Flavius Claudius Julianus,1 son of Julius Constantius and nephew of the Emperor Constantine, was born at Constantinople in 331 a.d. His father, eldest brother, and cousins were slain in the massacre by which Constantius, Constantine II., and Constans secured the empire for themselves on the death of their father Constantine in 337. Julian and his elder brother Gallus spent a precarious childhood and youth, of which six years were passed in close confinement in the remote castle of Macellum in Cappadocia, and their position was hardly more secure when, in 350, Gallus was elevated to the Caesarship by Constantius, who, after the violent deaths of his two brothers, was now sole ruler of the empire. But Julian was allowed to pursue his favourite studies in Greek literature and philosophy, partly at Nicomedia and Athens, partly in the cities [pg viii] of Asia Minor, and he was deeply influenced by Maximus of Ephesus, the occult philosopher, Libanius of Nicomedia, the fashionable sophist, and Themistius the Aristotelian commentator, the only genuine philosopher among the sophists of the fourth century a.d.

When the excesses of the revolutionary Gallus ended in his death at the hands of Constantius, Julian, an awkward and retiring student, was summoned to the court at Milan, where he was protected by the Empress Eusebia from the suspicions of Constantius and the intrigues of hostile courtiers. Constantius had no heir to continue the dynasty of the Constantii. He therefore raised Julian to the Caesarship in 355, gave him his sister Helena in marriage, and dispatched him to Gaul to pacify the Gallic provinces. To the surprise of all, Julian in four successive campaigns against the Franks and the Alemanis proved himself a good soldier and a popular general. His Commentaries on these campaigns are praised by Eunapius2 and Libanius,3 but are not now extant. In 357-358 Constantius, who was occupied by wars against the Quadi and the Sarmatians, and threatened with a renewal of hostilities by the Persian king Sapor, ordered Julian, [pg ix] who was then at Paris, to send to his aid the best of the Gallic legions. Julian would have obeyed, but his troops, unwilling to take service in the East, mutinied and proclaimed him Emperor (359 a.d.). Julian issued manifestoes justifying his conduct to the Senates of Rome and Athens and to the Spartans and Corinthians, a characteristic anachronism, since their opinion no longer had any weight. It was not till 361 that he began his march eastward to encounter the army of Constantius. His troops, though seasoned and devoted, were in numbers no match for the legions of his cousin. But the latter, while marching through Cilicia to oppose his advance, died suddenly of a fever near Tarsus, and Julian, now in his thirtieth year, succeeded peacefully to the throne and made a triumphal entry into Constantinople in December, 361.

The eunuchs and courtiers who had surrounded Constantius were replaced by sophists and philosophers, and in the next six months Julian set on foot numerous economic and administrative reforms. He had long been secretly devoted to the Pagan religion, and he at once proclaimed the restoration of the Pagan gods and the temple worship. Christianity he tolerated, and in his brief reign of sixteen months the Christians were not actively persecuted. His [pg x] treatise Against the Christians, which survives only in fragments, was an explanation of his apostasy. The epithet “Apostate” was bestowed on him by the Christian Fathers. Meanwhile he was preparing—first at Constantinople then at Antioch, where he wrote the Misopogon, a satire on the luxury and frivolity of the inhabitants—for a campaign against Sapor, a task which he had inherited from Constantius. In March, 362 he left Antioch and crossed the Euphrates, visited Carrhae, memorable for the defeat of Crassus, then crossed the Tigris, and, after burning his fleet, retired northwards towards Armenia. On the march he fought an indecisive battle with the Persians at Maranga, and in a skirmish with the retreating enemy he was mortally wounded by a javelin (January 26th, 363). His body was carried to Tarsus by his successor the Emperor Jovian, and was probably removed later to Constantinople. The legend that as he died he exclaimed: Γαλιλαῖε νενίκηκας, “Thou hast conquered, O GalilÆan!” appears first in the Christian historian Theodoret in the fifth century. Julian was the last male descendant of the famous dynasty founded by Constantius Chlorus.

In spite of his military achievements, he was, first of all, a student. Even on his campaigns he took his [pg xi] books with him, and several of his extant works were composed in camp. He had been trained, according to the fashion of his times, in rhetorical studies by professional sophists such as Libanius, and he has all the mannerisms of a fourth century sophist. It was the sophistic etiquette to avoid the direct use of names, and Julian never names the usurpers Magnentius, Silvanus, and Vetranio, whose suppression by Constantius he describes in his two first Orations, regularly refers to Sapor as “the barbarian,” and rather than name Mardonius, his tutor, calls him “a certain Scythian who had the same name as the man who persuaded Xerxes to invade Hellas.”4 He wrote the literary Greek of the fourth century a.d. which imitates the classical style, though barbarisms and late constructions are never entirely avoided. His pages are crowded with echoes of Homer, Demosthenes, Plato, and Isocrates, and his style is interwoven with half verses, phrases, and whole sentences taken without acknowledgment from the Greek masterpieces. It is certain that, like other sophists, he wished his readers to recognise these echoes, and therefore his source is always classical, so that where he seems to imitate Dio Chrysostom or Themistius, both go back to a common source, which [pg xii] Julian had in mind. Another sophistic element in his style is the use of commonplaces, literary allusions that had passed into the sophistic language and can be found in all the writers of reminiscence Greek in his day. He himself derides this practice5 but he cannot resist dragging in the well-worn references to Cyrus, Darius, and Alexander, to the nepenthe poured out by Helen in the Odyssey, to the defiance of nature by Xerxes, or the refusal of Socrates to admit the happiness of the Great King. Julian wished to make Neo-Platonism the philosophy of his revived Hellenism, but he belonged to the younger or Syrian branch of the school, of which Iamblichus was the real founder, and he only once mentions Plotinus. Iamblichus he ranked with Plato and paid him a fanatical devotion. His philosophical writing, especially in the two prose Hymns, is obscure, partly because his theories are only vaguely realised, partly because he reproduces the obscurity of his model, Iamblichus. In satire and narrative he can be clear and straightforward.