THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 045
Julian the Apostate
3-17. Julian the Apostate
By the death of Constantius the Empire was happily freed from the horrors of another civil war : Julian was clearly marked out to be his 'Cousin's successor, and the decision of the army did not admit of doubt; Eusebius and the Court party were forced to abandon any idea of putting forward another claimant to the throne. Two officers, Theolaifus and Aligildus, bore the news to Julian; fortune had intervened to favour his rash adventure, and he at once advanced through Thrace by Philippopolis to Constantinople. Agilo was despatched to Aquileia and at length the besieged were convinced of the Emperor's death and thereupon their stubborn resistance came to an end. Nigrinus, the ringleader, and two others were put to death, but soldiers and citizens were fully pardoned.
When on 11 December 361 Julian, still but 31 years old, entered as sole Emperor his eastern capital, all eyes were turned in wondering amazement on the youthful hero, and for the rest of his life upon him alone was fixed the gaze of Roman historians; wherever Julian is not, there we are left in darkness, of the West for example we know next to nothing. The history of Julian's reign becomes perforce the biography, of the Emperor. In that biography three elements are all-important: Julian's passionate determination to restore the Pagan worship; his earnest desire that men should see a new Marcus Aurelius upon the throne, and that abuses and maladministration should hide their heads ashamed before an Emperor who was also a philosopher; and, in the last place, his tragic ambition to emulate the achievements of Alexander the Great and by a crushing blow to assert over Persia the preeminence of Rome.
Innumerable have been the explanations which men have offered for the apostasy of Julian. They have pointed to his Arian teachers, have suggested that Christianity was hateful to him as the religion of Constantius whom he regarded as his father's murderer, while rationalists have paradoxically claimed that the Emperor's reason refused to accept the miraculous origin and the subtle theologies of the faith. It would be truer to say that Christianity was not miraculous enough — it was too rational for the mystic and enthusiast. The religion which had as its central object of adoration the cult of a dead man was to him human, all too human: his vague longings after some vast imaginative conception of the universe felt themselves cabined and confined in the creeds of Christianity. With a Roman's pride and a Roman's loyalty to the past as he conceived it, the upstart faith of despised Galilaean peasants aroused at one moment his scorn, at another his pity: a Greek by education and literary sympathies, the Christian Bible was but a faint and distorted reflex of the masterpieces which had comforted his solitary youth, a mystic who felt the wonder of the expanse of the heavens, with a strain in his nature to which the ritual excesses of the Orient appealed with irresistible fascination, it was easy for him to adopt the speculations of Neoplatonism and to fall a victim to the thaumaturgy of Maximus. The causes of Julian's apostasy lie deep-rooted in the apostate's inmost being.
His first acts declared his policy: he ordered the temples to be opened and the public sacrifices to be revived; but the Christians were to be free to worship, for Julian had learned the lesson of the failure of previous persecutions, and by imperial order all the Catholic bishops banished under Constantius were permitted to return. Those privileges, however, which the State had granted to the churches were now to be withdrawn: lands and temples which had belonged to the older religion were to be surrendered to their owners, the Christian clergy were no longer to claim exemption from the common liability to taxation or from duties owed to the municipal senates.
With Julian's accession Christianity had ceased to be the favoured religion, and it was therefore contended that reason demanded alike restitution and equality before the law. Meanwhile a Court was sitting at Chalcedon to try the partisans of Constantius. Its nominal president was Sallust (probably Julian's friend when in Gaul), but the commission was in reality controlled by Arbitio, an unprincipled creature of Constantius. Julian may perhaps have intended to show impartiality by such a choice, but as a result justice was travestied, and though public opinion approved of the deaths of Paul the notary and of Apodemius, who were principally responsible for the excesses committed in the treason trials of the late reign, and may have welcomed the fate of the all-powerful chamberlain Eusebius, men were horror-struck at the execution of Ursulus, who as treasurer in Gaul had loyally supported Julian when Caesar; his unpopularity with the troops was indeed his only crime, and the Emperor did not mend his error by raising the weak plea that he had been kept in ignorance of the sentence.
Julian's next step was the summary dismissal of the horde of minor officials of the palace who had served to make the Court circle under Constantius a very hotbed of vice and corruption. The purge was sudden and indiscriminate; it was the act of a young man in a hurry. The feverish ardour of the Emperor's reforming energy swept before it alike the innocent and the guilty. Such impatience appeared unworthy of a philosopher, and so far from awaking gratitude in his subjects served rather to arouse discontent and alarm.
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