THE EMPEROR JULIAN THE APOSTATE. CHAPTER II . JULIAN'S BOYHOOD, YOUTH, EDUCATION, AND CAESARSHIP.

CHAPTER II

JULIAN'S BOYHOOD, YOUTH, EDUCATION, AND CAESARSHIP.

" This should have been a noble creature—he

Hath all the energy which should have made

A goodly frame of glorious elements

Had they been wisely mingled."

It is not too much to say that Julian's personal motives, qualities and aims, all-decisive as they were in determining the character of the great reaction which history must always couple with his name, would remain a riddle, had no notices of his early years survived. The thoughts, training and experiences of Julian's boyhood and youth shed floods of light upon his subsequent career: they convert a historical surprise and crux into a consequent and little complicated narrative.

Among the earliest events indelibly impressed upon the memory of the imaginative child of six must have been those days of horror when he and his brother Gallus, hidden away in the obscure recesses of a church, listened in hushed terror to the tramp of soldiers and cries of bloodshed, watched the anxious faces of their protectors, the good Mark of Arethusa and his servants, and heard the whispered news passed from mouth to mouth of the death of those nearest and dearest to them.

The sun of the sons of Constantine rose blood-red with the slaughter of their kin. Two uncles and four cousins were the first-fruits of dominion offered up by him, whom the orphaned survivor might well call the butcher of his family. These things remained to Julian the unutterable horrors of a tragedy which he shuddered to recall. In this indiscriminate and most unnatural carnage fell Julius Constantius, younger brother of the great Constantine and father to Julian. Alone of indirect branches of the Imperial house, his two sons survived the hideous massacre.

If Constantius blamed fortune for having thus preserved them, he yet shrank from forthwith imbruing his hands yet more deeply in innocent blood. The oversight might be forgiven: the danger was not imminent. An emperor might spare awhile a child of six, and a boy of thirteen already, it was said, smitten with a deadly disease. Thus Julian was saved. A mother's care he had never known, for the accomplished Basilina had survived but a few months the birth of her Julian first-born. But the child promised to inherit something of his mother's fondness for the poems and masterpieces of ancient Greece. At least he drank in with avidity such Homeric or Hesiodic or philosophical lore as the family eunuch Mardonius, his precise and old-fashioned pedagogue, was pleased to instill.

The child's eager teachableness must have often recalled even to the harsh eunuch reminiscences of the mother whom he had led along the same paths. To Eusebius, the Arian bishop of Nicomedia, it was entrusted to bring up the child, with whom on the mother's side he was distantly connected, in the way of the imperial religion. About his religious education neither Julian himself nor his biographers enter into detail. He no doubt passed through the regular stages incident at that age to the Christian catechumen and neophyte—was counted among the purified, the illuminated, and the perfected in orderly succession—received the seal of baptism—participated in the Eucharist—was instructed in the services of the Church, and initiated into the highest mysteries of faith and dogma. The old culture and the new faith were each to mould his intellectual and moral growth: from the poison of Paganism he was to be guarded inviolate.

For six years or more he was nurtured thus, in the society of tutors and grown-up folk alone. With no father's or mother's love to win his confidence, cut off from home affections, separate from other children, he enjoyed none of those bright sunny influences which are most essential to the free development of all child-nature. Mardonius, whatever his moral worth, was at least no congenial companion for a quick and susceptible child. He was Scythian-born, and rough in manner. A eunuch moreover, well-advanced in years and not free, we may conjecture, from the repellent aspect, and the dwarfed moral nature that characterized his unhappy class. His virtue, if such he possessed, was of a severe, forbidding type: he mistook distant surliness for dignity, harsh insensibility for wise reserve. He was a precisian and a martinet, and made his pupil's life one monotonous round. In going to school he must perforce walk always by the same road and keep his eyes fixed upon the ground: he must regard with philosophical or puritanical aversion the pantomime, the dance, the horse-race, everything indeed that to a Roman boy savored at all of fun or excitement. If ever, as happened twice or thrice, he went to the theatre, it was by order, as a part of educational training: if the child's heart longed for a dance or a romp about the garden, he was drearily referred to the dancing of the Phaeacian lads, the piping of Phemius or Demodokus, the bowery isle of Kalypso or the garden of Alcinous, as far more delicious than the living reality.

