MEDIEVAL HISTORY LIBRARY

THE EMPEROR JULIAN THE APOSTATE

CHAPTER X.

JULIAN AND HELLENISM.

      If Julian misinterpreted Christianity, his initial misconception of Paganism was as grotesquely complete. His reaction is the picture of a man plunging deeper and deeper into an impassable morass. Little  by little the truth dawned upon him that he was a general without soldiers, and that no inch of ground he won could be permanently retained.

It was from the literary side, in other words as Hellenism, that Paganism first fascinated Julian. By inheritance, by instinct, and by training, he was possessed with a singular appetite for culture. From childhood, he says, he was smitten with a devouring passion for books. His beau-ideal of life was that of the student. At an early age he became an ardent book-collector. The happiest remembrance of his youth was that of days when in sight of the blue Propontis and dancing sails, he reclined on beds of convolvulus and thyme and clover with his eyes upon his book, able in the pauses of reading to feast upon the beauties of the scene.

Of all his wedding presents none charmed him so much as the library with which the Empress enriched him. Through his Gallic Campaigns and in his Persian expedition his books 'followed him everywhere like his shadow.' On hearing of the death of Bishop George, it was Julian's chief solicitude that the prelate's library, with which in old days he had made acquaintance, should not be broken up or spoiled. Of all his letters, Naville remarks, two only are to ladies; the one promotes Kallixene the priestess; the other thanks 'the most worshipful' Theodora for a present of books!    His knowledge of literature was most extensive; not one of his associates, he says, had perused more volumes than himself.  His own pages prove the intimacy of his knowledge of Greek authors, before all others Homer and Plato.

He himself was Greek to the core—“enamored of Greece”, writes Libanius, “above all of Athens the eye of Greece, Athene's town, the mother of Plato, Demosthenes and wisdom”. His pages teem with loving laudation most exactly corresponding to this descrip­tion. “Though a Thracian maybe by birth, I count myself Greek by vocation” are his own words. He learnt of Greek teachers, selected Greek friends, wrote and thought in the Greek tongue, moved in a world of Greek ideas. Yet essentially Greek as he was, so wide was his literary range that he did not, like the disdainful schoolmen of his time, wholly ignore the language and literature of Rome. In Gaul he humorously laments that he had “almost forgotten his Greek”, and not only could he talk Latin, but harangue publicly in that language with sufficient ease. His extensive knowledge of Roman History old and new, and of anecdotes and sayings of Roman statesmen and emperors make it certain that he indulged himself on occasion with Latin authors.

Nor did he possess merely literary appreciation. He was endowed with literary faculties of no mean order.    In Niebuhr's judgment “he was a true Attic, unequalled for elegance since the day of Dion Chrysostom”. He molded his style on that of Libanius; but the judgment of posterity is unanimous that the pupil surpassed the master. He did not emancipate himself from all the rhetorical vices of his age, from frigid affectations, from conceits, flourishes, and plethoric use of quotations, but these are most rank in his more youthful rhetorical exercises, and under the breezier influence of practical activity disappeared: at his worst he displays less verbosity and meretriciousness than Libanius. In writing he had the most astonishing fertility, coupled with powers of expression, of illustration, of humor, and of irony, entitling him to take place beside Lucian, and higher than all his immediate contemporaries. In his writings, considering the occasions which gave them birth, and remembering that they are the products for the most part of sleepless nights snatched from the midst of a life of restless and incessant activities, we are amazed at the retentiveness of memory, the rapidity of composition, the fecundity of allusion with which they bristle at every page.

All this literary fervor was enlisted on the side of Paganism. Hellenism was the name he gave to Paganism.  It appeared to him inseparably bound up with old Greek form of belief: it was the fruit or the flower which would inevitably perish if the roots were exposed or even seriously disturbed. Julian did his utmost to encourage the Sophists because he regarded them as the exponents and representatives of Hellenic education. And this, the study of the great poets and historians and orators of Greece, he believed to be the sole mental discipline which could induce virtuous and intelligent habits of mind, and achieve the intellectual regeneration of his fellow-men. 

Piety and Greek culture he regarded as synonymous. Mingling with the literary value that he attached to   Paganism was its philosophical importance. Neo-Platonism as a philosophic system claimed to unravel the difficulties of life and belief: and Julian accepted it as the most satisfactory solution of the mysteries of existence. It taught him, writes Libanius in his account of Julian's conversion, the nature of the soul, its origin and destiny, the means by which it is humbled and abased, or exalted and lifted up, the meaning of spiritual bondage and spiritual liberty, with the way to escape the one and attain the other. It initiated him into the love of gods and daemons.

