MEDIEVAL HISTORY LIBRARY

THE EMPEROR JULIAN THE APOSTATE

CHAPTER VI.

JULIAN'S PERSONAL RELIGION

It will be useful to supplement the last chapter by some Julian's details of Julian's own personal religion. This will serve in some measure as a test of the sincerity and efficacy of his teaching, and also exemplify its working. In the main he strove conscientiously to carry out the ideal which he set before others.

Recognizing the grand truth that increased opportunities imply increased responsibilities, he endeavored in imperial measure to perform the duties of a private individual. As a citizen he had been liberal to the destitute; when in days of comparative poverty, his grandmother's estate, long forcibly withheld, was at length secured to him, of his little fortune he gave ungrudgingly to those in greater need than himself: raised later to princely power, his alms must be princely.

It is almost with despair that he contemplates the accumulated responsibilities of an emperor. He numbers up the virtues that are required of the man, whose highest function it is to be the servant not the ruler of his subjects: a modesty and sobriety, gentleness and goodness, humility and patience, impartiality and conscientiousness, unswerving justice and philosophic foresight; these and a thousand others, and coupled to them all, an entire self-abnegation ready to forego every indulgence, to shake off all sloth, and to make the whole life a sacrifice to others' welfare: and then as he thinks of the mountainous heaps of abuses everywhere rife, he cries out in half-despair that it is verily a Herculean task thus thoroughly to purge earth and sea of prevalent vice, and that the true king must in sober reality, as Plato has fabled and Aristotle reasoned, be no man but  a demi-god. 

Yet tremblingly conscious of the magnitude of his task, he faced it bravely. Not, it may safely be said, without stern effort. Early and late, in 363 AD no less than in  356 or 301 AD, he confesses the shrinking reluctance with which he entered upon power. His lonely frostbitten boyhood produced an acute, not to say morbid sense of personal deficiencies. This was only partially removed by his collegiate education: it continued to paralyze energies as yet untested and therefore undeveloped. 

He shrunk instinctively from active life; he mapped out for himself the student's career, singing Attic tales to solace the ennui of existence. The Epicurean maxim “Live and let live” seemed life's best motto. There   were   moments  when   suicide  appeared the readiest solution of unhappiness. On leaving Athens for the Caesarship he wept “fountains of tears”. One letter of that epoch or earlier is preserved. It is addressed to the philosopher Iamblichus and closes thus dejectedly:—“Do thou remain at home, and fare thou well, and never forfeit the peace thou now enjoyest; we for our part, we will bear with fortitude whatever God may dispense; for good men ought, they say, to cherish hopefulness, and do their duty while they follow destiny”. The last phrase is eminently true to his frame of mind at the time.

He seemed fortune's toy; she for good or for evil was mistress of man's acts and destinies. He accepted provisionally a Stoic idea of duty, but accepted it perfunctorily:  for Stoicism with its summons to action, perseverance, fortitude for their own sake, with its arbitrary definitions of happiness, with its reversal of all ordinary standards of success looked to him a bleak disappointing creed invented to disguise the failures of its best exemplars. Had not Cato failed, and Dion failed ? At the moment when the insignia of pomp were conferred, there rose to his lips the line of Homer, that on its prey “purple death lays hold and mastering fate”. The burden of his constant presentiment was that now “he should die busier”.

But no sooner was power in his hands, and he by short trial made conscious of his real aptitudes for command and influence, than these nightmares passed away. Now or never was the time to justify his old boast, to give the lie to those who  assumed  that good  philosophers must be indifferent citizens, and to show that even a student might be cast in a princely and courageous mould. It would be travelling too far aside to depict the young Caesar as soldier, combining dash with prudence, shaming cowardice, regenerating discipline, inspiring devotion in his friends and terror in his foes; or to review with any fullness his exploits or mistakes as legislator, as administrator, as economist, as judge, as orator or as student; but the moral gist of his whole bearing as Caesar and as Augustus claims some summary.

No stress need be laid on his easier excellences, manliness, courage, generosity, fidelity to friends, and such like: they belonged to the man, and were little affected by his creed.—Of his more strictly moral virtues the most striking is unselfish, untiring devotion to work. At the close of his first year of power he pictured the virtuous prince as one “laborious and of capacious mind, allotting their proper tasks to all, reserving for himself the largest share, but without reserve distributing the rewards of peril among the workers”. Five years later his panegyrist speaks thus:—“Our most virtuous emperor spares nothing to make us live as our station demands, abounding   in all things needful, leading chaste but cheerful lives.  Other emperors have been either chafed by hard work or enervated by sloth. The strenuous have failed in graciousness, the gracious in earnestness…Our emperor spares himself no trouble and no fatigue; but exacts neither from his friends. His toil secures others' leisure. He is the dispenser of wealth, the eager recipient of cares, readier always to discharge the most irksome offices in person rather than impose them upon others”. But testimonies to his indefatigable self-denying industry are too common to multiply; the more as it will appear abundantly in the sequel. Physical weakness renders this elastic energy the more admirable.