He was properly steeped in philosophy from Socrates to Theophrastus. Thus at the most critical time of life all his spontaneity and natural affectionateness of disposition was chilled and nipped. A remarkably beautiful character was strangely marred. Not only, like all children who are thrown much or entirely with their elders, did he become precocious in habits and thoughts. He was by nature a wistful dreamy child, full of strange reveries; from his earliest years he would be possessed by a strange elation of soul as he gazed upon the splendor of the sun, and would strive to meet his rays with unblenching eyes; or again under the pure firmament, a child-worshipper, would meditate upon the wonder of the stars till all thought of self, all sense of surrounding sights or sounds were swallowed up in yearning contemplation of the Gods. This rich emotional nature was all forced in upon itself: there was no one to encourage his child-confidences, or guide them into true channels.

Hard experience made him day by day increasingly and sadly worldly-wise: reserve, distrust, dissimulation became a second nature to him. The dullest reader may feel touched at the sad self-conscious irony of the Misopogon, as Julian with ill-concealed bitterness traces his rough ungraciousness of manner, his severe unsympathizing view of life to the training of that loveless childhood: almost against his will he tells us how the iron had entered into his soul, and to his last day rankled there. From self-recorded traits of boyhood, nay even from the letters of his manhood, considering what a training he had endured, we see how full he by nature was of tender brimming lovingness. He possessed to a singular degree the twofold power of attaching others to himself, and not less himself to others. If he came out of the ordeal so frank and loyal a friend, so thoughtful and sympathizing a master, so grateful and humble a disciple, so fervent and self-forgetful a worshipper of all that he believed good and true, what might not a happier training have made him?

But fate gave no amends for past unkindness. At thirteen years of age, when in years he had but just passed from the child into the boy, but in thought and premature discretion was almost full-grown, Julian was removed from Constantinople to a new home. The jealous suspicions of Constantius could not suffer any prince of the blood royal so near the seat of power. Julian and Gallus, hitherto designedly kept separate, were now together banished to the wilds of Cappadocia. Not that the royal chateau of Macellum was in itself unpleasing. True it was far from the haunts of men: yet placed on a spreading plain skirted by woods that climb towards the snowy peaks of the Argean range, its natural situation was lovely and picturesque enough: without were gardens and fountains ever flowing, while within doors the appointments were admirable, the fare and service princely.

But to Julian it was in his own words an oriental state-prison. It was heaven's help, not man's kindness, that brought him safely through. His sole gain was the society of his step-brother Gallus, itself a questionable advantage. Not only was Gallus several years his senior: in character as in looks he was a complete contrast to Julian. His rough untutored mind, his strong natural passions were the very reverse of Julian's refined intellectual taste, and gentle self-controlled demeanour. A Titus was linked to a Domitian. And Gallus' natural violence and savagery were aggravated, not subdued by the treatment to which the two brothers were in common subjected. Immured like very prisoners, kept under secret espionage as well as open surveillance, cut off from every play-mate, every teacher, every servant even in whom they could repose confidence, they were forced to consort with slaves ever on the watch for an unguarded word or look. Suspicion was the very air they breathed, repression of each natural sentiment the alphabet of their moral training. Under such auspices they sucked the milk of godly doctrine from paid agents of the tyrant. Stinted of more liberal culture, the youthful princes were taught the Christian evidences, were trained to give alms, to observe fasts, to venerate and with their own hands rear the shrines of martyrs, and even to officiate themselves in the services of the Church.

Such was Julian's life from thirteen to nineteen, such his preparation for the more active existence on which he next entered. What was the character of his sentiments at this time? Endowed by nature with intellectual capacities of a high order, he was yet by no means the mere student or recluse. The blood of Constantius Chlorus ran in his veins. The course of his life testifies to the full the practical vigor, the ardent courage, the restless indefatigable craving for action that animated him. It was because all other channels were closed to him that Julian plunged with characteristic vigor into literary pursuits. Though devoid, as his works testify, of originality or of actual genius, he was possessed of a quick active intellect, and of receptive powers of the very first order. The grace of style, the abounding readiness of allusion, the variety of knowledge he displays, show with what diligence and with how great success he steeped himself in the productions of the greatest writers of Greece. But his intellectual labors are for our immediate purpose less material; it is rather his religious standpoint at this juncture that we must seek clearly to realize.