This same philosophy, while definitely supporting Paganism, inferred from its existence and its diversities an underlying unity: The outward differences of expression were to the Neo-Platonist only less important than the hidden unity on which they were based. Special characteristics of belief, worship morals, are permanently fixed in nations, ingrained in their mental or moral structure. They are not random or evanescent: they correspond to archetypal ideas. They are due to the action of the deities of polytheism, whose existence is inferred and demonstrated by precisely the same line of argument as that which led Plato to his Ideal theory.  

The Neo-Platonism and polytheism each leant upon the other and it is not wonderful that Julian identified philosophy and religion. Knowledge of the Gods and similitude to the God were his favorite definitions of philosophy. He was the best philosopher who most approximated to their likeness. Julian believed that science and religion were sisters. He was at great pains, and indeed would strain all historical evidence, to show that all the great philosophers were devout Pagans. Philosophy, and as associated with it Paganism, had proved to himself a purifying and expanding power, and he believed it would prove the same to others. He was in no small measure the victim of delusion. The earlier phases of his acquaintance with Pagan philosophers need not here be retraced.   

Friendless and forlorn he had found in them guides, teachers, admirers, and, what he most needed, sympathizing friends. Intellectually Julian was a born hero-worshipper. With all his quickness and vivacity, he fell short in genuine original power. He became a child in the hands of men by no means his superiors in mental calibre.   

His exaggerated admiration of Maximus, the fulsome effusiveness of his compliments to Iamblichus pass from the sublime to the ridiculous. They betray a certain shallowness of judgment, and amount to almost an hallucination. In broad and hyperbolic expressions of regard Julian's breadth of reading and fertility of imagination enabled him to outmatch his contemporaries.

To the ancient Maximus he writes with the ardor of some-youthful lover. His letters he places under his pillow as a healing charm on which his head may rest; only by virtue of them in the absence of the author can he be said truly to live. When Maximus arrived at court, no sooner was he announced than Julian left the throne of judgment; and passing down the hall publicly embraced and kissed the philosopher, to the mixed amusement and   contempt of the assembled court.

Not only is Iamblichus a second Plato; not only are his letters the swallows of spring, and the harbingers of calm, but he himself, considering Julian's own religious creed, is almost blasphemously styled a Helios, shedding abroad on earth pure rays of celestial light, an Esculapius of reasoning souls, in whose absence the Emperor is wrapped in Cimmerian darkness, and consumed with a fever of desire.   

When he lay ill the letters of Iamblichus could recover him from sickness, nor could he peruse their contents till he had covered with kisses the envelope that brought them, and feasted his eyes and lips on the seal which the philosopher's own hand had stamped. Here again is a sample letter to Libanius, extracted in full.

“Yesterday I read your essay almost through before breakfast; and after breakfast without a moment's rest completed the reading. Happy art thou who canst so indite, nay happy rather who canst so think. What language! what wit! what combination! what discrimination! what treatment! what arrangement! what periods! what language! what harmony! what a tout ensemble!”

Such excessive adulation betrays a weakness of temperament, which fatally crippled Julian's independence of judgment. In sending a composition of his own to Maximus, Julian compares himself to the eagle that teaches her unfledged young to face the sun's full beams, and still more submissive to the Celtic mother who delivers her babes to the mercy of the Rhine to prove whether they be bastards or no.

A word from Maximus should be the verdict of death. Thus Julian committed his intellectual belief, bound hand and foot, into the keeping of others. Excusably if erroneously he made up his mind on the merits of Christianity and Paganism in the favor of the latter. The misfortune was that he never reconsidered his decision when longer thought and broader experience might have enabled him to rectify it. Once made he laid it on the shelf; he accepted the teaching of others, and when come to man's estate, in reality never scrutinized its real value.

The fact is that in his estimate both of contemporary Hellenism and of Neo-Platonism Julian went woefully astray There was no germ of recreative life in the Hellenic culture which Julian so admired and strove to foster. Already its cheek was hectic with approaching death. The arts and skill—such as they were—which it most boasted, were symptoms of mortification. Already in the schools the sophist and the rhetorician had dispossessed the philosopher: in other words form had superseded substance; the health of the body was neglected, nay forgotten, for the cut of the figure and the beautification of the clothes: the day of doom was very close. Julian lived during the short breathing-space which was granted to the Sophists before they too made their bow, and were hissed off the stage.

