The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 (10 page)

Julian,
Hymn to Cybele, Mother of the Gods

Young Constantius had behaved impeccably during those first few weeks in Constantinople after the Emperor's death, and had favourably impressed many of the leading citizens by his comportment during the funeral. Once his father had been laid safely away in his huge apostolic tomb, however, and he and his two brothers had jointly received, on
9
September, their acclamation as Augusti, he abruptly shed the mild-mannered mask that he had worn
u
ntil that moment. A rumour was deliberately put about to the effect that, after Constantine's death, a scrap of parchment had been found clenched in his fist - accusing his two half-brothers, Julius Constantius and Delmatius, of having poisoned him and calling on his three sons to take their revenge.

The story seems improbable, to say the least; but it was vouched for by the Bishop of Nicomedia and accepted unhesitatingly by the army in Constantinople. Its effect was horrendous. Julius Constantius was pursued to his palace and butchered on the spot with his eldest son; so too was Delmatius, together with both his sons, the Caesars Delmatius and Hannibalianus, King of Pontus. Soon afterwards Constantine's two brothers-in-law - his close friends Flavius Optatus and Popilius
Nepo
tianus, who had been respectively married to his half-sisters Anastasia and Eutropia - met similar fates; both were senators and former Consuls. Finally the blow fell on Ablavius, the Praetorian Prefect, whose daughter Olympias was betrothed to the new Emperor's younger brother
Con
stans. Apart from three little boys - the two sons of Julius Constantius and the single offspring of Nepotianus and Eutropia, who were presumably spared because of their age - the three reigning Augusti, when they met in the early summer of
338
at Viminacium on the Danube to divide up their huge patrimony between them, were the only male members of the imperial family still alive.

The demarcation - of such vital importance for the peace and stability of the Empire - proved straightforward enough, the brothers continuing to control, with a few adjustments, the same regions in which they had previously ruled as Caesars. To Constantius went the old County of the East, including the whole of Asia Minor and Egypt. This gave him responsibility for the always delicate relations with Christian Armenia, as well as for the conduct of the war with Persia which was now beginning in earnest. His elder brother, Constantine II, was to remain in charge of Gaul, Britain and Spain, while to the younger brother, Constans - though he was still only fifteen - went the largest area of all: Africa, Italy, the Danube, Macedonia and Thrace. This distribution theoretically gave Constans authority over the capital itself; but as neither he nor Constantius was to spend any time there during the coming year, and as in
339
Constans was voluntarily to surrender the city to his brother in return for his support against Constantine II, the point proved of little significance.

It was perhaps inevitable, given their characters and upbringing, that the three Augusti should sooner or later start quarrelling among themselves; one feels, none the less, that with a measure of self-control they might have preserved the peace for a little longer than they in fact managed to do. The initial blame seems to have been Constantine's. The eldest of the three - born early in
317,
he had been appointed Caesar when only a month old - he found it impossible to look on his co-Emperors as equals and was forever trying in one way or another to assert his authority over them. It was Constans's refusal to submit to his will that led Constantine, in
340,
to invade Italy from Gaul in an attempt to bring his refractory young brother to heel. But the latter, for all his tender years, was too clever for him, and ambushed him with his army just outside Aquileia. Constantine was struck down and killed, and his body thrown into the river Alsa. From that time onward there were two Augusti only, and Constans, aged just seventeen, held supreme power in the West.1

Unfortunately, the character of Constans was no better than that of

1
Constans was to visit Britain in
345,
the last legitimate Roman Emperor ever to do so.

his surviving brother. Sextus Aurelius Victor, the Roman Governor of Pannonia whose
History of the Caesars
is one of the principal sources for the period, describes him as 'a minister of unspeakable depravity and a leader in avarice and contempt for his soldiers'; he certainly neglected the all-important legions along the Rhine and Upper Danube whose duty it was to secure the Empire's eastern frontier against the unremitting pressure from the barbarian tribes, preferring to take his pleasures with certain of his blond German prisoners, as dissolute and debauched as himself. By
350
the army was on the brink of revolt, and matters came to a head when, on
1
8 January of that year, one of his chief ministers gave a banquet at Augustodunum - the modern Autun - while Constans was away on a hunting expedition. Suddenly in the course of the festivities, a pagan officer of British extraction named Magnentius donned the imperial purple and was acclaimed Emperor by his assembled fellow-guests. On hearing the news Constans took flight, but was quickly captured and put to death.