That Julian was a professing Christian there is no doubt. Not only was he intimately acquainted with the Bible, and a practiced theologian versed in patristic lore; but in his outward life he attended divine service, observed fasts, practiced scrupulously the regimen of ecclesiastical discipline, built shrines to the holy martyr Mamas, and performed subordinate clerical functions. All this however, it is manifest, proves nothing whatever as to his private convictions. Theodoret states explicitly that “fear of Constantius” instigated these outward exhibitions of Christianity. Christian or no Christian, he must regulate his outward conduct as such. It was a part of the yoke laid upon him. Christianity was one of the accomplishments he was to acquire. To demur, to object, to rebel might have cost him his life. He was too subjugated now, and what is more, too discreet to think for an instant of anything but passive submission. By this time too he had become too practiced a dissimulant to betray himself by unguarded words or acts. Years later, even when joint-emperor, in an outlying province, surrounded by trusty legions, while in private practice and conviction he was a complete Pagan, to all outward seeming he remained a Christian. How much more then as a solitary, defenseless youth! Not that he had become as yet even at heart an open dissident, a pronounced unbeliever; but rather that the religion, which he obediently accepted in externals, had laid no hold upon him inwardly, while his bias was to see and notice the objections and imperfections with which it was surrounded.

Such at least would seem a priori the probable state of the case if we consider how Christianity presented itself to him. It came to him under royal stamp and warrant, as the religion of his oppressors. It was part of his discipline, a wise prison-rule, so to speak, that the most beneficent Constantius was pleased to lay upon him. His gentle cousin, who had made him an orphan, had butchered his kinsmen, had driven him into exile, had treated him as a slave, provided him now with a religion. Would Julian be very eager to accept it unquestioned?

With his works before us it is no mere conjecture to say that the first instinct of Julian's youth was a terrifying awe and a shrinking abhorrence of Constantius. He says how he shunned the hated presence; and what efforts it cost him to lodge under the same roof with his father's murderer. It was well enough for courtier slaves to palaver of Constantius' past innocence, of his present regrets, his wish to make amends, his sense that his childlessness was a deserved judgment from on high, but Julian had facts to speak to him as well as servile mouths. The Emperor had first spoiled him of his kin, then stripped him anew of every friend, then robbed him of liberty itself, and should he in return accept without demur the boon of the religion that he offered? Fear, suspicion, resentment, hate, passions not less potent because assiduously masked, were all enlisted against, not for the religion of the tyrant.

Nor could the religion commend itself by its own virtue. Christianity, it must never be forgotten, was set before Julian in the mangled imperfect form of Arianism. From his later writings, from the contemptuous scorn with which he almost invariably treats the teaching and even the name of Christ, it may safely be affirmed that the moral beauty of Christ's character and work had never captivated the imagination of the Apostate; and there is little wonder in this, considering how violently Arian was his training, and also how that heresy neglects and tends therefore to mar and deface the true personality of Christ.

But not only was this mutilated distortion of Christianity the aspect of it displayed to Julian; even this was propounded by most unworthy advocates. There is no positive evidence that one sincere Christian was numbered among the young prince's tutors: such were not readily found, nor greatly patronized among the dependents of Constantius: certain it is that most of his teachers were either wholly careless, or else Pagans in disguise, as they openly became so soon as the court breezes blew that way. Julian is hardly to be blamed if he regarded with indifference or even concealed dislike an enforced religion propounded so imperfectly, and commended so disadvantageously.

On the other hand, what were his relations towards Paganism? Besides his day-dreams, his yearning reveries, his communings with a felt but unknown Deity, his foremost pleasure was his books. They distracted him from the miserable present: in Homer he could revel by the hour, forgetful of frets and troubles and perils looming in the distance; Plato was already perhaps his darling author; Aristotle's keen dialectics were familiar ground. And in all these authors whom he loved the best, in the poets and historians, in the orators and philosophers of Greece there was one common property; they were believers in and teachers of a polytheistic creed. Compared with their garlands of everlasting flowers, the writings of divines and long drawn discussions on dogma or Christian evidence seemed colourless and perfumeless indeed. Was it not a legitimate inference that the inspiration of each was drawn from the creed, and that the value of the creed might be in some measure determined by the efficacy of the inspiration?

At this age, be it remembered, the Bible had not yet attained, the chosen Classics had not yet lost that common sanction of the wisest, which conferred on them something more than their inherent lustre. The critic and schoolman still handled the Bible with contempt. Like Mohammed claiming the Koran as his true miracle, Paganism could point to her Homeric scriptures, that “Old Testament” which enlisted nay enforced the admiring reverence even of the disbeliever, and say “These are the seal of my Apostleship”. Julian must thus early have begun to feel, what in later life he continually reiterates, that the splendid afflatus of the old culture was the gift of the Gods whom it reverenced.

