145- Julian the Apostate

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Hello, and welcome to the history of Rome,

episode 145: Julian the Apostate

In November 361 AD, Constantius II died, and Julian, last of the Constantinians, inherited the Empire.

It would be an ironic end to the dynasty.

At least, I'm pretty sure it's ironic.

Sometimes I think that no situation actually fits the technical definition of irony, and that the word just sort of hangs out in the linguistic ether, singing a siren song that's designed to crash the unsuspecting against the jagged rocks of pedantry, but I'm pretty sure it's ironic.

Constantine began the dynasty by single-handedly launching Christianity to prominence, and his nephew would end it by attempting to single-handedly turn back the clock and bury Christianity.

That's ironic, right?

It sure seems ironic, but it's probably just interesting.

When Julian received word that his cousin was dead, I have to imagine that it took a few minutes for the news to sink in.

Here he was, hunkered down in Thrace and ready to make what was very possibly shaping up to be his last stand, and instead Constantius is dead, and I am now emperor.

Like an approaching hurricane that just sort of transforms at the last moment into a pleasant sunny day, it takes a second to fully appreciate what the heck has just happened.

But after the first few minutes of blinking wonder passed, Julian wasted no time completely embracing his imperial windfall.

It appears that he had been thinking for a while about what he would do if he became emperor, because as soon as he became emperor, Julian jumped right into a completely out of left field program of reform with both feet.

Many critics of the new emperor note, though, that while his enthusiasm is laudable, maybe Julian should have looked before he leaped.

Now the unopposed master of the Empire, Julian entered Constantinople on December 11, 361 AD and immediately got down to it.

The first order of business, of course, was to completely overhaul the imperial court.

Stalking the halls of the palace were men who were not just venal and corrupt, but men who had actively opposed Julian, men who had consistently tried to talk Constantius into killing him.

These men needed to be identified and purged.

Aware that it might look bad if he just showed up and started arbitrarily killing people, Julian gave his purge the air of objectivity by appointing an independent commission of six trusted men to sort through the roles and separate the good men from the bad men.

The emperor even went so far as to situate this commission across the Sea of Marmara in the town of Chalcedon so that the verdicts would not originate from the imperial palace itself.

But I doubt that anyone was too fooled by this superficial independence.

The worst of the emperor's enemies were executed, and the rest were exiled.

It wasn't hard to see the invisible hand of Julian guiding the Commission's decisions about who needed to go and who could stay.

But beyond the strictly personal personnel decisions, the Commission also included among the guilty men who were just plain old bad eggs.

Constantius' court had a reputation for corruption, and the idealistic Julian appears to have been genuinely interested in purging the imperial roles of the worst of the worst.

But Julian was not done when the commission wrapped up its business.

For all the attention his religious policies receive, religious policies that we'll get to in a minute, it is worth noting that Julian was not just trying to turn the clock back on the church.

He was also trying to turn it back on the state.

Julian clearly idolized the emperors of the Antonine dynasty and sought to base his own administration on their example.

The first thing he attacked was just the sheer bloat of the imperial court.

The Golden Age emperors had not needed 50 chefs and 30 secretaries and a personal barber, so why did he?

Pink slips started flying through the palace, and anyone deemed unnecessary, redundant, or useless was simply given the boot.

But firing all the leeches was just the beginning of Julian's attempt to turn back the clock to the hundreds AD.

In a far more dramatic and far more disruptive move, the emperor also began to abandon the whole emperor as a living god conceit.

He shed the massive smokescreen of officials standing between him and his subjects.

He ate simple foods and wore simple clothes.

He grew a philosopher's beard.

Clearly, Clearly, Julian wanted to pretend like the epoch-shifting reforms of Diocletian had never happened, and return to the Princeps model of governance.

In Julian's head, these were virtuous reforms that would be embraced by a public weary of overblown imperial egos.

But mostly, the public was just bewildered.

It would have been like Vespasian emerging from the civil wars of 69 AD and suddenly announcing that the Republic was back in effect.

No one would have had any idea how to act, how to deal with it, or what was even expected of them.

The entire political system of the late Empire was centered around a quasi-divine emperor who inhabited the realm between man and God.

To have an emperor suddenly joining in Senate debates, expressing emotion in public, and just sort of generally being around, well, it was massively disconcerting.

Julian meant well, but his vision was hopelessly anachronistic.

When he died, the mere mortals of the Empire gratefully ran back into the paternal embrace of their once again quasi-divine emperor.