The schools of Rhetoric were decaying fast: enervation of moral teaching and laxity of discipline were undermining the whole system of education. Men were already turning from the polished periods and complacent pedantry of Athens and Antioch to the rising law schools of Rome and Berytus.

Libanius and other neglected favorites were already beginning to bemoan the wane of enthusiasm, the deterioration of intellectual earnestness and power, the increase of fastidiousness and the decrease of students. Himerius, the last of the great holders of the chair of Rhetoric at Athens, died within five years of Julian himself. Void of its old strength but maintaining all its old pretensions, “Hellenism headed by an Emperor was matched against Christianity unsupported by the state, but with the blood of martyrs in her veins, and truth for standard-bearer”. And if Julian misread the immediate future in store for Hellenic culture, still more was he at fault in the necessary connection that he assumed between it and Paganism. The truth was that there was no chance for Hellenic culture, unless it were divorced from Paganism and married to the religion of Christ. For that the times were not yet ripe; but Julian only necessitated and precipitated its extinction by widening the existing breach,   and doing his utmost to make the union impossible.

Nor was Julian less hopelessly mistaken in his estimate and Neo-Platonism. There is more excuse for him here; for it undeniably was the best and greatest, because the only philosophy of his day. It had too the merit of being in possession. Still he vastly overrated its achievements. A little more penetration might have placed Julian nearer the level of the modern student. It did not require fifteen centuries to prove that Iamblichus was something lower than Plato, any more than that Libanius did not cast Demosthenes alto­gether into the shade.

It was true that some brilliant lights and hues hovered around the sunset of Greek philosophy; but when Julian mistook the evening glow for the fresh radiance of morning he made a gigantic mistake. The last of the great Neo-Platonists had lived and died before Julian ascended the throne; the Neo-Platonists of his own day were none of them gifted with genius, and most of them were credulous and dissembling charlatans.

From Iamblichus onwards philosophy was posting to ruin and self-annihilation: it was yet to boast a Proclus and an Hypatia: but its age-long decrepitude had begun, the protracted enfeeblement which waited two hundred years1 for the fiat of destruction to fall, when the sorry remnant, 'the last Seven Sages of Greece,' turned their backs on Athens and crept away eastward, vainly hoping to find in heathen Persia a respect which Christian Europe had refused. All this was dark to Julian; a fundamental error beset his whole mental constitution, a fatal transposition of actual truth, which led him to miscalculate all the forces at work around him. Among dying embers he watched and wondered at the lingering sparks; they gained a brightness from the growing darkness, but they could not light up the old fires that had smoldered out.

But Julian found subsidiary evidences of Paganism besides those of a literary and philosophical character.    It is beyond question that he looked upon the truth and laws of theurgic art as scientifically demonstrable, and their validity as proved by the experience of generations of men.

From the history of Cain and Abel, from the usage of Abraham downwards, divination, rightly conducted, had received the approval and unmistakably revealed the will of the Deity. Apart from this mysterious lore, a crowd of historical evidences attested the truth of Paganism. Some were of a material kind: witness the heaven-descended Ancilia! Some prophetic: witness the  inspired predictions of the Sybil! Some personal: witness the wisdom of virtuous legislators of the past, of Lycurgus, of Solon, of Numa 'the most wise'! Some national: witness Greece! witness Rome! Last link in this long chain of historical evidences stood Julian himself. For he, like his supporters, appealed to his own career as most decisive testimony to the power and interference of the Gods. It was as their champion that he had been delivered  in childhood from the murderer, guarded and guided and promoted in youth, and in the prime of his days set without a struggle sole on the seat of Empire.

It must seem strange at first sight that Julian should have appealed with the persistency he does to historical evidences of Paganism. How, it will be said, could Paganism have historical evidences to allege? It was well enough for Christianity born in obscurity and only struggling by hard-won inches to toleration and preeminence to claim on its side the verdict of history: but Paganism was never pitted against a rival: in various shapes it parted out the whole world; Paganism triumphant was but the reverse side of Paganism overcome: one element dispossessed another, and that was all.

