Julian: Rome’s Last Pagan Emperor, by Philip Freeman
Published by Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-300-28187-3
Review published in Cornucopia, issue 68/2025
The Emperor Julian died young, fighting alongside the soldiers that he led into battle, his body pierced by a Persian spear. He had sent one of his most trusted friends, the scholar physician Oribasius, to the oracle at Delphi to petition the gods. Fortunately he never heard the answer:
Tell the king, that the glorious hall has fallen.
Phoebus Apollo no longer has his dwelling house here
no laurel branch for prophecy, nor the speaking spring
The sacred waters that once spoke are silent.
Emperor Julian stood at the cusp of one of the most fascinating periods of the Roman Empire. It was a time (between 311 and 380 AD) when incense was burnt in both temple and church, both of whose doors stood open in all the two thousand great cities of the Empire. As a boy, Julian had been taught Christianity but as a youth, he chose to study philosophy. He felt free to revere Jesus as an ethical teacher ( a fit object of reverence for slaves and widows) but he himself chose to partake of the Eleusinian mysteries, was initiated into the Manichean traditions wrapped around the worship of Helios the sun god and enthusiastically revived public sacrifice. He never persecuted Christians, but removed some of their new privileges. He was loathed by Christian writers and labelled the Apostate, for his fondness of the old beliefs, temple sanctuaries and ancient traditions. I have always thought of him as a hero but from a distance, as through a glass darkly.
For one of the principal problems with the Emperor Julian is that he has been both mythologised and demonised. He became a symbol of godless evil for over a thousand years in the eyes of Christian chroniclers, until the Enlightenment, when he was championed by Montaigne, Voltaire and Edward Gibbon as ‘a philosopher of true virtue’ and ‘as a romantic figure fighting a brave but hopeless battle against the suffocating power of the church’. This heroic vision was reinforced by Gore Vidal’s historical novel, Julian: a portrait of a clever, sensual philosopher who is also a physically tough warrior prince.
And the problem with charismatic writers of historical fiction is that it is almost impossible to remove their taste from your mouth once you have dined alone in their company. I also read Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian much too young. Her vision remains strong, and like a highly polished marble statue of the deified Emperor, shakes off the clutter of factual dates draped over his shoulders like an unwanted cloak. I was similarly enslaved by Gore Vidal’s brilliant fictional construction of Julian, which is perhaps why I am extraordinarily impressed by Philip Freeman’s short and factual biography. For one of the happiest aspects of seeing the Emperor Julian afresh, was the realisation that Gore Vidal’s research had been so thorough and well-grounded, albeit seeped in his distinctively contrarian voice.
Fortunately Philip Freeman does not destroy our hero, but educates us about how precarious any opinion (be it ever so well-informed) must be. Because for all of his symbolic importance for pagan historians and Christian theologians, the Emperor Julian ruled for a very brief period - hardly more than 18 months. He was a young, inexperienced man, just thirty years old, when he became sole Emperor. He was not a father to any child and had been married off to his cousin, Princess Helena, the sister of the Emperor Constantius II, the man who had executed both his father and his brother. So any examination of Julian’s reign must always acknowledge that we are not even looking at a work in progress, just observing a flying start. Julian had to spend his youth pretending to be a loyal servant to his elderly cousin, Constantius II before he was in a strong enough position to extract revenge and raise a rebellion.
The brevity of Philip Freeman’s biography, at just 133 pages, is entirely in keeping with this fundamental awareness. Julian may be a great symbolic presence but his actual period of authority was so short. It is useful to remember that all the great Roman emperors that remain household names (Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, Septimius Severus) reigned for around twenty years, and the greatest of them all (Augustus) had forty years in which to impose his policies.
I was also fortunate to read Philip Freeman’s biography whilst travelling across southern Turkey on a Roman road trip with Don McCullin. Every other day, to an almost bizarre extent, our ten-day journey intersected with the historical landscape as experienced by the Emperor Julian. This began on day one, where we photographed the so-called Julian column that still stands in Ankara. It continued when we walked the Roman pavement at Tarsus to discover that this was where his potential nemesis Emperor Constantius II, caught the mild fever that would in a few days kill him. He died crossing the Taurus mountains - close to where we made our own crossing. Most powerfully we explored the gaunt ruins of the once great city of Antioch, where the Emperor Julian lived for nine months, before following the route by which he led the Roman battle army, marching them East in 363 to cross the Euphrates, which we also saw. I found out that I had also explored his base camp, the fortress city of Dara, which overlooked the frontier of the Persian Sassanid Empire which he had determined to invade.
These coincidences helped concentrate my mind on the exceptionally strong Anatolian identity of this heroic young emperor. In conversation with my travelling companions, I explained that if we are allowed to think of Hadrian and Trajan as Spaniards, and Septimius Severus as Libyan, it is not too much of a tautology to think of Julian as an Anatolian-Turk.
Julian was the first and only member of his dynasty to be born in Constantinople. His father was the half-brother of the Emperor Constantine, but his mother (Basilina) came from the kingdom of Bithniya (the north-western stretch of Turkey that borders the Black Sea). Julian’s mother died young and so he was effectively brought up in Constantinople, mixed with periods spent with his maternal grandmother in the Bithynian countryside. The entirely Anatolian fabric of his childhood was continued by his boyhood in an imperial palace in Cappadocia (central Turkey) where he remained for the next seven years, aged eleven to eighteen. The Christian beliefs that he had been taught during these years of childhood were then dramatically transformed by his time as a young student at Pergamon, near the western seaboard of Anatolia. At 18 years old, he was free to study, whilst his elder half-brother Gallus governed the Eastern Empire as a junior Caesar on behalf of their all-powerful cousin, Constantius II.
The neo-Platonic philosopher Aedesius, who himself came from a wealthy Cappadocian family, was the central figure of a group of thinkers resident at the great city of Pergamon. Aedesius encouraged tolerance and an eclectic, all-embracing interest in all faiths and creeds, but was always interested in balancing the miraculous with the moral, the external with the internal. His principal followers were drawn from Anatolian families long associated with the principal cities of Ancient Turkey, such as Eusebius of Myndos (the ruins of which can be explored near Bodrum), Maximus from Ephesus and Orobasios (the personal physician of Julian) who also came from Pergamon. Their lives would be chronicled by Eunapius of Sardis.
These three years (351-4) spent in and around Pergamon and her pagan Neo-Platonic philosophers, 351-354 were clearly the most important period in the development of the spiritual character of Julian. The next period of his life was entirely lit up in the bright flames of murderous dynastic politics. This began with the sudden fall from power and execution of his half-brother Gallus in 354, followed by a year in Milan, directly under the eye (and in the shadow of the suspicion of treason) of the Emperor. Then the slow, five-year-long ascent to power, as he earns the trust of the soldiers, as a brave, resourceful and charismatic young Caesar, in command of Gaul and the Rhine frontier.
Philip Freeman’s wonderfully erudite and lively biography begins with a marvellously dramatic encounter. “A cold wind was blowing fiercely down from the mountains that late November in the year 361 when two towering Germans marched unexpectedly into the palace at Nish where the rebellious young Ceaser was plotting his next move against the ruler of the Roman Empire.” To find out the rest, you must read this slim book for yourself.
“any examination of Julian’s reign must always acknowledge that we are not even looking at a work in progress, just observing a flying start”