What a cover. That’s the copy I bought in paperback in some used bookstore somewhere. It looks very 60s, but it also pretty accurately depicts the types of guys you’ll find in the novel. Also more interesting than the generic Roman legion helmet on the audiobook cover. If I were designing one, it would feature a bloody spear — violent but totally fitting. Maybe that’s just my morbid side.
Julian was published in 1964 by Gore Vidal, a prolific American author with a political family background and a history of left-wing activism and attempted runs for Congress. While Vidal was concerned with politics in the mid-20th century, that political interest still comes out in Julian, the fictionalized autobiography of the short-lived 4th century Roman emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus or simply Julian. Quite a few of the Roman emperors around both the mid-third century AD and this period only lasted a year or two and weren’t that interesting — a general is declared emperor and gets killed in battle or by his own troops for not giving them enough money, stuff like that.
Julian was different — if he’d lasted a few decades, he might have massively changed the course of Christianity and world religion to this day. He lasted less than two years, killed in battle while invading Persia (bad fucking idea, by the way, unless you’re Alexander) and so he didn’t change the course of much of anything, but that wasn’t for a lack of trying. Known both as Julian the Philosopher and the Apostate, this kid was born in 331 AD the nephew of Constantine, the emperor who made Christianity the state religion of Rome. As Julian grew up with his older brother Gallus, he had to endure the murder of their father and most of their family by Constantine’s son Emperor Constantius II, a devout Christian. Throughout their childhoods shuttled between palaces around Anatolia as virtual prisoners, Julian comes to love philosophy, to revere the old gods, and to turn away from Christian belief.
Despite his rough start, Julian ends up outsurviving his insane and violent brother, eventually being raised to Caesar of the West alongside Constantius.* Unfortunately, Constantius is a paranoid wreck, and when the college-aged philosophy nerd Julian ends up leading an army to huge victories in Gaul against the Germans, the Augustus panics and starts trying to undermine his cousin to tone down his popularity and make him less of a threat. Julian fully understands the threat to his life — Constantius had already had his brother Gallus tried and executed after his own disastrous stint as Caesar of the East. After constantly denying his desire to unseat his cousin Jon Snow-style, Julian goes ahead and rebels at the behest of his troops in one of those “if I don’t do this I’ll get killed anyway” instances, being declared Augustus by his army in 360 in place of his cousin.
Constantius has big ass armies and will probably end up crushing Julian despite the kid’s unexpected skill at war, but Julian lucks out and Constantius dies of a fever in 361, leaving the entire empire to him in his will together with a surprisingly thoughtful note about how only they can know the burden and loneliness of being the emperor.
Julian on a gold coin. Note the beard, which was apparently seen as a sign of his love of philosophy and pagan/Hellenistic stuff. Nice portrait, too — the Greeks and Romans are where we get many of our modern western coin designs from. (Source: Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. http://www.cngcoins.com, CC BY-SA 2.5.)
And finally Emperor Julian Augustus gets to put his plans into motion. As a Hellenist, Julian is kind of like a weeb, only instead of anime and idol groups and Touhou Project, he obsesses over ancient Greek philosophy and religion. He’s as excited to study in Athens before his elevation to Caesar as we would be to visit Akihabara. So naturally, he plans to reopen the temples, restart the sacrifices to the gods, and remove the Christian church from its supreme place under Constantine down to just another religion.
Obviously his plans to restore the old gods didn’t work, otherwise some of us today might be going down to the Temple of Apollo to sacrifice a goat on the holy day instead of going to church.† Julian instead ends up getting convinced to invade Persia to do some regime change and gets himself killed in the process (bad idea as stated previously, though we have the benefit of hindsight now.)‡ The Christians of the empire understandably don’t mourn his loss too much, given that it means an end to his measures against them. But even after they regained and solidified their position as the only religion, Julian was still generally admired or at least acknowledged for his energy and bravery, leaving a mixed and complicated legacy of the emperor that lasts to this day.
Julian being a fictionalized account from the title character’s own pen, like Robert Graves’ I, Claudius, it contains a lot of the author’s interpretation about character. Both used the existing histories to create or recreate these real figures, but the interpretation still has to be there, otherwise we’d end up with a wooden block for a character instead of a human. Vidal’s take on Julian is of a conscientious, smart, and likeable prince with strong feelings that he let control him too much, sometimes taking him beyond the bounds of practicality and occasionally into cruelty. Julian is fairly humble, or as humble as you could expect a Roman emperor to be, and being a follower of philosophy and pretty self-reflective, he admits some of his faults and mistakes and tends not to excuse his behavior in those instances.
