In Our Time - Julian the Apostate

Episode Date: April 18, 2024

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the last pagan ruler of the Roman Empire. Fifty years after Constantine the Great converted to Christianity and introduced a policy of tolerating the faith across the empire, Julian (c.331 - 363 AD) aimed to promote paganism instead, branding Constantine the worst of all his predecessors. Julian was a philosopher-emperor in the mould of Marcus Aurelius and was noted in his lifetime for his letters and his satires, and it was his surprising success as a general in his youth in Gaul that had propelled him to power barely twenty years after a rival had slaughtered his family. Julian's pagan mission and his life were brought to a sudden end while on campaign against the Sasanian Empire in the east, but he left so much written evidence of his ideas that he remains one of the most intriguing of all the Roman emperors and a hero to the humanists of the Enlightenment. With James Corke-Webster Reader in Classics, History and Liberal Arts at King’s College, LondonLea Niccolai Assistant Professor in Classics at the University of Cambridge and Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics, Trinity College And Shaun Tougher Professor of Late Roman and Byzantine History at Cardiff UniversityProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Polymnia Athanassiadi, Julian: An Intellectual Biography (first published 1981; Routledge, 2014)Nicholas Baker-Brian and Shaun Tougher (eds.), Emperor and Author: The Writings of Julian the Apostate (Classical Press of Wales, 2012)Nicholas Baker-Brian and Shaun Tougher (eds.), The Sons of Constantine, AD 337-361: In the Shadows of Constantine and Julian, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)G.W. Bowersock, Julian the Apostate (first published 1978; Harvard University Press, 1997)Susanna Elm, Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Vision of Rome (University of California Press, 2012)Ari Finkelstein, The Specter of the Jews: Emperor Julian and the Rhetoric of Ethnicity in Syrian Antioch (University of California Press, 2018)David Neal Greenwood, Julian and Christianity: Revisiting the Constantinian Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2021)Lea Niccolai, Christianity, Philosophy, and Roman Power: Constantine, Julian, and the Bishops on Exegesis and Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2023)Stefan Rebenich and Hans-Ulrich Wiemer (eds), A Companion to Julian the Apostate (Brill, 2020)Rowland Smith, Julian’s Gods: Religion and Philosophy in the Thought and Action of Julian the Apostate (Routledge, 1995)H.C. Teitler, The Last Pagan Emperor: Julian the Apostate and the War against Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2017)Shaun Tougher, Julian the Apostate (Edinburgh University Press, 2007)W. C. Wright, The Works of Emperor Julian of Rome (Loeb, 1913-23)

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, considering he ruled as Roman Emperor

for less than two years, 361 to 363 AD, Julian Napostate made an extraordinary impression on history. Christians saw him as the villain who returned the empire to paganism after Constantine the Great's conversion early that century, while Gibbon was to see that return as a heroic attempt to halt the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

And he was a philosopher emperor, inspired by Marcus Aurelius, writing satires, being written about in turn, leaving a remarkable record. With me to discuss Julian Napostate are James Cork Webster, reader in Classics, History and Liberal Arts at King's College London, Leia Nicolai, assistant professor in classics at the University of Cambridge

and fellow and director of studies in Classics Trinity College, and Sean Tucker, Professor of Late Roman and Byzantine History at Carleif University. Sean Tucker, can you talk to us about the Roman Empire at the time of Julian's birth, 331 AD? What state was it in? By 331, it was actually in a more stable state than it had been. The Emperor Constantine the Great had come to power in 306, and this was followed by quite a protracted period of civil wars, but eventually he became the sole Augustus in the Roman Empire in 324,

and he established a new dynasty prior to Constantine. There was a power-sharing system with multiple emperors, but Constantine re-established the dynastic principle and ruled with members of his family, but he was the only Augustus. So by the time Julian is born in 331 or 332, Constantine has established himself in power. He has been promoting and supporting Christianity. And also dramatically, he has refounded the ancient Greek city of Byzantium as Constantinople. I was dedicated in 330. and that's modern day Istanbul.

And actually Julian was to be the first emperor to be born in Constantinople. Sean, so we've heard about stability, but then some of Julian's own family were slaughtered. What's going on there? Yes, yes. I mean, this happens after the death of Constantine, the Great. So he died in 3.3.7.

And the dynastic situation is quite complicated. When Constantine dies, he has three surviving sons, but he also has relatives through the other branch of the family. His father had married twice and had children by two different women. So there are actually a lot of half-siblings and their descendants on the scene as well. So Constantine's half-brothers and their sons are being brought into the imperial system at the time of Constantine's death.

