I mentioned in an earlier post how Constantine’s murders of Crispus and Fausta set a kind of pattern — a pattern that would have certain surprising consequences. Here’s Gibbon:
Constantine himself derived from his royal father the hereditary honors which he transmitted to his children. The emperor had been twice married. Minervina, the obscure but lawful object of his youthful attachment, had left him only one son, who was called Crispus. By Fausta, the daughter of Maximian, he had three daughters, and three sons known by the kindred names of Constantine, Constantius, and Constans. The unambitious brothers of the great Constantine, Julius Constantius, Dalmatius, and Hannibalianus, were permitted to enjoy the most honorable rank, and the most affluent fortune, that could be consistent with a private station. The youngest of the three lived without a name, and died without posterity. His two elder brothers obtained in marriage the daughters of wealthy senators, and propagated new branches of the Imperial race. Gallus and Julian afterwards became the most illustrious of the children of Julius Constantius, the Patrician. The two sons of Dalmatius, who had been decorated with the vain title of Censor, were named Dalmatius and Hannibalianus. The two sisters of the great Constantine, Anastasia and Eutropia, were bestowed on Optatus and Nepotianus, two senators of noble birth and of consular dignity. His third sister, Constantia, was distinguished by her preëminence of greatness and of misery. She remained the widow of the vanquished Licinius; and it was by her entreaties, that an innocent boy, the offspring of their marriage, preserved, for some time, his life, the title of Caesar, and a precarious hope of the succession. Besides the females, and the allies of the Flavian house, ten or twelve males, to whom the language of modern courts would apply the title of princes of the blood, seemed, according to the order of their birth, to be destined either to inherit or to support the throne of Constantine. But in less than thirty years, this numerous and increasing family was reduced to the persons of Constantius and Julian, who alone had survived a series of crimes and calamities, such as the tragic poets have deplored in the devoted lines of Pelops and of Cadmus.
The family tree is pretty complicated — you can take a look at it here. And what makes it more complicated is Constantine’s decision, just before his death in 337, to divide the empire among his three surviving sons, Constantine II, Constans, and Constantius, with a few other relatives having a share as well. (The family naming conventions don’t help.) The person most offended by this spread-the-wealth strategy was Constantine II, who fiercely believed in primogeniture and tried to assert it. He was killed in 340 by soldiers under the command of his brother Constans, who immediately took over Constantine’s lands.
So now we had, roughly speaking, Constans the Caesar ruling the Western half of the empire and Constantius the Caesar ruling the Eastern half. By this point Caesar was a title that meant, or was thought by the Constantines to mean, something like “ruler of a large chunk of the Empire but subservient to the One Emperor, the Augustus.” For the Constantines there might not be at any given moment an Augustus, but there should be, and it should be one of them.
Constans lived until 350, when he was killed by a general named Magnentius, who then (a) proclaimed himself the Caesar of the West and (b) tried to conquer the rest of the Empire. But his campaign against Constantius went badly from the beginning, and when his forces were crushed at the Battle of Mons Seleucus in 353, he took his own life.
Now Constantius was sole Emperor, which was what he had wanted all along — and indeed when he first came to power, in 337, he had systematically slaughtered everyone in his family who might make a claim against him, leaving only two young children, the half-brothers Gallus and Julian. Eventually he made both of them Caesars — but when Gallus began taking on airs (i.e., acting like an Augustus) Constantius had him killed … and that’s how we ended up with the situation Gibbon describes: “this numerous and increasing family was reduced to the persons of Constantius and Julian, who alone had survived a series of crimes and calamities, such as the tragic poets have deplored in the devoted lines of Pelops and of Cadmus.”
But was Julian content to be a mere Caesar and leave the stature of Augustus to Constantius? Of course not. In 360 he rebelled, and wrote in self-justification, “Six of my cousins — his cousins too! — he killed without mercy, along with my father, who was his own uncle, and another uncle of us both on my father’s side, then later my elder brother. He had them all put to death not even bothering with a trial.” Which was true.