But he still glosses over some of the negatives of his personality and rule. Thankfully, we have two other guys to fill in those gaps: Libanius and Priscus, philosophers who taught and accompanied Julian through his short reign. Julian is presented as the manuscript of an autobiography of the emperor with Libanius backing it and Priscus providing the firsthand materials. Both make their own comments in the text when they have something to contribute to Julian’s account. And while both were sympathetic to Julian, both on the personal and professional levels — Libanius was a Hellenist or pagan, and Priscus more or less an atheist, but both very much against the rise of Christianity in the empire — they also correct the record when they think Julian is making convenient omissions or isn’t representing the public mood accurately.
More often than not, the two philosophers chalk these oversights up to Julian’s naviete in a few matters or his increasingly uncompromising stance on religious practice. The emperor notably doesn’t kill anyone for practicing Christianity unlike some of his predecessors, but he clearly has a lot of disdain for the religion in his references to churches as “charnel houses” and Christians as “Galileans” (Nazareth being in Galilee, a region of northern Palestine — maybe an attempt to belittle the religion as regional instead of universal as its followers claim?) It helps Julian that he knows the Bible inside and out, having been raised a Christian and taught theology by bishops, but the serious internal conflicts over the nature of Christ in Christian doctrine hadn’t been resolved by that point, and he attempted to set the Athanasian vs. Arian turf battle aside as pointless and irrelevant in the fact of his restoration of the worship of the old gods.
Julian certainly gave the two sides in that conflict a common enemy to fight against. I can’t take any sides in this historical battle, not believing myself in either the Trinity or any of the western or eastern pagan religions of the time, but the Julian of the novel is a genuine believer in his gods, and considering the great efforts he took to restore the pantheon, the historical figure was as well. It would have been a lot easier for him politically to accept Christianity at least outwardly, but he didn’t, and I have to respect his commitment somewhat at least, even if he is understandably reviled by many Christians for it. On the other hand, as several characters who sympathize with his views point out to him, the reigns of his uncle and cousin had by Julian’s time cemented Christianity so completely that his cause was lost and futile even then.
The Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople where Julian was buried. He probably would have totally hated that.
There’s an interesting link between Julian and the fictionalized Claudius of I, Claudius three centuries earlier: both were committed to lost causes. Entirely different lost causes, but equally lost: Claudius yearned for a return to the good old austere, serious days of the Roman Republic, but while in his day the republic was still in living memory, it had already been killed by his own family starting with his grandfather, the first emperor Augustus. By Julian’s time, the republic was a centuries-old relic of history, so maybe understandably he instead tries to use his powerful office to impose his own vision of a reinvigorated Hellenistic religion.
But by the 360s, the old religions were already fading away and their temples falling into disrepair. One of the most affecting parts of the novel comes at the very end, where Libanius recounts his conversation with his former best student, now a popular bishop, who ends up almost taunting his old teacher with the Christians’ victory. The two old pagans Libanius and Priscus aren’t just putting Julian to rest with this manuscript, they’re also putting to rest the world he tried and failed to save. Shouldn’t have invaded Persia, dumbass (and there’s a nice lesson that I hope to God my own country’s government understands, though I don’t hope very much considering our recent history.)
If Julian sounds all dry and dour, though, don’t worry — it has plenty of humor to spice things up, a lot of it provided by those two old pagan philosophers sniping at each other between their notes and letters that are interspersed through Julian’s account. The audiobook excels in these parts with the different actors playing Julian, Libanius, and Priscus and especially in the fights between the old guys. My favorite character in the book is the catty Priscus, who I’m pretty sure I’ll resemble if I reach my 70s (not damn likely, but I can hope.)
But hell, even if he is the Apostate, I like Julian too. He seems like a massive nerd at heart with his love of ancient religion and history, and that’s why he’s on my short list of Roman emperors I’d have dinner with (not most of them; they tended to be murderous.) That’s keeping in mind that the Socrates and Plato and ancient Athens stuff he never shuts up about was all in the 400s BC, almost 800 years earlier. We think of both Pericles of Athens and Julian as ancient guys, but “ancient” is an incredibly broad range of time: if Julian lived today, Pericles would have lived in the 1200s, as far from him as we are from King Edward I, the Braveheart guy. I can appreciate a stupid level of dedication to the study of history more than anyone.
All that said, Julian’s cause was lost in the end, and he does have an overbearing quality to him — no surprise considering he spent most of his life consciously being carried along by destiny. But really, invading Persia was a fucking dumb idea, man.
A carving in Persia showing the investiture of a new king, standing on top of the dead body of Julian. Partial credit for the energy and bravery and all that, but you still failed. (Source: By Philippe Chavin – Own work, CC BY 2.5.)
