Julian, surnamed the Apostate, on account of his renunciation of Christianity, Roman emperor from about the end of 361 to the middle of 363 A.D., was born at Constantinople in the later half of the year 331. He was the youngest son of Julius Constantius, the half-brother of Constantine the Great, and his full name was Flavius Claudius Julianus. On the death of the great Constantine in May 337, and the accession of his three sons, there was a general massacre of the male branches of the younger line of the Flavian family descended from Constantius Chlorus and his second wife Theodora. Thus perished the father of Julian, his elder brother, paternal uncle, and cousins, while he himself and his elder half-brother Gallus were alone spared as too young to be dangerous. He lived a loveless youth, under rigorous espionage, at Macellum in Cappadocia and at Nicomedia, embittered moreover by the terrible tragedy he had just escaped, which stripped him of all belief in the reigning religion, and drove his ardent temperament for relief into the literary and philosophical studies of his time. His secret apostasy seems to have been begun at Nicomedia and consummated at Ephesus under the influence of the Neoplatonist Maximus. In 355 he spent a few happy months at Athens in the study of Greek philosophy, and among his fellow-students and acquaintances here were the future Bishops Basil and Gregory Nazianzen. Gallus had been put to death the year before, and in November 355 Julian was summoned to Milan to assume the rank of Cæsar, and marry the emperor's sister, Helena.
The shy young student moved awkwardly amid the atmosphere of policy and intrigue at the court, but during the next five years he found more congenial occupation in the camp, and by his skill and vigour showed that he was a soldier as well as a philosopher. He overthrew the stubborn and victorious Alemanni near Strasburg, subdued the
Frankish tribes along the Rhine and across the river, and fixed his winter quarters at Paris. He endeared himself to the people by lightening the public burdens, and to the soldiers by his personal courage, his success in war, and the severe simplicity of his private life. In April 360 the emperor, alarmed at his growing popularity, demanded that he should send some of his best troops to serve against the Persians, but his soldiers rose in insurrection and proclaimed him Augustus. He occupied some time in consolidating his power, then sent forward one portion of his army through Rhætia and Noricum, another by the northern confines of Italy, while he himself with 3000 chosen soldiers plunged into the gloomy recesses of the Marcian or Black Forest, and sailed down the Danube as far as Sirmium, where he waited to unite his forces. Here he first threw off the mask and openly declared himself a pagan. Here also he learned of the opportune death of his cousin at the foot of Mount Taurus (November 3, 361), which opened up to him the government of the world. The first winter he spent in the imperial city in a course of public reforms, sweeping away a host of corrupt officials who had long battened at will on private bribes and exactions. Towards Christians and Jews alike he ostentatiously adopted a policy of toleration, but none the less he devoted himself with all the enthusiasm of the convert to the task of restoring the dignity of the old religion. He was assiduous in the practice of divination and all other superstitious ceremonies, reopened and rebuilt the deserted temples, and lavished his patronage upon the time-serving reprobates who deluded him into a belief in the reality of their conversion. He stripped the church of its peculiar privileges by every means short of persecution, but was mortified to the heart by the little success of his ardent propagandism alike among the citizens and the soldiers, although the latter were unable to pay their due worship to the person of the emperor without seeming to bow to idols, from the subtle way in which the imperial and the divine symbols were deliberately intermingled. As soon as he had settled affairs in Constantinople he set out on a journey through Asia Minor to Antioch. Here he lived from July 362 to the March of the following year, and found its luxurious citizens as indifferent to his paganism as to Christianity. Yet his zeal in reformation was less hateful than his economic policy in fixing an arbitrary price on corn in order to stave off a threatened famine. The impudent Antiochenes revenged themselves upon the sensitive emperor by lampoons and ridicule; yet he restrained his resentment, or confined it to the pages of his Misopogon, an ironical satire on their effeminate manners, full of the interest of self-revelation. His famous attempt to rebuild the temple at Jerusalem was intended to falsify the cherished prophecies of Christianity no less than to please the Jews; and the balls of flame which brought the work to a standstill were with one accord accepted as miraculous evidence of the special interposition of heaven. Much has been written on this startling story, which even Gibbon was obliged to receive with some respect, and the case for the miracle has been admirably put by Newman in his Essay on the Miracles in Early Ecclesiastical History (1842).
