The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 (11 page)

To Julian, this was yet another proof that the gods were working on his behalf. Neither then nor later, however, did he show any sign of relief or jubilation. He hastened on to Constantinople, in order to be present when the body of his predecessor reached the capital. On the day of its arrival he himself, dressed in the deep mourning that he had ordered for the whole city, was on the quayside to supervise the unloading of the coffin. Later he led the funeral procession to the Church of the Holy Apostles, weeping unashamedly - and, as far as we can tell, genuinely - as his father's murderer and his own life-long enemy was laid to rest. Only after the ceremony was over did he assume the attributes of Empire.

And he never entered a Christian church again.

Within days of Julian's accession to the imperial throne, it was plain to all in Constantinople that the new regime was going to provide a marked contrast to the old. A military tribunal was established at Chalcedon across the Bosphorus to try certain of Constantius's chief ministers and advisers whom the new Emperor suspected of having abused their powers. Some were acquitted, others let off with periods of banishment or forced residence; but several were condemned to death - including two, the sinisterly named Paul the Chain and his collaborator Apodemius, joint chiefs of Constantius's detested intelligence network, who were
sentenced to be buried alive. More deserving of sympathy was Ursulus, who had served Julian with distinction in Gaul as his minister of finance and who, though subsequently transferred to the East, had never shown him the slightest disloyalty. Some years before, however, at the siege of Amida in Upper Mesopotamia, he had unwisely cast aspersions on the Empire's military efficiency; and the eastern generals had never forgiven him. Julian had taken care not to be a member of the tribunal himself; as Emperor, however, he could easily have intervened to save his old friend. It was a disappointment to many of his admirers that he did not do so.

In the Palace itself, the new broom was even more dramatically apparent. Ever since the days of Diocletian, the Emperor had been growing more and more of a being apart, separated from his subjects by a court increasingly rigid with ceremonial, approachable only by his senior ministers - in the intervals between their successive prostrations - and surrounded by whole regiments of domestics whose numbers increased with every passing year. As Libanius was later to claim in his funeral oration on Julian:

There were a thousand cooks, as many barbers, and even more butlers. There were swarms of lackeys, the eunuchs were more in number than flies around the flocks in spring, and a multitude of drones of every sort and kind. There was one refuge for such idle gluttons, to have the name and title of being one of the Emperor's household, and in very quick time a piece of gold would ensure their enrolment.1

The purge that followed Julian's arrival was swift and thorough. Literally thousands of chamberlains and major-domos, of grooms and barbers and bodyguards, were summarily dismissed without compensation, until the Emperor was left with only the skeleton staff required to meet his own needs - those of a single man (for his wife Helena was by now dead), ascetic and celibate, to whom food and drink were of little interest and creature comforts of none.

Similarly radical reforms were made in the government and administration - usually in the direction of the old republican traditions. There was, for example, a significant increase in the power of the Senate, which Julian henceforth made a point of attending regularly and in person, travelling there on foot as a sign of respect. The taxation system was tightened up and rationalized; so too were the imperial communications, and in particular the
cursus publicus,
which ensured the proper provision of horses, mules and oxen for the transport of government servants

i Oration XVIII, 130.

travelling on duty and for the carriage of official freight. Once famous for its efficiency, this organization had been allowed by Constantius to fall into the hands of unscrupulous agents whose animals were often so overworked and undernourished that, so Libanius tells us, 'most of them dropped down dead as soon as they were unhitched - or even before, while they were still in the traces'.1

But these measures were of the kind that any strong ruler might enforce on succeeding a weak and corrupt regime. Where Julian stands alone among all the Emperors of Byzantium is in his convinced and dedicated paganism. During his years as Caesar, he had been obliged to pay lip-service to the Christian faith: as late as April 361 we find him attending Easter mass at Vienne. But his inner rejection of that faith had long been an open secret, and from the moment that the news was brought to him at Naissus of Constantius's death he made no more pretence. It was as a professed pagan that he attended his predecessor's funeral in the Church of the Holy Apostles, and as a pagan that he settled down, after much divine consultation, to frame the laws which, he was convinced, would ultimately eliminate Christianity and re-establish the worship of the ancient gods throughout the Roman Empire.

