God Against the Gods (27 page)

So Julian was an exceedingly unlikely candidate for Caesarship, and not only because of his intentionally eccentric appearance and manners. And yet, as Julian now discovered, he had been summoned by the emperor precisely because his cousin was now ready to raise him to the rank only recently held by his slain brother. He was turned over to the army of body servants in the imperial palace who went to work at transforming him from a Greek philosopher into a Roman general: “They set up a mock barber’s shop, cut off my beard, threw a military cloak around me,” recalls Julian, “and turned me—as they obviously thought—into a rather comical soldier.”
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Julian, the secret initiate into the mysteries of Mithra and the Great Mother, was now given a very different and far more public form of initiation. As the emperor Constantius II and the empress Eusebia watched, one surely less gratified than the other, Julian mounted the high tribunal around which the imperial legions were gathered
en masse
beneath the eagle standards of ancient Rome. Constantius II himself bestowed the purple robe on Julian—“At the instigation of God in heaven,” he intoned, “I put upon his shoulders the mantle of empire”
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—and the soldiers signaled their approval by the traditional gesture of striking their shields against their knee armor.

To seal the new alliance between them, Julian was presented with a relation of the Augustus to be his wife—the bride was Helena, daughter of Constantine the Great and the sister of Constantius II, a woman at least five or six years older than Julian. “We shall sustain one another with strong and unshakeable affection,” declared Constantius II to Julian, “we shall fight side by side, and we shall rule with equal moderation and sense of responsibility a world to which—God grant our prayer—we have brought peace.”
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Against every expectation, and still only in his early twenties, the young man who had twice avoided death at the hands of Constantius II was now his brother-in-law as well as his brother emperor.

“Purple death and mighty destiny gathered him in,” muttered Julian to himself, quoting a line from his beloved Homer that summed up his own misgivings at his sudden change of fortune.
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As yet, the new rank carried no real power. Constantius II was now, if anything, even more watchful of Julian: “The slavery that ensued and the fear for my very life that hung over me every day, Heracles, how great it was, and how terrible!” Julian later recalls. “My doors locked, warders to guard them, the hands of my servants searched lest one of them should convey to me the most trifling letter from my friends!”
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All but a few of the servants who attended the new Caesar had been assigned to him by the imperial chamberlain and, for that reason, Julian had to assume that his household was salted with spies. Of the four servants that Julian had been permitted to bring with him from Athens, only a single one was entrusted with knowledge of Julian’s allegiance to the pagan gods and goddesses—“and, as far as he was able,” reveals Julian, this man “secretly joined me in their worship.”
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Nothing in Julian’s upbringing, temperament or experience, of course, predicted that he would rise to the rank of Caesar or that, once there, he would have the faintest idea of what to do. Of the two brothers, as we have seen, Gallus was the man of action, impulsive and often brutal, while Julian was the man of letters, given to dreams and reveries. Nevertheless, Julian was not lacking in the stuff that was required to survive and succeed in the imperial family of ancient Rome. Both of them, after all, were grandsons of Constantius the Pale, the rough soldier who had fought and intrigued from the Roman legions to the rank of Caesar. Julian, still a secret pagan, would show that he was capable of doing the same.

“I Engaged the Enemy Not Ingloriously”

When Julian was dispatched to the troubled province of Gaul in the winter of 355, he was given command of a detachment of only 360 legionnaires. The men were so lacking in the both the skill and the spirit of soldiery that, as Julian himself famously puts it, “they knew only how to pray.”
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The sorry state of his miniature army was just the first clue that Julian was a Caesar in name only; the emperor had also provided Julian with a set of handwritten orders that specified exactly how much money he was allowed to spend, and even what kind of food he should eat. The generals who commanded the embattled Roman garrisons in Gaul, Julian understood, outranked him in authority if not in title. “For letters had been sent and orders given that they were to watch me as vigilantly as they did the enemy,” he writes, “for fear I should attempt to cause a revolt.”
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On his arrival in Gaul, Julian was surprised to find himself warmly welcomed by the citizenry of Vienne, a town on the banks of the Rhone River that would serve as his first seat of government. The narrow streets were hung with festive banners and filled with a cheering crowd—the very first taste of public acclaim, and an especially sweet one, for the young man who had been a prisoner of state for most of his life. One old blind woman, according to a tale that came to be preserved in the ancient chronicles, asked the name of the newcomer. When told that he was Julian, the new Caesar, a cousin of Constantius II, the old woman offered a solemn and surprising prophesy—he is the one, she insisted, who would restore the old pagan temples that the Christian emperor had destroyed.

The tale may be purely apocryphal. When he first arrived in Gaul, Julian was still a public Christian, and he enjoyed only such scraps of authority as Constantius II was willing to share with him. For example, Constantius II extended Julian the honor of cosigning a few of the imperial decrees that were formally issued in the names of both the Augustus and the Caesar. As a result, Julian is recorded as the co-author of a law issued in 356 that imposed a sentence of death on any malefactor who dared to sacrifice or even utter a prayer to pagan idols. He put his signature to the decree, according to Ricciotti, “only a few hours after he had himself performed secret acts of pagan worship.”
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Yet the “comical soldier” now discovered and displayed a genius for command that no one suspected to exist, least of all himself. In fact, the bookish Julian delighted in military life. He insisted on participating in drills and exercises alongside the rank and file, and he pointedly ate the same rations, “sometimes while standing like a common soldier.”
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At the same time, he set himself to the study of the Roman province over which he was as yet only the nominal ruler. Julian understood that a knowledge of the history and geography of Gaul, its fortifications and lines of defense, would be essential if he intended to actually lead his army into battle. Significantly, he also mastered the Latin tongue—Greek was the language in which he discoursed with pagan philosophers in Athens and Ephesus, but Latin was what he needed to address the troops in Gaul.

