Julian Tries to Restore the Old Religion

Julian was a nephew of Constantine (Socrates, Church History 3.1). After Constantine’s death, Socrates says, the soldiers killed the emperor’s brother Dalmatius, and the lives of Julian and his brother Gallus were in danger; Julian, then eight years old, was spared. He was brought up as a Christian and served as a reader in the church of Nicomedia (Socrates, Church History 3.1). Ammianus Marcellinus, a pagan officer who served under him and admired him, says that he had been drawn to the old gods from boyhood and practised their rites in secret (Ammianus Marcellinus 22.5.1–4). Even after the army in Gaul had proclaimed him emperor, he attended church at Epiphany to conceal it (Ammianus Marcellinus 21.2.4–5).

On the death of his cousin Constantius II he became sole emperor (Socrates, Church History 3.1) and entered Constantinople in December 361 (Ammianus Marcellinus 22.2.4). He then ordered, in Ammianus’s words, “the temples to be opened, victims brought to the altars, and the worship of the gods restored”. He called the quarrelling Christian bishops to the palace and told each to follow his own belief without fear. Ammianus thought he expected freedom to deepen their divisions (Ammianus Marcellinus 22.5.1–4). Julian himself wrote that he had recalled those exiled under his predecessor and restored their property, and that he allowed no one to be dragged to the altars against his will (Julian, Letter 41). Among those who came home was Athanasius (Athanasius, Festal Letter Festal Index 34).

In June 362 a law required teachers to be approved by their city councils and by the emperor (Theodosian Code 13.3.5). A rescript explained the purpose: those who expound Homer and Hesiod must honour the gods those poets honoured, and anyone who thinks them mistaken should “betake themselves to the churches of the Galilaeans to expound Matthew and Luke” (Julian, Letter 36). Ammianus called the ban on Christian teachers “inhumane” (Ammianus Marcellinus 22.10.7). Julian also urged the pagan priests to match the Christians in works of charity. He told the high priest of Galatia to found hostels for strangers, since “the impious Galilaeans support not only their own poor but ours as well” (Julian, Letter 22).

In 362 he moved to Antioch to prepare a war against Persia (Ammianus Marcellinus 22.9.2; 22.12.1). When the temple of Apollo at Daphne burned, he suspected the Christians and closed the city’s great church (Ammianus Marcellinus 22.13.1–2). He gave orders to rebuild the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem; the work was abandoned when, Ammianus reports, balls of fire burst out near the foundations (Ammianus Marcellinus 23.1.2–3). Socrates, a Christian historian, tells it as a series of miracles (Socrates, Church History 3.20).

In June 363, on the march in Persia, Julian was struck by a spear in a skirmish and died that night, talking with philosophers about the soul, by Ammianus’s account (Ammianus Marcellinus 25.3.6–23). Theodoret, some ninety years later, repeats a story that he cried “Thou hast won, O Galilean” (Theodoret, Church History 3.20). A later Latin writer noted that every emperor from Constantine to his own day had been a Christian except Julian (Origo Constantini 6.33).