tiplicity of the national gods, genii, heroes, and natural powers; believed in immediate communications and revelations of the gods through dreams, visions, oracles, entrails of sacrifices, prodigies; and stood in league with all kinds of magical and theurgic arts. Julian himself, with all his philosophical intelligence, credited the most insipid legends of the gods, or gave them a deeper, mystic meaning by the most arbitrary allegorical interpretation. He was in intimate personal intercourse with Jupiter, Minerva, Apollo, Hercules, who paid their nocturnal visits to his heated fancy, and assured him of their special protection. And he practised the art of divination as a master.* Among the various divinities he worshipped with peculiar devotion the great King Helios, or the god of the sun, whose servant he called himself, and whose etherial light attracted him already in tender childhood with magic force. He regards him as the centre of the universe, from which light, life and salvation proceed to all creatures. In this view of a supreme divinity he made an approach to the Christian monotheism, but substituted an airy myth and pantheistic fancy for the only true and living God and the personal historical Christ. His moral character corresponds with the preposterous nature of this system. With all his brilliant talents and stoical virtues, he wanted the genuine simplicity and naturalness, which are the foundation of all true greatness of mind and character. As his worship of Helios was a shadowy reflection of the Christian monotheism, and so far an involuntary tribute to the religion he opposed, so in his artificial and ostentatious asceticism we can only see a caricature of the ecclesiastical monasticism of the age which he so deeply despised for its humility and spirituality. He was full of affectation, vanity, sophistry, loquacity, and a master in the art of dissimulation. Every thing he said or wrote was studied and calculated for * Libanius says of him, Epit. p. 582: . . μαντέων τε τοῖς ἀρίστοις χρώμενος, αὐτός τε ὢν οὐδαμῶν ἐν τῇ τέχνῃ δεύτερος. Ammianus Marcellinus calls him, XXV, 4, praesagiorum sciscitationi nimiae deditus, superstitiosus magis quam sacrorum legitimus observator. Comp. Sozom. V, 2. + Comp. his fourth Oratio, which is devoted to the praise of Helios. effect. Instead of discerning the spirit of the age and putting himself at the head of the current of true progress, he identified himself with a party of no vigor or promise, and thus fell into a false and untenable position, at variance with the mission of a ruler. Great minds, indeed, are always more or less at war with their age, as we may see in the reformers, in the apostles, nay, in Christ himself. But their antagonism proceeds from a clear knowledge of the real wants and a sincere devotion to the best interests of the age; it is all progressive and reformatory, and at last carries the deeper spirit of the age with itself, and raises it to a higher level. The antagonism of Julian, starting with a radical misconception of the tendency of history and animated by selfish ambition, was one of retrogression and reäction, in addition, was devoted to a bad cause. He had all the faults, and therefore deserved the tragic fate of a fanatical reäctionist. . His apostasy from Christianity, to which he was probably never at heart committed, Julian himself dates as early as his twentieth year, A.D. 351. But while Constantius lived, he concealed his pagan sympathies with consummate hypocrisy, publicly observed Christian ceremonies, while secretly sacrificing to Jupiter and Helios, kept the feast of Epiphany in the church at Vienne as late as January, 361, and praised the Emperor in the most extravagant style, though he thoroughly hated him, and after his death all the more bitterly mocked him. For ten years he kept the mask. After December, 355, the student of books astonished the world with brilliant military and executive powers as Cæsar in Gaul, which was at that time severely threatened by the German barbarians; he won the enthusiastic love of the soldiers, and received from them the dignity of Augustus. Then he raised the standard of rebellion against his suspicious and envious imperial cousin and brother-in-law, and in 361 openly declared himself a friend Comp. Jul. Orat. I, in Constantii Laudes; Epist. ad Athenienses, p. 270; Cæsares, p. 335 sq. Even heathen authors concede his dissimulation; as Ammianus Marc. XXI, 2, comp. XXII, 5, and Libanius, who excuses him with the plea of regard to his security, Opp. p. 328, ed. Reiske. of the gods. By the sudden death of Constantius in the same year, he became sole head of the Roman empire, and in December, as the only remaining heir of the house of Constantius,* made his entry into Constantinople amidst universal applause, and rejoicing over escape from civil war. He immediately gave himself, with the utmost zeal, to the duties of his high station, unweariedly active as prince, general, judge, orator, high-priest, correspondent, and author. He sought to unite the fame of an Alexander, a Marcus Aurelius, a Plato, and a Diogenes, in himself. His only recreation was a change of labor. He would use at once his hand in writing, his ear in hearing, and his voice in speaking. He considered his whole time due to his empire and the culture of his own mind. In the eighteen short months of his reign (Dec. 361June, 363), he made the plans of a life-long administration and composed most of his literary works. He practised the strictest economy in public affairs, banished all useless luxury from his court, and dismissed with one decree whole hosts of barbers, cup-bearers, cooks, masters of ceremonies, and other superfluous officers, with whom the palace swarmed; but surrounded himself instead with equally useless pagan mystics, sophists, jugglers, theurgists, soothsayers, babblers, and scoffers, who now streamed from all quarters to the court. In striking contrast with his predecessors, he maintained the simplicity of a philosopher and an ascetic in his manner of life, and gratified his pride and vanity with contempt of the pomp and pleasures of the imperial purple. He lived chiefly on vegetable diet, abstaining now from this food, now from that, according to the taste of the god or goddess, to whom the day was consecrated. He wore common clothing, usually slept on 'the floor, let his beard and nails grow, and, like the strict anchorites of Egypt, neglected the laws of decency and cleanliness.