Julian’s first opportunity to put his newly acquired skills to use in combat came during the spring of 356, when Constantius II ordered a general campaign against the Germanic tribes that threatened the frontier, both the Alemanni and the Franks. Constantius II and his army attacked through the Black Forest, and the Roman legions in Gaul marched toward the Rhine. Julian was not even told of the campaign until shortly before it was set to begin, and he was given only a small force of cavalry to command. But when he rode off to join the main body of the Roman legions, Julian chose a perilous route that, he hoped, would bring him into contact with the enemy. By the time he reached the Roman encampment, he had already won his first victory against a band of barbarian marauders and taken the first prisoners.

“I engaged the enemy not ingloriously,” recalls Julian,
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modestly enough, but the fact is that he was victorious over the next three campaigning seasons, driving the barbarians back across the Rhine and restoring Roman sovereignty in Gaul. The generals whom Constantius II sent to Gaul were rarely helpful to Julian—a few may have been under orders from the Augustus to make sure that he was never
too
successful in battle—and, more than once, Julian was forced to face a superior enemy with only his own troops after Roman armies failed to arrive or abandoned the field before the fighting was over.

Julian also insisted on leading his men into battle himself, plainly demonstrating both his newfound genius for command and his own physical courage. “The sight of Julian, conspicuous by the purple dragon pennant at the point of his long lance, shamed some of the officers into rallying their men,” writes Robert Browning of one such engagement. “Julian was everywhere, in the thick of the fight, shouting orders, encouraging the timid, restraining the foolhardy, oblivious of personal danger.”
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Julian did not hesitate to adopt the ruthless tactics favored by the Roman legions, including the taking of hostages and the pillaging and burning of villages, to terrorize the barbarians into submission. On one occasion, he offered a gold coin to every soldier who brought back the head of an enemy warrior, and they soon provided him with a mound of severed heads. But he was also mindful of the need to restore peace and prosperity, to rebuild the cities and resettle the lands, to restore the supply of grain, to lighten the burden of taxation, to feed, house and clothe the men, women and children of Gaul, all of which amounted to a practical expression of pagan morality or, as Browning puts it, “that
philanthropia
—love of one’s fellow men—which was part of the heritage of ancient ethical thought.”
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“One who is just, kind, human, and easily moved to pity” is how Julian defined the ideal ruler, “devising means of protection for the weaker and simpler citizens, and for the poor against those who are strong, dishonest, wicked and so elated by their wealth that they violate and contemn justice.”
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Julian’s surprising success in both war and peace, however, stoked the anxiety and enmity of Constantius II. No longer “a comical solider,” Julian had won the affection and loyalty of both the soldiers he commanded and the civilians over whom he reigned as Caesar. “At [first] I provoked their laughter,” Julian writes of his remarkable ascent, “but a little later their suspicions, and then their envy was kindled to the utmost.”
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Then, too, Julian was already regarded in some pagan circles as a likely champion of Hellenism in its life-and-death struggle with Christian rigorism. He still concealed his commitment to paganism, but he was obviously
not
a Christian zealot. When Julian retired to his winter quarters at Paris in 359, he was very much on the mind of his cousin back at Constantinople “This billy-goat,” one fawning courtier told Constantius II, referring to the beard that Julian wore so proudly and so defiantly, “is becoming a bore with his victories.”
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The Poisoned Cup

Helena, sister of Constantius II and wife of Julian, had accompanied the new Caesar to Gaul, but she did not seem to inspire much passion in her otherwise highly passionate husband. Julian, for example, is moved to lavish praise of Eusebia for giving him a small collection of books on philosophy and history to replace the cherished library that he had been forced to leave behind in Athens: “She made [Gaul] and the country of the Celts,” he writes, “resemble a Greek temple of the Muses.”
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He also named a city after his mother, whom he had not known at all, and he cherished the baubles that she left behind on her death. But he hardly mentions his own wife, and he says nothing at all about the fact that she gave him a son in the winter of 356—or that the infant died only a few days later.

Even if Julian himself is silent on his arranged marriage, both Helena and Eusebia—like so many of the crucial women in the lives of Constantine the Great and his sons—attracted plenty of attention from gossipmongers in the court and the camp. Perhaps, they speculated, the childless Eusebia was so jealous of Helena that she arranged for the midwife to strangle Julian’s newborn son “so that this most valiant man should have no offspring.”
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Just as Fausta, second wife of Constantine and mother of both Constantius II and Helena, was accused of adultery with stable boys and even her own stepson, Eusebia was denounced for engaging in sexual adventures with Julian at the imperial palace in Milan. When Eusebia fell ill and died in 359, it was suggested that she had been the victim of a plot by the jealous Helena, who was accused of introducing a slow poison into the concoctions that Eusebia was known to drink in a desperate effort to promote her own fertility. Two years later, when Helena herself died, Julian was charged by the rumormongers with using his mother’s jewels to bribe her physician to poison her.

The rumors may never have reached Julian, and he certainly said and did nothing to encourage such speculation. “Now when first I came into her presence,” he writes of Eusebia, “it seemed to me as though I beheld a statute of Modesty set up in some temple.”
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As for Helena, the only detail of their domestic life that he deemed appropriate to reveal is that his letters to his wife were so restrained and so respectful they could be read aloud without embarrassment. All the lurid tales told about Julian and the women who loved him are dismissed by Ricciotti as “a complete fiction maliciously spun out of the calumnies circulating among the courtiers.”
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