The answer to this is, what must be once more reaffirmed, that to Julian Paganism was Hellenism. And this Julian conceived to have everywhere prevailed. It had molded, trained and immortalized Greece: it had subjugated the East: it had taken captive Rome its conqueror; it had now learned how to combine in a connected whole the religions of the world. It had one last foe to conquer, Galileism, and would then take its rightful scepter of universal sovereignty. In this estimate Julian had some facts to bear him out; others he imported into history. Hellenic colonies he argued had civilized the world, and prepared it for obedience to Rome: Rome was Hellenic in origin, Hellenic in rites, and Hellenic in faith. Romulus was sprung of Ares, Numa received his revelations from Sun direct, Caesar could trace descent to Eneas son of Aphrodite.

On the same side, and bound up with these historical beliefs, were enlisted all Julian's conservative instincts. These were necessarily strong. The greatness of Rome was in the past: her choicest rulers he could aspire only to imitate not to surpass. Marcus Aurelius as virtuous ruler, Trajan as military leader, he could not scale sublimer heights. His policy and the entire movement which he headed were reactionary. The 'dear dead light' was that to which he looked back, that which he strove to rekindle. He was in one word a Romanticist.

He undertook conservation and reconstruction, but not origination. Return seemed to him the sole salvation. This was true of religion above all else. “Innovation shun in all things, most of all in what concerns the Gods”, is his own declaration. The prime impulsive or subversive forces of his time were the Christians and the barbarians. Julian's public life was one sustained struggle against these two. One threatened the outward, the other the inward unity of the Empire.

The Christians were the 'spiritual barbarians' of the day. Their innovating, progressive, revolutionary character was in Julian's estimation one of their most flagrant demerits. In his eyes nothing was more heinous than abandonment of traditional law. Observance of law was by his teaching a part of religion. It had a positive religious as well as moral significance. Each national difference and peculiarity, laws, morals, customs, and rites alike, were characters impressed by the presiding deity, and the dereliction of any one of these was rebellion and apostasy from revealed truth.

Such then were the principal grounds on which Julian moral based his enthusiastic devotion to Hellenism. Living in immediate contact, and for the most part in personal intercourse with the most gifted Pagans of his day, it was intelligible and perhaps natural that Julian should exaggerate the intellectual merits of Neo-Platonism and expiring Hellenism. His deductions even from its past history are explicable enough, illogical as they may appear from a modern standpoint. That he should have so completely misapprehended its moral powers is far more amazing.

He did go so far as to recognize some at least of its actual moral deficiencies; he allowed for instance that the Jews exhibited superior purity and religious scrupulousness; but the wonderful thing is that he should have supposed Paganism capable of reform; that he should have attributed so much potential energy and recuperative power to a system which really possessed none.

It has been paradoxically declared that no Pagan would conceive of reforming Paganism; and if reformation be limited to its strict sense of correction of supervenient abuses and return to some primitive uncontaminated model, the remark is strictly true. There was no model, neither personal exemplar nor authoritative tradition, to which to return. Paganism might be amended, it could not be reformed. Neither would it admit of the transformation to which Julian endeavored to subject it.

It may have been one weakness of the scheme that the welfare, nay existence of the religious organization was inseparable from that of the empire, but assuredly it showed other and more fatal flaws. We have seen the kind of revival contemplated, the creation, namely, of a Pagan Church Catholic. The notion originated with the Neo-Platonists. It was a stupendous folly. If it needed a clever man to frame the conception, a far duller one might have recognized the utter impracticability of carrying it into effect. None but a pedant could have supposed the strange jumble of poetry, philosophy, mysticism and witchcraft which commended itself to Julian, a religion capable of being popularized. Still it laid hold on the minds of the Hellenist philosophers of the day with a strange fascination. It was perhaps worthwhile that once for all the feasibility of the attempt should be disproved to demonstration.

To summarize once more results already attained, Julian following the general Neo-Platonist rebound from the skeptical materialism that preceded it, assumed the religious instinct; asserted in unqualified terms man's intuitive apprehension of God; recognized in religion the support of morality, the sustainer of law, the author and preserver of Hellenic culture.

The truth of Paganism as against Christianity was substantiated by its antiquity and universality as witnessed by the scattered but confluent testimonies of the various nations of mankind; by the historical success which had attended the propagation of the religions of Greece and Rome; by the evidences of prophecy and divination; by visible tokens of the Gods' presence among men; last almost chiefly by the full ripe clusters of poetry and philosophy that graced the old religion. Keenly alive to the imperfections of contemporary Paganism Julian strove to eradicate them.

