of a common concern of the emperors in this period.

and they were especially keen in confronting themselves with the Romans, while with the Germanic tribes it is more difficult to understand exactly what was going on, but we see new gatherings and new coming together also. It seems like these groups were becoming more able to um come together and confront the romance.

to secure his own position because if you are successful in battle you prove definitively that you have the support of the gods. And that then underpins everything else you try and do. So military success is the way to be a successful emperor.

The interesting thing about Julian, uh, generally is that we we have so many sources. So so we know much more about what he's up to compared to like uh other members of his family, what they had done. So we're quite informed about the details of the campaign by the historian Amianus in particular, but also Libanius and other writers from the period.

as well. So he does seem to have had a particular strategy, so he left Antioch in March three sixty three, uh, and he he tries to confuse the Persians, he sort of he pretends that he's going to the Tigris and across the Tigris, but then he goes back to the Euphrates and down the Euphrates to uh this Persian capital of Ketisophon, this really important political royal centre, and besieges it.

And then it all seems to go completely wrong. So it's a bit of a mystery. He gets to Khatisophon and then it seems not to know what to do or you know, he doesn't capitalise on that, so begins going northwards. Again. Famously he also burnt the fleet, which they'd brought down the Tigris, so he destroys that before they start heading north. and then on the on the way north he's wounded in a skirmish. So so it's it's kinda very puzzling.

Catesophon. So it it's tricky to reconstruct exactly not just what happens but what the plan was and as as everything with Julian when we don't have clear sources commentary is always so polarized that people that want to kind of praise Julian over exaggerate his vision and those that want to critique him say he has no plan and so it it can be very difficult to read through the polarizing lenses to try and figure out exactly what he was trying to do in the moment.

a theologian and a high priest in a sense somebody laying out the rules for the appointment of priesthood reformed pagan cult but i would say that maybe If there is, and of course an author, a literary author, a rhetorician, a thinker, I would say though that if there is maybe one conception of himself that cuts through all the others is Julian's idea of being the finest interpreter of his time.

the one who had understood what were the real forces driving history and who had understood how to speak about history through himself, through his self-image.

makes a difference. So I think any any emperor that survives that long has a better chance of affecting change.

that catalyzes Christian authors in particular to rethink how they articulate Christianity and its relationship with power. And so in some ways w Julian ha probably has the opposite effect that he wants to, that he he reinforces trends that were already in play, that what we call the sort of transformation of the fourth century and the relationship between church and state, that were happening to some extent naturally.

But Julian's attempt to shut them down is a shot in the arm to various Christian bishops and intellectuals who then think very hard about how to make sure that Julian doesn't happen again.

And as James says, you know, they respond to that and say, Well, no, we are Roman too, you know, we value culture Uh so they begin to articulate that. And and one thing we haven't got into is this idea that Julian wants to sort of control who gets to be a a teacher, uh sort of state funded or a city funded teacher.

in the Roman Empire, so maybe trying to control the appointment of teachers. He doesn't want seems not to want Christians to become teachers in schools. He wants only to pagans to teach pagan texts.

ma ciò che Giuliano non riesce ad ottenere e il misopogon è un testamento alla sua scuola perché è lui uh shouting against an entire city. What Julian doesn't entirely manage t to achieve uh is an inclusive system in which he's really talking to all the subjects.

who are gonna be of a particular moral standard and are gonna go out there and and build kind of hostels and help people out. So you could argue that that's an attempt to reach beyond the philosophical elite. But again it doesn't get very far.

Julian, sort of a distant relative kind of emerges a few years later. Um, so we have to sort of begin again, you know, the the process of reestablishing or trying to reestablish a family. So I think that that is always a problem moment in the Roman Empire if sort of if you lose the authority of the imperial family. So so that causes some problems as well.

And I think as James referred to, I think it does make emperors a and other people in the empire stop and think about where they're going in terms of religion and notably some emperors immediately after Julian are a bit more cautious about

throwing themselves into the promotion of Christianity, keep a bit of a distance. But, you know, soon it comes back even stronger, sort of the the imperial promotion of Christianity. So it does become state religion under the Roman Emperor Theodosius I from three hundred seventy nine.