The usurper did not last long. Constantius, realizing that the revolt in the West was potentially more serious even than the Persian menace, marched against him with a large army, pausing only to appoint his young cousin Gallus - one of the three survivors of the massacre of
337 —
Caesar of the East, and to marry him off to his sister Constantina, widow of the less fortunate Hannibalianus. In September
351
Magnentius was soundly defeated at Mursa - now Sisak, in Croatia - and two years later, having failed to regain his following or to rebuild his scattered forces, decided his position was hopeless and fell on his sword. The Emperor, however, still felt threatened. Late in
354,
suspecting - almost certainly wrongly - that Gallus was plotting his overthrow, he had the young Caesar beheaded, thereby widowing the luckless Constantina for the second time.

Constantius was now the undisputed sole ruler of the Roman Empire. His defeat of Magnentius, however, did not mean the end of his problems in Gaul. The German confederations beyond the Rhine, emboldened by the neglect of the frontier by Constans and the ensuing rebellion, were making themselves increasingly troublesome. Among his own army, too, several other minor conspiracies had been brought to light. On the other hand the Persian War was by no means over, and he could not stay in the West indefinitely. Much as he would have preferred to keep the power in his own hands, by the autumn of
355
he had at last come to accept the fact that he would have to appoint another Caesar.

On the assumption that any new Caesar was to be chosen from within
the Emperor's immediate family, there was only one possible candidate. A philosopher and a scholar, he had no military or even administrative experience; but he was intelligent, serious-minded and a hard worker, and his loyalty had never been in question. Messengers were accordingly dispatched post-haste to Athens to fetch him: the Emperor's twenty-three-year-old cousin Flavius Claudius Julianus, better known to posterity as Julian the Apostate.

The child, as everybody knows, is father to the man; and since, for the past sixteen centuries, historians have been trying to explain Julian's curious and complex character in terms of his early life, it may be worth our while to trace those formative years, very briefly, here. His father, Julius Constantius, was the younger of the two sons born to the Emperor Constantius Chlorus by his second wife Theodora - a branch of the imperial family that had been obliged to keep an extremely low profile after the succession of Constantine and his elevation of Theodora's predecessor and sworn enemy, Helena, to Augustan rank. Julius Constantius had thus spent the greater part of the first forty-odd years of his life in what was effectively a comfortable but unproductive exile when, soon after Helena's death, Constantine had invited him, with his second wife and his young family, to take up residence in his new capital; and it was in Constantinople that his third son Julian was born, in May or June of the year 332. The baby's mother, Basilina, a Greek from Asia Minor, died a few weeks later; and the little boy, together with his two considerably older stepbrothers and a stepsister, was brought up by a succession of nurses and tutors under his father's benevolent, if somewhat distant, supervision. Then, when he was still only five, Julius Constantius was murdered - the first victim of that family blood-bath that followed the accession of his nephew to the throne.

It was a day that Julian never forgot. Whether he actually witnessed the murder of his father and stepbrother is not recorded; nor do we know - though we can easily guess - how near he himself came to sharing their fate. But the experience left a permanent scar, and although a child of his age could hardly have understood why it occurred or who was responsible, the truth soon became apparent as he grew up. And, as it did so, his early respect for his cousin turned to an undying hatred.

To Constantius, on the other hand, young Julian was no more than a minor irritation. The only real problem was what to do with him. The Emperor sent him first to Nicomedia where, with Bishop Eusebius as his tutor, he could be assured of a conscientious, if somewhat narrow, Christian upbringing; then, when Julian was eleven, he and his brother Gallus found themselves effectively exiled to Macellum, the ancient palace of the Kings of Cappadocia. There they remained for six years, with only books for company; not until
349
were they allowed to return to the capital. Gallus was called to the imperial court; Julian, however, by now formidably well read in both classical and Christian literature, obtained permission to apply himself to serious study.