There would, he believed, be no need for persecution. Persecution meant martyrs, and martyrs always seemed to have a tonic effect on the Christian Church. The first thing to do was to repeal the decrees by which pagan temples had been closed, their property confiscated and their sacrifices declared illegal. Then, in the ensuing atmosphere of complete religious toleration, an amnesty would be proclaimed for all those orthodox
Christian churchmen whom the pro-Arian government of Constantius had sent into exile. Orthodox and Arian would soon be at each other's throats again, of that he was sure - for, as Ammianus notes, 'he had found by experience that no wild beasts are so hostile to men as are Christian sects in general to one another'.
2
After that it would be only a question of time before the Christians saw the error of their ways and embraced once again the old faith that they should never have left.

Such reasoning, over-simplified though it may be, must seem to modern minds quite impossibly naive. Julian was, however, that unique combination - a Roman Emperor, a Greek philosopher and a mystic. As an Emperor, he knew that his Empire was sick. It no longer functioned as it had in the golden age of the Antonines two centuries before. The army had lost much of its old invincibility and was now, more often

1 Oration XVIII, 14).

2
Ammianus Marce
llinus, XXII, v, 4.

than not, barely able to keep the peace along the frontier. The government was inefficient, plagued by pluralism and corruption. The old Roman virtues of reason and duty, honour and integrity were gone. The Emperors themselves, his immediate predecessors, had been sensualists and sybarites, living in an unreal world of fantasy and self-indulgence; still capable, perhaps, of leading their forces into battle when absolutely necessary but happier by far to recline in their palaces, surrounded by their women and their eunuchs.

All this, clearly, was the result of moral degradation. As a philosopher, however, Julian was not prepared to leave it at that. He was determined to discover the cause of the decline; and, because he was a deeply religious man living in an age in which men instinctively sought spiritual solutions to worldly problems, he concluded that this all-important question could be answered in a single word: Christianity. Here, as he saw it, was a faith that rode roughshod over the old virtues, emphasizing instead such effete, feminine qualities as gentleness, meekness and the turning of the other cheek. Worse still, it preached the disastrous creed of free and easy absolution. In a curious little composition entitled
The Caesars,
composed for the Saturnalia of December
362,
Julian makes his views clear enough - picturing Jesus (who has taken up his abode with Incontinence) 'crying aloud to all comers: "Let every seducer, every murderer, every man guilty of sacrilege, every scoundrel, come unto me without fear. For with this water will I wash him and straightway make him clean. And though he should be guilty of those same sins a second time, let him but smite his breast and beat his head and I will make him clean again.'"

In a word, Christianity had emasculated the Empire, robbing it of its strength and its manhood and substituting a moral fecklessness whose effects were everywhere apparent. Comparisons with other places and periods are always dangerous; yet to say that Julian looked on the Christians of the fourth century in something of the same light as a conservative of the old school might have looked on the hippies and Flower Power people in the
1960s
might not be too wide of the mark.

Conservatives of the old school, however, are not normally mystics. Julian was. Dearly as he loved philosophical and theological debate, his approach to religion was always emotional rather than intellectual. Seldom during his short reign did he miss an opportunity of publicizing his views - shocking many of his subjects, pagan as well as Christian, by descending to the market place to give public lectures and firing off long, impassioned treatises and tracts in refutation of those contemporary thinkers whom he thought wrong-headed. When he took up his pen, he worked furiously, frenziedly and at almost unbelievable speed. The 17,000 words of his
Hymn to Cybele
were, he tells us, written in a single night. Unfortunately, it reads like it. Julian's style is diffuse, undisciplined and oddly self-indulgent - all those faults that he most deplored and that were most conspicuously absent from his daily life: a style that might have found favour among some of the woollier of the neo-platonists whom he admired, but that would have cut little ice with Socrates or Aristotle. No matter. He wrote, as he earnestly believed, under divine guidance. The gods were always with him, inspiring his tongue, directing his pen, for ever ready with a sign of encouragement or warning to lead him in the path of righteousness and truth. Never, one suspects, never for a single second, did he bethink himself that he might be wrong, or that the old religion might not, after all, prevail.