The motive which impelled him was partly a high Neo-Platonic sense of duty and religion; partly a deep conviction of the power of his example, as it is written in Plato, “Rulers and elders must practice modesty and temperance” that the people may see and be beautified:' partly too, it is just to add, an intense love of applause, degenerating at times to vanity, willfulness and egoism.

Another characteristic of Julian was kindliness: it is prominent both in public and private relations. One striking instance of leniency was his treatment of Constantius' adherents, who were about him when proclaimed Augustus: at that critical hour he neither committed nor allowed a single execution, though more than one declared personal enemy was in his grasp. Few usurpers of the Empire could say the same.

It is hardly less rare to find an autocrat pleading for clemency of treatment to prisoners in gaol previously to sentence being declared: to the innocent it is a due; to the guilty it will do no harm. Most victors would agree with Julian in the policy of relentlessly pushing and harrying a foe till he acknowledges defeat, but not all, of his age not many, would have seriously called it “a pollution” to strike or slay the enemy who asks for quarter. But his gentleness appears not only in lenient treatment of enemies, nor only in the general indulgence of his rule, and his affectionate solicitude for the welfare of his subjects, but quite as prominently in more personal relations: in courtly deference towards officials; in affability towards councilors, with frank acceptance of wise rebukes; in devotion to teachers, such as Maximus, Libanius, Iamblichus; in gratitude to benefactors, such as Eusebia; in private life, as for instance in the kindly letter, by which he hopes to console the bereaved Amerius for the loss of a young wife: the news had “filled his eyes with tears”. But natural lenity did not shove justice aside. Julian was just, yet not afraid on occasion to temper justice. Rigidly exacting of proof, he presumed innocence till guilt was substantiated. When an angry advocate, baffled in his indictment, cried impatiently, “Can anyone be found guilty, if denial is to clear him?” Julian promptly responded, “Can anyone be found innocent, if assertion is to convict him?” He aimed at being “slow to condemn, put slower still to relax a sentence once given”. Moreover an habitual earnestness armed him with great power of righteous indignation at acts of unjust oppression. At no small risk he manfully shielded the provincials from the exactions of Florentius, a prefect appointed in Gaul by Constantius. Let’s hear his own words to his private friend and physician:

He thought to implicate me in his own infamy, by sending me his knavish infamous memorials for signature.  What was I to do? hold my peace or show tight? The  first was a feeble, cringing, debasing course; the second was honest, manly, and free, though circumstances made it inconvenient. Was I to abandon an unfortunate population to the mercy of thieves, or to the best of my ability defend them, reduced as they are to the last gasp by the villainous machinations of rogues like him? To me it appears cruel injustice to put military tribunes on  trial for leaving their post, to punish them with immediate death, and refuse them burial; and then myself to desert my post as champion of the unfortunate, when called on to fight against thieves like these, and that too with God, who gave me my commission, contending on my side.—Well, if it should turn out ill, it is no small consolation to have a good conscience for a companion”.

Thus as a ruler he sought to be a faithful shepherd of the flock entrusted to him. He regarded it as essential to the true monarch, and he gave to the term a daunting comprehensiveness. By his definition it included “conscious active subjection to the Gods and the laws, frank recognition of the claims of equals, courteous acknowledgment of superior merit, watchful precautions against class oppression, with constant readiness to brave prejudice, passion and abuse; all this moreover with unruffled resolute composure, disciplining and controlling every passionate impulse.    It included too abstinence from questionable pleasures of all kinds, even from those tolerated by an elastic public opinion, in the conviction that private personal indulgence is the sure outcome of public laxity and frivolity.