While he was bringing the role of emperor back down to Earth, Julian also attempted to reduce the public power of the imperial bureaucracy in general.

Adopting a more trajan-like worldview, Julian believed that the central government was there to focus on the big picture issues like defense and taxation.

It was not there to micromanage the affairs of every city, town, hamlet, and farmhouse in the empire.

Seeking to devolve political authority, Julian re-empowered the ruling councils of the cities and handed over jurisdiction of huge tracts of imperial land to these local magistrates.

The idea was to get them involved in the decision-making process so Julian himself was not bogged down by endless minutia.

But once again, the citizens of the empire were more bewildered than anything else.

Had Julian lived longer, this might all have eventually sunk in.

But in the year and a half he ruled, he mostly just spun his wheels, trying to convince the leading men of various cities that being a magistrate wasn't just a massive financial burden anymore, that real power and and real authority was theirs for the taking.

They remained skeptical, though, until Julian's death ended the argument, and the rich and powerful men of the Empire continued their drift into rural feudalism undisturbed.

To the energized 29-year-old emperor, however, these reforms were not yet doomed to failure, and he really felt like he was just getting started on a complete overhaul of the empire's political constitution.

He had no way of knowing that because he was about to die, none of this was going to stick.

We don't really have any idea what would have happened had Julian lived, and it is one of the great speculative questions of Roman history.

Maybe the institutional barriers would have been too great to overcome in the end, but then again, maybe thirty years of Julian really would have been revolutionary.

Which brings us to the heart and soul of Julian's short reign, the heart and soul of Julian the Apostate

As I mentioned two episodes back, Julian had secretly rejected Christianity around 350 AD, not long after being released from his Cappadocian exile.

But until now, this rejection had been a behind closed door sort of thing.

Close friends and advisors were aware of Julian's religious preferences, but since there was no upside to publicizing these religious preferences, it was a secret that stayed with his close friends and advisors.

Now that he was king of the hill, though, Julian was free to bring his paganism out into the open, and boy, did he ever bring it out into the open.

From the minute he became emperor, Julian worked obsessively to tear down the socio-political influence of the Christians, or, as Julian liked to call them, the Galileans, a subtle dig based on a quote from the Gospel of John, the out of Galilee ariseth no prophet.

But Julian knew that merely tearing down would not be sufficient to fulfill his vision of a repaganized empire.

He would also have to build something up to replace the soon-to-be-displaced Christians.

When Julian entered Constantinople in December of 361, he immediately began this dual program of tearing down Christianity and building up paganism.

It goes without saying that the political purge that accompanied Julian's arrival in the capital was driven in part by religious motives.

In other words, the Christians were to be kicked out of influential posts, denied access to the imperial purse strings, and denied access to the emperor personally.

Since the previous regime of Constantius had been so overtly Christian, though, this basically meant getting rid of everyone, something even Julian found he couldn't bring himself to do.

So the apostate emperor wound up retaining a handful of the most honest and capable Christians in his administration.

Beyond these token few, though, if you were Christian, your civil service career was suddenly in jeopardy.

Now, of course, the swiftness with which Julian was able to reorganize the inner circle of the imperial government could not be matched on a system-wide basis.

The bureaucracy was simply too large and too dispersed to overhaul overnight.

But Julian was taking the long view on this thing, and so he promulgated a discriminatory order that when jobs opened up, the God-faring candidates, that is, pagans, were to be preferred over the atheists, that is, the Christians.

For the ambitious civil servant, this had to be a frustrating development.

Like a week ago, they told me I had to be Christian if I wanted this job, and now you're telling me that because I'm a Christian, I'm not going to get the job?

I don't really care one way or the other, I just wish you guys would get your story straight.

On the building up front, Julian turned his attention first to building up in the literal sense.

He ordered all the old shrines and temples and sanctuaries that had been closed over the years to be reopened, and appropriated imperial funds to help defray the costs.

But, knowing that the central government would not be able to afford to cover even a fraction of the total costs that this order would generate, Julian issued an addendum edict that was one part practical and one part punitive.

Under the previous Christian regimes, citizens had been encouraged to destroy the blasphemous sanctuaries of the pagans, or at the very least, to repurpose them into something more useful.

So all these old pagan buildings became shops and warehouses, and in some cases, family apartments.

Julian ordered that the men responsible for the destruction or repurposing of the temples be responsible for the costs of undoing the damage they had done.

Even Julian's most ardent admirers are troubled by the real-world effects of this edict.

The Empire had been Christian for forty years now, so in many cases families and businesses had absorbed the old pagan holy places a really long time ago.

