God Against the Gods (29 page)

Julian promptly set up a military tribunal to purge the imperial administration of the officers and courtiers who had agitated against him and arranged for the murder of his brother during the reign of Constantius II. The eunuch Eusebius, who had played a powerful role in imperial politics as chamberlain to both Constantine and Constantius II, was beheaded. The two men whom Constantius II had put in charge of domestic espionage were tried, condemned and buried alive. The apparatus of state terror was dismantled and the number of
agentes in rebus
was reduced to fewer than a dozen. A greater number of the accused, however, were given mild sentences, including fines, house arrest and banishment.

Julian replaced the purged officers and courtiers with men whom he regarded as both more capable and, crucially, more likely to serve him loyally. Among them were men who shared Julian’s passion for paganism, including those who had known him when he was still a secret pagan. Libanius, the pagan orator whose lectures young Julian had been forbidden to attend, was invited to serve as an imperial counselor. So was Maximus of Ephesus, the theurgist who had formally initiated Julian into the mysteries of paganism. Praetextatus, the pagan who so famously collected pagan priesthoods and initiations into the mystery cults, was appointed to serve as governor of the Roman province of Greece. Salutius, a soldier who had served under Julian in Gaul, was now appointed praetorian prefect in the eastern empire. These men had once worshiped with Julian in secrecy and at great risk, but now they participated openly in the rituals of sacrifice over which the emperor presided.

“There came from every corner of the world a whole host of magicians and enchanters, diviners, augurs and mendicant priests, a workshop of every sort of trickery,” sputters John Chrysostom in his condemnation of Julian’s pagan revival. “Even the imperial palace was bursting at the seams with fugitives from justice and men of infamy!”
¹⁵

Then, too, Julian seemed to delight in the opportunity to rid the palace of the opulence and decadence that so offended his ascetic sensibilities. An emblematic story, often retold, recalls how Julian, soon after he took up residence at the imperial palace, decided that his shaggy locks were all too shaggy and summoned a barber for a quick trim. The man who answered the call was so richly attired that Julian mistook him for a minister of state—“It is a barber that I want,” said Julian, “not a receiver-general of the finances.”
¹⁶
When the man insisted that he was, in fact, the imperial barber, Julian asked how he managed to dress so well on a barber’s pay. The barber admitted that he enjoyed not only a generous salary but also a budget sufficient to feed twenty men and twenty horses, and he supplemented his earnings by taking a coin or two in payment for the service of presenting petitions at court.

Such excesses inspired Julian to purge the household staff as he had purged the highest ranks of the army and the government. He dismissed all of the eunuchs who had served as a veritable shadow government, wryly noting that he no longer needed the services for which they were so uniquely equipped because his wife was dead and he did not intend to acquire a new one. He summoned the cook who had prepared the lavish meals that were presented to Constantius II and his courtiers—a man as well appointed as the imperial barber—and stood him side by side with the field cook who had been attached to Julian’s army. When the emperor asked his courtiers which one more closely resembled a cook, the man in the fancy dress found himself without a job.

Julian was always proud of his own discipline and self-denial, and the wealth and power that he now enjoyed did nothing to seduce or soften him. He ate only sparingly, often confining himself to meals “of the vegetable kind,” as Gibbon puts it.
¹⁷
Unlike other Roman aristocrats, who famously gorged themselves at the banquet table and then retreated to the
vomitorium
so they could return to the table and gorge again, Julian boasts that he vomited only once since becoming Caesar and, even then, “by accident and not due to over-eating.”
¹⁸
At the circus, he lingered for only five or six of the twenty-four races, all the while distracted by the correspondence and documents that he brought with him. Indeed, he worked around the clock, pausing only for hasty meals and brief intervals of sleep, and he was attended at all hours by secretaries and servitors. “He could employ his hand to write, his ear to listen, and his voice to dictate,” writes Gibbon, “and pursue at once three trains of ideas without hesitation and without error.”
¹⁹

