Julian (emperor)
Flavius Claudius Iulianus (331–June 26, 363), was a Roman Emperor (361–363) of the Constantinian dynasty. He was the last pagan Roman Emperor, and tried to restore the traditional worship as a measure to stop the decay of his world.
His philosophical studies earned him the attribute the Philosopher during the period of his life and of those of his successors. Christian sources commonly refer to him as Julian the Apostate, because of his rejection of Christianity and conversion to Theurgy, a late form of Neoplatonism. Modern Neo-Pagans (particularly reconstructionists) sometimes refer to him as "Julian the Faithful," in direct opposition to the pejorative implications of the common epithet "the Apostate."
He is also sometimes referred to as Julian II, to distinguish him from Didius Julianus.
Life
Early years
Julian, born in 331 in Constantinople, was the son of Julius Constantius, half brother of Constantine I, and his second wife, Basilina. His paternal grandparents were Western Roman Emperor Constantius Chlorus and his second wife, Flavia Maximiana Theodora. His maternal grandfather was Caeionius Iulianus Camenius.
In the turmoil after the death of Constantine in 337, in order to establish himself as sole emperor, Julian's devout Christian cousin Constantius II led a massacre of Julian's family. Constantius II extinguished many descendants from the second marriage of Constantius Chlorus and Theodora, leaving only Constantine II, Constans, Julian and Julian's half brother Gallus as surviving males related to Emperor Constantine. Constantius II then saw to a strict Christian education of the surviving Julian and his brother Gallus.
Constantine II died in 340 when he attacked his brother Constans. Constans fell in 350 in the war against the usurper Magnentius. Gallus was made Caesar (junior emperor) by Constantius II to govern the East, while he himself defeated Magnentius. Shortly afterwards, Gallus was executed (354). Julian was imprisoned, but soon released and promoted to Caesar in Gaul, since Constantius had to deal with the Sassanid threat in the East. In Gaul, Julian's rule was very successful. Eventually, he succeeded his cousin Constantius II on the throne.
In traditional accounts of his life, considerable weight is given to the Julian’s early psychological development and education. Initially growing up in Bithynia, raised by his maternal grandmother, at the age of seven he was tutored by Eusebius, the Arian Christian bishop of Nicomedia, and Mardonius, a Gothic eunuch. However, in 342, both Julian and his half-brother Gallus were exiled to the imperial estate of Macellum in Cappadocia. Here he met the Christian bishop George. At the age of 18, the exile was lifted and he dwelt briefly in Constantinople and Nicomedia.
In 351, Julian returned to Asia Minor to study Neoplatonism under Aedesius, and later to study the Iamblichan Neoplatonism from Maximus of Ephesus. During his studies in Athens, Julian met Gregory Nazianzus and Basil of Caesarea, two Christian saints.
The later emperor’s study of Iamblichus of Chalcis and theurgy are a source of criticism from his primary chronicler, Ammianus Marcellinus.
Rise to power
After his brother Constantius Gallus was made Caesar of the East (351) and executed (354) by Constantius II, Julian was called to the emperor in Mediolanum (Milan) and, on 6 November 355, made Caesar of the West and married to Constantius' sister Helena. In the years afterwards he fought the Germanic tribes that tried to intrude upon the Roman Empire.
He won back Colonia Agrippina (Cologne) in 356, during his first campaign in Gaul. The following summer he defeated the Alamanni at Strasbourg. In 358, Julian gained victories over the Salian Franks on the Lower Rhine, settling them in Toxandria, near the city of Xanten, and over the Chamavi. During his residence in Gaul, Julian also attended to non-military matters. He prevented a tax increase by the Gallic praetorian prefect Florianus and personally administrated the province of Belgica Secunda.
In the fourth year of his campaign in Gaul, the Sassanir Emperor Shapur II invaded Mesopotamia and took the city of Amida after a 73 day siege. In February 360, Constantius ordered Julian to send Gallic troops to his eastern army. This provoked an insurrection by Petulantes troops, which proclaimed Julian emperor in Paris, and led to a very swift military campaign to secure or win the allegiance of others. From June to August of that year, Julian led a successful campaign against the Attuarian Franks.
That same June, forces loyal to Constantius II captured the city of Aquileia on the north Adriatic coast, and was subsequently besieged by forces loyal to Julian. Civil war was avoided only by the death of Constantius II, who, in his last will, recognized Julian as his rightful successor.
Among his first actions, Julian reduced the expenses of the imperial court, removing all the eunuchs from the offices. He reduced the luxury of the court established with Constantius, reducing at the same time the number of servants and of the guard.
