God Against the Gods (28 page)

Julian sent Helena’s remains to Rome for interment in the eternal company of her sister, Constantina, who had been his brother’s wife. Julian never married again, and no mention is made in his own writings or those of the ancient chroniclers about any further sexual entanglements of any kind. “Except in the short interval of a marriage, which was the effect of policy rather than love,” writes Gibbon, “the chaste Julian never shared his bed with a female companion.”
⁷¹
Ammianus affirms that “even his most confidential servants never accused him of any suspicion of lustfulness, as so often happens.”
⁷²
Like Constantine, in fact, Julian was apparently a prude and a puritan. Julian himself later acknowledges that his critics taunted him for his chaste ways: “You complain: ‘You always sleep alone at night, [but] there is plenty else to be enjoyed, men and lovely boys, and lots of dancing girls.’ ”
⁷³

To be sure, Julian was capable of remarkable passion, but only in service of the gods and goddesses whom he continued to worship in secret.

The Sign of Zeus

If the death of Eusebia in 359 saddened Julian, it also further and fatally estranged him from Constantius II. The emperor’s wife, who had been responsible for his sudden elevation from prisoner to Caesar, was no longer there to soothe her husband’s fear and envy of Julian. Julian himself was emboldened by the ever widening gap—physical, political, religious and familial—that separated the cousins and coemperors. “Another moral link binding Julian to the emperor,” explains Ricciotti, “was broken.”
⁷⁴

The final breaking point came in January 360, when an emissary sent by Constantius II arrived in Paris with an ominous and unsettling order: the emperor required four of Julian’s strongest regiments, as well as 300 men to be drawn from each of the remaining regiments; these soldiers were to be sent to the eastern empire to serve in a new campaign that Constantius II was undertaking against the Persians. Nor was Constantius II content with drawing off the most accomplished and experienced soldiers in Julian’s army—he also showed his contempt for the Caesar by addressing the order not to Julian himself but to the generals under his command.

The order was actually occasioned by a new and urgent military concern. The Romans had suffered a catastrophic defeat in the war against the Persians in Mesopotamia, and the emperor sought to replace the six legions that he had lost. But the ulterior motive was unmistakable, and Julian resolved to frustrate the whole effort by playing on the morale of the soldiers who were now being asked to fight on the dangerous and far-distant Persian front. Many of them were local men—or married to local women—and not a few had enlisted in the Roman army on the promise that they would not be sent beyond the Alps. Julian moved among the rank and file and then invited the officers to a banquet. As they dined together, he expressed his sympathy with their plight and his frustration at his inability to do anything about it—he was, after all, only Caesar and not Augustus!

Later the same night, as Julian rested with Helena in her private apartment on the upper floor of the palace, he was alerted by his courtiers to the approach of a crowd of soldiers. At that moment, he did not yet know whether they intended to make him a scapegoat for his cousin’s order or make him emperor in his cousin’s place. Roman history, as Julian knew well, provided examples of both. Soon enough, however, he was able to make out the fateful words that they were shouting: “
Iuliianus Augustus!
” (Emperor Julian! )

According to his own account of the incident, Julian was not yet sure whether to resist or submit to the will of the mob. So he offered a hasty but earnest prayer for guidance to the high god Zeus. When he happened to glance out the window, he spotted the planet Jupiter in the night sky over Paris. “A man who needs a sign from heaven usually gets one,” quips Browning, “and Julian got his, whatever it was.”
⁷⁵
Julian promptly decided that the sight of Jupiter, the Roman counterpart of Zeus, ought to be understood as confirmation from on high that the crown now belonged to him: “Surely it was my duty,” writes Julian, “to trust in the god after he had shown me the sign.”
⁷⁶

Thus resolved, Julian descended from his wife’s apartment and addressed the army. “Very well, go back to your quarters and you will not set foot beyond the Alps, since such is your desire,” declares Julian, choosing his words with both precision and guile. “I will explain this to the emperor, who is a reasonable and prudent man, and I am sure that I will convince him.”
⁷⁷

The scene was expertly played by Julian, who granted the army exactly what it sought from him while deftly avoiding an open claim on the crown. Now the soldiers took the initiative, which is exactly what Julian was calculating they would do—Constantine the Great, after all, had been acclaimed as Augustus by his army at York, and Julian expected that his own troops would do the same for him at Paris. And the soldiers obliged.