That self-justification came in a letter to the people of Athens — an odd choice of recipient, for Athens was, and had been for centuries, a mere backwater of the Empire. But Julian had received an excellent education in classical thought — even though he had also been raised a Christian — and had a special reverence for Athens’s philosophical and literary history. That a Christian family should give their sons a classical education should not be surprising, for it was common. If you want to know the reasons, try reading Basil of Caesarea’s “Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature.”
For Julian, the classical education took; the Christian formation did not. Until he became Augustus, on the sudden and unexpected death of Constantius in 361, he maintained the façade of Christian belief, but then he threw it off and announced himself the defender and celebrant of the ancient Roman gods and the enemy of the “Galileans,” as he derisively called Christians. We do not know when he ceased to believe in the Christian religion, or even if he ever believed in it; but almost everyone who has studied the matter believes that his long and close observation of the world-class hypocrisy of the Constantines, who professed a devout faith in the Prince of Peace and yet ruthlessly slaughtered anyone who threatened their grip on power, played a major role in his hatred of the religion.
Julian is fascinating because he’s genuinely determined to see Christianity eradicated in the empire, but he doesn’t want to be seen as a persecutor. So he pronounces a an edict of universal toleration of all religions, and he often writes that he doesn’t want to see the Christians injured in any way. For instance, he writes to one of his provincial governors, “I swear by the gods I do not want the Galileans killed or unjustly beaten or treated badly in any way. What I desire most insistently is to show preference to those who fear the gods.”
But he does three things that are worth noting here. Philip Freeman, from his excellent brief biography of Julian:
Scarcely a month after Julian had taken the throne and made his rejection of Christianity known, the Alexandrians murdered Bishop George, the leader of the Christian church in one of the most important towns in the Roman world. That he was an Arian and not orthodox meant little to the pagan mob. He was a Christian, and that was enough. George had been an important figure in young Julian’s life during his education in Cappadocia, and his excellent library, made freely available to the prince, had given Julian a matchless window into the rich intellectual tradition of Greek philosophy and literature. The new emperor’s response was not one of outrage at the murder of a prominent Roman citizen but only a mild rebuke to the crowd for taking the law into their own hands. In a letter to the Alexandrians he shamelessly pandered to the pagans of the city by casting George as an enemy to the gods who got what was coming to him: “You say that perhaps George deserved to be treated in such a fashion? I’ll grant that and admit that he deserved even worse and more cruel treatment.”
At this moment Julian’s concern is to preserve the pagan books in George’s library, the library he had delighted in as an adolescent, thanks to George’s generosity. Now he writes about the Christian books in the library, “I wish them to be utterly destroyed. But make sure you do so with the greatest care lest any useful works be destroyed by mistake. Have George’s secretary help you. Let him know that if he is faithful in the task he will get his freedom as a reward. But if he is in any way dishonest in sorting things out, he shall be put to torture.”
So that’s one thing: his complicated disingenuousness about his attitude towards Christians.
The second thing, from Freeman again:
His declaration of religious tolerance also included an amnesty and right of return for all orthodox Christian leaders who had been exiled and marginalized under Constantius, who had favored Arian Christians. This was a clever move on Julian’s part. As the pagan historian Ammianus would say disparagingly a few decades later, the Christians were like wild beasts who fought more viciously with each other than they ever did with pagans. Rather than launch a persecution against Christians as a whole, Julian was deliberately fueling a civil war within the church to encourage the orthodox and the Arians to attack and weaken one another, leaving his own hands clean. Most notable of these pardoned orthodox exiles was Athanasius, the former bishop of Alexandria, who had been replaced by an Arian Christian leader in the city. Julian was eager to see what trouble he would stir up when Athanasius arrived back in Egypt.
Clever! First of all, the rival Christians will kill each other. And in so doing, they will discredit the Gospel. (Tertullian, 150 years earlier: “But it is mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead many to put a brand upon us. See, they say, how they love one another, for they themselves are animated by mutual hatred. See, they say about us, how they are ready even to die for one another, for they themselves would sooner kill.” Julian: 😂) Julian knows that he doesn’t have to persecute Christians: the different Christian factions will persecute each other.