Looking around him and taking note of the rapid growth and prevalence of Christianity he proceeded to emend Paganism on that model. He has been called 'the ape of Christianity.' Gregory of Nazianzus elaborates his metaphor at length. Impressed with the belief that Christianity was a mere scheme, and blind to the genuine enthusiasm that animated it, Julian fancied that Paganism had merely doceri ab hoste, to learn from its worst enemy, to adopt its tactics, to follow its example in some details, and that forthwith it would step into its place and everywhere supplant its influence. The first thing necessary was a purified morality; the second an organized church. To these ends the 'Luther of Paganism' constantly strove. He introduced an elaborate sacerdotal system. The practices of sacred reading, preach­ing, praying, antiphonal singing, penance, and a strict ecclesiastical discipline were all innovations in Pagan ritual. Added to these was a system of organized almsgiving, to which Julian attributed so much of the success of Christianity; with the proceeds temples might be restored, the poor succored, the sick and destitute relieved. Nay if Gregory's words are more than rhetoric, even monasteries and nunneries, refuges and hospitals were reared in the name of Paganism.

But attempts like these necessarily and irremediably failed. The alms which were to be the panacea for infidelity were not forthcoming. Julian spared neither private purse nor public funds, but though he might rebuild temples he could not provide a congregation.  State endowment never yet created spiritual life. It was a more hopeless attempt than a restoration of medieval monasticism in the nineteenth I century. The real fact was that every element of permanent vitality was hopelessly wanting to this revival.

It may have been the last resort of both Neo-Platonism and Paganism: if so, it was the knell of both. A Pagan Catholic Church was a contradiction in terms. For first a visible unity was absolutely impossible. For convenience sake Paganism has been treated as a system; and as though it formed a compact whole: and for certain purposes such language is perfectly legitimate.

It is convenient to group the Opposition in Parliament as a single party; to class Dissenters as a common society. But regarded in their positive and proper selves, both split into numberless divisions, possessed of no common principle save that of joint antagonism to a common foe. Far more is this the case with Paganism. Its name was legion. There was no pretence in it of unity. Nay its whole strength lay in disunion. It possessed not a single element of cohesion. No common parent, no primitive stock: no authoritative sanction, no common creed, no symbol of faith, not even a common God. It was simply a conglomeration of fragments, that had neither natural affinity nor artificial connection. To proclaim the oneness of these, to rally them into a single whole, was wantonly to make a decisive blow possible. Paganism might perhaps for long wage a successful guerilla warfare with Christianity, now advancing, now receding, cutting off troops here or supplies there, but to meet it in the open field was to court defeat.

And if the want of unity in Paganism made catholicity unattainable, sacerdotalism became by virtue of that fact an impossibility. Julian might frame rules and spin theories, but a sacerdotal system devoid of all basis except arbitrary state enactment was the baldest folly. To have conceived the possibility of realizing such does small credit to Julian's sagacity.

The essence of sacerdotalism consists in the possession of certain mystical and transmitted, and it may perhaps he added inalienable, powers. To such Julian's priests could not make pretence. By simplest Pagan use citizen was made priest in the same fashion as he was made magistrate: it was an affair of election; and his tenure and terms of office were similarly regulated. A man became priest for one festival, for one day, or for one year, as utility demanded. The idea of such a priesthood could not of a sudden be revolutionized to order. It is true that under most if not all forms of mystery-worship, priests became a trained and consecrated caste.

But even such a priesthood could only base its prerogative on very arbitrary and undefined claims, while between the various priest-castes there was not only no realized unity, but not even a potential bond of connection. What theory was there or could there be in Paganism analogous to that of Apostolic transmission? What power of absolution, or ordination or administration of holy mysteries was vested in their hands? and by what virtue? or by whose warrant from whence derived?

Their office was a mere caricature of the Christian priesthood. Their services and prayers were but mumming ritual. Their initiations and their sacrifices unmeaning parodies, or unholy sorceries, fit only to tickle the foolish or awe the superstitious. When Felix the youthful martyr of Abitina, having confessed himself a Christian, was asked whether he had attended meetings, he replied with an explosion of scorn, “As if a Christian could live without the Lord's ordinance! Knowest thou not, Satan, that the Christian's whole being is in the sacrament”. The very thought was unintelligible to a Pagan worshipper. Just as in the past there was neither bond of union nor historical foundation, so in the present there was no active spiritual fellowship with believers or with God, no feeding on a present Saviour and no com­munion with the saints.