Julian,'cause a lot of this material feels private even though it is in fact public. So there is this kind of temptation to us all that we might be the one that really understands what Julian. That's one of the things that's going on. I think the other thing that's going on is that he just serves as a touch point for so many of the big issues that are key to the transformation of the Western world in this period.

around religion, around the role of the empire, around geopolitics, etcetera, that he's quite a good place to put a lot of those debates for contemporaries and for people later on

precisely the distaste of Julian, the antiquity for Julian. But then I think that once we reach modernity and Julian is rediscovered as a thinker, as an author, as a philosopher, Perhaps his legacy is that of being an incredibly liberating figure, so somebody who continues to inspire, even today, so much literature, counter-fictional literature, even popular.

literature comic books because he seems to be somebody who in a sense was not afraid of asserting what he believed in tomb and his true identity in a world where that seem to have become something impossible.

uh and is obviously set on conflict with Constantius the Second. And w and one of the really interesting things that Julian does in this phase, uh, when he's in the Balkans he writes a series of letters to cities, so Athens, most famous because that letter survives, but he also wrote to Corinth and Sparta and he also wrote to the Senate in Rome, setting out why he was opposing Constantius the Second and justifying his position. So it it's such a an interesting text to have that.

from you know, potentially, you know, he he was a usurper, he could have failed, but he he kinda puts his side of the story uh, which is so interesting. So so I think that's one thing. And James kind of touched on dynasty and uh we didn't sort of get into the women of the dynasty and this issue of him not having

uh thought about succession and I think that's quite an interesting aspect of what's going on in this period because he he did marry uh his own uh cousin, um Helena. There was cousin cousin marriage. within the Constantinus Constantinian dynasty a way of keeping power within the family. I mean she died before he became Sol Augustus, but he doesn't marry again after that and and famously, you know, this is one of his

characteristics, you know, he d he doesn't like indulgence, so he said not to sort of have expensive tastes, indulge in food, indulge in sex. So he doesn't get married Again but again I think we're back to the problem that he only reigns for such a short time and maybe he would have got married. again at some point

And therefore in the moment in which he's criticizing his subjects who have failed to recognize them, he's also confronting them with the question of what kind of ruler.

they really think would be beneficial for them? Do they want somebody like the representatives of the Constantinian dynasty and Constantius II, whom Julian depicts in the piece as having pondered to their pleasures and expectations, or do they want to have a harsh teacher, but a real teacher, which is how he depicts himself in the piece. And so the harshness is the other side of his expertise.

policy. So there's this whole debate over you know, he seems to, for example, be committed both in Gaul um and later in the East to, for example, reducing tax burdens to what Trump would call draining the swamp, to reducing the size of the court, for example, and to ch to to cultivating a more simple ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r

And there's a sort of question mark there about whether this is a sort of deliberate sustained policy decision, um or whether emperors could really in this period do sustained policy and whether it's just a series of uh haphazard actions here or there. But there's there's a there's an interesting question to be asked about what he tries to to to do as a as a policymaker.

And then I also just think that there is a certain I guess you call it a romance of someone that dies young on the cusp of achieving or trying to achieve something that it's like an it's like an unfinished promise that invites people to sort of finish the story for themselves. It's sort of

try and tie up the story in a bow. So I think that combination of things makes him just one of the most evocative figures from antiquity that s so many people have so much invested in for so many different reasons.

movement, sort of rejection of the dominance of the church and Christianity. So so they they sort of adopt him as kind of like a figurehead or or see him as a kind of a a proto humanist Uh but then they have to explain away his his paganism and say, Well he didn't really believe all this stuff, you know, he wasn't really, you know, a fanatical pagan

There are new figures of religious authority, the bishops, who have uh um apostolic uh authority that legitimizes them over the emperor. So in the moment in which Julian is fighting Christianity is also simultaneously reclaiming that sort of spiritual power that has been taken away.

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