Gore Vidal - Julian

Acclaim for GORE VIDAL s

JULIAN

High entertainment.Gore Vidal is able to penetrate the depths of human being. Julian was enchanted with living, intensely and drivingly engaged. It is this quality of flashing vitality that Mr. Vidal admirably captures.

The New York Times Book Review

Simply great.A truly monumental novel.

Associated Press

Impressive.To the formidable task which Vidal sets himself, he brings an easy and fluent gift for narrative; a theatrical sense of scene and dramatic occasion; and a revealing eye and ear for character delineationto say nothing of wide reading.

Newsweek

Julian was the magnificent first fruit of Vidals reinvention of himself as a Roman. Ever a ventriloquist, he enters into the mind of the Emperor Julian with an eerie nonchalance.As an historical novel about the ancient world, it is every bit the equal of anything by Mary Renault or Robert Graves.

Jay Parini in
Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain

[Vidals] account of Julians conquest of Persiaand defeat by Persiacasts a kind of spell from which one must shake oneself awake.As a pagan hymn from a darker world, it sets some present truths into the light.

The Christian Science Monitor

No odder figure ever guided the destinies of the Roman Empire than the Emperor Julian Augustus. Here was a recluse and a scholar who became a great military leader, an ascetic who preached the life of the senses, a fatalist who believed he would remake the world.He is endlessly fascinating.

Time

GORE VIDAL

JULIAN

Gore Vidal was born in 1925 at the United States Military Academy at West Point. His first novel, Williwaw, written when he was nineteen years old and serving in the Army, appeared in the spring of 1946. Since then he has written twenty-three novels, five plays, many screenplays, short stories, well over two hundred essays, and two memoirs. He died in 2012.

BOOKS BY GORE VIDAL

NOVELS

Williwaw

In a Yellow Wood

The City and the Pillar

The Season of Comfort

A Search for the King

Dark Green, Bright Red

The Judgment of Paris

Messiah

Julian

Washington, D.C.

Myra Breckinridge

Two Sisters

Burr

Myron

1876

Kalki

Creation

Duluth

Lincoln

Empire

Hollywood

Live from Golgotha

The Smithsonian Institution

The Golden Age

NONFICTION

Inventing a Nation

SHORT STORIES

A Thirsty Evil

Clouds and Eclipses

PLAYS

An Evening with Richard Nixon

Weekend

Romulus

On the March to the Sea

The Best Man

Visit to a Small Planet

ESSAYS

Rocking the Boat

Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship

Homage to Daniel Shays

Matters of Fact and of Fiction

The Second American Revolution

At Home

Screening History

United States

The Last Empire

Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace

Imperial America

The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal

MEMOIRS

Palimpsest

Point to Point Navigation

VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, AUGUST 2003

Copyright 1962, 1964, copyright renewed 1990, 1992 by Gore Vidal

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Little, Brown & Company, Boston, in 1964. Previously published by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., in a somewhat different edition.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The first two chapters of Julian appeared in somewhat different form in Three by Gore Vidal, Signet edition of the New American Library of World Literature, Inc., 1962.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Vidal, Gore, 1925

Julian.

Reprint of the ed. published by Little, Brown, Boston.

p. cm.

1. Julianus, Apostate, Emperor of Rome, 331363Fiction. I. Title.

[PZ3.V6668Jw10]

[PS3543.I26]

813.54

76-10593

Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN9780375727061

Ebook ISBN9780525565802

www.vintagebooks.com

v5.3.1

a

For Lucien Price

Contents

A NOTE

Robert Graves, when he came to publish his sequel to I, Claudius, remarked in a somewhat irritable preface that a good many reviewers seemed to think he had simply spun himself a novel from Suetoniuss gossip, which looked to them like a very easy thing to do. In Claudius the God, Graves struck back with a long bibliography, listing nearly every relevant text which has survived from the ancient world. Unfortunately, I have not read as much as all that. But to anticipate those who might think that ones only source was the history of Ammianus Marcellinus (or even of Edward Gibbon), I have included at the end of the book a partial bibliography.

The Emperor Julians life is remarkably well documented. Three volumes of his letters and essays survive, while such acquaintances as Libanius and Saint Gregory of Nazianzus wrote vivid accounts of him. Though I have written a novel, not a history, I have tried to stay with the facts, only occasionally shifting things around. For instance, it is unlikely that Priscus joined Julian in Gaul, but it is useful to the narrative to have him there.

Julian has always been something of an underground hero in Europe. His attempt to stop Christianity and revive Hellenism exerts still a romantic appeal, and he crops up in odd places, particularly during the Renaissance and again in the nineteenth century. Two such unlikely authors as Lorenzo de Medici and Henrik Ibsen wrote plays about him. But aside from the unique adventure of Julians life, what continues to fascinate is the fourth century itself. During the fifty years between the accession of Julians uncle Constantine the Great and Julians death at thirty-two, Christianity was established. For better or worse, we are today very much the result of what they were then.

In naming cities, I give the modern rather than the ancient name (Milan, not Mediolanum), except when the original name is more familiar to us (Ephesus, not Seluk). Dates I put in our fashion, A.D. and B.C. Since Julians court was a military one, I have used our own armys way of dating, i.e., 3 October 363. Currency is a tricky matter. No one is quite certain what the exact purchasing power of money was in the fourth century, but a gold solidus was probably worth about five dollars. Julian, Priscus and Libanius, the three narrators of this story, all wrote Greek. Their Latin was rather shaky, as they are quick to remind us, but they occasionally use Latin terms, much the way we do. For those readers who will search in vain for Julians famous last words, Thou hast conquered, Galilean!, he never said them. Theodoret must take credit for this fine rhetoric, composed a century after Julians death.

I should like to thank the American Academy at Rome and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens for letting me use their libraries.

G. V.

YOUTH

I

Libanius to Priscus Antioch, March [ A.D. ]

Yesterday morning as I was about to enter the lecture hall, I was stopped by a Christian student who asked me in a voice eager with malice, Have you heard about the Emperor Theodosius?