Rowland B. E. Smith - Julians Gods: Religion and Philosophy in the Thought and Action of Julian the Apostate

JULIANS GODS

Religion and philosophy in the thought and action of Julian the Apostate

Rowland Smith

First published 1995

by Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

1995 Rowland Smith

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0415034876

Prayers without sacrifice are only words, prayers with sacrifice are animated words.

Sallustius, On the gods and the universe

He did not feast some and ignore others, but made libation to all the gods whom the poets have passed down ancestral parents and their offspring, gods and goddesses, ruling and ruled and filled the altars of all of them with sheep and oxen.

Libanius, Oration XVII

How much more individual still was the character they assumed from being designated by names, names that were for themselves alone, proper names such as people have.

Proust, Du ct de chez Swann, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff

Abbreviations

(Titles of periodicals are abbreviated according to the conventions of LAnne philologique.)

Note on Citations from Julians Works

Source-references in the text and notes to Julians writings are cited by title of work only, omitting the author: eg. Or. 4.131a, Caes 306a.

The modern editions of Julian in the Loeb and Bud series use different systems to denote individual works. Citations here follow the Loeb in retaining the conventional numbering of the Orations:

The Ceasars (= Caes.), Misopogon, Letter to the Athenians (= Ep. ad SPQ Ath.), Letter to Themistius (= Ep. ad Them.), Letter to a Priest and the fragments of the Contra Galilaeos (= CG) are cited by title.

Citations of the above works normally follow Loeb text of W.C. Wright, with occasional departures signalled in the notes. For consistency and brevity, source-references in the main text to Letters of Julian are cited by a Loeb letter-number only, but J. Bidezs differently numbered edition of the letters (Vol. I.ii in the Bud) is here preferred as textually superior, and references in the notes add the Bud letter-number also, in brackets: eg. Ep. 1 (13 Bidez).

Preface

The reign of the Emperor Julian was brief, and it ended in dbcle. When he died in the summer of AD 363 he had ruled undisputed barely a year and a half, and the projected invasion of Persia in the course of which he met his death was to issue in a signally humiliating reverse for Rome in the East. Julians Persian campaign had been grandly conceived and prepared, but it was patently failing even before he was killed, and in the judgement of many the same was true of the best known of all his designs his attempt, fifty years after Constantines conversion to Christianity, at a pagan restoration in the cities of the Empire. On a common view, what Julian tried to do in this connection was unrealizable from the outset; on any view, the restoration and his other public purposes came to nothing.

None the less, very few antique figures have matched Julians enduring fascination in later eyes, and the case has not appealed solely as a study in imperial failure: Julians own personality and cultural mentality have held a powerful intrinsic attraction. In his lifetime, a large part of his reputation had rested on his fame as a daring and successful commander. On that score, it could not but suffer for the way the reign ended. But from the first there were other aspects to the man that made him an imperial rarity and attracted the interest of contemporaries. This Emperor was highly educated a learned man of discriminating literary taste, an avid student of Greek philosophy, and a writer of respectable talent in his own right. These were personal interests, but they were reflected too in the Emperors public style. Julian wore a philosophers beard, and responded to the Antiochenes ridicule of it with polished satire composed for public circulation; the civic inscriptions and oratory of politer subjects celebrated the rule of a lover of wisdom and letters. More than that: in Julians case, the cultured interests were closely bound up with a fervent religious sensibility which plainly impinged on central features of his public action. And the evolution of that sensibility had involved the repudiation of a Christian upbringing. Romes last pagan Emperor was also antiquitys most notable pagan convert, a nephew of Constantine educated as a Christian prince under the supervision of leading bishops of the day: Julian was to be remembered chiefly as the Apostate.