This growing bias towards Paganism could not but tend to develope. It was Julian's misfortune to be brought up book-learning without the healthy corrective of practical observation. Cut off from his fellows, except a picked and unworthy few, he saw things from the student's point of view; he became what in great part he continued to be through life, a pedant. Defrauded of all opportunity of testing their practical influence upon men's lives, he judged creeds by their self-enunciation or their literary results. No view of polytheism could have been more favorable. What he knew from personal observation of Christianity, what he witnessed of its moral power, was not encouraging: the man he most hated for his crimes was the man most loud in Christian profession; the paid satellites, who were his spies and tools, were one and all Christians. Of Paganism on the other hand he knew only, on the positive side, that it was the avowed creed of all those whose works he cherished and admired, and still the living faith of one half of the Roman Empire; on the negative, that it was the faith not only hated by those whom he hated, and suspected by those who suspected him, but also feared for its power by those who prohibited him contact with its more gifted exponents. Not that such thoughts as these were consciously present to Julian in a developed form: he had not yet formulated a theory; self-analysis and introspection had not proceeded thus far. Some Socrates was needed with skilled majestic art to bring them to the birth; but dormant they lay there, a self-sown seed ready to spring up under the first warmth of sympathy, or the dew of judicious instruction.

That such was Julian's state of mind is quite confirmed by such intimations as remain. “From the first rudiments of boyhood”, writes Ammian, “his bias was towards Paganism; little by little with growing years his devotion that way grew with him. In fear and trembling, yet as often as he was able, he meditated in secret on all that looked thitherward”. With his own lips he himself declares with what strange fascination in those early days he gazed upon the sun and stars, so that wholly forsaken of earthly thoughts, he was possessed with the beauties of heaven, and, a beardless astrologer, entered into strange and sensible rapport with them, as he pondered then upon the Gods. There is yet another testimony, which though rejected by some as coming from hostile sources yet seems so natural as even to invite belief. In the training of catechumens it was an established practice to set the students rhetorical theses, which constantly took the form of apologetic defense or attack upon Christianity. In such school-room exercises Julian, it is said, was prone to conduct the defense of Paganism with unseemly vigour and ingenuity against the less impartial Gallus. Here is a genuine representation in the concrete of exactly that state of mind which it has been the aim of these pages to depict, and in which he continued to hang balanced until the day came when he bade adieu to Macellum, and by Imperial permission repaired to Constantinople.

The five years that followed the recall from Macellum were decisive of the part Julian was to play in life. They were passed in the prosecution of his studies, in the first instance at Constantinople. He received the training of an ordinary well-educated citizen: grammar he learnt of Nikokles; his master in rhetoric was the sophist Hekebolius, a sort of Vicar of Bray of his times, who an Arian under Constantius, and a hot Pagan under Julian, pleaded abjectly in the succeeding reign for readmission into the Christian communion. In philosophical acquirements as in natural genius he had by this time outstripped his instructors. Fairly beaten and baffled by the precocity of their pupil, his teachers had petitioned Constantius, that their young charge might he permitted to attend others of the more famous seats of learning. More important than this was the fact that in the metropolis his merits were too much before the world. It was not safe to leave a prince of the blood, brother to a reigning Emperor, free to his own devices. He was imprudent enough to make friends amid fellow-students and teachers; unfortunate enough to attract the notice of citizens. Dangerous talk of his talents, his sociability, his fitness for Empire reached the Imperial ear. Constantius' suspicions took fire.

He must leave Constantinople. Fondly hoping that literary zeal might foster political indifference and supplant dangerous aspirations, he ordered or permitted Julian to proceed to Nicomedia. There he was to remain under the eye of Hekebolius, and was solemnly pledged not to imperil his orthodoxy by attendance at the lecture-room of Libanius. Hekebolius cared little about the taint of Paganism. Perhaps he imagined that it was the personal influence of Libanius that alone need be feared. Be that as it may, Julian, though keeping the letter of his oath, was enabled day by day to peruse the lectures that he was forbidden in person to attend. He devoured them voraciously; he made them the model of his style. They fell in with his half-formed prepossessions. Predisposed to Hellenism alike by his philosophical and literary studies, and by the estimate of Christianity which personal experience had taught him, Julian responded to the advances made to him by the leaders of the Neo-Platonist movement. They had only arguments, and scoffs, and polite contempt for the Christian “superstition”, but were also men of real culture, and not less of insight into character. They showed him sympathy, such as he had never before received: treated him with a kindness and deferential courtesy hitherto unknown to him: stimulated his industry, praised his acquirements, flattered his genius, entered into his difficulties. Their hazy cloud castles of mystic yearning and promise and hope, fabrics wrapped in visionary splendors, fascinated wistful longings nursed by the Phaedrus and the Republic; they chimed with

