Julian the Apostate

Flavius Claudius Julianus was born in Constantinople on November 17, 331 CE, into the ruling dynasty of the Roman world. His father, Julius Constantius, was a half brother of the emperor Constantine the Great, which placed the infant Julian close to the center of imperial power and, as events proved, close to its dangers ^[1].

That danger arrived in 337, when Constantine died. In the purge that followed, soldiers loyal to Constantine's sons killed most of the male relatives who might have contested the succession, including Julian's father. Julian, roughly six years old, survived along with his older half brother Gallus. The orphaned boy was placed under the supervision of Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia, and later spent years of comfortable confinement at the remote estate of Macellum in Cappadocia ^[2].

His education was thorough and, in the end, subversive of the purpose his guardians intended. Julian received a Christian upbringing and even served as a lector in church, yet his tutor Mardonius instilled in him a deep love of Homer and the Greek classics. Study in Nicomedia, Pergamon, and Ephesus brought him into contact with Neoplatonist teachers, and around 351 the philosopher Maximus of Ephesus initiated him into theurgic rites. From that point Julian was privately a devotee of the Hellenic gods, though he concealed his conversion for a decade ^[1][3].

By the early 350s the emperor Constantius II, Julian's cousin, ruled alone but needed family members to share the burden of a vast frontier. He first elevated Gallus to the rank of Caesar in the East, an experiment that ended with Gallus's execution for misrule in 354. Julian himself fell under suspicion, was detained, and owed his release in part to the intervention of the empress Eusebia, who also secured him permission to study in Athens ^[2].

Athens in 355 was the happiest interlude of Julian's life. He immersed himself in philosophy and, according to later Christian writers, was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries. Among his fellow students were two future bishops, Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus, the latter of whom would become one of his fiercest posthumous critics ^[3].

The idyll lasted months, not years. On November 6, 355, Constantius summoned Julian to Milan, proclaimed him Caesar, married him to his sister Helena, and dispatched the bookish twenty four year old to Gaul, a province ravaged by Frankish and Alamannic incursions. Few expected the philosophy student to succeed as a soldier ^[1][4].

Julian confounded those expectations. In 357, commanding a heavily outnumbered army near Strasbourg (ancient Argentoratum), he crushed a coalition of Alamanni under their king Chnodomar, capturing the king himself. He went on to restore towns along the Rhine, campaign across the river into Germanic territory, and reduce the tax burden on the Gallic provinces, earning genuine popularity among soldiers and civilians alike ^[4].

Any account of Julian the Apostate achievements begins with the events of 360. Constantius, hard pressed by Persia, ordered large detachments of Julian's Gallic army to march east. The troops, unwilling to leave their homes and families, mutinied at Paris and proclaimed Julian Augustus, reportedly raising him on a shield in Germanic fashion. Negotiations with Constantius failed, and civil war loomed until Constantius died of illness in Cilicia on November 3, 361, naming Julian his successor. Julian entered Constantinople in December as sole emperor without a battle ^[1][2].

His reign, though it lasted under twenty months, was crowded with activity. Julian cut the size and cost of the palace staff, dismissing crowds of barbers, cooks, and eunuchs whom he regarded as parasites on the treasury. He reduced taxes, tried to revive the fortunes of the city councils that carried local government, and set up a tribunal at Chalcedon that punished some of the more notorious officials of the previous regime ^[4][5].

Religion, however, was the core of his program. In early 362 he proclaimed toleration for all cults, reopened and restored pagan temples, and ordered the return of property confiscated from them. He recalled Christian bishops exiled under Constantius, a move contemporaries suspected was designed to inflame quarrels within the church. Most controversially, his school edict of June 362 barred Christians from teaching classical literature, on the argument that they could not honestly teach texts about gods they rejected. Even the pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who admired Julian, condemned that law as harsh ^[1][5].

Julian also attempted to rebuild the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, a project that would have refuted Christian claims that the site was cursed to remain desolate. Ammianus records that flames bursting from the foundations drove off the workmen, and the project was abandoned when Julian left for Persia ^[5]. Alongside all this, Julian wrote at a pace few emperors matched: hymns to the gods, the satire known as the Misopogon (Beard Hater) aimed at the citizens of Antioch, the polemic Against the Galileans attacking Christianity, and a large surviving correspondence ^[3][6].