So we have the so-called Summer of Blood in 337 after the death of Constantine, and this is when the sons of Constantine eliminate a lot of these other members of the family. They want to secure a part for themselves. His sons are actually quite young. They're sort of in their early 20s, if that, at this stage. So they might have felt threatened by this other branch of the family, and they're quite ruthless in eliminating them.

And in particular, it's his son, Constantine son, Constantius II, who's particularly attributed with overseeing these killings. Thank you very much. Leia Lea Nicolai. Let's switch to Julian's education. It really matters in this story. It's key to him in a way. So how was he educated? Julian's education is quite of an impressive journey. And I mean it both in cultural and even in geographical terms, because Julian travels across his youth. And his education begins when he's just a little child after this family purge that had exterminated. dominated among others also his father and the eldest of his brothers.

Julian is taken to Nicomedia, the city of Nicomedia in Asia Minor. And there, ironically, his first teacher is bishop, is Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, who later on would become the bishop of Constantinople. Now, I said ironically because we all know that Julian afterwards, I mean, his fame is due to the fact that he tried to restore the traditional Greco-Roman religion. but actually knowing that he was raised as a Christian as a child helps us understand what kind of grasp he had of the religion that at some point he was trying to oppose.

Then afterwards he kept travelling, he kept being moved around, we should say, because his cousin Constantius II was sending him to other cities. For instance, he sent him to Capadocia, which was a remote region, probably because he didn't want Julian to get in contact with his other brother, Constance, who was becoming more powerful in the West. And at the very beginning of his training, Julian goes through the traditional educational path of the Roman elites. So essentially he studies Plato, first Homer, of course, Plato, but especially rhetoric.

So he's taught by Ekebolius, a famous rhetorician of the time, indirectly also by the even more famous rhetorician like, Leibanius, who was a rival with Ekebolius, so Julian was not allowed to take his classes, but he was so passionate about the teaching of Lybenius that allegedly he would have sent his servants to gather, to fetch the notes for him so that he could learn from this master. And then the real turning point happens around Julian's 20th year of age, or so he says in his letters. The moment in which he leaves the study of rhetoric, following his discovery of philosophy, more specifically neoplatonic philosophy, which becomes his love, his passion for the rest of his life. So he begins to travel across Greece and Asia Minor to search for the perfect master,

we could say, and eventually he finds this figure in Maximus of Tyre, who was a philosopher, but at the same time he performed the what now we call theurgy. There was a sort of set of mystical rights meant to put the philosophers in communication with the gods. And by this time, Julian has already joined the traditional religion. So he is no more a member of the church as he was as a child. Thank you very much, James Cork-Webster. He declares himself to be an alien to Christianity.

Why was he turning away from this religion? The simplest answer to that question, and the sort of reasoning that he himself gives, is that when he comes under the influence of Maximus, who Leia mentioned before, the Neoplatonist, he sort of has an intellectual awakening and realizes that this is a superior intellectual offering, which is a better explanation

than the Christianity that he was raised with, Explanation of what? Explanation of the nature of reality, the nature of the gods, the reasons we're all here. Is this the idea of the one and then it's extrapolated from the one? Very good. Yeah, there's a good kind of opening gambit for Neoplatonism.

So the dominant philosophical enterprise in this period is an evolution of the thinking of Plato. So Plato believes in the kind of our world and then the world of the forms. And the Neoplatonists, most famously Plotinus in the third century and his disciple, Porphyry, had developed a sort of more sophisticated version of this theory with sort of multiple transcendental levels emerging, as you say, from the one.

But combined it with traditional myth and what we would think of as sort of traditional religion and with an element of mysticism as well. So it's a sort of almost a universe, a grand theory, that combines religion, philosophy and myth. Now, so Julian says that it's this moment with Maximus that is sort of the turning point for him. But he also says elsewhere that as a child,

he says, I had a particular hankering for the sun and for the stars. And so some people have said, well, that distaste for Christianity is much earlier, is related to Constantius' treatment of his family, and maybe he's a sort of secret pagan from earlier on. I suppose one thing it's worth adding into that debate about when he converts is that modern sociology of conversion suggest that when people look back on their own conversions,

they tend to think of it as a sort of light bulb intellectual moment. I was sort of exposed to something and that changed my mind. Whereas actually when you study how people convert, it tends to be a more gradual process, and it really depends on the networks that you, you're moving in. And I think it's not a coincidence that that period when he's with Maximus is a sort of moment of relative freedom for someone who has had a fairly traumatic, itinerant, controlled childhood. And he's moving around Asia Minor in the company of multiple

different neoplatonists. And so we might be better to ascribe the conversion to that more general period of intellectual and personal awakening rather than just the kind of intellectual exposure he gets with Maximus. Could you say what apostate means? Apostate, in essence, means one who abandons something in this case, Christianity. So it's a denigratory term to say, Julian, the apostate, is someone who abandons Christianity. Paul is an apostate because he abandons Judaism. It's one who leaves a religion behind.