The impromptu nature of Julian’s coronation is confirmed in the surviving account of the antics that preceded the ceremony. Julian was already supplied with the requisite purple robe—Constantius II had bestowed it upon him in advancing him to the rank of Caesar—but he lacked the imperial diadem. Someone suggested prevailing upon Helena for a tiara, but Julian demurred; a bauble filched from his wife’s jewel box was hardly an auspicious way to inaugurate his reign as Augustus. Someone else proposed using a chain from one of the harnesses on the cavalry horses, but it was pointed out that a horse was even less appropriate than a woman as the donor of a crown. Finally, Julian accepted the offer of a brass collar that served as a standard bearer’s insignia of rank.

An honor guard then approached Julian with a shield, and they raised him to shoulder height, so the rest of the men could plainly see the ceremony that they were intent on carrying out. They swore a solemn oath to Julian and raised their swords to their own throats in a gesture of loyalty that signified their willingness to die for him. The purple cloak was draped over his shoulders, the brass collar was perched atop his head and one of the officers recited the traditional formula for making a man into an Augustus: “Julian, our Emperor, Caesar, Lord, and always our Augustus.”
⁷⁸

CHAPTER TEN

“BEHOLD, THE RIVERS ARE RUNNING BACKWARDS”

The Pagan Counterrevolution of the Emperor Julian

And he bowed down his hopeless head
In the drift of the wild world’s tide,
And dying,
Thou hast conquered
, he said,
Galilean
; he said it, and died.

—Algernon Charles Swinburne, “The Last Oracle”

Julian was not eager to fight Constantius II over the imperial crown, but neither was he willing to conceal his intimate grievances against his cousin. He sent a letter to Constantius II at his field headquarters in Cappadocia with a proposal to put in place the old power-sharing arrangement that had begun under the pagan emperors—Constantius II would continue to reign in the eastern empire, Julian would reign in the western empire, and they would both bear the title of Augustus. When Constantius II, however, sent an emissary to Paris to put Julian in his place and scold him for his ingratitude—had Julian forgotten, the emissary asked, the generosity that his cousin had shown to him when he was a poor and friendless orphan?—Julian did not confine himself to oblique and ironic cracks.

“Orphan!” retorted Julian. “Does my father’s murderer reproach me with being an orphan?”
¹

Still, Julian soon saw an opportunity to honor the old gods and goddesses while advancing his own political agenda. At a ceremony in celebration of his
quinquennalia
, the fifth anniversary of his elevation to imperial rank, Julian was ready to make a public demonstration of his authority. He replaced the humble brass collar with a proper diadem fashioned of gold and richly embellished with precious stones. The legions paraded in his honor, and he handed out the traditional gift of gold and silver to the troops. And he chose that moment to issue a remarkable decree: an edict of toleration that annulled the legislation issued by his Christian cousins and thus decriminalized the worship of the old gods and goddesses .
²

Propaganda and Psychological Warfare

The standoff between the rival emperors continued through the spring of 361. But Julian’s spies began to report that Constantius II was preparing an army to march against him. Now Julian was forced to decide whether to wait for Constantius II to attack him in Gaul and thus fight a defensive war on friendly ground, or to cross the Alps and strike first. So he prayed again for a sign from the gods, and he was granted not merely a sign but a vision—a divine apparition manifested itself in plain sight and directed him to a passage in Homer that seemed to predict the death of Constantius II. To prepare himself for the coming battle, Julian again sought out the secret rite of the taurobolium, bathing himself in the blood of a slaughtered bull and imploring the divine favor of the Roman goddess of war, Bellona.

Thus blessed and emboldened, Julian and his army set off in the direction of Constantinople. Along the way, Julian asserted his authority in each province through which he passed, and he sought to win the sympathy and support of the major cities that lay ahead on his line of march—Rome, Sparta, Corinth and Athens—by composing and sending a series of public letters that arrived in advance of his army. Only one of these extraordinary exercises in propaganda and psychological warfare,
Letter to the Athenians
, survives intact from antiquity, but it reveals how boldly Julian condemned his Christian cousin and how close he was coming to an open declaration of his own pagan faith.