Still, Julian was no mere drudge, and a certain charm and whimsy can be also seen in his reign as a philosopher king. When, for example, a Roman citizen was accused of treason because he had dared to acquire a purple robe, a garment that only a monarch could lawfully own and wear, Julian satisfied himself that it was a matter of vanity rather than ambition. So he sent the informer back to the accused man with a gift—“a pair of purple slippers to complete the magnificence of his Imperial habit.”
²⁰

On another occasion, Julian presumed to engage in the formal ceremony of manumission, the freeing of a slave, while attending the games of the circus. When it was pointed out to him that Roman law reserved the ceremony to the consul who was also in attendance at the games, Julian solemnly put himself on trial and judged himself to be guilty of “trespassing on the jurisdiction of another magistrate.” He imposed on himself a fine of ten pounds of gold, thus making the point that no one, not even the emperor, was above the law.
²¹

The Gentle Persecutor

Julian is charged by pious Christian historians with embarking upon yet another persecution of Christianity, but the fact is that he was the gentlest of persecutors. “I declare by the gods that I do not want the [Christians] to be put to death,” insists Julian, “or unjustly beaten, or to suffer anything else.”
²²
Even if Julian had been inclined to threaten the Christians with torture and death—and nothing in his nature suggests that he would have or could have—he realized that these were the wrong weapons to use against religious zealots. Indeed, he flatly refused to provide the Christians with a fresh supply of martyrs. Rather, he attacked Christian rigorism by resorting to the oldest pagan tradition of all: religious tolerance.

The edict of toleration that Julian issued in 360 is lost to us, but the document can be understood as a mirror image of the Edict of Milan issued by Constantine almost a half century earlier. Constantine had extended the pagan principle of religious toleration to the persecuted Christians. Under his sons and successors, that principle was abandoned, and it was the Christians who came to persecute the pagans as well as each other. Now Julian restored the status quo as it had existed under Constantine and throughout most of pagan antiquity.

Julian issued a series of decrees that were intended to injure the Christian cause, but only through the mildest of measures. The cross and the
chi-rho
were removed from the imperial standard. Property that had been seized from pagan temples by the Christian emperor was to be returned to its owners. Bequests to the church were no longer permitted, the tax exemptions enjoyed by churches and clergy were ended and the stipends that had been paid to Christian clergy out of the public treasury were cut off. All public rituals of worship were to be tolerated, pagan as well as Christian. Thus, Julian’s imperial proclamations can be understood as evenhanded and open-minded: he may have favored paganism, but he acted only to put
all
faiths on a equal footing.

Still, Julian was clever enough to recognize how to cause his Christian adversaries the greatest possible aggravation—he issued an order for the recall of all Christian bishops and other clergy who had been exiled from their places of residence on charges of heresy or schism, including Arians, Donatists and even the famous Bishop Athanasius. Indeed, the Christians regarded religious liberty as a form of persecution: “He began with re-establishing Paganism by law and granting a full liberty to the Christians,” explains the eighteenth century historian William Warburton, an Anglican bishop. “He put on this mask of moderation and equity for no other purpose than to inflame the dissensions of the Church.”
²³

At a moment of exquisite irony, for example, Julian convened an assembly of Christian clerics, forcing Arians to sit side by side with Athanasians, and he echoed the words of Constantine the Great when he scolded them for fighting so bitterly among themselves. But the pagan emperor insisted that he was entitled to a far greater measure of gratitude from the Christians than his late cousin, the Christian emperor. “For under him, most of them were sent into exile, prosecuted and imprisoned, and many of them were butchered, whereas under me, the opposite has occurred,” Julian writes with characteristic sarcasm. “Under my laws, the exiled have been restored and the dispossessed repossessed of everything. I do not permit a single one of them to be dragged to the altars against his will.”
²⁴

Now and then, to be sure, Julian was willing to use his imperial authority to punish his Christian adversaries. At Antioch, for example, Julian was told that Apollo was refusing to communicate through the oracles because his shrine in the suburb of Daphne was polluted by the presence of dead bodies—a church had been built next to the temple of Apollo during the reign of his half brother, Gallus, and the remains of a martyred bishop had been buried there. When Julian ordered that the corpse be moved elsewhere, a crowd of Christians followed the burial party and sang psalms that were intended (and taken) as an insult to the pagan emperor: “Confounded be all they that serve graven images, that boast themselves of idols.”
²⁵