Turn we to morality, and the case stands hardly any better. The Paganism of Julian's time was incurably corrupt. It was immoral to the core. Many sanctuaries existed as dens of debauchery. Prostitutes were priestesses, and temple was cant name for brothel. The essence of worship was the satisfaction of lust.

When on days of high festival Julian royally attired passed through the streets of Constantinople to solemn celebration of the feast, it was no decorous procession of venerable priests or modest virgins that followed in his steps: around the chaste grave young Emperor thronged a drunken rout: among those that bore the insignia of sacerdotal pomp were mutilated priests of Cybele, priestess-courtesans of Venus, immodest screaming bacchants catching the public gaze by their obscene cries and antics.

And this immorality was not only on the surface, or confined to certain public resorts. It was far more than skin-deep. It pervaded and poisoned the very springs of home life: it violated the sanctity of the domestic hearth. It cannot be grossly unfair to select the darling festival of Antioch as in some measure typical of eastern Paganism. This was the so-called Maiuma feast.

Julian takes the dissolute townspeople to task for the vast sums they lavished on carouses during its celebration. Nominally it was a religious festival. What then was its character? In the great amphitheatre, in an open reservoir filled with water, the common women of the town swam and gambolled in public. A resident at Antioch, and no less firm a Pagan than Libanius, declares that the essence of the Maiuma was “not to abstain from any kind of abomination”.

It remains one proof of Julian's weakness that he had to license this annual degradation, which his predecessor had suppressed. There was not wanting a moral element among Pagans; but it was too feeble to protest. Even when it found a voice, it had nothing much to say. The Neo-Platonists, as moral or religious philosophers, were practically a close sect. They did not aspire to moral propagandism. Their creed was a hothouse plant.

The leading sophists did indeed undertake to expound ethics; it was one of their main pretensions, no less than of the older sophists, to teach young men virtue. Each had his clientele of students, for whose conduct he accounted himself responsible hardly less than for their intellectual training. But the moral hold of the sophists was steadily relaxing; their utterances are burdened with regrets and complaints anent the decay of discipline. It was no wonder. Their lectures were no better than dull sermons. “As preachers of righteousness the schoolmen were easily surpassed by the great doctors of the church, who like themselves had mastered all the rules of rhetoric and used them in a nobler cause”. They were not like their great predecessors, men of daring and incisive intellect, the free-thinkers of Greece exposing conventional untruth, and excogitating doctrines destined to revolutionize or rather recreate ethics. These wrangling Diadochi could but hark back with stale iterations and vapid moralizing to lifeless or exploded theories, and bring to disrepute the world-renowned forces which had given them birth.

Again, Paganism was in matter of religion immovably callous. There are times when the most odious moral corruption coexists with fanatical religious fervor. But this was not the case with the Pagans of Julian's day. Among them religious indifference reigned supreme. Where Paganism retained an outward ascendancy, where, as at Rome, the aristocracy of wealth and fashion remained adherent of the old cults, it had lulled itself into the most complete nonchalance of fancied security.

There is no attempt at self-defense, much less at missionary vigor. No Pagan priest comes forward as an apologist for his faith; there too Julian must in person and alone bear the brunt of the fray. With a comatose inactivity Paganism accepted or adopted a policy of absolute and culpable laissez-faire. It was in its dotage and simply asked to be let alone to its torpor and imbecility and folding of the hands in sleep. The Pagans themselves only laughed at Julian's zeal, or stared at it in dull undisguised amazement: then after the first moment of amused surprise yawned themselves to sleep again. It was the same among the educated and the uneducated, among the rich as among the poor.

Julian alone was impervious to the comic aspect of his proceedings, and his gravity heightened the joke. The Sophists no doubt as a body warmly supported him; for while Constantius had treated them with marked coolness and ousted them from court, Julian had restored to them more than their previous privileges. But their support was strictly limited to the sphere of self-interest, and guaranteed no devotion or self-sacrifice. Basking in court sunshine, they sponged upon their patron's liberality, but were mere spectators of his attempt to reanimate religion. Many were time-servers not at all anxious to commit themselves too deeply against the Christians. Some, like Chrysanthius and Aristomenes, and perhaps too Libanius, were so incredulous of Julian's success, as actually to shrink from appearing at court at all.

That however was a refinement of prudence discarded by most. As a body the Sophists were only too glad to sip the sweets of power while the sun shone. They even urged the reformer to steps against which his own sense of justice revolted. They welcomed the triumph of Hellenism, but in their own person would face no risk nor privation to promote it. They applauded the combatants and egged them on, but did not come down into the arena.