those obstinate questionings

of sense and outward things,

fallings from us, vanishings;

blank misgivings of a Creature

moving about in worlds not realized,

of which his religious sentiment rather than conviction had consisted. He drank in the new Gospel. He was soon a convert to its creed.

For to this period beyond all cavil his definite perversion to Paganism must be referred. Whatever his previous misgivings or self-questionings, he had not definitely renounced Christianity before his arrival in Nicomedia in 351. Under more favorable auspices he might yet have been won for the Church. Had he for instance chosen Alexandria as his school, and fallen under the influence of an Athanasius, it is curious to think what a transposition of his whole subsequent career might have resulted.

The testimonies here are decisive. Not only does Sozomen single this out as the period of his conversion, and Libanius speak of him as at this time bridling his virulent hate against the gods, and, tamed by divinations, breaking loose like a lion from the chains which fastened him, put Julian himself designates his twentieth year as that in which he began first “to walk with the gods”.

For the young man of twenty—for Julian as for many another—the impressions now received, the emotions now awakened were to mould his entire future. To himself he seemed issuing out of darkness into day: “let the time of that darkness be forgotten”, he writes, speaking of the years immediately preceding this period. Light was streaming in upon his soul, chasing away the shadows that had rested there and illuminating the heights that lay before him. He was not yet wholly satisfied: his soul still panted Excelsior!: the old cravings after a goal still unattained spurred him on. His shrewd teachers perceived them, and forged them into chains that bound him fast. By wise reticence, by suppressed allusions, by mystical hints and innuendoes, they taught the neophyte to believe “that there were new glories, unknown ecstasies, more transcendent revelations awaiting the initiated believer”. The fame of Aedesius attracted him to Pergamus. With all the gravity of age but all the enthusiasm of youth, Julian sat at the old man's feet drinking in breathless and open-mouthed the master's wisdom. Pressed to reveal those higher esoteric mysteries to which from time to time he would refer, the old man answered, “Thou knowest all my heart, thou hast heard all my instruction; thou seest with thine eyes how feeble is this outward tenement of soul, and its frame nigh to dissolution. If thou wouldst do aught, loved child of wisdom, get thee to mine own true-born sons, and there take thy fill of the sweet juices of all wisdom and instruction: if thou participates in those holy mysteries, thou wilt verily blush to have borne the nature and name of man. Would that Maximus Eusebius or Priscus were here present! But of my friends, Eusebius and Chrysanthius alone are left here. Take heed unto them and have compassion on my age”.

Thus he was transferred to the teaching of Eusebius and Chrysanthius. At the close of elaborate philosophical discourses, Eusebius would utter obscure warnings against impostures that delude and mock the senses, magicians' acts, cheating and materializing men's conceptions by pretended miracles. On one such occasion Julian took Chrysanthius aside, and asked him to expound the meaning of such epilogues. Affecting a profound gravity he sagely replied, “You will do well not to learn of me, but of their author”; in accordance with which advice he consulted Eusebius directly. After some fencing Eusebius, pressed hard by Julian's pertinacious curiosity, and finding him at length fairly in the net, told him of one Maximus, among the oldest and most honored of their teachers, who with the magnificent boldness of genius, despising sober logical demonstration, applied himself to these fool's manifestations. He then went on to say how Maximus had one day summoned them to the temple of Hecate; and how, after he had adored the goddess and burned incense and chanted a hymn, the statue of the goddess, as they sat there, smiled visibly upon him, and the torches in her hands took fire. At this recital, continues the narrator, the divine Julian bade him farewell and stick to his books; “for you have shown me the man I was looking for”. So saying, he kissed Chrysanthius and set off with speed for Ephesus.