As for the novel, it’s great, and I highly recommend it. Julian is a fascinating novel about the use of political power to change a culture and a nice reminder of the historical lesson that that usually doesn’t work. At least I hope it doesn’t, because living in America these days when people with massive influence are trying to fuck our political culture utterly, I feel like this is a relevant work. And the audiobook form is well-acted and produced, so if you get to drive on shitty, slowly crumbling American highways like I do, it’s a good choice to pass the hours in traffic.
Though your mileage may vary if you’re a Christian. I get the impression Gore Vidal wasn’t a fan of Christianity from this novel, but even as the tragic hero, Julian still lost and the world he tried to preserve would soon be dead. No idea whether that was for better or worse, but I’m no historian. I actually did miss my fucking calling, man.
*A short background to all this: in the early fourth century AD, the emperor Diocletian reformed the Roman imperial system, dividing the massive empire into West and East and giving each side a senior emperor called the Augustus and a junior called the Caesar. These and other reforms became necessary after decades of mostly military dictator-style emperors getting constantly murdered by rival generals or their own officers. This Tetrarchy was the system Julian was born into, and we see just how poorly it ended up working in this novel. Diocletian was a smart guy, and his plans did sort of hold together while he was still alive at least, but I guess it was just too late at that point. Note that Constantine, Constantius, and Julian all ruled the entirety of Rome as sole emperor in their days, not what he’d intended.
The sheer size of the empire also led to a change in culture over the five hundred years since the Roman republic had conquered Greece, Anatolia, and Syria. The spread of Christianity and its adoption as the state religion was the obvious change and is central to the novel, but the city of Rome by the fourth century was also on its way to being a political backwater — the capital now stood at New Rome aka Constantinople, and the imperial administration suddenly got a lot less Latin and a lot more Greek. Julian and his family only speak Greek, and he refers to himself throughout as an “Asiatic” as the people of the eastern part of the empire were known. This Eastern Roman Empire, later known as the Byzantine, would endure for a thousand years after the fall of the West in 476, and this is more or less around where that polity started.
† It’s interesting to think of how the old pagan forms of worship might have changed if they’d hung on. I know there are still followers of the old Greek and other pre-Christian European religions around, but that feels like more of a throwback for history nerds who want to really commit to the past, and as far as I know there are so few of them that they’re barely a blip in the statistics.
But if Julian had his way and people were still honoring Helios and/or Mithras today, I doubt we’d still be sacrificing goats and bulls and checking their livers for omens. Then again, followers of Santería still sacrifice animals down in Florida and the state can’t do a damn thing about it.
‡ This was the “spear of destiny” some believe was wielded by a saint in revenge for the emperor’s anti-Christian measures. We do get an answer to who killed Julian in the novel, but while a Christian conspiracy against him was suspected by some in real life including Libanius, it might just have well been some Persian guy in the Great King’s army who got a lucky stab in.
Whether it was God’s doing or not, Julian still had a pretty good death in Roman terms, getting killed in battle heroically and all. So I thought it would be fun to highlight a few of the less glamorous deaths in Roman emperor history (not counting the later Byzantine period, which I sadly don’t know enough about to comment on except that those guys really enjoyed blinding each other.)
- Vitellius (69) – found hiding from a rival general’s coup attempt in a Roman inn, thrown down a very long flight of stairs.
- Commodus (180 – 192) – killed by his wrestling instructor in an assassination plot after being a murderous incompetent ass for his whole reign and trying to name everything in Rome after himself (not killed by Russell Crowe in the Colosseum, sadly — but Gladiator also toned Commodus’ insanity way down.)
- Pertinax (193) – successor of Commodus, killed after three months by the Praetorian Guard for refusing to bribe them.
- Didius Julianus (193) – successor of Pertinax, killed by one of his own soldiers after paying the Praetorian Guard for the imperial seat in an ancient eBay auction, then being hated by everyone and besieged by rival generals for two months.
- Caracalla (211 – 217) – a colossal asshole of an emperor; murdered by the head of the Praetorian Guard while taking a dump on the side of the road. Perhaps the most fitting of all imperial deaths.
- Elagabalus (218 – 222) – found hiding from the Praetorian Guard’s coup attempt in a latrine, stabbed to death. (There’s a lot more interesting about Elagabalus than this; he’s worth looking up.)
- Jovian (363 – 364) – one of Julian’s generals in Persia and his immediate successor; choked on fumes from a charcoal fire while sleeping in a newly painted room (though considering the times, this might have been the coverup for an assassination.)
- Valentinian I (364 – 375) – got so mad and screamed so hard at an enemy envoy while on campaign that he had a fatal stroke on the spot. That’s a rough one.
Everything is bad for you 