Indeed throughout the correspondence and speeches of Sophists contemporary with Julian, few features are more marked than their pervading religious indifferentism. Such indifferentism was in point of fact inevitable : and for this reason, that there was no essential antagonism between Hellenism and Christianity.

When Paganism became Hellenism the essential hostility between it and Christianity ceased. And it was of Hellenism, of intellectual culture that is to say and not of moral or theological beliefs, that the Sophists were apostles.   Gregory and Basil were firm Christians, as students at Athens: Libanius numbered among his pupils Theodore of Mopsuestia, Maximus Bishop of Seleucia and John Chrysostom himself.

The same indifferentism (which appears a juster term than tolerance) was not confined to the great educators, but affected the cultured classes at large. To quote one palmary instance:—I the great historian of Julian's age was Ammianus Marcellinus: he was soldier and officer of state as well as student: notwithstanding the unusually full materials for judgment that he left behind him, there are still students and readers of his works who  remain  unsatisfied  that he was a Pagan.

Neither he nor any other profane historian has thought it worthwhile to record the exact time or circumstances of Julian's profession of apostasy. As with the higher classes so was it with the lower, save that the latter showed a little more of boorish curiosity. The rich spectacles provided for their edification soon lost the charm of novelty; if they attended the temple at all, it was with the object of securing al good view of the lord of the world, and enjoying the unwonted spectacle of an emperor butchering beasts, handling entrails, or distending his cheeks to kindle the altar-fire.

Again and again does Julian reiterate the complaint that people came to the temples to see him, not to do worship the Gods. Even when the outward show was unimpeachable, when in externals decorousness and zeal were everywhere apparent, Julian at last could not resist the suspicion that it was due solely to a desire to win his approbation and with it some substantial reward.

If Paganism was languid where as at Rome it was in the 'ascendant, it was not less so where it with difficulty held its own. Antioch was a metropolis of the East: it was fourth city in the Empire, third patriarchate in the Church; including native Syrians, Greek colonists, and Roman officials, it had a large Pagan population, and party-spirit was brisk.

The first sound (it had been noted as of ominous significance) that fell upon the Emperor's ear, as he approached the town, was the wild summer wailing for the lost Adonis. Adonis was indeed dead and his fellows! In spite of all Julian's efforts and exhortation, in spite of his own devotion, in spite of his restoration of Apollo's shrine at Daphne, when he came to celebrate with renovated pomp the annual festival of the town's patron deity, the sole representative of all the wealth and prosperity of that great city was a single priest with a solitary goose, who could scarcely prevail on his own son to serve him as acolyte.

No wonder that Julian turned away sick at heart, to vent his spleen in indignant objurgations to the council. But it was everywhere the same. “Everywhere”, says Libanius, “were altars and fires and blood and fat of sacrifice and smoke and sacred rites, and diviners fearlessly performing their functions. And on the mountain-tops were pipings and processions, and the sacrificial ox, which was at once an offering to the Gods and a banquet to men”. Ah yes, everywhere were these things, but where were the genuine worshippers, who could make them all significant?

Paganism was thus profoundly indifferent, because it was not only hopelessly and mortally corrupt, but also because it was yet more hopelessly and recklessly frivolous. There was probably less of flagrant wickedness at Rome than at the time when in the words of her great historian the imperial city was “the common sink and rendezvous of every atrocity and abomination”. But it will be worthwhile to scan the somewhat less dark portraiture of a later age, and see reflected in the microcosm of Rome the outward spirit of the age of Julian.   

The trials of infancy, the stalwart pride of youth, the strength of maturity, the venerable tranquility of a green old age were all past. It was the acme of genius now to invent a more stylish phaeton, a daintier fringe, or a more transparent gossamer stuff. The rich man rattled along the basalt-paved streets at the head of a miniature army; not a scullion was left behind: grooms and lacqueys led the van: grimy cooks and hired loungers filled the ranks, while lines of sallow and ill-favored eunuchs brought up the rear: in every direction troops of ballet-girls with wanton ringlets tripped or waltzed along the pavements, showing their ankles in true theatrical fashion.

Meanwhile the libraries were deserted as graveyards. The philosopher's chair was taken by the choir-master, and professors of broad farce filled the ancient seats of professors of rhetoric. While the growth of celibacy and rapid physical degeneracy threatened to extirpate the higher classes, the lower spent all their time, gambling and betting, in low and immoral resorts.

