In the previous episode in this mini-series, we focused on the early years, upbringing,
and education of the Roman emperor Julian and told the tale of his brilliant victory
against the Germanic confederacy at Strasbourg.
But Julian was known for much more and this episode will cover his reign as the emperor,
his later years, his war against the Sassanid Empire, his opposition of Christianity and
how he gained the bitter sobriquet of ‘Apostate’.
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In the several years following his magnum opus battle at Strasbourg, Julian embarked
on a number of smaller successful expeditions.
The territories of Frankish and Alemanni tribes were invaded, ransacked and their rulers subjugated.
Long-destroyed forts were reconstructed, Gaul’s civic life was regenerated and the tax regime
was gentle.
Unexpected political and military triumph of this kind was good for the western empire,
but it rankled with Constantius II and his courtiers, who had suffered a series of setbacks
in conflict against Persia, most recently the fall of Amida in 359.
Therefore, the imperial court began hampering the Caesar, refusing to give Julian money
to reward his victorious soldiers.
Cold war of a sort began, with the two cousins publicly maintaining a friendly relationship.
The facade of imperial cooperation finally came crashing down at the beginning of 360.
Under external pressure from the Persians, Constantius requested a significant number
of Julian’s troops, including the brave auxilia palatina units which had done so much
to win at Strasbourg.
When angry troops who did not wish to leave their families beseeched their commander to
intercede, Julian put up a suspiciously weak display of resistance before allowing the
soldiers to raise him up on a shield and proclaim him Augustus of the Roman Empire.
Despite this outright usurpation of the imperial purple, Constantius was powerless to act due
to being occupied in the east.
The cold war between these two relatives continued even more tensely than before.
At this time and apparently prompted by nothing at all, the previously-subdued Alemanni of
a king known as Vadomarus resumed their attacks on Roman territory.
With customary gusto, Julian managed to defeat and capture the Germanic king, coming into
possession of a letter implying that Constantius had instigated the attack.
In a truly Roman moment that similarly signalled an era at its end, the death of Julian’s
wife and Constantius’ sister Helena severed the final link between the two men.
In spring of 361, Julian and his western armies made their way east via Pannonia.
Stopping first at Sirmium, the self-proclaimed Augustus then progressed to Naissus, from
where he sent a flurry of letters to the Greek cities legitimising his actions.
Despite his boldness, Julian was in danger of being caught between the emperor’s army
approaching from the east and a legionary force of Constantius loyalists in Northern
Italy.
Constantius had all the advantage, but he fell ill en route . It seems despite the enmity
between them, Constanius did in the end truly believe that Julian was the best bet if the
empire was to prosper, reportedly designating the Gallic Caesar as his formal successor
in a deathbed admission.
A month later, after burying Constantius with honours and offering public condolences, Julian
assumed the role of sole Augustus.
Now that he possessed the ultimate power, ‘the mask was removed.
A new phase in the history of the Roman Empire had begun.’, as historian Hans Carel Teitler
phrased it in his work.
Throughout his early twenties, Julian kept his secret reverence for the pagan gods and
continued going through the motions required of a ‘Christian’ ruler of Rome.
But now ‘he revealed the secrets of his heart and by plain and formal decrees ordered
the temples to be opened, victims to be brought to the altars, and the worship of the gods
restored.’
Emperor Julian essentially wanted the traditional Greco-Roman gods venerated as they had been
in the empire’s high days, the increasingly labyrinthine imperial bureaucracy thinned
down to its streamlined principate status and the old ‘first among equals’ model
of imperial rule restored.
In short, he wanted that noble old world he read about in his books.
It wasn’t going to be that easy.
The emperor’s first move was to cut the bloated imperial court and its expensive administrative
apparatus.
Throngs of minor officials and courtiers were thrown out to facilitate a simpler style which
was closer to the people.
Although we might look at Julian’s attempts at thriftiness and desire to be a people’s
man as admirable, it was very different for the citizens of imperial Rome in the fourth
century.
Some in Roman high society, such as the panegyrists4 Mamertinus and Libanius, did indeed laud the
emperor for his senatorial austerity, but others were less impressed.