“Close kinsmen as we were,” declares Julian with his characteristic sarcasm, “how this most humane Emperor treated us!”

Six of my cousins and his, and my father who was his uncle and also another uncle, and my eldest brother, he put to death without trial. As for me and my other brother [Gallus], he intended to put us to death but finally inflicted exile upon us; and from that exile he released me, but [Gallus] he stripped of the title of Caesar just before he murdered him.
³

Julian pointedly refrains from invoking the Christian god in his letter to the Athenians. Rather, he declares that he was spared from death at the hands of his murderous cousin only “by the help of the gods.”
⁴
And, when he recalls the prayers that he offered at the moment when he was called by Constantius II from Athens to Milan to accept the Caesarship, Julian makes a remarkable and even startling confession of faith.

What floods of tears I shed and what laments I uttered when I was summoned, stretching out my hands to your Acropolis and imploring Athene to save her suppliant and not abandon me, many of you who were eyewitnesses can attest, and the goddess herself, above all others, is my witness that I even begged for death at her hands in Athens rather than my journey to the Emperor.
⁵

The argument has been made that Julian was not yet revealing and affirming his own paganism—rather, he was merely employing the conventions of language that would have been familiar and endearing to the gentry of Athens. And, in fact, Julian did not engage in a single public act of unambiguous pagan worship so long as Constantius II remained alive. But the Christians who were his political adversaries, not least of all his cousin, surely understood that his words amounted to a declaration of war not only on Constantius II but on the Only True God, too.

“That goddess did not betray her suppliant or abandon him,” Julian says of Athena, a goddess in the eyes of classical paganism and a demoness in the eyes of Christian rigorism. “For everywhere she was my guide, and on all sides she set a watch near me, bringing me guardian angels from Helios and Selene.”
⁶

On the Knife-Edge

Whether we attribute it to God or the gods, the fact is that Julian was spared the necessity of defeating Constantius II on the field of battle. After Julian and his army reached Naissus in the Balkans in November 361, emissaries arrived on horseback from the court of Constantius II. The emperor, they reported, was dead of a sudden fever at the age of forty-four. To spare the empire from civil war, or so it was later said, the dying man had named Julian to reign in his place, and the armies of the eastern empire promptly declared their allegiance to Julian as the sole Augustus of the Roman empire. At these words, Julian wept, surely as much out of relief as triumph.

“For it seemed almost like a dream that a young man, in the flower of his age, slight in stature but famous for great exploits,” writes the pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus, “had now finally received imperial power by divine will without any injury to the state.”
⁷

Now that the gods and goddesses had answered his prayers, so clearly and so directly—and now that Constantius II was safely dead—Julian did not bother to conceal his paganism any longer. On the march from Naissus to Constantinople, he paused to offer a blood sacrifice to his divine benefactors, the very first such public ceremony in which he participated. “We worship the gods openly,” declares Julian, who wielded the sacrificial blade with his own hands. “I have offered many hecatombs to the gods in gratitude for what they have done for me.”
⁸

Julian entered Constantinople, the place of his birth, not as a conqueror or a usurper but as the lawful if wholly unexpected successor of the man after whom it was named. Ironically, he was the first emperor to be born in the city that was meant to replace pagan Rome and thus symbolize the triumph of the Only True God in the Roman empire—and yet he promptly set out to restore the reign of the old gods and goddesses throughout the empire. To symbolize the restoration of the cherished old traditions that the Christian emperors had sought to destroy, Julian ordered that the altar of Victory, which Constantius II had removed from the Roman Senate, be restored to its former place of honor.