Julian's marriage to Helena, sister of Constantius, was a political arrangement made on the day of his elevation to Caesar in 355. The couple had no surviving children; Helena died around 360, and Julian never remarried. Ancient sources note that he lived with conspicuous austerity afterward, and he made a point of his own chastity, a virtue he associated with philosophic discipline ^[2][4].

Contemporaries left vivid sketches of his appearance and habits. Ammianus, who served in his Persian campaign, describes a man of medium build with a beard, bright eyes, and restless energy, who slept little, ate sparingly, and divided his nights between paperwork and philosophy. The unkempt philosopher's beard became a target of mockery in clean shaven Antioch, and Julian answered his critics with the self mocking Misopogon rather than with punishments ^[4][6].

Who was Julian the Apostate in private? His letters reveal a man of intense loyalties and equally intense grudges, devoted to teachers like Maximus of Ephesus, affectionate toward friends such as the orator Libanius, and bitterly resentful of the dynasty that had slaughtered his family. His religion was personal and fervent: he sacrificed so many animals that wits joked the cattle supply would fail, and he saw himself as a servant of Helios, the sun god, to whom he addressed one of his surviving hymns ^[3][6].

In the summer of 362 Julian moved to Antioch in Syria to prepare a massive invasion of the Sasanian Persian Empire, the traditional enemy on Rome's eastern frontier. His months there were unhappy. A food shortage, his awkward attempts at price controls, and the city's mockery of his beard and his sacrifices soured relations, and the burning of the temple of Apollo at Daphne in October, which Julian blamed on Christians, led him to close Antioch's cathedral in reprisal ^[4][5].

The Persian expedition set out in March 363 with an army modern scholars estimate at some 65,000 men. Julian advanced rapidly down the Euphrates, won an engagement outside the walls of the Persian capital Ctesiphon, but judged the city too strong to besiege. He then burned his river fleet and struck inland, intending to link up with a second Roman column, a decision that left his army short of supplies in hostile country as the Persians harassed the retreat ^[1][4].

On June 26, 363, during a running fight near Samarra in Mesopotamia, Julian threw himself into the action without his breastplate and was struck in the side by a spear. He died in his tent that night, aged thirty one. Ammianus, an eyewitness to the campaign, portrays him discussing the soul with philosophers as he died; later Christian legend claimed his last words were an admission of defeat addressed to Christ, a story historians treat as polemical invention. The thrower of the spear was never identified with certainty ^[4][5].

The army elected the officer Jovian as emperor. To extract the trapped forces, Jovian ceded five frontier provinces and the fortress city of Nisibis to Persia, a humiliating price that colored later judgments of Julian's campaign ^[1].

Julian's religious project died with him. Jovian and every subsequent emperor was Christian, and within two decades Theodosius I began the legislation that made Christianity the empire's official religion. Christian tradition fixed on Julian the label Apostate, meaning one who abandons the faith, and church writers from Gregory of Nazianzus onward cast him as a tyrant and a warning ^[2][5].

Yet Julian left an unusually rich record for study. Because so many of his own works survive, along with Ammianus's detailed narrative and the letters of Libanius, historians can reconstruct his reign more intimately than almost any other in the fourth century. Modern scholars debate whether his pagan restoration ever had a realistic chance, with biographers such as Glen Bowersock stressing its narrow intellectual base, while others note that paganism remained widespread and that a longer reign might have changed the balance ^[1][2].

The fascination has never been confined to academics. Julian appears in Edward Gibbon's history as a flawed hero, in Henrik Ibsen's double drama Emperor and Galilean, and in Gore Vidal's 1964 novel Julian, which brought the emperor to a wide modern readership ^[6]. Readers who come to a Julian the Apostate biography today usually arrive through one of those doors: the last defender of the old gods, the philosopher in armor, or the emperor who tried to argue history into reverse. The basic Julian the Apostate facts, a two year reign, a failed restoration, a death in the Mesopotamian desert, only sharpen the question of what might have followed had he lived ^[1][6].