The story, even if its literal correctness is questioned, is full of instruction and significance. It is a true picture of the restless agitation, the yet unsatisfied cravings that were driving him forward at all hazards, the constant pursuit of a higher truth, a completer revelation than any as yet vouchsafed him. It betrays at once the ardor and the weakness that characterized him: he was full of excitable impetuosity, and not less of a wistful superstition. He possessed a temperament dissatisfied yet sanguine, a mind docilely receptive yet ardently inquisitive, a nature emotional rather than strong, imaginative and sensuous rather than calmly philosophical or patiently devotional.

Maximus was a teacher well suited to such a pupil. To a venerable hoary beard, a quick searching eye, a rich harmonious intonation worthy of an Athene or Apollo, he united a commanding eloquence and a prophetic earnestness, that seem to have enforced assent, enchaining his hearers with a kind of awe. “The hidden spark of divination” of which Libanius speaks, was quickly nursed into flame. Julian became, what he remained through, life, his devoted adherent. After due probation he was solemnly initiated in the temple of Artemis. To the accompaniment of weird chants and unholy rites, amid awful apparitions of demons and spirits of the departed, with every accessory suited to impress the imagination and stifle calm deliberation, Julian was admitted to the new faith. He was disinfected from the pollution of Christianity: the taint of baptism was washed off with the warm blood of a slaughtered bull sprinkled on his head. From this time forth his conversion to Paganism was complete hopes of the party centered in him. He was in active correspondence or personal contact with the leading Neo-Platonists of Greece and Asia. His change of creed was not of course outwardly professed. The lion was unshackled, but had yet a while, says Libanius, to wear the ass's skin. No sooner did whispers of his apostasy, of at least undue familiarity with Pagan teachers, begin to circulate, than Julian shaved close, wore the tonsure, observed saints' days, assiduously read the Scriptures in public, and adopted the outward demeanour of a monk. But in private he indulged in Pagan practices and mystic rites.

The rapidity and the completeness of Julian's conversion demand neither surprise nor blame. Christianity was presented to him for perfunctory acceptance, not only in a maimed, disfigured shape, not only as the religion of his enemies, but also by wretchedly unworthy exponents. With Paganism his fortune was just opposite. Hellenism, wooing him in its most finished and becoming dress, courted his spontaneous acceptance, not only as the religion of new-found friends, but also as introduced to him by most worthy advocates. Not an Aedesius merely or Maximus the soul-physician, but Libanius greatest of the sophists, Iamblichus the most divine, Themistius prince of orators, Proaeresius king of eloquence, such were the men through whom Julian learned Paganism. In the fact of his conversion there was nothing unnatural nor ignoble, rather the reverse: it calls for pity, not for condemnation; it is the permanence of it rather, when but for prejudice and pride and bigotry a better judgment might have been formed, that awakes regret. It proved too late to retrace his steps, when superstition, and pride of consistency, and intellectual self-sufficiency, and long-protracted pain of enforced disingenuousness, all barred the way.

If anything was yet lacking to confirm Julian in his adherence to Paganism, and alienation from Christianity, Constantius was careful to supply the want. Julian had still one relative in the world, cousin at once and brother-in-law to the Emperor. His hour was now come to be brought to “The Butcher”. Gallus, who had hitherto disregarded Constantius' threats and evaded his orders, was now enticed by soft promises to leave his Eastern province and visit the Emperor in person. At first he journeyed with the state befitting a Caesar; one by one, as the toils closed faster round him, the marks of homage were withdrawn; from Constantinople he was hurried away by imperial order: at Petobio (Pettau) Creatures of the Emperor put him under arrest, stripped him of the purple, dressed him in common clothes, bade him “Get up at once”, and so drove him in a post-chaise to Pola. The place was ominous: the blood of Crispus still cried from its prison walls. It was destined to witness yet another Caesar's death, falling victim to his kinsman's jealousy. Gallus was spared the mockery of a trial. His hands tied behind him, he was dragged like a common felon to the block. Even the decency of burial was denied to the mutilated trunk.

Scarcely had the news of his brother's murder reached Julian when he too received the mandate to repair from the quiet retreats of Ionia “to visit the Emperor in person”. There had risen in Constantius' mind a doubt whether the Imperial consent had been formally attached to his departure from Macellum. It was an authenticated fact that only three years before the young prince-student had had an interview with his brother on his royal progress eastward through Nicomedia. Letters had passed at intervals between them. Besides there was an a priori probability that he was a co-conspirator. It was certain at least that he was connected by blood with the Emperor himself, and was now the sole offender who had not expiated by death that crime. “The wolf thought well to be his watch-dog”.

