Apparently peeved at this delay, Constantius declined to meet him when he arrived at the palace, sending word only that his younger cousin was to take for his lodgings an ancient villa the Emperor owned in the countryside eight miles outside Milan. Julian was not even permitted the time to take a cool drink before the centurion was ordered to turn around and lead him back out of the city. We arrived just before nightfall, and in the waning light the old mansion was not without its charm. Though it had been uninhabited for years, the extensive gardens and orchards within its winding stone walls had been carefully maintained, and afforded numerous nooks and shady benches for quiet reading and study. The house itself, though silent and musty from years of abandonment, was in good repair. The only cloud on this small horizon was the uncertainty of knowing how long Julian would be required to remain here before being allowed to return to his studies, or otherwise disposed of by the Emperor.
Julian and I wandered through the vast, echoing halls and atriums, as he alternately gaped at the luxurious surroundings and scoffed at the wastefulness. Finally, he planted himself in a small office, an anteroom off the well-stocked library.
'I will take this room,' he said simply.
'Very well, sir,' said the steward. 'For your study, I presume?'
'For my lodgings,' Julian replied. The steward raised one eyebrow suspiciously. 'My cot against the wall, please, the table and chair in the middle, a chamber pot behind that screen in the corner. The library is just through that set of doors. Lease out the rest of the villa, or burn it for all I care. You will not see me in any other room. What better place to spend one's last days than in a library?'
The steward went out, shaking his head in wonder.
That first morning, as Dawn illumined the earth with Phoebus' torch and scattered the dampness and nightgloom — Ah, Gregory, even at this distance, at this late date, I can see you cringe as I write these words.
''The sun rose on another day,'' you told me when I was but a boy, as you corrected my composition exercises. 'Just write: 'The sun rose on another day.' Why must you forever confound your words with false embellishments of a simple fact of nature? It's a sunrise! 'Phoebus' torch,' indeed.'
I painstakingly scratched out the offending phrase and with adolescent rebelliousness began again: 'When early Dawn, leaving Tithonus' saffron bed, sprinkled the earth with new light, the sun poured down, and all the world was made clear…'
You scolded me again after viewing my work. 'I told you to write. 'The sun rose on another day.' Why do you defy me with this overwrought trash?'
'Because it's beautiful,' I replied petulantly. 'It's descriptive. It recalls Homer, and Virgil.'
'Homer and Virgil. Any sensible Christian would simply write 'The sun rose on another day' and be done with this pagan nonsense.'
'But why?' I persisted. 'Just because we are Christian, must we forgo beauty?'
You sighed patiently. 'Of course not, Caesarius. By simplifying, by getting to first principles, you do not forgo beauty, but enhance it. Beauty is truth, and by writing truth you bring beauty to the fore. You emphasize God's Creation in its purest form.'
I must have looked saddened, gazing at the bescribbled manuscript over which I had labored for so many hours, for you softened your voice and put your arm across my shoulder.
'In the end,' you continued, 'the simplest form of writing is the happiest form — for you acknowledge that nothing is greater than God's work, no mere words can improve on the ultimate beauty of the world. A man cannot possibly express more joy in creation, more optimism in the perfection of the Kingdom to come, than by simply writing 'The sun rose on another day.''
In principle, Brother, I agreed — yet still, then and perhaps even now, my desire to express myself in purity and simplicity was sometimes outweighed by a perverse pleasure in annoying you.