It is time now to inquire into his more inward practice of virtue and beliefs. First then his personal chastity stands above reproach. No Christian writer has impugned it, while Pagans with one mouth extol even if in some cases almost deprecating it. “Purer than a Vestal” is the description of Hamertinus, while Libanius and Ammian are to modern reserve indelicately precise in their emphatic acquittals of Julian from all frailty: to Zonaras he seemed unnaturally fastidious. In Julian's own eyes personal purity was a part of that entire subdual of the flesh, which his philosophic creed inculcated. When first introduced to the highest mysteries of Neo-Platonism, he was told that such were the ecstatic revelations reserved for the initiated, that he would shortly blush to own the nature and name of man. He should be like Plotinus, who would neither hear nor make mention of his parents, his country or his birth; who replied to the disciple who desired his portrait, that it was enough to bear the image in which nature had veiled us, without perpetuating it for posterity. Julian was a humble follower in the same track. Not only did practice strict continence, and abstain from the frivolities of the theatre and the exciting or bloody spectacles of the amphitheatre with resolute determination, but in his private life practiced a strict asceticism. Abstemious in diet, stinting himself of sleep, rejecting downy coverlets for the coarse carpet rug and palliasse, he guarded against the first approaches of effeminacy; in the hardest winter he went without fires: striving in every way by constant discipline of the flesh to follow out those precepts of Plato and Aristotle which from childhood he had imbibed.

His religious life demands a closer scrutiny. The first most noticeable trait is his ever-present belief in an overruling Providence. “For it is against all reason”, he writes, “that a man who commits himself wholly to the Almighty should be disregarded of him and left utterly desolate: rather, God shelters him with his own arm, endues him with courage, inspires him with strength, teaches him all he ought to do, and deters him from all he ought not to do”. Like professions recur again and again in the pages of his writings. They appear in his state manifesto to the Athenians. “Human wisdom”, he tells them, “is powerless to change the past or foretell the future: even for the present it is not infallible, and may be content with a comparative exemption from error. But the far-reaching wisdom of the Gods, with its omniscient gaze, knows and does always what is best; for the Gods themselves are the authors of the future no less than of the present. To their guidance men may entrust themselves without reserve”. The same belief is reiterated till it becomes a common place in his devotional works.    It meets us in his Satires. And perhaps no religious thought recurs more frequently in his private correspondence.   

Writing immediately after the death of Constantius to his uncle Julian, he says that all his actions had been prompted by an immediate impulse from the Gods: he had been but a passive agent in their hands: had the issue been put to the stake of a battle-field, he should have trusted all to fortune and the Gods, awaiting such issue as might seem good to their love. To the providence of the all-seeing God he attributes his falling into sickness, no less than his recovery from it.  From Him comes all success and all disaster. The saying 'Deo volente' glides as naturally into Julian's correspondence as into the letters of a modern Christian.

Not unfrequently indeed this present sense of an overruling Providence is exaggerated into a kind of semi-Fatalism, from excesses of which however Julian's masculine good sense preserved him. He speaks of conduct “regulated not by virtue only nor resolute free choice, but far rather controlled by an ever-ruling fate constraining the bent of action to its will”. Once again dwelling on the active power of fate, he quotes with approval the dictum of Plato, which in his own experience he has found true—“God is all things, and with God's help fate and circumstance control all human action”. In this connection, for the sake of the insight it gives into  Julian's religious life, it will be useful to cite long extracts from the allegory in which Julian has described the phases or crises of belief which he passed through. Nothing could show more vividly how completely Julian, regarded himself as an instrument in the hands of the Gods, from whom he had derived an altogether special mission.

Having portrayed Constantine under the image of an unscrupulous rich man, and described the scenes of disorder and crime that ensued upon the distribution of his vast wealth to his unworthy heirs, he represents Zeus and Helios taking counsel together to counteract the mischief and impiety that had resulted from the insolent pride of these heirs. A consultation with the Fates results in the weaving of a new thread of life for Julian.

“Then Zeus addressing himself to Helios says, 'Behold this young child; kinsman though he is, nephew of the rich man of I whom we spoke and cousin to his heirs, he is just flung aside in utter neglect; yet is this child thy offspring. Swear then by my Scepter and thine, that thou wilt take him in special charge, wilt tend him and heal him of his sickness. Thou sees how he has been as it were begrimed with smoke and filth and soot; and that the flame which thou hast sown in him is in danger of being quenched, unless thou gird him with strength. To thy charge I and the Fates do commit him. Take him hence and nurture him'. Thereat King Helios was glad and took pleasure in the babe, seeing yet alive in him a tiny spark of his own, fire, and from that day forth he nurtured the young child, and withdrew, him

                                  From blood and the ward in and slaughter of men.