Julian set his fellow pagan and comrade in arms, Salutius, to the task of arresting a few of the Christians and putting them to torture—he wanted to identify the agitators who had organized the demonstration. But the prisoners refused to name names, and the rumor spread through Antioch that one of the victims had been sustained through his agony by the physical presence of an unseen angel. Salutius understood that the whole investigation was likely to spark yet more trouble in the streets. Julian relented and allowed the prisoners to be released. When the temple of Apollo burned to the ground a few days later, he suspected the Christians of arson but did nothing to seek out the culprits, contenting himself with a gesture of tit for tat—he ordered the closing of a church at Antioch that Constantine had built.

Over the centuries that followed his reign, Julian came to be charged with meaner and uglier deeds. One tale, for example, holds that he ordered blood from sacrificed animals and libations from the pagan temples to be sprinkled over the food on sale in the public markets so that Christians would be tricked into partaking of the offerings to the gods—a practice of earlier Roman emperors that was attributed to Julian himself.

Another tale, set down some four centuries after the reign of Julian, imagines the torture and death of a martyr falsely accused of torching the temple of Apollo at Daphne—Julian orders the martyr to be crushed between the two halves of an immense rock that has been cleft in two by stonecutters, but the doughty martyr emerges miraculously alive.

“He was a horrifying sight and a strange example of the human condition: a man naked, his bones shattered, his eyes out of their sockets, yet he walked about and spoke back to the tyrant,” goes the martyrology. “Pronounce whatever sentence you like on me, whatever Satan who dwells in your soul inspires you,” the martyr himself is made to say to Julian. “Along with your gods, you too will be given to the everlasting and unquenchable fire, to be punished for all time, because you trampled on the Son of God.”
²⁶

Julian has been generally acquitted of these charges by historians, religious and secular. “He was a persecutor of the Christian religion,” concedes the ancient pagan historian Eutropius, a contemporary of Julian, “but one who held back from shedding blood.”
²⁷
Only a few men and women who were put to death during the reign of Julian are nowadays recognized as authentic martyrs. Some of them were zealots who actively sought out martyrdom by carrying out provocative attacks on pagan shrines, and a couple more are members of Julian’s palace guard who suffered the death penalty after they tried to assassinate the emperor. More often, however, Julian resorted to a weapon that drew no blood but one that he wielded with both pleasure and expertise—a pen dipped in the acid ink of satire.

Against the Galileans

The sharpest instrument that Julian brought to bear against Christianity was a purely verbal one—he engaged in open and sustained ridicule of their most cherished beliefs and practices. He employs a contemptuous term, “the Galilean,” to identify Jesus—the Galilee was a backwater of the unruly province of Palestine and a notorious hotbed of banditry, as any reader of Josephus would have known. He refers to Christianity as “the cult of the Galilean” when he does not flatly condemn it as “atheism.”
²⁸
He disdains the veneration of martyrs and, especially, the enshrinement of their body parts as sacred relics—he describes relics as “corpse-pieces”
²⁹
and the churches where they were piously displayed as “tombs.”
³⁰

The decree that best expresses Julian’s own passion and prejudice is one that prohibited Christian teachers from teaching their students about the works of pagan authors—Homer and Hesiod, Herodotus and Thucydides. “Did [they] not receive all their learning from the gods? I think it absurd that men who explain the works of these writers should dishonor the gods whom they honored,” writes Julian.
³¹
“If [Christians] feel that they have gone astray concerning the gods, then let them go to the churches of the Galileans, and expound Matthew and Luke.”
³²
Since the pagan classics formed the basic curriculum of the course of instruction called
paideia
, the law functioned to keep Christian pedagogues out of the schools. But it was also Julian’s way of reclaiming the culture of classical paganism in the same way that he had reclaimed the crown of pagan Rome from the Christian emperors who had worn it for the last fifty years.