§ 4;. JULIAN THE APOSTATE. 4i
won the entliusiastic love of tlie soldiers, and received from them the dignity of Augustus. Then he raised the standard of rebellion against his suspicious and envious imperial cousin and brother-in-law, and in 361 openly declared himself a friend of the gods. By the sudden death of Constantius in the same year he became sole head of the Roman empire, and in December, as the only remaining heir of the house of Constantine,' made his entry into Constantinople amidst universal applause and rejoicing over escape from civil war.
He immediately gave himself, with the utmost zeal, to the duties of his high station, unweariedly active as pi'ince, general, judge, orator, high-priest, correspondent, and author. He sought to unite the fame of an Alexander, a Marcus Aurelius, a Plato, and a Diogenes in himself. His only recreation was a change of labor. He would use at once his hand in writing, his ear in hearing, and his voice in speaking. He considered his whole time due to his empire and the culture of his own mind. The eighteen short months of his reign (Dec. 361 — June 363) comprehend the plans of a life-long administration and most of his literary works. He practised the strictest economy in the public affairs, banished all useless luxury from his court, and dismissed with one decree whole hosts of barbers, cup-bearers, cooks, masters of ceremonies, and other superfluous officers, with whom the palace swarmed, but surrounded himself instead with equally useless pagan mystics, sophists, jugglers, theurgists, soothsayers, babblers, and scoffers, who now streamed from all quarters to the court. In striking contrast with his predecessors, he maintained the simplicity of a philosopher and an ascetic in his manner of life, and gratified his pride and vanity with contempt of the pomp and pleasures of the imperial purple. He lived chiefly on vegetable diet, abstaining now from this food, now from that, according to the taste of the god or goddess to whom the \lay was consecrated. He wore common clothing, usually slept on the floor, let his beard and nails grow, and, like the
' Hia older brother, Gallus, for S0 3ie time emperor at Antioch, had ah-eady been justly deposed by Constantius in 364, and beheaded, for his entire incapacity and hii Otfircilcss cruelty.
46 THEBD PERIOD. A.D, 311-590.
strict anacliorets of Egypt, neglected the laws of decency ani cleanliness.' This cynic eccentricity and vain ostentation certainly spoiled his reputation for simplicity and self-denial, and made him ridiculous. It evinced, also, not so much the boldness and wisdom of a reformer, as the pedantry and folly of a reactionist. In military and executive talent and personal bravery he was not inferior to Constantino ; while in mind and literary culture he far excelled him, as well as in energy and moral self-c3ntrol ; and, doubtless to his own credit, he closed his public career at the age at which his uncle's began ; but he entirely lacked the clear, sound common sense of his great predecessor, and that practical statesmanship, which discerns the wants of the age, and acts according to them. He had more uncommon sense than common sense, and the latter is often even more important than the former, and indispensable to a good practical statesman. But his greatest fault as a ruler was his utterly false position towards the j)aramount question of his time : that of religion. This was the cause of that complete failure which made his reign as trackless as a meteor.
The ruling passion of Julian, and the soul of his short but most active, remarkable, and in its negative results instructive reign, was fanatical love of the pagan religion and bitter hatred of the Christian, at a time when the former had already for-
' In the Misopogon (from fiKreoi and irwytev, the beard-hater, i. e. hater of bearded philosophers), his witty apology to the refined Antiochians for his philosophical beard, p. 338 sq., he boasts of tliis cynic coarseness, and describes, with great complacence, his long nails, his inlv-stained liands, his rough, uncombed beard, inhabited (horribile dictu) by certain Siripia. It should not be forgotten, however, that contemporary writers give him the credit of a strict chastity, wliich raises him far above most heathen princes, and which furnishes another proof to the involuntary influence of Christian asceticism upon his life. Libanius asserts in his panegyric, that JuliaH, before his brief married life, and after the death of his wife, a sisicr of Constantius, never knew a woman ; and Mamertinus calls his IcctuUis, " Vestalium toris purior." Add to this the testimony of the honest Ammianus Marcellinus, and the silence of Christian antagonists. Comp. Gibbon, c. xxii. note 50 ; and Carwithcn and Lyall : Hist, of the Clir. Ch., etc. p. 54. On the other hand, the Christians accused him o/ all sorts of secret crimes ; for instance, the butchering of boys and girls (Gregor. Orat. iji. p. 91, and Theodor. iii. 26, 27), which was probably an unfounded infereno* from his fanatical zeal for bloody sacrifices and divinationa.