Abandon Christ and pay the price

Emperor Julian tried to drag Rome back to the pagan era. As this crisp study shows, it went badly

168pp, Yale, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£18.99, ebook £18.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ

The story of Flavius Claudius Julianus, known to posterity as Julian, throws up one of the great what-ifs of history: supposing his attempt to reverse the Roman Empire’s conversion of its official religion to Christianity had succeeded, might European civilisation have followed an entirely different trajectory?

Philip Freeman, the American classicist, has written a slim, elegant and judicious book exploring the career of the man behind this unanswerable but haunting question. The primary sources are rich – Julian wrote extensively himself – so this is not a speculative, novelistic reconstruction, but a monograph adhering to documented facts that are intriguing enough to sustain one’s fascination.

Julian had the misfortune to be born – in 331AD – into what Freeman describes as “an ambitious, murderous and thoroughly Christian family”, whose persistent backstabbing makes the antics of Logan Roy’s clan look like the Teletubbies. Effectively parentless – a dead mother, an assassinated father –

Julian was educated by slaves and eunuchs at the point at which Greek mystical neo-Platonism was finding some common ground with monotheistic Judaism.

Julian stood firmly for neo-Platonism: he found Christianity’s claims ridiculous. But his great-uncle was Constantine, the emperor who had made Constantinople the new capital of the Empire and legalised the Christian faith (at that point still merely one internally quarrelsome cult among many others). Constantine’s son and successor, Constantius, ruthlessly disposed of anyone in the family who looked like trouble. But Julian appears to have been spared through Constantius’s bluestocking wife Eusebia, who took a shine to the bookish young man and married him off to Constantius’s sister Helena, a devout Christian. It was no love match and she soon died of natural causes without issue.

After that, women played no apparent part in Julian’s life. Ascetic in lifestyle, he flourished as a mili

tary commander when Constantius sent him to Gaul with a mission to sort out the

Franks and Germans. This he fulfilled so impressively that Constantius then ordered Julian’s army to move to Persia, precipitating a revolt in the ranks and the threat of a civil war halted only by Constantius’s sudden death.

Julian was his undisputed successor. Up to that moment, the latter had played along with the outward forms of Christianity, but once confirmed as emperor, he “came out” as a pagan, making public animal sacrifices and appearing on coins as bearded, in emulation of his hero Marcus Aurelius.

Neither corrupt, nor greedy, nor by Roman standards cruel, he began by proclaiming universal religious tolerance, but his best intentions faltered in the face of violent opposition and in-fighting.

And perhaps his liberal sentiments went only skin deep: his weakness, according to Freeman, was that he could be “an unbearable prig who simply could not understand why others felt differently” from him, and his biggest mistake was to put his weight firmly behind a cerebral paganism (focused on Helios, the sun god) that lacked mass appeal.

Imitating Alexander the Great, he then continued Constantius’s campaign to conquer the Persians and secure Mesopotamia, but his increasingly obsessive campaign to purge the ranks of Christianity – by bribery or punishment – spelt disaster. In retreat, he was killed in a skirmish – his wounds possibly inflicted by a Christian in his own

army. He died at 32, the same age as Alexander, after only two years in power. Leaving no bloodline successor, his throne fell to a Christian cavalry officer, Jovian, and by the end of the fourth century, paganism in Rome was a dead letter.

Julian was a subtle and forceful writer, and his tract Against the Galileans delivers a powerful blast at the literalism of Christians. In the pious Middle Ages, this cannonade caused him to be vilified as an apostate, but later commentators, such as Montaigne and Gibbon, redeemed him as a “philosophic monarch”. In the last century, CP Cavafy and Gore Vidal went further, painting Julius as an embattled romantic hero. Freeman’s meticulous, unsentimental portrait removes all this varnish, and restores a clearer image – of a tragic figure.

The backstabbing in Julian’s family makes Logan Roy’s clan look like the Teletubbies

All that glitters: a coin from Julian’s reign