And father Zeus bade Athene too, born without mother and ever-virgin goddess, aid Helios in the nurturing up of the tender child. Now as soon as he was nurtured and come to youth's estate

                               With the down on his chin, and in youth's fresh bloom,

when he surveyed the multitude of wrongs that had been wrought upon his kinsmen and his cousins, his impulse was to fling himself down to Tartarus in horror at the magnitude of those wrongs. But of his good grace Helios and Athene of Providence cast him into the slumber of a deep sleep and banished that design; then when he had awaked he went into a wilderness. Now it came to pass he lighted there upon a stone, where he rested for a space and considered with himself how he might escape the throng of all his woes: for so far everything looked to him untoward, and there was no good thing anywhere. Then Hermes, whose heart wad wholly towards him, appeared to him in the form of a young man as one of his associates, and accosted him affectionately and said: 'Come hither, and I will guide you along a smooth and more level track, as soon as you have surmounted this little space of crooked broken ground, where everyone, as you see, stumbles and them makes his way back again'. Then the young man turned and set forward very warily. Now he had with him a sword and a shield and a lance, but his head was still quite bare. Trusting to his guide he pushed forward by a smooth unbroken path, beautifully clean and teeming with fruits, and many goodly blossoms, such as the Gods love, and with shrubs of ivy and bay and myrtle.

So he led him to a great and tall mountain, and said, 'Upon the crest of this mountain sits the father of all the Gods. Take heed therefore: here is your great peril: first worship him with all reverence, then ask from him whatever you desire; mayest thou choose, my son, that which is best'. When he had said these words, Hermes hid himself again. Now he would fain have inquired of Hermes what thing he might to ask of the father of the Gods; but when he did not see him near, he said, His counsel was good, though incomplete. Let me therefore with good success make entreaty for the best gifts, though I do not clearly behold as yet the father of the Gods. 'O father Zeus, or by whatsoever name thou delightest to be called, point me the way that leadeth upwards to thee. For yonder regions where thou dwellest are incomparably beautiful, if I may divine their beauty that is at thy side from the pleasantness of the path which I have already travelled.' When he had prayed thus, there fell upon him a kind of sleep or trance. And the God showed him Helios himself. Then the young man, astonished out of measure at the sight, exclaimed, 'To thee, 0 father of the Gods, in return for these and all thy other gifts, I offer and consecrate myself.' Then casting his hands about the knees of Helios, he laid hold of him and besought him to be his saviour. Then Helios called Athene, and bade her first examine the arms that he carried. Now when she saw the shield and the sword and the spear, she said, 'But where, my son, is your aegis and your helmet?' Then he made answer, 'Even these I had work to procure; for in my kinsmen's house I was despised and flung aside, and there was no man to be my helper'. 'Know therefore', said great Helios, 'that thou must assuredly return thither'. Then the youth entreated him not to send him thither again, but rather keep him; otherwise he should certainly never return again, but perish of the ills he suffered there. And as he besought him importunately with tears, the God said to him, 'Nay, you are young and uninitiated. Get you therefore to your own folk, that you may be initiated and dwell mere in safety : for you must go hence and purge away all those iniquities, praying for aid to me and to Athene and to the other Gods'. As soon as the young man heard that, he stood still in silence.

Then great Helios led him to a certain eminence, whose top was full of light, but the lower parts of fold on fold of mist, through which the light of the brightness of King Helios pierced dimly as through water. 'Do you see', asked the God, 'your cousin who hath the inheritance?' 'Yea', said he. 'And yonder herdsmen too and shepherds?' Once more the young man answered in the affirmative. 'What like, pray, is he that hath the Inheritance? and what like are the shepherds and herdsmen?' The young man made answer, 'Methinks he is sodden with sleep, kid keeps himself close and is given over to pleasure: and the dutiful shepherds methinks are few, for the most are bad and brutal. For they both devour and sell the sheep, and so do double wrong to their master. For they destroy his flocks and bring in small returns from ample means, and grumble for wages and make complaint. And yet it were better to secure their wages in full than to destroy the flock'. 'Suppose that I and Athene, at the behest of Zeus', said Helios, 'were to make you steward of all these in the room of him that hath the inheritance'. Then the young man clung to him once more, and besought him greatly that he might remain there. But he said,

Be not very rebellious,

Lest the excess of my love be turned to the fierceness of hatred.

So the young man answered,

                       Most mighty Helios, and thee Athene, and Zeus himself, I do adjure, do with me what ye will.

