Rome alone. I need Rome itself, I need its will, the united will of the entire Empire. There is but one thing that prevents that will from materializing, Caesarius: neglect of the gods. And there is only one source of dissent in the Empire-'
'And that is the Christians,' I finished for him. He nodded almost regretfully and walked back around behind his table.
'Even the Persians are no obstacle,' he continued. 'They are cowering and pleading like stable slaves at the threat of Rome's might! But the Christians refuse to cooperate, to contribute to our efforts.'
I moved to change the subject. 'Julian, this Persian campaign you are planning — in Paris you denounced Constantius as mad for attempting the same thing.'
'Ah, but he was mad,' Julian said, smiling. 'He planned his campaign with only half the Empire behind him. I, as you recall, was the other half, and he knew I would not support him, yet he embarked on the venture anyway. His motivation was pure greed and ambition. Mine is the glory of Rome. Our unity is Persia's defeat! So you see, he was mad.'
'We have all been mad once,' I replied quietly.
It had taken me three weeks traveling overland from Nazianzus to catch up with the Emperor at his new base in Antioch, where he was preparing for a final reckoning with Sapor, the King of Kings, the Persian who had for so long been a thorn in the side of the Empire. From Antioch, Julian was gathering men and supplies for the most powerful military expedition Rome had undertaken in a generation. Provisions were pouring in through Antioch's nearby seaport of Seleucia and from across the desert by way of Aleppo. The supplies were intended not only for the army and the auxiliaries, but for the entire court, the administrators and the thousands of camp followers who were making of Antioch, already a great city, now one to rival even Alexandria, perhaps even Ctesiphon itself for opulence and wealth. Into Antioch's port poured the fruits and wines of Italy and the decorative tiles of Narbonensis; the wheat of Egypt and all of Africa, and the olive oil, silver, and copper of Spain; the venison, stout oaken beams, and soft, carded wool of Gaul; the marbles of Greece and Numidia and the cured hams of Baetica; the tin of Britain and the gold and amber of Dacia. From the vast caravans of ill-tempered camels flowed the dates of the oases and the porphyry and incense of Arabia; the ivory of Mauritania and the papyri of the Nile valley; glass from Syria and Phoenicia and silks from the Far East; and the gems, corals, and spices of India. And with the Emperor's arrival in Antioch, Antioch now eclipsed even Rome and Constantinople as the very center of the world.
Julian had arrived in the middle of July, while all the rest of the Empire was resting and escaping the heat in a somnolent torpor. He was accompanied by the recalled Sallustius, who stood always at his right hand, the side of Julian's sword arm, while Maximus kept to his left, the hand with which he wrote, the side of his intellect. They were his two principal advisers, dextral and sinister, and I was astonished and deeply concerned that Maximus seemed now to have attained influence as an adviser equal even to that of Sallustius. The Emperor was greeted at the ancient city by an enormous crowd, a fact partially accounted for by his fortuitous timing: his arrival coincided precisely with the ancient feast of Adonis, Aphrodite's lover, which was being celebrated throughout the city with the construction of small, artificial gardens and rites commemorating his death by a wild boar and his burial.
Nevertheless, despite the crowd's size, it was not necessarily one that enthusiastically supported the Emperor. Rather, the Antiochians seemed to prefer to defer judgment on their new lodger, for they had heard many things about him — that he was an ascetic, careless in his appearance, a scholar and a killjoy, a religious zealot — none of which endeared him to that city's hedonistic, worldly, cynical residents. And though the population was largely pagan, with some tepid acceptance of Christianity, or worse, of a pseudo-Christianity that blended certain of the ancient pagan rites with an adapted Christian liturgy, the citizens were not won over by Julian's enthusiastic leap into sacrificial worship of the ancient gods. In fact, they were badly put off by his excesses, for in a time of general famine (the harvests had largely failed that year), within the first weeks of his arrival at Antioch, he had engaged in an orgy of bloody sacrifices such as had never in memory been seen there.