Ammianus, for example, usually one of Julian’s biggest fans, recounts an occasion during
which the Augustus rushed out of the senate to greet his old philosopher mentor Maximus
‘in an undignified and ostentatious display of affection’.
During the Late Empire, emperors were expected to be above mere emotional men.
Trimming the central government, imperial court and their expenses was also an effort
on Julian’s part to rejuvenate the heavily-taxed cities of the empire and revive their civic
institutions as he had done in Gaul.
He wanted a ‘union of healthy, well-ordered cities, taking pride in their great heritage
and honouring their gods.’
Julian could cut spending and sack officials as much as he wanted, but that would not accomplish
the far deeper work of disentangling the Roman world from Christianity, a religion which
was now deeply rooted, especially in its eastern part.
The immediate response to Julian’s religious decrees varied by region, but triggered what
amounted to a localised religious civil war in many of them.
Inscriptions from the ruins of pagan statues, shrines and temples from Syria to Numidia
champion the new emperor as a ‘restorer of temples’ or the ‘restorer of Roman
religion’, phrases which express the pagans’ gratitude for Julian’s patronage.
Still, the fervently anti-Christian emperor knew all too well that he couldn’t destroy
the hated faith just by attacking it directly.
According to Ammianus, the emperor once remarked ‘that no wild beasts are such dangerous
enemies to man as Christians are to one another’.
Less than half a century since Constantine’s triumph at the Milvian Bridge, the monotheistic
religion was already riven by internal division.
Controversies such as the Donatist dispute and Arian heresy led to violence which was
just as bad if not worse than that inflicted against the heathen pagans.
Ostensibly to facilitate ‘religious freedom’, Julian ordered the return of all religious
exiles to their native cities and their native churches.
The result was predictable and immediate: brutal retribution and violence, a likely
intention of the emperor’s desire to see Christianity destroy itself.
In Mauretania, a band of vengeful Donatists raided the church of Castellum Lemellefense,
killing many Nicene Christians.
Nearby, another mob of Donatists managed to get inside the predominantly Nicene settlement
of Tipasa, desecrating holy artefacts and killing children and women.
Julian’s attempted religious reversal buckled the entire Roman world, and had profound consequences
at the local level.
Julian gave gifts to predominantly pagan cities, while at the same time ‘persecuting’ primarily
Christian cities by rescinding tax exemptions, diminishing their privileged status.
Most scholars believe that Julian did not embark on a violent, systematic campaign against
the Christians, primarily because he had learned how powerful their gesture of martyrdom was
from Diocletian and other past persecutions.
Instead, the infamous so-called ‘School Edict’, basically prohibited Christians
from teaching classics.
According to him: ‘When a man thinks one thing and teaches his pupils another, he fails
in my opinion not only in his educational task, but is also a dishonest person…’
They should, in Julian’s opinion, stick to teaching about the gospels of Matthew and
Luke, rather than subverting classical teachings.
This forced many Christian teachers to leave the schools, weakening their influence in
the society.
In July 362, soon after issuing the School Edict, Julian, now definitively derided as
the apostate, arrived in the great city of Antioch in preparation for a long-awaited
expedition against the ever-present Sassanid Empire, and planning to emulate the great
deeds of one of his heroes - Alexander the Great.
Antioch was a hotbed of Christianity in the east and, although the citizens received the
emperor warmly at first, a mutual distrust quickly fermented.
Throughout the months of his stay in Syria as the Roman military mustered for war, Julian
repeatedly clashed with the population.
His style of rule diminished the respect given to the Roman monarchy by the Antiochians,
who expected imperial power to be an awesome spectacle.
According to Ammianus this affected the emperor and after almost eight months in Antioch,
an irritated Julian departed the city for his Persian campaign leaving a violent and
capricious man in charge there, as he thought the greedy and rebellious Antiochians should
be ruled by someone in their mold.
In March 363, Julian directed the comes Sebastianus to join with the Armenian king Arshak II and
attack Sassanids from the north.
Using this diversionary attack as cover, the Augustus advanced directly down the Euphrates
river with 65,000 troops and 1,000 riverborne vessels, intent on capturing the Persian capital
Ctesiphon for a sixth time in Roman history.
The Persians weren’t going to make Julian’s life easy.