The next six years were the happiest in his life - spent wandering across the Greek world from one philosophical school to another, sitting at the feet of the greatest thinkers, scholars and rhetoricians of the day; reading, arguing, discussing, disputing. First he was in Constantinople; from there he returned to Nicomedia, but not to old Eusebius. The name that attracted him now - significantly enough - was that of
Lib
anius, a celebrated philosopher who had firmly rejected Christianity and all it stood for and remained a proud and self-confessed pagan. By this time the direction of Julian's own sympathies may have been suspected: when one of his former Christian teachers forced him to swear a solemn oath that he would not attend Libanius's lectures, he had them taken down and copied at his own expense. After some time at Nicomedia he passed on to Pergamum, thence to Ephesus and finally to Athens. It seems to have been while he was at Ephesus that he made his decision to renounce Christianity for ever and to transfer his allegiance to the pagan gods of antiquity; but the process was a gradual one, to which it is impossible to ascribe a precise date. In any case he had no choice, in his exposed position, but to keep his new faith a secret; it was to be another ten years before he was able to avow it openly.

Julian arrived at Athens in the early summer of
355.
He had not been there long before he caught the eye of a fellow-student. 'It seemed to me,' wrote St Gregory Nazianzen later,

. . . that there was no evidence of a sound character in that oddly disjointed neck, those hunched and twitching shoulders, that wild, darting eye, that swaying walk, that haughty way of breathing down that prominent nose, those ridiculous facial expressions, that nervous and uncontrolled laughter, that ever-nodding head and that halting speech.1

As one of the Empire's leading Christian theologians, Gregory was admittedly
parti pris;
the portrait he paints is hardly an attractive one. And yet, despite its obvious exaggerations, it still has a somehow authen-

1 St Gregory Nazianzen, Orations, V, 23.

tic ring, and it is at least partly corroborated by other descriptions that have come down to us. Julian was obviously not a handsome man. Burly and stocky, he did indeed hold his head at a curious angle; he had fine, dark eyes under straight brows, but their effect was spoiled by the overlarge mouth and sagging lower lip. In manner - not surprisingly in one who had grown up without a single friend of his own age - he was awkward, uncertain and quite painfully shy: not the sort of material, in short, of which Emperors are made. But then he had no ambitions in that direction. He asked no more than to be allowed to remain at Athens, with his teachers and his books; and, when the call came to present himself before Constantius at Milan, he himself tells us how he prayed to Athena to bring him death rather than allow him to set forth on so fateful a journey.

But his prayers went unanswered; the Emperor's command could not be disobeyed. On Julian's arrival at Milan the situation proved to be just as he had feared. After an agonizing wait of several days, he was duly received by Constantius — the two had met only once before, some seven or eight years previously at Macellum - and informed that he was henceforth a Caesar. His hair was trimmed short, his scholar's beard shaved, his ungainly body squeezed into a tight-fitting military uniform; and on
6
November he received his formal acclamation from the assembled troops. As he acknowledged their doubtless somewhat perfunctory cheers, he - and they - could hardly have failed to remember the unfortunate Gallus, acclaimed in similar fashion not five years before and already twelve months in his grave. The Emperor's words, as he presented the new Caesar to the legions, were nothing if not affectionate; but Julian knew that, if he were to avoid the fate of his half-brother, he would have to tread warily indeed; and the interminable panegyric which he composed at this time in praise of Constantius leaves us in no doubt that he intended to do so.

There has long been a tradition - initiated, in fact, by Julian himself - to the effect that when he was sent into Gaul as Caesar in the late autumn of
355
it was as little more than a figurehead: that, as Libanius was later to put it in his funeral oration, 'he had authority to do nothing save to wear the uniform'. There were even suggestions that he was being deliberately sent by Constantius to almost certain death. All this was, of course, nonsense. The Emperor could boast a formidable record of family murders already; had he seriously wished to eliminate Julian - who, as a wandering scholar, had presented no conceivable threat to his security he would have found a far quicker and surer way of doing so. (And he would hardly have given Julian the hand of his sister Helena in marriage, as he also did at this time.) Besides, the need for a Caesar in the West was genuine and undeniable. The truth seems to be that Julian, on assuming what he had expected to be the unfettered command of the army in Gaul, was piqued to discover that both the Praetorian Prefect and the
magister equitum -
the civil and military commanders respectively - were directly responsible to Constantius himself. Here, he believed, was a deliberate attempt on the part of the Emperor to diminish his authority. The thought that he was not yet twenty-four and totally without experience in the field does not seem to have struck him.