After this Hermes, suddenly reappearing, filled him with new courage, for now he thought he had found a guide for his return journey, and his sojourn on earth. And Athene said, 'Listen, most goodly child of mine and of this good sire divine! This heir, you see, finds no pleasure in the best of his shepherds, while the flatterers and rogues have made him their subject and slave. Consequently the good love him not, while his supposed friends wrong and injure him most fatally. Take heed therefore when you return, not to put the flatterer before the friend. Give ear, my son, to yet a second admonition. Yon sleeper is habitually deceived; do you therefore be sober and watch, that the flatterer may never deceive and cheat you by a show of friendly candor, just as some sooty and grimy smith by dressing in white and plastering his cheeks with enamel might finally induce you to give him one of your daughters to wife. List now to a third admonition. Set a strong watch upon yourself: reverence us and us alone, and of men him that is like us and none other. You see what tricks self-consciousness and   dumb-foundering faint-heartedness have played with yonder idiot'. Great Helios here took up the discourse and said, 'Choose your friends, then treat them as friends; do not regard them like slaves or servants, but associate with them frankly and simply and generously; not saying one thing of them and thinking something else. See how  distrust towards friends has damaged yonder heritor. Love your subjects as we love you. Let respect toward us take precedence of all goods: for we are your benefactors and friends and saviours'.

At these words the young man's heart was full, and he made ready there and then to obey the Gods implicitly always. 'Away, then', said Helios, 'and good hope go with you. For we shall be with you everywhere, I and Athene and Hermes here, and with us all the Gods that are in Olympus, and Gods of the air and of the earth, and all manner of deities everywhere, so long as you are holy toward us, loyal to your friends, kindly to your subjects, ruling and guiding them for their good. Never yield yourself a slave to your own desires or theirs. And now, besides the armour, in which you came hither, take this torch from me for your journey, that even on earth its light may shine mightily before you, so that you will desire nothing upon earth; and as fair Athene's gift take this aegis and helmet, for she has many another gift, you see, and she gives to whom she will. Hermes likewise will give you a golden wand. Go therefore furnished with this armour, over land and over sea, steadfastly obeying our laws; and let none, neither man nor woman, nor friend, nor stranger, persuade you to neglect our precepts. So long as you cleave to them, you will be dear and precious to us, reverenced by our good servants, and the terror of miscreants and evil-doers. Know that your poor body hath been bestowed on you for this service; for from  respect to your fathers we will cleanse you your father's house. Remember therefore that your soul is immortal and born of us, and that if you follow us you shall be a god, and with us shall behold our father.”

The last words of the extract emphasize Julian's belief in immortality. This has already been discussed, but it will be pertinent to remark that his personal belief was more than a transient hope, useful to grace a philosophic period, and remained with him unshaken, his solace in the hour of death. When the fatal wound had been received, and Julian faint with loss of blood and conscious of approaching death, lay in the tent amid the sorrowing throng of friends and comrades who surrounded the bedside, he addressed them all. The time of departure he said was at hand: like an honest debtor we must render back to nature the' life that she had lent. Death he could face with joy rather than sorrow, remembering that it was the most precious gift of the celestial Gods to pious souls. He had nothing to repent of, and no willful prong to regret: alike in the obscurity of youth and in the Exercise of sovereign power he had striven to keep his hands unspotted with crime. The tranquility for which he had long yearned would now be his; that thought filled him with an almost exultant joy. He had long foreseen his end: none could be more happy or more glorious. As he had been ready to live, so he did not fear to die. His strength was ebbing fast. His latest prayer was that a virtuous ruler might be found to succeed him. During the brief span of life that yet remained, he discoursed with Maximus and Priscus on the exalted nature of the soul, till at midnight the gush of blood came which painlessly set him at rest.

In spite of philosophic affectation, and a characteristically Pagan self-complacence, it is hardly gross exaggeration to say that his death was “not only, like that of Socrates or Marcus Aurelius, resigned and dignified, but full also of faith and hope and spiritual exaltation and passionate yearnings for his celestial abode”.

Throughout the whole of the above extract stands prominently forward Julian's pervading sense of intimate personal communion with God. “Though I tremble before the Gods”,  he elsewhere writes, “and love and worship and hold them in awe, yet always and in all things do they deal with me as gentle masters, as teachers, as fathers, as my own kin, yea, in all things it is always so”. The same trait manifests itself in his earnestness and regularity in prayer, which reappears often quite incidentally at most of the great crises of his life. When summoned from Athens, to the throne or the scaffold, he scarce knew which, he relates how he lifted up his hands to Athene's consecrated mount in passionate entreaty that she would not desert nor betray her suppliant, but suffer him if it might be even to die in Athens. Once more, in Gaul when the sound fell upon his ears of the voices of soldiers proclaiming him Augustus, there in the upper chamber he fell upon his knees in prayer to Zeus, and called upon the God not unavailingly to guide him by a sign. And it was so in the small crises no less than in the great. He would constantly rise at midnight and in secret pray to Hermes, the God of sound judgment, as the best preparation for his official duties on the coming day.

