Rome

espoused by his egomaniac bully of an uncle, Constantius II, seems to have been a classic example of what can go wrong when beliefs are shoved down the throat of an intelligent, sensitive youth temperamentally unfit to receive or practice them. Constantius II, from the historian Ammianus Marcellinus’ account, took orthodoxy to new heights, and was rigidly obsessed with making his godlike stature felt:

He both stooped when passing through lofty gates (although he was very short), and as if his neck were in a vise, he kept the gaze of his eyes straight ahead and turned his face neither to left nor to right.… Neither did he nod when the wheels jolted nor was he ever seen to spit, or to wipe or rub his face or nose, or move his hands about.

This narcissistic and crazed formalist was hardly the kind of person to raise a young intellectual. He demanded from the lad a hostility for all Hellenic culture; and Julian’s predictable response was to embrace classical Greece, its art, its philosophy, and Platonic ideals, with enthusiasm. He took up studies in Athens in 355, in his early twenties. He also showed a real and unexpected talent for military command. Also in 355, Constantius II dispatched him to Gaul, to quell dissent among the Franks and Alemanni. Though completely untested in battle, Julian proved highly successful as a victorious general—this also while in his early twenties. So successful was he, in fact, that his troops were more loyal to him than to their remote commander, Constantius. When Constantius wanted to move Julian’s legions to fight in a coming Persian campaign, they mutinied and proclaimed him Augustus. Civil war loomed; it was only averted because Constantius unexpectedly died, leaving Julian as emperor—he would be the last pagan emperor of Rome.

To the young Julian, Constantius II’s mind-set seemed bigoted and barbaric—as indeed it was. Julian had a deeply religious temperament but not a Christian one. His natural bent was toward what was called “theurgy,” the pantheistic mysticism favored by the Neoplatonist philosophers of his time. There were undoubtedly quacks and charlatans among the theurgists, but at least it can be said that they did not have the fanatical character common among the early Christians, and no one was persecuted by them. He believed in the idea of “metempsychosis,” proposed by followers of Pythagoras: the direct transmigration of souls, from one body to another. (Julian apparently believed that his body was occupied and, as it were, animated by the spirit of Alexander the Great.)

Theurgy meant, in Greek, “divine work”; it was a kind of mystery religion, part Neoplatonist and part esoteric ritual based on (now lost) Greek texts known as the Chaldean Oracles. The theurgist hoped to learn how the universe worked and then apply its workings to his own advantage. Thus the soul would be purified. It clearly had a powerful appeal for Julian and other intellectuals who wished to preserve some of the character of the old worships. But since the rites of theurgy were understood to compel divine powers and not merely invoke them, it was not always easy to distinguish theurgy from magic. To a polytheist, the magic was white; it depended on a belief in hidden sympathies and affinities between different parts of the cosmos. To Christians, the magic was black, and had to be opposed because it was thought to summon demons. Julian’s beliefs, to the extent that they could be revealed to anyone outside his circle of fellow theurgists, struck Christians as being little short of witchcraft.

Just as Constantine had restricted his powerful favors to Christian petitioners, so Julian reserved his for pagans. He would not persecute “Galileans,” as he scornfully called the followers of Jesus, but he scarcely tolerated them; he withheld both his respect and his help from them. “When the inhabitants of Nisibis sent to beg his aid against the Persians who were about to invade the Roman territories, he refused to assist them because they were wholly Christianized. He would neither reopen their temples nor resort to the sacred places, and he threatened that he would not help them, nor receive their embassy, nor come to enter their city until he had heard that they had returned to paganism.”

In his political views, Julian looked back to an earlier Rome. What he admired was Augustus’ conception of the emperor as primus inter pares, “the first among equals,” a citizen not ostentatiously raised above his fellows, not a despot, and scorning the apparatus of imperial power. “The luxury of the palace excited the contempt and indignation of Julian,” wrote Edward Gibbon, “who usually slept on the ground … and who placed his vanity, not in emulating, but in despising, the pomp of royalty.” He deeply disliked such signs of servility as being addressed by inferiors as dominus or “lord.” He dressed simply and let his beard grow, which exposed him to ill-tempered satire. After the death of his wife, he is said never to have looked at another woman.

He felt a duty to assert the rights of his adoptive tradition against the arrogant presumptions of the state- sponsored Christians. In fact, because of his commitment to apostasis or “standing up” against Christian doctrine, he was known in his time and ever since as Julian the Apostate. Having won the status of official religion to the Roman Empire, the once-marginal sect of Christians went on the attack—and this began even before Julian’s ascendancy to Augustus. In the Theodosian Code of 357 C.E., the Emperor Constantius issued bans on soothsayers and astrologers, whose “evil teachings” must henceforth “become silent” and “forever cease.” They must all be deported from the city of Rome. Christian punishment for haruspication, the “heinous” ancient Etruscan practice adopted by Rome, seemed to know no limits. But the punishment of those who worshipped traditional gods at their traditional shrines was deliberately and cleverly left to those new fanatics, the Christian masses themselves, who could be relied on to do more damage in their effusions of zeal than need ever be planned by Christian bishops. Posses of hymn-chanting monks, the “black-robed tribe” of whom the traditionalist Libanius, a justly renowned orator and writer (314–93), complained to the Emperor Theodosios, pious drunkards “who eat more than elephants,” assailed the unprotected temples with stones and crowbars. “Then utter desolation follows, with the stripping of roofs, demolition of walls, the tearing down of statues and the overthrow of altars, and the priests must either keep quiet or die. After demolishing one, they scurry to another, and to a third.… Such outrages occur even in the cities.…”

But they were worst in the countryside, where, by ravaging the ill-protected temples, the Christians condemned countless sites to religious and therefore social and economic barrenness. “Temples, Sire,” Libanius tried to point out to Theodosius,

are the soul of the countryside; they mark the beginning of its settlement, and have been passed down through many generations to the men of today. In them the farming communities rest their hopes for husbands, wives, children, for their oxen and the soil they sow and plant. An estate that has suffered so has lost the inspiration of the peasantry together with their hopes, for they believe that their labour will be in vain once they are robbed of the gods who direct their labours to their due end.… One god supports the might of Rome, another protects for her a city under her sway, another protects an estate and grants it prosperity. Let temples everywhere continue to exist, then, or else let these people agree that you emperors are ill-disposed to Rome since you allow her to act in a manner that will cause her harm.

Constantius II, in his last will, had recognized Julian as his lawful successor, and now, with this authority confirmed, Julian set about restoring the damaged prestige of polytheism.

His first tactic was to reduce the Christian churches’ income, so lavishly bestowed on them by Constantine. Large sums had been confiscated—or, in plain terms, looted—from the pagan temples and given to the churches. Julian saw to it that they were given back, along with the income-earning lands taken by the churches. This could not, of itself, restore the loss and damage that the pagan religious foundations had undergone since the conversion of Constantine. But it went some way to rectify things—if only briefly. Sometimes one detects a heavy-handed, chortling irony in Julian’s abjurations. Thus he took obvious pleasure in imposing heavy fines on the Christians of Edessa for “the insolence bred by their wealth,” by invoking Jesus’ praise of the poor and lowly: “Since by their most admirable law they are bidden to sell all they have and give it to the poor so that they may attain more easily to the kingdom of the skies … I have ordered that all their funds that belong to the church of Edessa … be confiscated;