Their lives and livelihoods had become tied, at imperial encouragement no less, to the discarded husks of what they had been assured were dead cults.

Now, suddenly, Julian wanted to kick them out and make them pay to rebuild the houses of said dead cults.

It was unfair in theory and cruel in practice.

But Julian pushed on undeterred, and in February of 362, about four months after donning the purple, he issued his famous, or infamous, depending on who you talk to, Edict on Religious Tolerance.

The point of the Edict was to officially overturn the anti-pagan laws that had been on the book since the reign of Constantine.

Now, those laws which banned sacrifice had never been uniformly or even diligently enforced, but still, officially, they were out there, and so Julian officially cancelled them.

Using the same sort of language Constantine had once used himself in the Edict of Milan, Julian declared that all religions were now to be considered equal in the eyes of the government.

This meant that all the secret pagans or lapsed pagans or whoever could now return to their old ways without fear of state sanction.

It also meant, though, that Christianity was not illegal.

Given everything we know about Julian the Apostate, one might assume that the first thing he did was ban the Galilean religion outright.

But his plans were a bit more subtle, a bit more long-term, and a bit more rational than his name might imply.

The utter failure of the Great Persecution was not exactly ancient history.

Julian knew that, far from breaking the Christians, that violent repression only led to a hardening of their resolved.

So his edict was designed to unleash upon them their very worst and most hated enemy in all the world, other Christians.

Julian's Edict of Toleration meant that the 40-year-old policy of using imperial muscle to back up what, for lack of a better word, I'll call mainstream Christianity, was over.

All those repressed heresies were now free to come out of the woodwork and preach their own particular brand of the one true faith.

Just at the moment when the Christian community needed to unite in the face of Julian's attacks, its ranks were sowed with discord.

In Julian's perfect world, he would never have to do anything so dramatic as destroy Christianity.

Instead, they would just slowly but surely tear themselves apart.

Probably the nicest thing about this toleration strategy was that it enabled Julian to maintain the moral high ground.

He pointedly declared that no religious violence would be accepted, no matter who the perpetrator or who the victim.

Pagans were not to attack Christians.

Christians were not to attack pagans, and Christians were not to attack each other.

Thus, Julian was able to avoid being painted as some monster, a la Galerius or Maximinus Dia.

Because I just want everyone to get along.

What's wrong with everyone getting along?

Come on, can't we all just get along?

But just because he encouraged non-violent means of achieving his goal, that did not mean that Julian's goal was not to drive Christianity into the ground.

His goal, most definitely, was to drive Christianity into the ground.

In May of 362, Julian left Constantinople and headed for Antioch.

Since he had originally established his bona fides in the West, it was important for the new emperor to reach out to the eastern provinces and consolidate his rule over the whole empire.

The east, after all, had been Constantius' domain for almost a quarter of a century, and Julian had come to power in the middle of a revolt against the man the eastern provincials had happily called Augustus all those years.

In other words, Julian had some making up to do.

On top of this political rationale, Julian also had a military rationale for heading east.

The war with the Persians that Constantius had broken off was still hanging out there unresolved, and Julian wanted to use that war to cement his imperial authority.

A big win over the Persians would catapult him to a whole new level.

Not only would he earn the respect of the Eastern legions, who had just months before been marching out to crush him, but he would also establish himself as a military leader of unparalleled skill.

He could already point to major victories in the west, add major victories in the east, and boy, he might just become bigger than Constantine.

On the road to Antioch, Julian issued another one of his famous/slash infamous anti Christian edicts.

Henceforth, Christians would not be allowed to teach children using any of the classical texts.

That meant no Homer, no Cicero, no Plato.

But of course, the basic curriculum of Roman education, philosophy and grammar and rhetoric, used all of those works as their standard text books.

If you can't teach Homer, you can't teach grammar.

It's just that simple.

The Edict thus presented the parents of the Empire with a stark choice.

Their kids could either be taught by Christian teachers, but be denied the standard education, or they could be given the standard education, and be denied any Christian interpretation of the material.

Since a classical education was still required if you wanted to have any sort of decent career, Julian was banking that the vast majority of parents would choose to abandon Christian teachers rather than have their children grow up up not knowing who Achilles was.

To put this another way, Julian passed a law essentially strangling off Christian access to impressionable young minds.

Like I say, he wanted to drive Christianity into the ground.

When he arrived in Antioch in July of 362, though, Julian finally ran into some pushback to all this.