Treated like a prisoner, dragged backwards and forwards between Milan and Como, in daily terror of his life, forced to guard every word and look, he learned bitterly enough that it was better for him to entrust the care of his life to the gods than to the word of Constantius. Possessed with deep-seated hatred for the murderer, for whom he was forced to simulate affection and loyal respect, he transferred no doubt some portion of that hate to the religion he so loudly professed. “How often”, says an eloquent writer,” as he raised his eyes to heaven, must he have seen, rearing itself between him and the God of Constantius, the bloody image of a father he had never known, and a brother that he dared not mourn”. “His Eternity” had just reached the climax of Arrogant self-sufficiency. He had cashiered a fourth Caesar. Persia for the nonce was quiet. Emperor of Emperors he aspired too to be counted Bishop of Bishops. With a brutal candor he asserted his lordship in Church as well as in State, in doctrine no less than in discipline. His civil supremacy he regarded as the proof and the measure of his religious orthodoxy. Arianism was demonstrably orthodox, if Constantius was Arian. L'église c'est moi was the position to which he committed himself. To assert it he browbeat or bribed, menaced or cajoled, imprisoned or exiled, tortured or deposed refractory bishops, as seemed best. No prestige of office could protect Liberius from Thracian exile, no extremity of venerable age deliver Hosius from the rack.

But it was not only a personal antipathy to Constantius, not only Constantius' own unworthiness, or his supercilious domineering over the Christian commonwealth, that finally discredited Christianity in the eyes of Julian. These things only corroborated or accorded with results to which personal observation must have led him.

The Christians with whom he chiefly came in contact during his residence at the court of Milan were beyond a doubt the Arian bishops who clung About the throne. They justified the bitter taunt of Liberius, by which he bade the Emperor remember that bishops were not created to avenge his wrongs. It so chanced that the council of Milan synchronized with Julian's stay in the place: It is needless to dwell in detail on the scenes of quarrelsome turbulence, or on individual cases of duplicity that marked the hey-day of ascendant Arianism, when a Valens and Ursacius swayed the helm of council, when honest men turned cowards, and wise men traitors, when prelatical violence and rancor and self-seeking drowned or gagged the voices of the solitary spokesmen of truth, and the blindness or timidity of her less unworthy leaders jeoparded well-nigh the existence of the Church of Christ. With what disdainful scorn must Julian in his hours of privacy have cast aside that mask of religion which he was forced to wear, and turned from the present to dream of Hellas, “home of the Muses!” Almost at the very hour that he was joyfully turning his back on the palace to journey towards his mother's hearth, another illustrious exile also set his face northwards, Liberius, chief bishop of the west, wending his way to weary exile in Thrace, because he declined to condemn a brother bishop unheard!

Thus we may consider that on Julian's arrival at Athens in the year 355 his prior alienation from Christianity had changed into positive aversion. The death of Gallus, the private and public bearing of Constantius, and the condition of official Christianity had riveted irrevocably the sentiments which Julian had derived from Macellum, from Nicomedia, and from Ephesus.

At Athens he appears to have been initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries. Outward repression and self-constraint only made his inward excitement more uncontrollable. The strange excited manner, the restless gait, the twitching shoulders, the dilated rolling eye, the distended nostril, attracted the notice even of his masters and fellow-students. At times he would fall into reveries, and so with nodding head and swaying steps, pass through the streets half-distraught. Then with a sudden jerk, or a harsh peal of laughter, would turn upon his companion with some strangely abrupt interrogation. Never, not in the first moments of elevation to the Caesarship, not in the perils of his Gallic wars, not in the sole possession of sovereign power, can life have been more intense to him than now. In the immemorial courts of Athens those convictions were finally matured which have given its permanent significance to Julian's life. There he moved amid the most intellectual circles, and though of royal blood proved not unable to hold his own with the bravest in the peaceful combats of the schools. Amid students of no common calibre, such for instance as the young Cappadocians, Basil and Gregory, he shone by his own merit. Needless to say that by professors and rhetoricians of the Pagan interest—though indeed, as Libanius assures us, he was to be counted among teachers rather than taught—he was at once instructed and caressed: but the true history of his University life survives solidified in the thoughts, the writings, and the policy of maturer manhood.