As a specimen of Julian's prayers, it cannot be wrong to quote the supplication with which he concludes his address to the Mother of the Gods:

“Mother of Gods and men, consort and partner in the throne of mighty Zeus, Source of the Intellectual Gods, thou who farest ever with the undefined essences of the Intelligible Gods, who receivest from them all the common source of being and does transmit it to the Intellectual Deities, life-bearing Mother, thou Wisdom and Providence and Creatress of our Souls, thou who lovest great Dionysus, who didst succour Attis when exposed, and didst raise him again after his descent into earth's cavern, thou who dost minister all blessings to the Intellectual Gods, and satisfiest with all things the sensible Universe, who givest to us all things always good, vouchsafe to all men happiness, whereof the chiefest element is knowledge of the Gods: grant unto the Roman people at large, first and foremost to wipe off the stain of atheism, and next thereto grant also that favoring fortune may guide the helm of state for many thousands of years; and to mine own self vouchsafe as the fruit of my service toward thee, truth in my views about the Gods, perfectness in theurgic art, and in all things, to whatsoever tasks of peace or war I lay my hand, virtual and happy fortune, and to the end of this life peace within and a fair name without, with a good hope for the journey that bring me to the Gods”.

One letter is interesting as showing Julian's belief in intercessory prayer: it is that to the Jewish Council, where remarking that in the press and worry of business princes had but brief leisure to pray, he begs that public supplications may be offered in his behalf for God's blessing and guidance in the affairs of state.

His punctilious regularity at public worship1 is so characteristic a trait of his life as to deserve renewed emphasis. It was a part of that scrupulousness in all religious matters which is stamped on every portion of the religious revival which he led. It provoked the amusement of friends and the derision of enemies. He is at pains to justify it more than once in his own writings. But he does not make it sufficiently clear, how far it was as a devout layman, and how far in his imperial character as high priest that he admitted and fulfilled obligations of worship. It was his custom to offer public sacrifice morning and evening. He erected a shrine to the sun within the palace walls: he “initiated and was initiated”. When he and his little philosophers' clique of seven came to Antioch, they went nowhere at all, ironically writes the ringleader, but to the temples, and just now and then by detachments to the theatres. “He divided his life between political occupations and service about the altars”. So prodigal were his sacrifices that the people of Antioch  nicknamed him “the Slaughterer”. During his campaigns he endeavored to secure the attendance of the soldiers at these celebrations. Such a practice, on the authority of a trustworthy historian, was not without its abuses: the multitude of oxen and smaller cattle, not to mention birds, offered almost daily by Julian was such, that according to Ammian his troops, more particularly the Petulantes and the Celts, gourmandized so freely on the victuals and drink thus liberally furnished, that many of them had to be carried home to their quarters on the shoulders of bystanders. The supply of animals threatened to run short: the witty epigram composed against another philosopher emperor could not but recur to the minds of the spectators:

We the white hulls bid Marcus Caesar hail!

Win but one victory more, our kind will fail!

Perhaps it was no wonder that Julian found his soldiers very religiously disposed! Here is the ironical description of his conduct, put in his own mouth in the Misopogon: “The Emperor, to be sure, offered sacrifice once in the temple of Zeus, again in that of Fortune, and then marched off thrice running to Demeter's. For I have lost count of the number of times I resorted to the shrine of Daphne, that august fabric which the negligence of its warders betrayed, and the presumption of the atheists demolished. The Syrian kalends are here, and the Emperor is off again to Zeus Philios; then comes the state festival, and with it the Emperor on his way to Fortune's precincts: and no sooner is the one fast-day over than he is once more paying his vows to Zeus Philios”.

His letter to Libanius descriptive of his doings during the opening days of the Persian expedition reads like the account of a religious rather than a military campaign. So great was his conscientious, but dispiriting waste of energy! It amounted to a nervous excited assiduity ill calculated to express contained and restful piety, induced it has seemed to some by misgivings rather than fullness of conviction.

His religious activity found another vent in proselytizing efforts. He employed not merely example, nor only the obvious indefinable methods, which thickly strew a monarch's path, of making new converts, but active preaching and argument as well, and not less, if occasion served, ridicule or sarcasm, or even hard cash. Perhaps the most sterling witness is his elaborate work against the Christians, which occupied so many of his long winter nights, and remained to the heath of Greek Paganism the text-book of Pagan evidences; put the tale of his relations with Caesarius will illustrate it more graphically.