But he learned fast. It was he, rather than his cautious generals, who led the whirlwind campaign in the summer of 356 that took his army from Vienne to Autun, Troyes and Rheims and thence to Metz, through the Vosges to Coblenz and finally to Cologne - which had been taken by the Franks ten months before and which he now recaptured for the Empire. The following year saw a still greater triumph near Strasbourg, in which 13,000 legionaries smashed a Frankish enemy of 30,000 or more, leaving some 6,000 dead on the field at a cost of just 247 of their own men. The next two years brought still further victories. By the end of the decade the imperial rule had been re-established for the whole length of the frontier, with Julian himself now settled in Paris and, finally, in undisputed control.

In the East, on the other hand - to which Constantius, after a brief visit to Rome, had long since returned - the situation was a good deal less happy. In 359 the Emperor had received a letter from the Persian King:

Shapur, King of Kings, brother of the Sun and Moon, sends salutation . . .

Your own authors are witness that the entire territory within the river Strymon1 and the borders of Macedon was once held by my forefathers; were I to require you to restore all this, it would not ill become me . . . but because I take delight in moderation I shall be content to receive Mesopotamia and Armenia, which was fraudulently extorted from my grandfather. . .

I give you warning that if my ambassador returns empty-handed I shall take the field against you, with all my armies, as soon as the winter is past.

Constantius had no intention of surrendering any of the disputed territory to King Shapur. He was, however, fully aware that he now faced the greatest challenge of his reign, and in January 360 sent a tribune

1 The modern Struma.

to Paris demanding huge reinforcements for the army of the East: four auxiliary units formed of members of Gallic or Frankish tribes loyal to the Empire were to leave at once for Mesopotamia, while all other units were to make available 300 men each. By Caesar and soldiery alike, the imperial command was received with horror. Julian was faced with the prospect of losing, at a single stroke, well over half his army; he had moreover promised the Gallic detachments that they would never be sent to the East. They for their part knew that, if they allowed themselves to be marched away, they would be unlikely ever again to see their wives and families. These would be left destitute behind them, an easy prey for the barbarian bands who,
f
inding the frontier almost unguarded, would once again come swarming into imperial territory.

We shall never know for certain just what took place in Paris during those fateful spring days. According to Julian's own account - in a letter which he wrote to the people of Athens late in the following year - he was determined that the Emperor's orders should be obeyed, however unwelcome they might be to him personally. He summoned all the units in question to Paris, told them the news and exhorted them to accept the inevitable, emphasizing the unprecedented opportunities and rich rewards that awaited them when victory was theirs and, in a further effort to reconcile them to their fate, promising that their families would be transported with them to the East at public expense. But the legionaries, their anger now further inflamed by the anonymous pamphlets that were being circulated from hand to hand, vilifying Constantius and declaring him unworthy of imperial office, would have none of it. By evening, Julian saw that he was faced no longer with disaffection but with open mutiny. Yet even then - he called upon all the gods to witness — he had no idea what was in his soldiers' minds. Were they planning to proclaim him as their Augustus, or to tear him to pieces?

Just about sunset, when Julian had retired to an upper chamber of the palace for some much-needed rest, a trembling chamberlain came to report that the army was marching on the palace. 'Then,' wrote Julian,

peering through a window, I prayed to Zeus. And as the shouting grew louder and the tumult spread to the palace itself I entreated the god to give me a sign; and he did so, bidding me cede to the will of the army and make no opposition against it. Yet even then I did not yield without reluctance but resisted as long as I could, refusing to accept either the acclamation or the diadem. But since I alone could not control so many, and since moreover the gods, whose will it was, sapped my resolution, somewhere about the third hour some soldier or
other gave me the collar;1 and I put it on my head and returned to the palace -lamenting, as the gods knew, in my heart.

Does Julian, perhaps, protest a little too much? There is no evidence that he conspired against Constantius, nor that he would ever have wavered in his loyalty if that fateful order for reinforcements had not ultimately made loyalty impossible. But his four and a half years in Gaul had taught him courage and confidence and had given him, for the first time, political ambitions. By now, too, he seems to have believed himself divinely appointed to restore the old religion to the Empire; and it seems unlikely to say the least that, once he had received - or thought he had received - the sign from Zeus, he should have continued to show much reluctance to accept the diadem.