Is it possible to explain what he actually believed at this point in his life? It's certainly possible to debate it. So he seems to have, I mean, most simply, he advocates the restoration of traditional Greco-Roman polytheism, and he wants to support the decline of Christianity. And so in some ways, turn back the clock. Polytheism hasn't gone away, but it has not been supported by the state to the extent that it was beforehand, and Christianity has had a large number of benefits and privileges under the Constantinians. More specifically what he believes, he is clearly philosophically committed to Neoplatonism

and to a particularly mystical, even we might say magical version of Neoplatonism. So Maximus, who we've already mentioned, is too mystical, too magical, even for some of the other Neoplatonists. He seems to, as part of this, be a big believer in the return of sacrifice and mass animal sacrifice, which had been in relative decline. So Amiens, for example, jokes that if Julian had survived, there wouldn't have been enough bulls in the empire. And he also has a particular kind of association with the cults of Mithras and Helios as well,

which are in some ways versions of a solar monotheism that had been increasingly popular in the third century and that his family as a whole, the Constantinians, had a particular association with. Thank you. Sean, now we're talking about very, very fast forward, we're talking about dizzying speed, it becomes a Caesar in the West in 355, and then emperor soon after that.

How did that happen? If I can just talk a bit about becoming Caesar because there are very particular circumstances. So Constanthius II, his cousin, had no children, and his two other brothers are killed. So he ends up being the soul, Augustus. So he needs to bring other people in to help him rule. And initially he turns to his cousin, Gales,

who is Julian's half-brother, and he was made Caesar in 351, but executed in 354, because he was seen as a bit of a loose cannon and potentially dangerous. So it's in the aftermath of that that then Constantius II turns to Julian to bring him in as Caesar.

He was brought to the court in Milan after the death of Gallus. He was sort of under suspicion because he was Gallus's half-brother. But after about a year, he is then appointed. Caesar himself and he has sent to Gaul. And some of our sources say he's just meant to be a figurehead.

You know, he's meant to represent Constantius the second there. But actually, he's very active in Gaul. And it turns out, you know, despite being this kind of archetypal student, very well-educated, he seems to be a successful general. He seems keen to make himself popular in Gaul by reducing taxation. He has some clashes. with bureaucrats, and he has a great military victory in 357, the Battle of Strasbourg. So he becomes very popular in Gaul, and actually at the Battle of Strasbourg, apparently the troops

were already acclaiming him Augustus because they're supporting him. And then a few, a couple of years later, in 360, when they're wintering in Paris, the troops are all gathered because Constanceius II wants to transport some troops to the eastern frontier. He needs them in the east. and the troops are portrayed as being upset about this. So they acclaim Julian as Augustus in 360, spring 360, and he accepts this, and he tries to get Constanthius II to kind of recognise this promotion.

Thank you very much, Leia. Almost uniquely with Roman Emperor, we have the unique insight from himself. He wrote enormous amounts, and then he read a satire. The Caesars. What did that tell us about him and them? The Caesars is a unique text. It is on the surface at least a satire written by an emperor on all the past emperors of Rome. I'm not aware of any other emperor in any other empire

of history who has done something similar, like satirized power from a position of power in this way. And in a sense, it is also intriguing that he should choose the Julian should choose satire to speak about his predecessors, because if we think about the function of satire and how usually associate it with the underdog, the subordinate, the person who is in need to speak obliquely to power, because it's not in a position of power, then it is even more surprising that an emperor should choose to adopt this means to speak about his predecessors. I like to define it as, if you allow me to use the expression, a beauty pageant among Roman emperors because essentially what happens in this piece is that there is a big banquet in the sky among the gods

and the gods decide to invite also the Roman emperors from the past to join the feast. And while they're feasting all together in the skies, at some point the gods decide to establish which of these emperors has been the best in the world. ruling the Roman Empire. So in the moment in which this question is brought to the scene, you also begin to sense actually how behind the playfulness of the piece there is a fundamental question that Julian is raising here and will continue to raise through his literary production. That is the question of how should we be reading history, which for Romans, be the Christians or pagan was always understood as providential history, as sacred history. How should we be reading

history in a moment in which the divinity behind the history is being renegotiated. And this is the reason why, on the one hand, Julian is displaying all his skills as a scholar, as an erudite, as a reader of Homer, as a reader of Plutarch. He is bringing in emperors on the scene and he's summoning the best-known features, vices, virtues. He's making all sorts of erudite puns and jokes about them. But on the other hand, he's also using this context to comment on the rule of the emperor that he thinks has, in a sense, ruined the Roman Empire, and that is inevitably Constantine, who is the buffoon of the peace, and is brought there as a votary of pleasure, as he is defined and ridiculed and humiliated, and eventually shown to be the very worst of emperors,

while Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher ruler, is shown to be the very best. The thing about the Cesar's that I've always found really intriguing, given that it is this sort of satire from the underdog perspective, is that all Roman men are obsessed with legacy, right, how they will be remembered, and the few writings we have by other emperors are all concerned with memory, Augustus, Marcus Aurelius, etc. But the Cesar's, Julian Cesar's, this curiously self-awarely, awareness about, you know, all of these emperors get roasted, essentially, right, by the gods,

that there's a focus on criticism, even of Augustus and Trajan and Marcus Aurelius and Alexander the Great, the sort of supposed heroes. So there's this kind of extraordinary, I've always felt, extraordinary awareness of your own vulnerability to posterity, that you are, you know, these are all the things that you can be critiqued for. That is a wonderful point. And you are absolutely right in underscoring that, for instance, even Marcus Aurelius, who is deemed to be the very best, is at the same time criticized for the way he had favored his son despite the lack of merits of his son himself and so on. Now your comment made me think that, in a sense,

at the beginning of the scissors, Julian begins by mocking even himself and saying, I'm expected to write a satire because this is a festive occasion. It's the Saturnalia there. But I'm not good at writing jokes. So I will have to come up with something else. This is my mutus. This is my story. I'm too serious.

Exactly, I'm too serious. And that, of course, is double-edged, because on the one hand, he's criticizing himself. And on the other, though, he's signaling that there is this kernel of philosophical truth in his message. That is the reflection of what makes a ruler a good one. Can we, through you, Sean, can we bring Christianity back into the picture here? We have, I'm being very crude here, just forgive me. We're having a battle between Christianity and non-Christianity. let's call it paganism.

And it's an extraordinary time to have and it's extraordinary battle subject to have. What do you make of it? I think it's important to see it maybe in less polarized ways. I know it's very tempting to do that. I mean, Constantine seems to be a Christian. He supports Christianity.

But he doesn't make Christianity, like, you know, the state religion of the Roman Empire. Paganism still exists, as James has said. There's some debate even whether, you know, what exactly did Constantine do? against paganism, so maybe the very limited measures against paganism.

So it's more that he's setting an example, and maybe if you want to get on in the Roman Empire, you'd want to follow the same religion. So to me it's less polarised, and I think what's so interesting about Julian, when he becomes emperor and can act on his religious beliefs, he's had to conceal his paganism, he doesn't go down the route of persecution of Christians,

which previous emperors had done. He basically says, toleration for everybody, though he himself obviously favours, you know, paganism, pagan cults. Some people think he's actually quite cunning, and it's a much more subtle way of undermining Christianity. I mean, he's deliberately trying to unpick the relationship between the Roman Empire and Christianity, which his uncle had started. I was thinking that in respect to Julian's cunning strategies, also the idea of summoning back the exiled bishop is something that is.

because on the one hand Julian's toleration goes up to the point of promoting the return of the bishops who had been exiled by Constanches II but that of course as Amianus sees is also a strategy to create internal struggle among different strands of Christianity. Yes. I mean the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem

is another good example of this right. Ostensibly this is about sort of supporting a traditional religion of the empire rebuilding the temple. But the alternative reading of that is that Christian supersessionism has been built around the replacement of Judaism with Christianity, and in particular Jesus' prophecy in the Gospels that not one stone of the temple will remain upon another. So if the temple were to be rebuilt, ostensibly just supporting Judaism, but it would undermine Christian prophecies and claims to religious superiority. Can we be specific here? Talk about his satire on

an Antioch. And why is that important? Do you want to start there? So the Misopogon, in a sense, following up from what James was saying, is the next chapter in Julian's extraordinary exposure of his vulnerability as an emperor

because it is a satire that is on himself and in particular on this outstanding feature of his appearance, that is his own beard, which he describes in gruesome details including mentioning the lies, the scamper about it. But it is very important to contextualize this self-mockery

in which Julian responds to poems written by the citizens of Antioch deriding his appearance, and he keeps up the derision, and he joins the derision, we could say, and adds other scoffing remarks on the way he looks. But then this is just the beginning, because the strength of the piece, is how progressively Julian turns the table around. And he reveals this to be a strategy of, in a sense, what Julian is doing is that he's revealing his unkempt appearance

to be the appearance of the real philosopher. And he is contrasting with that the shaven and refined appearance of the citizens of Antioch, which is indicative of how they live a shallow, superficial lifestyle, because they are clinging to Christianity. Are we talking about someone who, at the time, it is possible, James, to tell us, oh, yes, it's that man who's putting forward this view, or did he just pass in the night, and 700 years later, began to be talked about?