† * His older brother, Gallus, for some time emperor at Antioch, had already been justly deposed by Constantius in 354, and beheaded, for his entire incapacity and his merciless cruelty. In the Misogogon, his witty apology to the refined Antiochians for his philosophical beard, p. 338 sq., he boasts of this cynic coarseness, and describes, with This cynic eccentricity and vain ostentation certainly spoiled his reputation for simplicity and self-denial, and made him ridiculous. It evinced, also, not so much the boldness and wisdom of a reformer, as the pedantry and folly of a reäctionist. In military and executive talent he was not inferior to Constantine; while in mind and literary culture he far excelled him, as well as in energy and moral self-control; and, doubtless to his own credit, he closed his public career at the age at which his uncle's began; but he entirely lacked the clear and sound common sense of his great predecessor, and that practical statesmanship, which discerns the wants of the age, and acts according to them. His greatest fault, as a ruler, was his utterly false position towards the paramount question of his time, that of religion. This was the cause of that complete failure, which made his reign as trackless as a meteor. The ruling passion of Julian, and the soul of his short but most active, remarkable, and in its negative results instructive reign, was fanatical love of the pagan religion and bitter hatred of the Christian, at a time when the former had already forever given up to the latter the reins of government in the world. He considered it the great mission of his life to restore the worship of the gods, and to reduce the religion of Jesus first to a contemptible sect, and at last, if possible, to utter extinction from the earth. To this he believed himself called by the gods themselves, and in this faith he was confirmed by theurgic arts, visions, and dreams. To this end all the means, great complacency, his long nails, his ink-stained hands, his rough, uncombed beard inhabited (horribile dictu) by certain vnpía. It should not be forgotten, however, that contemporary writers give him the credit of a strict chastity, which raises him far above most heathen princes, and which furnishes another proof to the involuntary influence of Christian asceticism upon his life. Libanius asserts in his panegyric, that Julian, before his brief married life and after the death of his wife, a sister of Constantius, never knew a woman; and Mamertinus calls his lectulus, "Vestalium toris purior." Add to this the testimony of the honest Ammianus Marcellinus, and the silence of Christian antagonists. Comp. Gibbon, c. XXII, note, 50; and Carwithen and Lyall : History of the Christian Church, etc. p. 54. On the other hand the Christians accused him of all sorts of secret crimes; for instance, the butchering of boys and girls (Grégor. Orat. III., p. 91, and Theodor. III., 26, 27), which was probably an unfounded inference from his fanatical zeal for bloody sacrifices and divinations. which talent, zeal, and power could command, were applied; and the failure must be attributed solely to the intrinsic folly and impracticability of the end itself. 1. To look at the positive side of his plan, the restoration and reformation of heathenism: He reinstated in its ancient splendor the worship of the gods at the public expense; called forth hosts of priests from concealment, conferred upon them all their former privileges, and showed them every honor; enjoined upon the soldiers and civil officers attendance at the forsaken temples and altars; forgot no god nor goddess, though himself specially devoted to the worship of Apollo, or the Sun; and notwithstanding his parsimony in other respects, caused the rarest birds and whole herds of bulls and lambs to be sacrificed, until the continuance of the species became a subject of concern.* He removed the cross and the monogram of Christ from the coins and standards, and replaced the former pagan symbols. He surrounded the statues and portraits of the emperors with the signs of idolatry, that every one might be compelled to bow before the gods, who would pay the emperors due respect. He advocated images of the gods on the same grounds, on which afterwards the Christian iconolaters defended the images of the saints. If you love the emperor, if you love your father, says he, you like to see his portrait; so the friend of the gods loves to look upon their images, by which he is pervaded with reverence for the invisible gods, who are looking down upon him. Julian himself led the way by a complete example. He displayed on every occasion the utmost zeal for the heathen. religion, and performed with the most scrupulous devotion the offices of a pontifex maximus, which had been altogether neglected, although not formally abolished, under his two predecessors. Every morning and evening he sacrificed to the rising and setting sun, or the supreme light-god; every night, to the moon and the stars; every day, to some other divinity. He prostrated himself devoutly before the altars and the ima * Ammianus Marc., XXV, 4 innumeras sine parsimonia pecudes mactans ut æstimaretur, si revertisset de Parthis, boves jam defuturos. |