Success had smiled upon the accomplished Caesarius from early youth. He was the brother of Gregory of Nazianzus, and seems to have shared his talents. Medicine was the profession he had chosen. Of a brilliant address, and a singularly ready kindness, the young physician was soon the darling of Constantinopolitan society. He was well known at court, and on Julian's accession, like other Christians, received a share of his favors. In spite of the apprehensions and adjurations of his brother Gregory, the young doctor, stout Christian as he was, did not decline the emperor's advances. Anxious to gain such a convert, Julian one day, before the assembled court, held a set conference lasting several hours. Not till all arguments were exhausted on either side, and Caesarius still declared, “I have been, I am, I will be a Christian”, did the Emperor desist with a good grace from his self-imposed task. In like manner he harangued the leading men of Antioch on their remissness, and delivered a religious address to the Council at Beroea; but on neither occasion apparently with much happier effect than in the case of Caesarius. Of less generous proselytizing attempts, if such they were, notice will be taken presently. Finally, what has been happily called his “pastoral” correspondence, a unique phenomenon amid the dispatches of Roman emperors, shows the living interest and force he spent in the effort to inoculate others with his own beliefs and aspirations. Borrowed as it was from Christianity, the idea of thus grafting a fruitful Church life on the stock of Paganism, is Julian's best claim to originality, if not to greatness. In the close union he assumes between religion and politics, he becomes the precursor of a Louis IX or a Cromwell. He persuades us almost against ourselves that he quite believed, and believed in, his own creed.

One last noticeable trait is Julian's faith in the various sources of communication between God and man. It serves to show the weaker and more superstitious side of his character and his religion. He was a genuine disciple of Iamblichus' credulity, which is only the more debased by its veneer of philosophy. His admirer Ammian, himself fair from a complete rationalist in these matters, numbers it among his faults, and compares him in this respect to the Emperor Hadrian.

Oracles he regarded with implicit reverence as due to the direct agency of Apollo. In his works their utterances are quoted with credulous respect, as decisive in most question of philosophy or theology. One instance of his curiosity and pertinacity in consulting oracles was his attempt to disinter the sources of the Castalian fount near Antioch. The power of these waters had first communicated to Hadrian his future accession to the throne. To prevent any repetition of the prophecy to other applicants, Hadrian choked the fountain mouth with masses of stone; the subsequent interment of Christian martyrs hard by had further hallowed, or desecrated, the spot.

Julian's solemn exhumation of these with purificatory rites led to issues anything but oracular. Prophecies again he reverently accepted: nor did he regard them as a lost privilege of former ages.   By his own account he received distinct predictions both of Constantius' death and his own. As soon as he heard that the place where he I lay wounded was named Phrygia, he knew that the wound would he to death; for an oracle (as usual true in letter, and misleading in spirit) had predicted he should die there.

Such soothsaying power he attributed to denizens of the spirit world, over whom Themis presided. But prophecies and oracles were rather irregular and intermittent than ordinary channels of Divine communications. Inspiration had spoken most clearly in the past, and the day of seers was wellnigh gone. Oracles yielded so to say at periods of time, lying fallow in the interim. Their place was supplied by omens and sacred arts, skill in which was derived from divine illumination. To these, whether given by divination or by augury, or by other means, he yielded willing credence, seeing in them a merciful gift of the Gods.

The philosophical basis on which to his mind the art of divination rested, was that adopted by the Platonists of the preceding century. Auspices are not gathered from the will of silly birds; but the kindness of the deity governs their motions and their cries in such a way as to make them significant to those who can read the sign: ultimately they depend upon the sympathetic unity of the whole universe which is secured by the all-pervading activity of the central world-soul.

Divination obtained a new lease of popularity, and the emperor was constantly attended by soothsayers, augurs, and interpreters of dreams. At the same time he did not suffer himself to be weakly dismayed by superstitious fears; he was unfeignedly pleased if Zeus favored him with gracious signs, or if by happy omen the garland from some triumphal arch fell and rested on his head, but gaily discarded less auspicious presages, or showed a felicitous readiness in construing favorably omens which at first sight might seem adverse.