That first morning, as Dawn illumined the earth with Phoebus' torch and scattered the dampness and nightgloom, Julian was startled nearly out of his wits by a crowd of servants thrown into action by the clangorous ringing of a gong. They flung themselves into his room bearing quantities of buckets, dust cloths, ladders and stools for reaching the ceilings, long poles bearing dripping sponges, feather dusters and brooms. He timorously inquired whether the villa was undergoing some type of renovation, but when the steward proudly informed him that this was the daily cleaning routine that had been devised to ensure the sanitation of Julian's lodgings, the appalled youth quickly dismissed the entire army of servants and told them not to return to his rooms unless he specifically called for them — which he did not intend to do, ever. He spent all his days locked in his room, emerging only briefly to attend daily prayers in the villa's chapel, chanted by the broken-down old presbyter who came attached to the property, as much a part of the furnishings as the garden statuary or the chamber pot in the bedroom. He was accompanied only by the house's vast quantity of books, and saw only me and the veiled servant girl whom Eusebia had assigned to his service, who cooked a simple and often vile fare, though Julian rarely took any notice of its quality, and who entered his room several times a week to make sense and hygiene of his notorious untidiness.
One sweltering day found the girl rustling about behind him as he ignored her soft humming, absorbed completely in his studies and absentmindedly swatting at a fly that buzzed lazily around his head. Suddenly, as he afterwards related to me, the girl spoke to him softly, which was unprecedented and not entirely welcome in that it broke his concentration on a particularly knotty philosophical problem he had been working through.
'Master? Begging your pardon, sir, for disturbing you…'
There was silence for a long moment before he mumbled, 'Hmmm? What is it?' without turning around.
'Should I place your Plotinus scrolls alphabetically next to Plato, or do you prefer me to file them separately among those of the theurgists?'
'Plotinus isn't a theurgist,' Julian muttered distractedly, and then lapsed into another long silence, punctuated by an irritated swat to the back of his neck. Suddenly, he spun around in his chair, his eyes wide. 'You're not my regular cleaning girl!'
Her eyes lowered demurely behind the veil. 'Begging your pardon, sir. Lucilla is sick. I'm taking her place.'
'But you can read Greek?'
'Of course!' she exclaimed. Then a nervous giggle. 'I mean, only a little. Just enough to read the titles.'
'But you know Plotinus and the theurgists!'
'No, sir,' she said softly, that is, not well. I must have overheard the palace scholars discussing them.'
The next day, silent and illiterate Lucilla had returned, back to her old habits of hopelessly misarranging all his work.
As the weeks passed, Julian spent his time in a mixture of fury and relief, waiting for Constantius to see him and inform him of his plans for the future. At first Julian had written daily, seeking an audience and receiving only form apologies from the Emperor's ministers and eunuchs, who curtly informed him of his busy schedule, or of his feeling indisposed, or of an unexpected emergency that had taken him out of town. Julian soon cut his entreaties down to a weekly basis, and then stopped corresponding with the palace altogether. The Empress Eusebia, however, perhaps out of remorse at her husband's rudeness, did take the occasion to send her young cousin-in-law an enormous quantity of texts, including many that were recently transcribed, by all the most fashionable modern philosophers, rhetoricians, and historians, many of whom were still living. She also sent him frequent missives expressing her goodwill toward him, reassuring him about the delay, and telling him to abide patiently, that all would be well.
Upon the arrival of the welcome gift of scrolls and codices, Julian wrote a letter to her expressing his gratitude, and requesting an audience with her, if not with her husband. This he handed to the eunuch who had been the most frequent conveyor of the Empress's letters, and who upon receiving it handled it gingerly between two fingers, with as much distaste as if it had been spat upon by a leper. He set it quickly upon a marble hallway table while he pretended to tighten his sandal strap, and there it was left for Julian to rediscover, many days later, after much wondering and bewilderment at the Empress's stony failure to respond to his request. It was not until I myself informed him that it would have been a grave violation of palace protocol for him to have corresponded with the Empress at all before obtaining leave from the Emperor, that he understood the eunuch's sensitivity to receiving such a document. For this very reason, an audience with Eusebia was completely out of the question for the time being; indeed, outsiders, even relatives, were rarely allowed in the gynaeceum, the women's quarters, a fact that I had forgotten, or never actually assimilated, given my own unimpeded access to the royal family by virtue of my