He came into the eastern capital under the mistaken assumption that the city was eager to shed its Christian veneer and return to its pagan roots.

But that was really not the case, as the fracas over the nearby temple of Apollo would make abundantly clear.

Julian went to visit the famous temple shortly after his arrival, and was dismayed at the dilapidated condition he found it in.

When he ordered a priest to join him at the site for a sacrifice, he was further incensed to see the disinterested priest wandering up with a leftover goose to offer Apollo rather than a nice fat bull.

Julian then consulted the oracle of the temple in order to gain some much needed mystical advice, but was told that as long as the dead were desecrating the temple grounds, the oracle could not speak.

In this case, the dead referred to a famous Christian martyr who had been buried near the temple grounds.

Julian figured it would be no big deal to exhume the body and then move it back to a proper cemetery, but the citizens of Antioch were outraged at this sacrilege.

They came out en masse to protest the emperor's decision, and then, just a few days later, the temple of Apollo mysteriously burned down.

The verdict of history is that the fire was probably an accident caused when some lit candles were neglected.

But the verdict of Julian was that the Christians of Antioch were guilty of arson.

All of this growing enmity was further exacerbated by another bout of famine, just like the one that had helped take down Julian's brother Gallus.

The emperor attempted to set price controls on the now scarce grain supply, but all that happened was that rich merchants bought up all the available food at the controlled price and then carted it off to the surrounding countryside where they sold it at an insane markup.

Between the religious conflict, the famine, and the just downright incompatibility of Julian and the Antiochians, they liked sumptuous living and games, he liked plain living and philosophy, it soon became clear that this was a relationship that was just never going to work.

At a set of games thrown by Julian, against his will, of course, the Antiochians went in for a particularly harsh round of heckling that left the emperor embarrassed and embittered.

He responded by publicly disseminating a satirical work called The Beard Hater, in which he viciously lampooned the citizens of Antioch while pretending to make fun of himself.

No one really comes off well in the exchange, and the final upshot of it all is that when the emperor finally left the city in March 363, he promised never to return.

His encounter with the Antiochians, though, did not cause him to reassess his religious policies so much as cause him to dig in his heels.

In January of 363, Christians were banned from practicing law.

In February, the Christian custom of daytime funerals was prohibited.

But as I said, Julian was not just about tearing down.

In the middle of all this, he also made an energetic, if futile, attempt to unify all the various pagan cults into a single organized religion, something that could structurally compete with Christianity.

Julian could see how the empire-wide network of Christians helped cement its place in the hearts and minds of the citizens, how their dedication to helping the poor, tending to the sick, and offering sanctuary to the lost made them so popular with the common people, and most of all, how their unity, despite their many differences, made them an institutional force to be reckoned with.

So, Julian tried to create a pagan alternative to the Christian church.

According to his plans, high priests would act as bishops, lower priests would act as presbyters and deacons, and social outreach would become a central part of everyone's religious duties.

The emperor even made a hurried stab at creating an overarching metaphysical, philosophical framework for all these cults to live in together.

But it was a hopeless cause because, because, first of all, the emperor did not have time to properly flesh out his ideas.

Second, maybe he didn't have the intellectual chops to even pull it off had he had the time.

And third, was a position paper really going to suddenly bind together religious cults that had never had anything to do with each other?

There was no such thing as capital P paganism.

It's just a word that we use to describe a collection of practices and traditions that had all built up independently of each other over time.

You can't just throw them all together and say, now you're just one thing.

Julian wanted the final fight to be a one-on-one affair, Christianity versus traditional polytheism.

But the very nature of that polytheism precluded the emperor's vision from ever becoming a reality.

It was always going to be Christianity versus a whole bunch of small, disunited cults.

But whether it would have worked or not doesn't really matter.

When I say Julian did not have the time to properly flesh out his ideas, I don't just mean that he was really busy and didn't have time to focus on philosophy.

As I'm sure you know, Julian is about to die and leave all of this work unfinished.

However, it would not be his war with Christianity that would bring him down, but rather his far more mundane and worldly war with Persia.

Next week the Emperor will take to the field ready to score a victory against the Sasanids.

But unfortunately, beyond score a victory, he didn't seem to have much strategic direction.

What would a victory even look like?

Did he want to sack the capital, beat Shapur in a big battle, remove Shapur from power completely, conquer the whole of Persia?

What?

No one really knew what the ultimate objective was, and it may have been the case that Julian himself did not even know what the ultimate objective was.

The emperor liked to jump into things with both feet, and once again, it appears that he really should have looked before he leaped.

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