No, no, it's fair to say that Julian was making a splash in his own day, as he did, in posterity. So, at first glance, if you look at contemporary commentary, and there's a lot of it, it seems very polarised, right? It's along binary lines that you have pagan commentators like Lebanius, like, so Lebanius is a famous orator of the day who's already been mentioned, like Amiens Marcellinus, who's a contemporary, who's a historian, who speak in kind of almost sometimes literally panegyrical. I'm now on Julian.

And they know Julian Amionis serves with him in the army. Lebanius indirectly at least teaches him in liaison. with him, and they speak very positively of him. On the other hand, you have other contemporaries that he knew, Christian classmates of his, for example, Gregory of Nazianzus is one of the most famous examples of these, who speak in equal and opposite negative terms about how Julian is the worst thing to happen to the empire. I mean, I think it is also important to remember in this, I think is often not talked about because we think about him as a legitimate emperor, but Julian is a usurper in some sense.

He is an emperor who claims power when there is a legitimate sitting emperor, and that breeds a certain degree of instability, which Julian kind of gets away with because Constanches dies before there is outright civil war. But what most people care about most of the time throughout the Roman Empire is stability, because stability enables people's own lives and projects to prosper, and instability civil war is in general, bad news for everybody except for the individual victors.

Just to add to that, I mean, James is right. I mean, you know, he's heading for civil war with his cousin, but then the cousin suddenly dies, so they don't have to fight each other. And, you know, most people think Constantius probably would have won if they had ended up in battle together. He was very concerned about the borders, wasn't he? He was concerned about the borders.

I mean, I think, you know, the Roman Empire has gone through quite a traumatic period. in the third century and then into the fourth century. I mean, they have been sort of focusing very much on civil war. But even Constantine, the Great Tours at the end of his reign, is campaigning over the Danube, so trying to reclaim territory that the Romans had had, you know, famously the successes of Trajan in the second century AD.

Constantine is also about to embark on a campaign into Persia at the time of his death. So it is a kind of a common concern of the emperors in this period. Speaking of the borders and the concern with borders, it is also the case that behind the borders, the situation was changing in very interesting ways in these decades. Because, for instance, in Iran, in Persia, since the third century there had been the rise of a new dynasty,

the Sasanians, which was much more powerful and militarily aggressive than the predecessors, the earth acids. And they were especially keen, in confronting themselves with the Romans. While with the Germanic tribes, it is more difficult to understand exactly what was going on, but we see new gatherings and new coming together of. So it seems like these groups were becoming more able

to come together and confront the Romans. It's also true, I think, for Julian and all other emperors, that the word imperator means general. Without military success, it can be very difficult to establish legitimacy, particularly if you come to power in, let's say, interesting circumstances. So for Julian campaigns on the northern frontier, the eastern frontier, they are the single best way to secure his own position

because if you are successful in battle, you prove definitively that you have the support of the gods. And that then underpins everything else you try and do. So military success is the way to be a successful emperor. On the other hand, it back fire on him in Persia. Spectacularly. Yes, I think the Sasanian King of King, Shappur II. He really wants to kind of overturn a peace treaty that had been disadvantageous to Persia.

So that's really what's going on. So there has been this constant pressure, revitalised pressure by the Persians on the eastern frontier in Mesopotamia and along the eastern frontier in particular. So it is a live issue. It's not something Julian just says, oh, I know, go off and fight the Persians. The interesting thing about Julian, generally, is that we have so many sources.

So we know much more about what he's up to compared to, like, other members of his family, what they had done. So we're quite informed about the details of the campaign by the historian Amianis, in particular, but also Albanias, and other writers from the period as well. So he does seem to have had a particular strategy. So he left Antioch in March 363. and he tries to confuse the Persians. He pretends that he's going to the Tigris and across the Tigris, but then he goes back to the Euphrates and down the Euphrates to this Persian capital of Ketisiphan,

this really important political royal centre and besieges it. And then it all seems to go completely wrong. So it's a bit of a mystery. He gets to Ketisvon, and then it seems not to know what to do or, you know, he doesn't capitalize on that, so begins going northwards again. Famously, he also burnt the fleet, which they'd brought down the Tigris,

so he destroys that before they start heading north. And then on the way north, he's wounded in a skirmish. So it's kind of very puzzling. Are you puzzled, James? I am similarly puzzling. Part of the problem is that Amianis' narrative, who gives us a lot of detail, suddenly cuts out at the key moment. It hasn't survived.