The only difficulty was that no diadem existed. Ammianus Marcellinus - a member of the imperial bodyguard, who was almost certainly in Paris at the time and was probably an eye-witness of much of what took place - writes that the soldiers first proposed to crown Julian with his wife's necklace; when he objected that female adornments would be unsuitable for such a purpose they suggested the frontlet of a horse, but once again he demurred. At last one of the standard-bearers tore the great gold chain from his neck - an emblem of his office - and placed it on Julian's head.

The challenge, unwilling or not, had been flung down. The die was cast. There could be no going back.

Julian was in no hurry to march to the East. The distance involved was immense, and he was far from certain of the loyalties of the many imperial garrisons stationed along the road. If they were to maintain their allegiance to Constantius, he might well find his way blocked - and, quite possibly, his retreat as well. He preferred to bide his time, to send ambassadors to his cousin informing him of what had occurred and suggesting some kind of accommodation between them.

The envoys found Constantius at Caesarea (now Kaiseri) in
Cappa
docia - ironically enough, on that very estate of Macellum where he had kept the adolescent Julian six years a prisoner. On receiving the messsage he flew into so furious a rage that they at first feared for their lives. For the moment, tied down as he was in the East, all he could do openly was to send Julian a stern warning; in secret, however, he began encouraging the barbarian tribes to renew their offensive along the

i See
below.

Rhine. That way he might at least tie his rival down and prevent him from any eastward advance. In the short term this plan proved moderately successful, and for much of the remainder of the year Julian found himself fully occupied on the frontier. Then in late October he moved south to Vienne, where on 6 November he celebrated the fifth anniversary of his inauguration as Caesar - wearing, Ammianus tells us, 'a splendid diadem inlaid with precious stones, though when first entering on his power he had worn but a paltry-looking crown like that of a president of the public games'.

The coming of spring saw more trouble on the Rhine, put down only after a somewhat discreditable episode in which the chieftain of the
Ale
manni was invited to dinner by the local Roman commander and -almost certainly on Julian's orders - arrested as soon as he crossed his host's threshold. But by then it had become clear that negotiations between the two Emperors were getting nowhere and that Constantius, taking advantage of a lull in the Persian campaign, was preparing an all-out offensive against his cousin. Julian, we read, was still profoundly uncertain about how best to react: whether to meet him half-way, securing as best he could the allegiance of the troops stationed along the Danube, or whether to wait for him in Gaul, on his own home ground, where he could be sure of his troops. Once again he prayed to the gods for a sign; and once again, we are told, it was vouchsafed to him. Pausing only to make a ritual sacrifice of a bull to Bellona, goddess of war, he assembled his army at Vienne and set out for the East.

Now the Rhine could not be left entirely undefended; moreover, if the whole story about the refusal of the Gallic troops to leave their homeland were not a complete fabrication, then must have been several units reluctant to follow their Emperor on this new expedition. Julian thus had only some 23,000 fighting men on whom to rely - pitifully few in comparison with the number that Constantius could be expected to hurl against him. To conceal this disparity and to make his strength appear greater than it actually was, he therefore broke up his army into three. Ten thousand were to cross the Alps into North Italy and make their way through modern Croatia; a similar number were simultaneously to march through Raetia and Noricum, an area roughly corresponding to Switzerland and the Tyrol. Finally, a select group of 3,000 under Julian himself were to head through the southern part of the Black Forest to the upper Danube in the neighbourhood of Ulm, there to embark on river boats and sail downstream. All three columns were to meet at Sirmium on the river Sava, some twenty miles to the west of Belgrade.

Not surprisingly, Julian's detachment arrived first; the impatient Emperor decided against waiting and pressed on to the south, pausing only when he reached Naissus, where he had decided to pass the winter and consolidate. He had been there only three or four weeks when messengers arrived from the capital: Constantius was dead. He, Julian, had already been acclaimed Emperor by the massed armies of the East. The struggle for power was over, almost before it had begun.

Constantius, the messengers reported, had been at Hierapolis (the modern Mambij, in northern Syria) when he had - most unwillingly -taken the decision to march against his rival. He had retraced his steps as far as Antioch, and had just set out on the 700 miles to Constantinople when he had come upon a headless corpse by the roadside, which he immediately took for an evil omen. By the time he reached Tarsus he was stricken by a low fever, but he refused to stop and dragged himself on a mile or two to the little village of Mopsucrenae. There it became clear that he could go no further; and there, on 3 November 361, he died. Until that last illness he had always enjoyed perfect health. He was forty-four years old.