After suffering the grueling approach to Ctesiphon, crisscrossed by canals, marshes, flooded expanses
and other waterways as it was, the Romans arrived outside the city and managed to win
a brief engagement in the shadow of its walls, pushing the defenders inside.
Observing the massive metropolis though, Julian and his commanders quickly came to the stark
realisation that Ctesiphon was all but impregnable and could resist until help arrived.
After a few days of indecision, Julian burned his riverine fleet and bypassed the Sassanid
capital entirely, pushing deeper into the hostile empire, territory which had heralded
nothing but misfortune for Roman rulers in the past.
Unfortunately for the Romans and their overly ambitious emperor, that trend continued when
the main Persian army under Shapur II entered the area and began a scorched earth policy,
refusing to give the invaders a battle whilst harrying them from afar and burning anything
that might sustain Julian’s war effort.
On June 16th 363, Julian and his war court discarded whatever further plans they might’ve
had to keep the invasion going and turned north, aiming the legions towards Roman territory
in hopes of salvaging something, even if that something was an army in one piece.
As the retreating imperial force plodded through the purposefully created wasteland north of
Ctesiphon, Shapur’s notoriously nimble Persian units continuously bit and sliced away at
it, using ambush and skirmish to weaken the Romans.
Despite cultivating an outdated bearing as a princeps of old, the Augustus nevertheless
garnered respect from all of his soldiers by military prowess and courage.
With classical heroes such as Alexander and Caesar at the forefront of his mind, Julian
repeatedly rushed to beleaguered sections of his marching column, fighting and leading
his troops by example to repel the Sassanid attackers.
He fought like a warrior-politician-general of the Punic Wars, merged with the dash and
glamour of a Hellenistic monarch.
As the emperor’s legions were marching past the city of Samarra, the rear-guard was assailed
from the rear by Sassanid cavalry.
When an unarmed Julian, who had been reconnoitering terrain in front of the column, got word of
the plight his men were in, the Augustus rushed to aid them, but crucially forgot to clad
himself in armour.
All he had was a hastily obtained shield, pitiful protection against the force Persians
were able to bring to bear.
As Julian was vigorously en route, subordinates informed him that the vanguard was suffering
precisely the same mauling.
Believing that threat to be of greater importance, the emperor turned about and rushed in the
direction of his front ranks.
At precisely that moment, a division of Persian cataphractarii bowled straight into the Roman
center ranks from the left, casting the thoroughly unprepared Julian into a struggle for survival.
Amidst the confusing chaos of the fighting at Samarra, the unarmed emperor’s Scholarii
guard was scattered and their charge left alone and vulnerable.
While fighting like a famous lion of the classical past in the very center of his troops, Julian
was suddenly speared through the ribs, some say by a Sassanid cavalryman, but others whisper
that the perpetrator was a Roman Christian, taking revenge on the reviled apostate for
his sins against the righteous.
Upon being borne back to camp for medical treatment, contemporary sources report how
Julian spoke to his closest companions on philosophical matters.
However, a fifth century Theologian called Theodoret records the pagan emperor’s words
in an apocryphal manner which, despite their probably falseness, illustrate the divide
Julian caused.
He is supposed to have said ‘You have won, Galilean.’, before dying from his wounds
on June 27th 363.
Only a short few days or even hours later, news of the Augustus’ death reached the
wider empire.
In nearby Carrhae, the messenger who brought the news was stoned by angry inhabitants,
but in Julian’s hated Antioch, Christians supposedly danced in the churches and within
the shrines of martyrs.
Everything the emperor worked for fell apart upon his death, including his civic and religious
reforms, as well as his defence of Gaul.
The question of what path the Roman Empire would have taken had Julian lived beyond 363
is by necessity one of intense speculation.
Would he have eventually restored the old religion, culture and nature of the Roman
world, or would Christianity have prevailed anyway?
It is impossible to answer these questions, but a fervent enemy of Julian - Bishop Athanasius
of Alexandria, was clearly threatened by Julian’s attempt at reform.
Although the Christian leader describes the apostate as a ‘fleeting cloud’ who couldn’t
do anything to stop the rightness of God’s faithful, he also says this: ‘The apostate’s
embers, although we have come safely through the flames, continue to scorch us still to
this very day.’
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