To this same period we must refer the rise of another feeling that laid strong hold upon Julian. He became impressed with the sense of a mission. He began to regard himself as the special instrument of the gods to fulfill the predestined restoration of Hellenism. Vague prophecies were current pointing to the imminent fall of Christianity; “Peter”, said one heathen oracle, “had by magic secured worship to Christ for three hundred and sixty five years; but thereafter his kingdom should fall”. Dreams of a Pagan Messiah floated through men's minds. Already the fabric of Christianity, triumphant externally, began to crumble from within. A seeming renaissance of Hellenism had set in. Julian, suggested far-sighted philosophers, and with growing buoyancy his own heart whispered the same hopes, alike by position and by actual gifts was the elect of heaven to consummate the change. Such half-formed aspirations chimed admirably with his imaginative nature. His mind, like Constantine the Great's, was so tempered, that while he yielded willingly to superstition, he found in it rather a strength than a weakness.

Julian could believe in a fortunate star, could credulously attribute each happy chance, each trivial success, which was due clearly to his own foresight, to the direct interposition of the gods on his behalf; while at the same time he was never frightened by childish omens, or cowed by superstitious fears from boldly facing and resolutely carrying out enterprises that demanded all his hardihood and natural resource. It was at this time that he began to recognize the divine hand in each incident of his career; to hear voices or dream dreams, which he reverenced as supernatural monitors: to see in himself the favored knight of Hermes and Athene. In his own language, from the day that he left Athens, the goddess was everywhere his guide, and compassed him about with guardian angels, assigned to him from the Sun and Moon. These things were signs of a growing self-confidence, presages of powers that as yet lay undeveloped, and indeed unsuspected, under the gauche exterior of the unprincely student.

It does not fall within the scope of this essay to follow Julian on his return from Athens to court, to unravel the court cabals and the Imperial hopes and fears which resulted in Julian's solemn investiture with the Caesarship and his espousal of Helena, sister to the Emperor. Nor are we concerned with the marches and counter-marches, that in three brilliant campaigns reduced Gaul and the Rhine provinces to entire submission to the young Caesar, and left him free to devote his whole attention to administrative and economical reform in the provinces entrusted to him. He had set out under the ignoble espionage of his own officers, restricted in all his powers, thwarted at every turn by privy conspiracies and opposition, with a school-boy's manual in his pocket regulating his powers, his money allowance, his very diet, a lay-figure dressed in purple to scare barbarians with the terror of a name, a sort of shadow apparition king, wearing on his brow the round and top of sovereignty and nothing more.

In three short years his native force, his industry, and his tenacity of purpose, had secured him a commanding ascendancy. His state of mind remained such as has been already described, though growing years and a career of almost unchequered success deepened no doubt his previous religious convictions. In life and belief a Pagan, in outward act a somewhat unpronounced Christian, he adopted a policy consonant with his ambiguous position. With, or more probably without his consent, his name was appended by Constantius to a law declaring it a capital offence to adore or sacrifice to idols. He interfered as little as possible with religious parties or disputes of any kind. Political necessities required perhaps his formal acquiescence in the banishment of Hilary, the young Bishop of Poitiers, from Gaul. But this was an isolated act, the omission of which must have alarmed the suspicions of Constantius and fanned his growing jealousy. Julian was too astute to provoke collision or give a handle to opponents by open professions of Paganism. He satisfied the requirements of imperial orthodoxy. Even after his army had by acclaim declared him worthy of the supreme dignity of empire, when open war was imminent, if not proclaimed, between him and Constantius, the young Augustus was still to be found wearing the ass' skin, and participating in Christian rites at Epiphany-tide in the church of Vienne. It was on the march to meet Constantius that he publicly abjured Christianity, took the title of Pontifex, and conducted sacrifice in Pagan temples. Even then deference to the feelings of not a few of his soldiers led him to temporize in some points. But from Illyria he can write joyfully to his foster-father in philosophy: “We worship the gods publicly; the whole army which is following my fortunes are devout believers: we openly sacrifice oxen: with many a hecatomb we render thank-offerings to the gods”. He issued to all true Greeks his Pagan manifesto. Confident in his mission, fortified by assurance of divine favor and looking for “great fruit of labor”, amid the plaudits of men and with heaven's smile, he set his face eastward to regenerate a misguided world and by the gods behest to make all things pure.

III.

NEO-PLATONISM.