The third point about Julian: his own paganism is complicated. There are two distinct elements to it. One of them is completely ignored by Charles Norris Cochrane in his otherwise excellent treatment of Julian, because Cochrane is a historian of ideas, and he wants to talk about their effect: his focus is on Julian as a neo-Platonic philosophical theologian, and that’s not wholly wrong, as we’ll see in a moment. But what Cochrane ignores Gibbon emphasizes: Julian’s love of blood sacrifice and his belief in divination and magical power. The Emperor actually becomes a haruspex:
On solemn festivals, he regularly visited the temple of the god or goddess to whom the day was peculiarly consecrated, and endeavored to excite the religion of the magistrates and people by the example of his own zeal. Instead of maintaining the lofty state of a monarch, distinguished by the splendor of his purple, and encompassed by the golden shields of his guards, Julian solicited, with respectful eagerness, the meanest offices which contributed to the worship of the gods. Amidst the sacred but licentious crowd of priests, of inferior ministers, and of female dancers, who were dedicated to the service of the temple, it was the business of the emperor to bring the wood, to blow the fire, to handle the knife, to slaughter the victim, and, thrusting his bloody hands into the bowels of the expiring animal, to draw forth the heart or liver, and to read, with the consummate skill of an haruspex, imaginary signs of future events. The wisest of the Pagans censured this extravagant superstition, which affected to despise the restraints of prudence and decency. Under the reign of a prince, who practised the rigid maxims of economy, the expense of religious worship consumed a very large portion of the revenue; a constant supply of the scarcest and most beautiful birds was transported from distant climates, to bleed on the altars of the gods; a hundred oxen were frequently sacrificed by Julian on one and the same day; and it soon became a popular jest, that if he should return with conquest from the Persian war, the breed of horned cattle must infallibly be extinguished.
That’s one side of Julian’s paganism. But in theory, as Cochrane shows, he is effectively a monotheist — someone who sees all of the gods as a manifestation of the One God. For him the ideal way to worship as a pagan is to worship the Sun. “From my childhood an extraordinary longing for the shining rays of the god pierced deep into my soul. From my earliest years my mind was so completely overcome by the light that rules the sky that not only did I desire to gaze at the brightness of the sun, but also whenever I walked on a clear and cloudless night I abandoned all else and gave myself up to the beauty of the heavens.” Soon after he became emperor he wrote a hymn to the Sun that he hoped would be the model for his people’s religion.
He didn’t get the chance to pursue this ideal programmatically — he died in battle in his early thirties — but he very much reminds me of Akhenaten, who wanted to replace the variegated polytheism of Egypt with a highly impersonal cult of the sun. Akhenaten and Julian alike were frustrated that they had so little success in weaning their people from a miscellaneous polytheism.
The other figure Julian reminds me of is, paradoxically enough, Constantine. Constantine was happy for pagans to be confused and rivalrous as long as Christians — on whose strength and integrity he staked his empire — were unified. Julian, his mirror-image, sowed chaos among the Christians while fruitlessly pursuing unity among his fellow pagans. Freeman once more:
Julian also believed the best way to defeat the church was to end division among the pagans, much as his uncle Constantine had tried to banish disunity among Christians. The followers of traditional religions had to work together in the true spirit of worshipping and honoring the gods, not squabbling with each other while the Christians happily looked on. The problem was that, like most crusaders throughout history, Julian was convinced that only his own particular religious beliefs were the right ones. But his austere form of Neoplatonism was not a belief system that had wide appeal to the pagan masses. The worship of the traditional gods of Greece and Rome had always taken a multitude of forms and had never been unified. It was not even exclusive. A good pagan might celebrate a solemn sacrifice to Zeus at a city temple in the morning followed by an afternoon visit to a shrine at a local spring and a frenzied festival honoring the goddess Cybele that same evening. The concept of a centralized set of doctrines was completely foreign to paganism. Pagans as such had no defining creeds, no universal priesthoods, and no canonical scriptures in the Christian sense. Julian was not only fighting Christianity but promoting a religion that had never existed. The fact that other pagans could not see the world in the same way he did baffled and frustrated him no end.
The Bible tells us, “Put not your trust in princes.” But maybe what princes need to learn is to put not their trust in the peaceable unity of any religious party.