In March 363 Julian set out on his long meditated expedition against the Persian king Sapor, and after a tedious march crossed the Tigris, and advanced to the walls of Ctesiphon. He was led to advance farther by the false promises of a Persian traitor, and was at length forced to retreat through a barren country, under a burning sun, and harassed by the swarms of the Persian cavalry. The enemy were repeatedly beaten off, but in one of the attacks the emperor was wounded by a spear-thrust in the side and fell fainting from his horse. Theodoret tells us how as his blood spouted from the wound he exclaimed, 'Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!'—a poetical tale that is at least an embodiment of a historic truth. He was carried to his tent, where, after a few words of brave philosophy to his weeping friends, he died about midnight on the evening of June 26, 363.
'Julian's life was an accident,' says Beugnot, 'and at his death events reverted to their natural channel.' He failed completely in the aims of his life; and history, says Mr Rendall, shows few sadder examples of noble views distorted, great powers misapplied, and high aims worse than wasted. He was at once a soldier and a statesman wrapped in a student's cloak, and his character was made up of strange contrasts. He was superstitious and fanatical; loquacious, restless, and irritable; without either the calm dignity of the Roman, or the graceful ease of the Greek; vain, pedantic, and hungry for applause; yet with a heart passionately devoted to truth and athirst for the cooling waters of divine philosophy. He was chaste and abstinent, just, liberal, and affectionate; yet the story of his wasted life, with more than the pathos, lacks all the charm that hangs around the brow of the imperial philosopher Aurelius.
To Gregory Nazianzen, Chrysostom, Sozomen, Theodoret, and all the early Christian writers, the Apostle was a monster of wickedness; to Claudius Mamertinus he was a figure above all taint of human infirmity. The veracious and competent military historian Ammianus Marcellinus and the rhetorical Libanios are alike warm, yet discriminating, panegyrists. Of modern writers the most illustrious is Gibbon, whose account is fairly just and one of the most splendid passages in historical literature. Yet, as Mr J. W. Barlow has shown (Hermathena, vol. iii. 1879), his picture of Julian has suffered from the necessity for the appearance of severe impartiality. He disliked his superstition, and throughout he damns him with faint praise, and sneers at his virtue, as if it lacked the merit of effort. Even the allusion to his uncleanly personal habits—his long nails, ink-stained hands, and populous beard—is scarce justified by the evidence, being based on a mere ironical exaggeration of Julian's own, in his Misopogon, to justify the excessive contempt of the over-luxurious citizens of Antioch.
Julian's extant writings are a series of Epistles, mostly addressed to men of letters; nine Orationes; Caesares, a series of satires in which past Cæsars are treated to caustic satire from Silenus; and the Misopogon. His most important work, Kata Christianōn, is lost. A serviceable edition is that by F. C. Hertlein (Leip. 1875). See vols. iii. and iv. of the Duc de Broglie's L'Église et l'Empire Romain au quatrième Siècle (1856-69); Neander, Kaiser Julian und sein Zeitalter (1813; Eng. trans. 1850); J. F. A. Mücke, Flavius Claudius Julianus: nach den Quellen (1867-69); and G. H. Rendall, The Emperor Julian: Paganism and Christianity, an expanded Hulsean Essay (1879); Bishop John Wordsworth's article in vol. iii. (1882) of Smith and Wace's Dictionary of Christian Biography; and Alice Gardner, Julian, Philosopher and Emperor (1895). The essay by Strauss, Der Romantiker auf dem Thron der Cäsaren (1847), is only a clever pamphlet aimed at Frederick William IV. of Prussia, and his religious reaction. Ibsen's splendid drama, Emperor and Galilean (1873; Eng. trans. 1876), sketches a new ideal culture for the world to succeed the Christian, as it replaced the classical.