So we don't actually know really what happened after they get to Ketephan. So it's tricky to reconstruct exactly not just what happens, but what the plan was. And as everything with Julian, when we don't have clear sources, commentary is always so polarised that people that want to kind of praise Julian over-exaggerate his vision and those that want to critique him say he has no plan, and so it can be very difficult to read through the polarising lenses to try and figure out exactly what he was trying to do in the moment.

But to be specific about this one thing, he was, one assumes, leading his troops were at the forefront of his troops in the battle, went into the battle, not fully armed, he says in one of the accounts I've read, and was wounded badly, and from that wound died quite quickly. So supposedly he forgets to put on his, breastplate and so a spear is able to hit him and pierce his liver that's right

a minor comment concerning how striking is the Julian Spershan campaign another element is the fact that he was going out for such a dangerous field of trip and he didn't really make plans for his succession so with his sudden death he leaves this vacuum of power and the army is in this array also for that. Which is the unforgivable sin of an emperor really, not having a good succession plan. Very true. How did he view himself?

He wrote a lot about himself and all your historians are very glad that he did because he wrote in detail and there isn't that sort of detail from many, many other people. What did he think of himself? Yeah, weirdly enough, I think that probably we know more about Julian than

any other Rome also considering the short span of his rule. Julian viewed himself in many ways. I believe he cultivated a complex self-image as a military leader, as we have been discussing, as a lawmaker and a judge, a fair judge that is another very important feature of his political personality, a theologian and a high priest in a sense, somebody laying out the rules for the appointment of priestness, reformed pagan cult. But I would say that maybe if there is, and of course an author, a literary author, a rhetorician, a

thinker, I would say though that if there is maybe one conception of himself that cuts through all the others is Julian's idea of being the finest interpreter of his times. the one who had understood what were the real forces driving history and had understood how to speak about history through himself, through his self-image, what was necessary in order to lead the empire towards a deeper understanding of the function of culture, education, religious practices in response to the changes implemented by his predecessors. So it was almost an accident that he didn't survive. In a sense, that was a sort of Julian made of his life a symbol of his success.

That is very clear also at the end of the Caesars. When he's addressed by the god as the figure who seals the entire satire, he's the author, the master puppeteer. And so in the moment in which his own symbol is defeated, that is a general failure of his entire project. I think that's one of the things that makes, Julian's such an interesting question is like if he hadn't been killed on the Persian campaign war would have happened. I mean, obviously we can't know that, but it doesn't stop people speculating or wondering.

You know, could things have been very different in the Roman Empire if he had survived? And what do you think would have happened to be survived? Well, it's so hard to say, presumably he would have kept on trying to promote paganism to undermine Christianity, you know, maybe if he'd lived long enough. potentially, but, you know, it's so hard to know, and especially all emperors after Julian were Christian, so that kind of moment passes. I mean, it's not a coincidence, I think, that the two emperors who have, can lay claim

to having the biggest influence on the way the empire works, Augustus and Constantine, are also the two that live longest, right? They have the longest period of time spanning a generation to sort of embed changes. And so I think it's easy to underestimate how just that longevity to enable things you want to do to bed in makes a difference. So I think any emperor that survives that long has a better chance of affecting change. But he was an emperor for 20 months. Exactly. And so has in some ways limited immediate impact.

But I think he does serve as a shock to the system that catalyzes Christian authors in particular. to rethink how they articulate Christianity and its relationship with power. And so in some ways, Julian probably has the opposite effect that he wants to, that he reinforces trends that were already in play, that what we call this a transformation of the fourth century and the relationship between church and state, that were happening to some extent naturally, but Julian's attempt to shut them down is a shot in the arm

to various Christian bishops and intellectuals, who then think very hard about how to make sure that Julian doesn't happen again. Yes, I mean, I think this is what's so interesting about Julian as well. He, his love of Greek culture is so key to understanding him. And to him, you know, Christianity can have no part in that. So he thinks this is an alien thing. So if you're going to be a Roman, this is not really part of their identity. So he's trying to sort of get that message across.

And as James says, you know, they respond to that and say, well, no, we are Roman too. You know, we value culture. So they begin to articulate that. And one thing we haven't got into is this idea that Julian wants to sort of control who gets to be a teacher, a sort of state-funded or a city-funded teacher in the Roman Empire. So maybe trying to control the appointment of teachers.

He doesn't want, seems not to want Christians to become teachers in schools. He wants only to pagans to teach pagan texts. Leah? Something that I often wonder when I ask myself, what would have happened if Julian had lasted for longer? I think he probably should have had to adjust the elitist component in his reform. Because Julian is somebody who writes a philosophical treatise in response, in critical response to Christianity.