Julian and religion
-CNG.jpg?lang=en)
Julian is called by Christians "The Apostate" because they believe he converted from Christianity to Paganism. He himself, as attested to in private letters between him and the Rhetorician Libanius, had Christianity forced on him as a child by his cousin Constantius II, who was a zealous Christian and would have not tolerated a pagan relative, but Julian stated that he had never really accepted any religion until his reading of the Homeric poems, some of the most important texts for the Greek religion. After this conversion to Hellenism he devoted his life to protecting and restoring the fame and security of this tradition.
After gaining the purple, Julian started a religious reformation of the state, which, in his intentions, was to give back its lost strength to the Roman State. He supported the restoration of the old Roman faith, based on polytheism.
Julian reduced the influence of Christian bishops in public offices. The lands taken by the Church were to be returned to their original owners, and the bishops lost the privilege to travel for free, at expenses of the State.
On 4 February 362, Julian promulgated an edict to guarantee freedom of religion, reverting 353 and 356 edicts by Constantius II which had made Christianity, de facto, the most influential religion in the Roman Empire. This edict proclaimed that all the religions were equal in front of the Law, and that the Roman Empire had to return to its original religious eclectism, according to which the Roman State did not impose any religion on its provinces.
He suppressed the official bias against pagans and allowed them to once again repair their temples, a practice that was forbidden after Christian Emperor Constantine official encouragement of Nicene Christianity. During his earlier years, while studying at Athens, Julian became acquainted with two men who later became both bishops and saints: Gregory Nazianzus and Basil the Great; in the same period, Julian was also initiated to the Eleusinian Mysteries, that he would later try to restore. Though Constantine had legalized Christianity, it was not declared the official state religion until Theodosius I in the 380s. Constantine and his immediate successors had prohibited the upkeep of pagan temples, and many temples were destroyed and pagan worshippers killed during the reign of Constantine and his successors. The extent to which the emperors approved or commanded these destructions and killings is disputed, but it is certain they did not prevent them.
Julian's religious status is a matter of considerable dispute. He did not practice normative civic paganism of the earlier empire, but a kind of magical approach to classical philosophy sometimes identified as theurgy and also neoplatonism. According to Christian historian Socrates Scholasticus (iii, 21), Julian believed himself to be Alexander the Great in another body via transmigration of souls, as taught by Plato and Pythagoras.
Since the persucution of Christians by past Roman Emperors had seemingly only strengthened Christianity, many of Julian's actions were sought to harass and undermine the ability of Christians to organize in resistance to the re-establishment of pagan acceptance in the empire. Julian's preference for a non-christian and non-philosophical view of Iamblichus' theurgy seems to have convinced him that it was right to outlaw the practise of the Christian view of theurgy and demand that suppression of the Christian set of Mysteries[1]. The Orthodox and Catholic Churchs retell a story concerning two of his bodyguards, who were Christian. When Julian came to Antioch, he gave orders to sprinkle all the food in the marketplace and all the water in the wells with blood from idol worship. This would have left the Christians in that town with nothing to eat or drink without violating their beliefs. The two bodyguards opposed the edict, and were executed at Julian's command. The Orthodox Church remembers them as saints Juventinus and Maximos.
In his school edict Julian prohibits Christian teachers from using pagan scripts e.g. the Iliad, that formed the core of Roman education. This was an attempt to remove some of the power of Christian schools by alienating their students from Roman society, not to mention a satirical attack at what Julian may have viewed as a hypocrisy: Christian schools teaching the Bible as the sole source of knowledge while simultaneously teaching classical pagan texts as well, knowledge of which was needed for success in Roman society.
In his tolerance edict of 362, Julian decreed the reopening of pagan temples, the restitution of alienated temple properties, and called back Christian bishops that were exiled by church edicts. The latter was an instance of tolerance of different religious views, but may also have been an attempt by Julian to widen a schism between different Christian sects, further weakening the Christian movement as a whole.
After his arrival in Antiochia in preparation for the Persian war, the temple of Apollo burned down. Since Julian believed Christians to be responsible, their main church was closed.
In 363, Julian, on his way to engage Persia, stopped at the ruins of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. In keeping with his effort to foster religions other than Christianity, Julian ordered the Temple rebuilt. A personal friend of his, Ammianus Marcellinus, wrote this about the effort:
- Julian thought to rebuild at an extravagant expense the proud Temple once at Jerusalem, and committed this task to Alypius of Antioch. Alypius set vigorously to work, and was seconded by the governor of the province; when fearful balls of fire, breaking out near the foundations, continued their attacks, till the workmen, after repeated scorchings, could approach no more: and he gave up the attempt.
The failure to rebuild the Temple has been ascribed to an earthquake, common in the region, and to the Jews' ambivalence about the project. Sabotage is a possibility, as is an accidental fire. Divine intervention was the common view among church historians of the time.[2]
Death
In March 363, Julian started his campaign against the Sassanid Empire, with the aim of taking back the Roman cities conquered by the Sassanids under the rule of Constantius II which his cousin had failed to take back.