In fact, Brother, Julian's actions were as extreme even as the exaggerated rumors we had heard back in Nazianzus, and worse — it was clear that in my absence his thinking had changed terribly, his taste for abomination grown, his capacity for refined and sophisticated thought deteriorated. I had accepted that he was no longer a Christian — indeed, he had made this clear to the entire Empire. But to have renounced even the subtleties of the philosophy he had so loved, which he had pored over for entire nights, all for the sake of these crude and humiliating pagan sacrifices was utterly beyond my comprehension. For hours every day, for days on end, the gutters of the temple precincts ran red, and Julian paraded from altar to altar with his hands and arms stained to the shoulders, at each one sloshing through a red bog of blood, surrounded by heaps of quartered beasts and reveling in the sheer quantity of animals put to the slaughter in the prodigality of his sacrifices. So insatiable was his appetite that he was said to rival even King Solomon, whom Scripture reveals to have offered such copious sacrifices that their blood and smoke must have infested Jerusalem for days.
To be sure, Julian felt compelled to remain in the gods' favor because of his plans to march against the Persians, and in order to maintain the love of his oldest and most trusted troops, the Celts and the Petulantes, who had accompanied him from Gaul and had remained faithful to him even during the darkest days of the winter in Thrace. Nevertheless, the constant feasting and orgies of the rude Gallic troops at the sacrificial banquets were an ongoing scandal to the refined and delicate Antiochians, who night after night suffered drunken, carousing foreign soldiers rampaging through their streets, and were unable to hide their resentment.
Yet the favor of the gods and of his men was more important to Julian than the private complaints of citizens in his host city, who soon resorted to less than honorable expressions in their jibes against him. He was a hairy ape, they said, bearded like a goat, buried always in his philosophical and sacred texts, with uncut, inkstained nails. He ate like a grasshopper and slept like a Vestal, and spent his days quartering countless hundreds of victims for his precious gods.
None of the ritual sacrifices did I see personally, of course, for still I refused to attend them, and indeed Julian granted me full exemption from doing so. This was a minor victory because he normally required all his troops and retainers, Christian and pagan alike, to witness his ceremonies. Nevertheless, there was one event during this period before the Persian campaign to which I was at least a secondhand witness, and which bears describing here, though I will refrain from applying any interpretation to it, Brother, in deference to your more accomplished skills in that regard.
Toward the end of that year, as I mentioned earlier, he resolved to rebuild the great Jewish temple in Jerusalem, which had lain as a pile of rubble for three hundred years since its destruction by the Romans in retaliation for the Jews' rebellion. For many years, in fact, Roman emperors had prohibited Jews even from visiting its ruins, which were left as a visible sign of shame, and, indeed, it was only in recent times that Jews were allowed to set foot in Jerusalem again at all. The reconciliation measure was logical from Julian's standpoint: he carried no enmity toward the Jews as he did toward the Christians, and in fact was greatly desirous of earning their friendship. Jewish brokers held a great deal of sway among the grain merchants of Egypt and northern Africa, and exercised influence over the sources and prices of many of the luxury goods crossing the desert in the caravans from Persia. Moreover, to his way of thinking, the Jews' religion was actually not far distant from that held by the Greeks, differing only in minor details, its chief defect, of course, being monotheism.
More important, however, was the metaphysical benefit to Julian from reconstructing the temple: Christ's statement that not a stone of that great edifice would remain standing would be resoundingly refuted. The Augustus, the High Priest of Paganism, would humiliate Christians in their own house, making their god out to be a fraud. This last objective, of course, he did not discuss with me, and perhaps I exaggerate in even attributing it to him as one of his motives.
The entire reconstruction plan was couched in the form of a restoration of friendly ties between Rome and the Jews and in November of that year he invited me to travel with him to Jerusalem to witness the ceremonial unveiling of the temple's new principal gate, the area around which had been recently cleared of debris, and with the erection of new columns and porticos about to be completed. Already he had received encouraging news of the temple's progress; how at the announcement that rubble was to be cleared for the start of the construction, Jews of every age and from every region had set aside their disputes and converged on the holy mountain of their fathers to witness and assist in the great event. Men forgot their haughtiness and women their fragility; spades and axes were donated by rich benefactors, and rubble was carried by hand, even in mantles of silk. Purses opened up and the region's entire population was enthused by the pious commands of their new monarch.
Despite my mixed feelings as to his true motives, I eagerly assented to the trip, for I had never before been