When, after his proclamation as Augustus, during martial exercises at Paris his shield of a sudden broke leaving nothing but the handle in his grasp, he reassured the dismayed bystanders with the prompt interpretation, “Let no one fear: I hold fast what I held before”. He would boldly defy auguries when in conflict with his better judgment: as Ammian phrases it, “he thought it unadvised to put faith in forecasts, that events might falsify”. In the Persian war, when the Etruscan diviners were for ever seeing stars and discovering unpropitious portents the emperor fairly struck against the whole science of vaticination”. On the eve of his expected conflict with Constantius as Julian was mounting his horse, the soldier who was helping him to the saddle suddenly slipped and fell. “See”, cried the Emperor, “he has fallen who raised me to my present elevation”.  

As his army marched through Illyria, though vintage time was past, unripe grapes hung still upon the trees. Boding hearts prognosticated for Julian marred hopes and premature death; but to him the unswelled clusters spoil only of fortunes still to ripen. If in the prepared entrails a cross appeared surrounded by a ring, Julian interpreted it not as the circle of eternity, but the emblem of circumscription that enwreathed the symbol of Christianity. Here too consciously or unconsciously he adopted  the  teaching of Maximus. That gentleman, when Julian's invitation to court reached him, at once consulted the auspices: on these turning out villainously unfavorable Maximus observed to his fellow, the alarmed and chagrined Chrysanthius, that was the lesson of a life-time “not to succumb to the first repulse, but if need were to take the kingdom of heaven by Violence”. Perseverance triumphed: Maximus’ persistent efforts were rewarded with success; and presently to court he went. Is it something of this sort that Libanius means, when he speaks of Julian in the Persian war being “his own Pythia”. His boldness in this respect is credible enough when we read of the rebuff he laid upon an unconciliatory God. Outside Ktesiphon one of ten bulls offered to Mars the Avenger had the independence to break his bonds, resist his sacrificers, and finally after death display most unfavorable omens; therefore Julian swore to let Mars go without victims for the future, and faithfully kept his word.

Magic rites and the paraphernalia of Neo-Platonic theurgy exercised from the outset a strange spell of fascination over Julian's mind. Christian theology of the fourth century probably enough familiarized him with belief in the existence angels and a hierarchy of demoniacal powers. His teachers laid hold of these conceptions. “The nature of demons and the beings who formed and preserved this universe” was his introductory lesson in Neo-Platonisms, mystic intercourse with familiar spirits his constant occupation and delight. Maximus was the representative of this charlatan department of philosophy, and to his dying breath Maximus remained his most trusted friend.

Apparitions, coming as mysterious visitants from the spirit world, thrilled and attracted him with a vague irresistible awe. We read how he went down to subterranean caverns to face the summoned specters; yet how when they stood before him, the sign of the cross involuntarily made scared them away. Such tales may well have a foundation in truth. It is as likely that shrewd sorcerers contrived the show as that Christian historians invented it. In Julian's remains the direct allusions to mystery worship and theurgic practices are rare. He treats the matter with reverent reserve, as unsuited to popular exposition. Whenever he does mention it, it is with a worshipful approval that speaks volumes. Without theurgic instruction God's prophets and spokesmen cannot attain to excellence. Theurgy makes man divine; it is the way oh perfectness, which in prayers for divine guidance comes prior to every kind of outward gifts or successes.

      In the numerous references to direct communications from the deities to himself, dreams  appear  to  have been the ordinary channel.  What the sign was, by which, at a sudden crisis and in open day, the Gods in answer to prayer directed his conduct, on his soldiers proclaiming him Augustus, we cannot tell; but it was by a dream that heaven warned him against sending an imprudent letter which he had composed to the Empress Eusebia: and in a dream that the shining figure communicated the warning which foretold the death of Constantius. In one letter where he expresses a strong belief in revelations by dreams, he recounts to his friend Oribasius a vision foreshowing his own rise and the imminent death of Constantius. We are not surprised to find this particular prediction recurring more than once in various forms. The final and most detailed version of it occurred at Vienne, on the eve of Julian's final march against Constantius. He was in a state of grievous indecision, sorely troubled at the thought of civil war, when in the night watches a form of superhuman splendour stood before him and pointed to the stars, and recited in Greek hexameters these verses:

When Zeus the Waterer's broad domain invades,

And Kronos thrice eight tracks across the Maid's

Hath drawn, lo Asia's land shall mourn her king

Sweet life to churlish death surrendering.

A not less famous dream is that which intimated his own approaching death. Julian dreamed that a young man, dressed in consular attire, met him in a tent near Ctesiphon, in a place called Rhasia, and wounded him with a spear. When he received his fatal wound, Julian asked those about him “What is the name of the place where my tent is set up?” On receiving the answer “Rhasia”, he exclaimed, “Sun, thou hast undone Julian!”

VII

JULIANS ADMINISTRATION.