He was speaking above all to the intellectuals of his time, to those who had had the chance and also the leisure to study through their life. But what Julian doesn't entirely manage to achieve, and the Misopogon is a testament to his failure, because it's him shouting against an entire city. What Julian doesn't entirely manage to achieve is an inclusive system in which he's really talking to all the subjects in the empire, even to those who haven't quite reached a level of education that is necessary to appreciate his extraordinary layered and subtle literature. One can argue that he starts to make justice to try and do this. So, you know, most famously, he says at one point, look, I may not like the Christians, but they're very good at charity, for example, are kind of reaching down to the poorest in society and those that are suffering.

And he says, my version of polytheism needs to do this better, right? So I need priests who are going to be of a particular moral standard, and are going to go out there and build kind of hostile. and help people out. So you could argue that that's an attempt to reach beyond the philosophical elite. But again, it doesn't get very far. Of course, but then we will get also in the question of whether that specific statement is an authentic Julianic statement or a forgery.

True, true. Finally, what do you think changed because Julian's rule, let's call it? I think one thing that did change was the Roman relationship with Persia. I mean, ironically, this actually initiates sort of quite a protracted period of peace with Persia because the Romans are forced into a weaker position. So that treaty gets renegotiated. But actually, it's a very stable treaty.

So I think that's one thing definitely. And then as James mentioned, there's the kind of denastic issue as well. You know, there's nobody to succeed, julian, sort of a distant relative kind of emerges a few years later. So we have to sort of begin again, you know, the process of, re-establishing or trying to reestablish a family. So I think that that is always a problem moment

in the Roman Empire. So if you lose the authority of the imperial family. So that causes some problems as well. And I think as James referred to, I think it does make emperors and other people in the empire stop and think about where they're going in terms of religion. And notably some emperors immediately after Julian are a bit more cautious about throwing themselves into the promotion of Christianity, keep a bit of a distance. But, you know, soon, it comes back even stronger, sort of the imperial promotion of Christianity. So it does become state religion under the Roman Emperor Theodosius,

the first from 379. James. The other thing I just think is fascinating about Julian is this question of why people have been so invested in him, really, I think, disproportionately in some ways. And I think one answer to that is just the amount of material that survives, right? And the nature of it, it is, you know,

this autobiographical and self-analytical material. It, I think, seduces readers into thinking that they can understand Julian because a lot of this material feels private, even though it is in fact public. So there is this kind of temptation to us all that we might be the one that really understands Julian. That's one of the things that's going on. I think the other thing that's going on is that he just serves as a touchpoint

for so many of the big issues that are key to the transformation of the Western world in this period around religion, around the role of the empire, around geopolitics, etc. That he's quite a good place to put a lot of those debates for contemporaries and for people later on. Nea, what do you think his legacy was? Julian's legacy has many faces. On the one hand, of course, there's also the legacy that probably he would not have been happy to know he had generated that was in a sense Julian

reinforced the church because the church at the time was divided among so many litigants fighting over issues of the nature of the Trinity and so on but they found the one point of union that was precisely the distaste of Julian the antivity for Julian

but then I think that once we reach modernity and Julian is rediscovered as a thinker, as an author, as a philosopher, perhaps his legacy is that of being an incredibly liberating figure. So somebody who continues to inspire, even today, so much literature, counter-fictional literature, even popular literature comic books, because he seems to be somebody who, in a sense,

was not afraid of asserting what he believed into and his true identity, in a world that seemed to have become something impossible. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, James Scott Webster, Leah Nicolai and Sean Tucker, and to our studio engineers, Sue Mayo. Next week, Finland's Kahivala, the epic poem that helped Finns find their national identity in the 19th century

as they sought independence from Russia. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin. and his guests. What would you like to have said that there wasn't time to say? Sean, why don't you start?

There's so much. I mean, as we were talking, I was thinking, you know, there's so much rich material. It's really difficult. So, you know, we didn't really get into the details of the conflict with Constantius I, the second.

You know, we could have said more about that. Well, why do you say a bit about that now? Yeah, I mean, he was, Julian was acclaimed by his troops in 360. But then there's this kind of protracted period where he's kind of trying to have a diplomatic relationship with Constantius the second. So it's not until, you know, 361 that he actually moves eastwards

and is obviously sets on conflict with Constanthus the second. And one of the really interesting things that Julian does in this phase, when he's in the Balkans, he writes a series of letters to cities, so Athens, most famous because that letter survives. But he also wrote to Corans. and Sparta, and he also wrote to the Senate in Rome, setting out why he was opposing Constantius II and justifying his position.