It appeared, on the other hand, in no great hurry to do so. In the summer of 362 Julian transferred his capital to Antioch, in preparation for the Persian expedition that he was preparing for the following year; and as he marched through the heartland of Asia Minor - covering the 700 miles in something under six weeks - he was concerned to note that the Christian communities, having overcome their initial fears that the Emperor might institute a new wave of persecutions, had settled down as before and were showing no sign whatever of tearing each other to bits; nor were the pagans - who represented an almost infinite variety of beliefs, from the primitive animism of the peasantry to the arcane mysteries evolved by the neo-platonist intellectuals - noticeably stronger or more cohesive than in Constantine's day. (The overwhelming majority of them probably practised no religion at all, or did so more out of respect for tradition than any real spiritual conviction.) In vain did Julian journey from temple to temple, personally officiating at one sacrifice after another until he was nicknamed 'the butcher' by his subjects. In vain did he try to impose upon his fellow-pagans an organized priesthood with its own hierarchy on the Christian model, urging them to establish hospitals and orphanages, even monasteries and convents, in order, as it were, to beat the Christians at their own game. The prevailing apathy was unshakeable. Ruefully, Julian himself told the local citizens the story of his visit to the great festival of Apollo, held annually at Daphne, the rich residential suburb of Antioch:

I hurried there from the temple of Zeus Kasios, believing that at Daphne if anywhere I should enjoy the sight of your wealth and public spirit. And, like a
man seeing visions in a dream, I pictured to myself what a procession it would be - the beasts for the sacrifice, the libations, the choruses in honour of the god, the incense, and the youth of your city gathered about the sacred precinct, their souls dressed in reverence and they themselves clothed in white raiment. But when I entered the shrine I found neither incense, nor barley-cake, nor a single beast for sacrifice . . . And when I enquired what sacrifice the city proposed to offer to celebrate the annual festival of the god, the priest answered: 'I have brought from my own house a goose as an offering, but the city has so far made no preparations.'
1

If the pagans could not be galvanized into life, there was no alternative but to increase the pressure on the Christians; and on 17 June 362 Julian published an edict which, innocuous though it appeared at first sight, struck a body-blow at the Christian faith. For any schoolteacher, it declared, the first and most important requirement was an irreproachable moral character. In consequence, no teacher would henceforth be permitted to follow his calling without first obtaining the approval of his local city council and, through that, of the Emperor himself. In an explanatory circular Julian made it clear that in his view no Christian who professed to teach the classical authors - who in those days occupied virtually all the school curriculum - could possibly be of the required moral standard, since he would be teaching subjects in which he did not himself believe. He must consequently abjure either his livelihood or his faith.

This edict has been denounced by Christian writers down the ages as the most heinous of Julian's crimes against the Church. Even in his own day, the pagan Ammianus Marcellinus considered that it 'deserved to be buried in eternal silence'. Its effects, moreover, were felt far beyond the academic world. Christian demonstrations were held in protest, and there were riots when, on discovering that the temple of Apollo at Daphne had been defiled by the burial within its precincts of a Christian martyr (ironically enough, at the command of Julian's own brother Gallus), the Emperor ordered its exhumation and removal. On this latter occasion, several of the demonstrators were arrested. They were later released, though only after at least one of them had been put to the torture; but on 26 October the whole temple was burnt to the ground. Julian retaliated by closing down the Great Church of Antioch, confiscating all its gold plate.