To the pagans, Julian was the long awaited pagan messiah whose coming had been predicted by the old blind woman at Vienne: “He laid bare the secrets of his heart,” writes Ammianus, “and, with plain and final decrees, ordered the temples to be opened, victims to be brought to the altars, and the worship of the gods restored.”
⁹

The Christians, of course, saw Julian in a darker light: “Sorcerer and blackguard that he was, he had at first pretended to profess the Christian faith,” complains John Chrysostom, the fiery Christian sermonizer. “But as soon as his benefactor died, Julian cast aside his mask and barefacedly flaunted for the world to see all those impious superstitions which he had previously concealed.”
¹⁰

At precisely this moment, the Roman empire—and, in a real sense, the whole of the Western world—was balanced on a knife-edge between two very different but equally plausible destinies. One possible future was defined by the Christian revolution that Constantine and his sons had set in motion, a world in which all men and women would be compelled to worship the Only True God. The other possible future was defined by the pagan counterrevolution that Julian was now posed to carry out, a world in which all men and women would be free to worship any or all of the gods and goddesses or none at all.

Julian aspired to restore and refurbish the traditions of classical paganism, a set of beliefs and practices that were deeply rooted in Greco-Roman civilization and embodied its highest moral and ethical aspirations. Classical civilization, as we have seen,
was
pagan civilization, and no one could claim to be well read or well educated without a command of pagan philosophy or pagan literature. Nor was classical paganism restricted to the aristocracy or the intelligentsia—the majority of the Roman population across the empire embraced paganism in one form or another. At the core of Julian’s vision, then, was the profoundly conservative notion of restoring the old and idealized world that he glimpsed in the pages of Homer and Plato and, even more powerfully, in the secret rites and rituals of Mithra and the Great Mother.

“Behold, the rivers are running backwards,”
¹¹
quips Julian in one letter, quoting an old proverb that is meant to describe the world turned upside down. He is even more plainspoken in another letter: “Innovation I abominate above all things, especially as concerns the gods.”
¹²

The Christian revolution that Julian proposed to dismantle was still something very new. The reign of the Christian emperors had so far lasted less than a half century. His predecessors may have ordered the closing of the pagan temples and criminalized the worship of the pagan gods, but the thousand-year-old traditions of paganism were not so easily suppressed. “The monuments which are still extant of brass and marble,” writes Gibbon, “continue to prove the public exercise of the Pagan worship during the whole reign of the sons of Constantine.”
¹³
Promptly upon the death of Constantius II, for example, the Senate of Constantinople, sitting in a city and acting on behalf of a government that were supposed to be pure expressions of Christianity, voted to grant him the same posthumous honor that was traditionally afforded to all dead emperors: Constantius II, like his father, was formally declared to be a god, a gesture that Julian later satirized as “fashioning gods as others fashion puppets.”
¹⁴

Christianity itself had shattered into countless sects and schisms, and no single faction was yet so commanding that it could wield authority as the “catholic”—that is, the universal—church. Obviously, nothing about the Only True God was self-evidently true—the followers of Arius were no less convinced of the truth of their teachings than the followers of Athanasius; the bishops of the Church of the Martyrs asserted their authority with as much zeal as the high clergy of the “orthodox” church; and each faction condemned the others as apostates, blasphemers and heretics.

For all of these reasons, nothing that Julian beheld from the high throne made the triumph of monotheism over polytheism seem inevitable. The Christians could not agree among themselves on the right way to worship the Only True God. Even with the legal and financial support of the greatest superpower in the ancient world, they had not yet managed to put an end to paganism. How would the Christians fare in the struggle for the hearts and minds of the Roman empire if they were denied access to the public treasury, the public courts and the services of soldiers, torturers and executioners?

Julian now resolved to publicly affirm his own pagan faith, to withdraw from Christianity the imperial favor it had enjoyed since the reign of Constantine and to restore official toleration to
all
expressions of religious belief and practice. At his most visionary moments, he dreamed of establishing a pagan “church” that would be as “catholic” as the Christian church claimed to be. Just as Constantine the Great credited the Christian god with his victory at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, Julian saw his bloodless triumph over Constantius II as a sign that he had been blessed by the gods and goddesses. And surely Julian was comforted by the thought that time, too, was on his side. After all, he was barely thirty years old, and his reign as the pagan emperor of Rome had just begun.

A Gift of Purple Slippers

The new Augustus, his head uncovered and dressed in mourning, greeted the cortege that brought the body of his cousin back to Constantinople and participated in the ceremonies by which his remains were interred alongside those of Constantine the Great in the Church of the Holy Apostles. As soon as the tomb was sealed, however, Julian set about the task of remaking the Roman empire in his own image.