So it's such an interesting text to have that. From, you know, potentially, you know, he was a usurper. He could have failed. But he kind of puts his side of the story, which is so interesting. So I think that's one thing. And James kind of touched on dynasty. And we didn't sort of get into the women of the dynasty.

and this issue of him not having thought about succession, and I think that's quite an interesting aspect of what's going on in this period because he did marry his own cousin, Helena. There was cousin-cousin-mourge within the Constantinian dynasty a way of keeping power within the family. I mean, she died before he became Sol Augustus, but he doesn't marry again after that.

And famously, you know, this is one of his characteristics. You know, he doesn't like indulgence. So he said not to sort of have expensive tastes, indulgent food, indulgent sex. So he doesn't get married again. But again, I think we're back to the problem that he only reigns for such a short time. I mean, maybe he would have got married again at some point. I mean, he says at one point, doesn't he? I would happily publish my correspondence with Helena because it's so chaste and proper,

which sort of makes you feel a bit for Helida that she's not going to be. getting anything interesting in the letters from she's going from her husband. Leia, would you, what would you like to have said you didn't have time to say? So maybe two things. The first is that I wasn't very happy with what I said for the misogon because I lost the thread. So I was wondering whether I could come back to it and say that in the misopogon, Julian paints himself as a Socrates.

So in this text, he gives a representation of the emperor as being a sort of new and their embodiment of the archetypical philosopher. And therefore, in the moment in which he is criticizing his subjects who have failed to recognize them, he's also confronting them with the question of what kind of ruler they really think would be beneficial for them. Do they want somebody like the representatives of the Constantinian dynasty and Constantius II, whom Julian depicts in the piece as having pondered to their pleasures and expectations, or do they want to have a hard?

teacher, but a real teacher, which is how he depicts himself in the piece. So the harshness is the other side of his expertise. Two things, I think, that we could have said more about. The first is just his role as a lawgiver and the question of policy. So there's this whole debate over, he seems to, for example, be committed both in Gaul and later in the East to, for example, reducing tax burdens to what Trump would call draining the swamp, to reducing the size of the court, for example, and to cultivating a more simple image of the emperor, so without all the adornment that had become characteristic of the late antique court. And there's a sort of question mark there about whether this is a sort of deliberate sustained policy decision

or whether empress could really, in this period, do sustain policy and whether it's just a series of haphazard actions here or there. But there's, there's an interesting question to be asked about what he tries to, to do as a, as a policymaker. And then I also just think that there is a certain, I guess you call it a romance of someone that dies young on the cusp of achieving or trying to achieve something, that it's like an, it's like an unfinished promise that invites people to sort of finish the story for themselves. It's sort of try and tie up the story in a bow. So I think that combination of things makes him just one of the most evocative figures

from antiquity that so many people have so much invested in for so many different reasons. Yeah, I mean, I think he can symbolise different things for different people. I think that's what's so interesting too. They can use them for their own purposes or see in him the things that they think he is. So, you know, with humanism movement, sort of rejection of the dominance of the church and Christianity. So they sort of adopt him as kind of like a figurehead or see him as a kind of a proto-humanist. But then they have to explain the way his paganism and say, well, he didn't really believe all this stuff. You know, he wasn't really, you know, a fanatical pagan.

But you think he did? Yes, I think, well, I would say that's pretty clear from his writings. his behaviour. I mean, he has that sort of intellectual side as well. And obviously, his opposition to Christianity. I think people identify with that in the 18th century and even earlier, in fact. Another topic possibly. Julian is interestingly a very lucid interpreter of how the annexation of the church to the Roman state has an impact on power dynamics specifically. So not just the religious in the spirituality of the Romans, but the fact that if you think about it, until Constantine, the emperor was also the high priest. He was the person entrusted with

maintaining the Pax de Orum, the good relationship between the state and the gods presiding over the state. In the moment in which Constantine annexes the church to the state, there are new figures of religious authority, the bishops, who have apostolic authority that legitimizes them over the emperor. So in the moment in which Julian is

fighting Christianity, he's also simultaneously reclaiming that sort of spiritual power that has been taken away. I think our producer is going to announce a great treat for all. Does anyone want to your coffee? No, then tea? Yes, I love tea, please.

Tea would be lovely. Two teas. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hi, I'm India Rackison and I want to tell you a story. It's the story of you. In our series, Child from BBC Radio 4, I'm going to be exploring how a fetus develops and is influenced by the world from the very get-go. Then, in the middle of the series,

we take a deep look at the mechanics and politics of birth, turning a light on our struggling maternity services and exploring how the impact of birth, on a mother affects us all. Then we're going to look at the incredible feat of human growth and learning in the first 12 months of life. Whatever shape the journey takes, this is a story that helps us know our world. Listen on BBC Sounds.