Turbulence, taverns, and vulgarity according to Ammian were the three prominent characteristics of Home. No wonder that in such a society science, poetry and art were obsolete. Constantine, master of the resources of the world, had not been able to deck his arch of Triumph, except by decorations pilfered from his great predecessor's trophy; while all Europe and Asia had to be rifled to supply statues for the requirements of the new metropolis that bore its founder's name.

Poetry had died after the ill treatment accorded it by Silius Italicus and succeeding poetasters; Claudian was in his nursery, and the Muses had not yet been christened and begun to lisp again in Prudentius. Alike in art, in intellect, and in morals, every spark of interest or earnestness had died out at Rome. She was in a state of such hopeless moral debauch that to Ammian it seemed that though Epimenides of Crete had risen from the dead, he could not have purged her uncleanness. Religion, morality, law alike pronounced her disease incurable. While the plague was upon her, the Imperial city, in thoughtless frivolity or giddy intoxication, was dancing her carnival of death, till the fierce Visigoth knocked at the gates and burst sword in hand upon the awe-struck revellers.

Rome then, as depicted to us by a contemporary, was a city given over to the pursuit of pleasure, a fourth century Paris. Rome too was the acknowledged stronghold of Paganism. The coincidence is not fortuitous : between the two facts there exists a natural correlation of idea.

True that Paganism owed something to the legal sanction, the official garb in which it walked; true too that the influence of the schools, and the preaching of the Sophists, by no means altogether failed in their advocacy of Paganism; true once more that where the instinct of legality failed, or intellectual appreciativeness was absent, divination and sorcery, with their subtle organization of mixed terrorism and winningness, their shrewd frauds of menace or promise or present delusion, enchained many victims of superstition; but yet, bearing in mind the activity and efficacy of these varied forces, and the yet more degraded allurements by which Paganism seduced the affections of its votaries, we may confidently affirm that the true basis of Paganism was not law, not culture, not superstition, not lust, much less of course religion, but in one word pleasure.

The maintenance of Paganism was consciously identified with the maintenance of pleasure, in its existing public forms. And if there is one right which a corrupt and fallen nation or populace asserts with devoted tenacity, it is the right to be amused. It was so with the people of Rome. Long after they had surrendered their free rights to the minions of emperors, they delighted still to call themselves lord in the amphitheatre, to scream for circenses as vociferously as for panem.

Forms of civic election were gone through for this end. It was the one duty and reward of the elective magistrates to provide their constituents with suitable and sufficient amusements. The splendor of the games was the measure of his merit. It has become a modern commonplace to oppose the spirit of Hebraism to that of Hellenism. The antithesis has been often criticized, and may be defective, but if there is one form of Hellenism to which more than another so-called Hebraism is antagonistic, it was the popular Hellenism of Julian's own day. It was easy-going, giddy, sensual, gregarious.

This Hellenism Julian tried to Hebraise—to make it earnest, grave, chaste, self-contained. It declined to put on the new man. It was too merry and wayward to attempt any such thing. Like Undine, it had not taken a soul—and winced and shrank away from the thought of it. Living and letting live, it had no heart to be sober or sad. It danced its innocent revel or rioted in dissolute delights, or thrilled to weird enchantments. From all these Julian thought to wean it. It is no marvel that he was left without encouragement and without support. The one marvel is that he should have attempted at all to spin ropes of this waste sand with no better cement than Iamblichus' patent.

Paganism was doomed, and Neo-Platonism could but precipitate eventual ruin. The moral sense of mankind had revolted long since against the gross conceptions of pristine theology. When Neo-Platonism espoused its allegorical method of interpretation, it was a confession that no supporter of Paganism, however ardent, could any longer adhere to its doctrines. The new orthodoxy was too capricious in method, too arbitrary in result, and too devoid of authoritative sanction ever to command assent. The moral regeneration of Paganism was in even worse case than the intellectual. The local and national and patriotic associations, which of old had served Paganism so well, were all stricken with death. Those who needed the consolation of religion at all, instinctively felt that that religion must be universal not partial, a religion not of clans or peoples, but of mankind. Julian and the Neo-Platonists realized the truth; but their misty, impersonal assurances of life to come, their 'ecstasy' so confined and unattainable, their empty formalities of worship could in the end satisfy none whom Christianity failed to allure.

XI

VICISTI GALILAE !