Moving from Antioch with about 90,000 men, Julian entered Sassanid territory. An army of 30,000 was sent, under the lead of Procopius, to Armenia, from where, having received renforcements from the King of Armenia, it was to attack the Sassanid capital from the north. Julian victoriously led the Roman army into enemy territory, conquering several cities and defeating the Sassanid troops. He arrived under the walls of the Sassanid capital, Ctesiphon, but even after defeating a superior Sassanid army in front of the city (Battle of Ctesiphon), he was unable to take the Persian capital. Also Procopius did not return with his troops, so Julian decide to lead his army back to the safety of the Roman borders.
During this retreat, on 26 June 363, Julian died near Maranga, during a victorious battle against the Sassanid army. While pursuing with few men the retreating enemy, and without wearing armor, he received a wound from a spear that reportedly pierced the lower lobe of his liver, the peritoneum and intestines. The wound was not immediately fatal. Julian was treated by his personal physician, Oribasius of Pergamum, who appears to have made every attempt to treat the wound. This probably included the irrigation of the wound with a dark wine, and a procedure known as gastrorrhaphy, in which an attempt is made to suture the damaged intestine.
Libanius states that Julian was assassinated by a Christian who was one of his own soldiers; this charge is not corroborated by Ammianus Marcellinus or other contemporary historians. Julian was succeeded by the short-lived Emperor Jovian.
Considered apocryphal is the report that his dying words were "Vicisti, Galilaee" ("Thou hast conquered, Galilean"), supposedly expressing his recognition that, with his death, Christianity would become the Empire's state religion. The phrase introduces the 1866 poem Hymn to Proserpine, which was Algernon Swinburne's elaboration of what Julian might have felt at the triumph of Christianity.
Julian as a writer
Julian wrote several works in Greek, some of which have come down to us.
- Hymn to King Helios
- Hymn to the Mother of the Gods
- Two panegyrics to Constantius
The above are hard for the modern reader to digest. The religious works contain involved philosophical speculations and the panegyrics to Constantius are formulaic and elaborate in style.
The following works, on the other hand, are quite accessible and readable.
- Misopogon or "Beard Hater" - a light-hearted account of his clash with some of his subjects after he was mocked for his beard and generally scruffy appearance for an emperor
- The Caesars - a humorous tale of a contest between some of the most notable Roman emperors. This was a satiric attack upon the recent Constantine the Great of whose worth, both as Christians and as leaders of the Roman Empire, Julian severely questions.
- Against the Galilaeans - a critique of Christianity, only partially preserved, thanks to Cyril of Alexandria's rebuttal Against Julian.
The works of Julian were edited and translated by Wilmer Cave Wright as The Works of the Emperor Julian (3 vols.). London, 1923.
Julian in fiction
Julian's life inspired the play Emperor and Galilean by Henrik Ibsen.
Julian was the subject of a detailed, carefully researched novel, Julian (1964), by Gore Vidal, describing his life and times. It is notable for, among other things, its scathing critique of Christianity.
Also, Julian appeared in "Gods and Legions", by Micheal Curtis Ford (2002). Julian's tale was told by his closest companion, the christian saint, Caesarius and accounts for the transition from a christian philosophy student in Athens to a pagan Roman Augustus of the old nature.
Julian's letters are an important part of the symbolism of Michel Butor's novel "La Modification".
References
- Roberts, Walter E., and Michael DiMaio, "Julian the Apostate (360-363 A.D.)", De Imperatoribus Romanis (2002)
- Athanassiadi, Polymnia : Julian. An Intellectual Biography. Routledge, London, 1992, ISBN 0-415-07763-X.
- Bowersock, Glen Warren. Julian the Apostate. London, 1978.
- Lascaratos, John & Dionysios Voros. 2000. Fatal Wounding of the Byzantine Emperor Julian the Apostate (361-363 A.D.): Approach to the Contribution of Ancient Surgery. World J. Surg. 24: 615-619.
- Lenski, Noel Emmanuel. Failure of Empire: Valens and the Roman State in the Fourth Century AD. UC Press: London, 2003.
- Lieu, Samuel N. From Constantine to Julian: A Source History. Routledge: New York, 1996.
- Murdoch, Adrian: The Last Pagan: Julian the Apostate and the Death of the Ancient World, Stroud, 2005, ISBN 0750940484.
- Rohrbacher, David. Historians of Late Antiquity. Routledge: New York, 2002.
- Smith, Rowland: Julian′s gods: religion and philosophy in the thought and action of Julian the Apostate, London, 1995, ISBN 0415034876.
External links
- Panegyric upon Julian by Libanius, who knew Julian well and admired him
- The Emperor Julian
- Laws of Julian