The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 Page 10

  The purge that followed Julian's arrival was swift and thorough. Literally thousands of chamberlains and major-domos, of grooms and barbers and bodyguards, were summarily dismissed without compensation, until the Emperor was left with only the skeleton staff required to meet his own needs - those of a single man (for his wife Helena was by now dead), ascetic and celibate, to whom food and drink were of little interest and creature comforts of none.

  Similarly radical reforms were made in the government and administration - usually in the direction of the old republican traditions. There was, for example, a significant increase in the power of the Senate, which Julian henceforth made a point of attending regularly and in person, travelling there on foot as a sign of respect. The taxation system was tightened up and rationalized; so too were the imperial communications, and in particular the cursus publicus, which ensured the proper provision of horses, mules and oxen for the transport of government servants

  i Oration XVIII, 130.

  travelling on duty and for the carriage of official freight. Once famous for its efficiency, this organization had been allowed by Constantius to fall into the hands of unscrupulous agents whose animals were often so overworked and undernourished that, so Libanius tells us, 'most of them dropped down dead as soon as they were unhitched - or even before, while they were still in the traces'.1

  But these measures were of the kind that any strong ruler might enforce on succeeding a weak and corrupt regime. Where Julian stands alone among all the Emperors of Byzantium is in his convinced and dedicated paganism. During his years as Caesar, he had been obliged to pay lip-service to the Christian faith: as late as April 361 we find him attending Easter mass at Vienne. But his inner rejection of that faith had long been an open secret, and from the moment that the news was brought to him at Naissus of Constantius's death he made no more pretence. It was as a professed pagan that he attended his predecessor's funeral in the Church of the Holy Apostles, and as a pagan that he settled down, after much divine consultation, to frame the laws which, he was convinced, would ultimately eliminate Christianity and re-establish the worship of the ancient gods throughout the Roman Empire.

  There would, he believed, be no need for persecution. Persecution meant martyrs, and martyrs always seemed to have a tonic effect on the Christian Church. The first thing to do was to repeal the decrees by which pagan temples had been closed, their property confiscated and their sacrifices declared illegal. Then, in the ensuing atmosphere of complete religious toleration, an amnesty would be proclaimed for all those orthodox Christian churchmen whom the pro-Arian government of Constantius had sent into exile. Orthodox and Arian would soon be at each other's throats again, of that he was sure - for, as Ammianus notes, 'he had found by experience that no wild beasts are so hostile to men as are Christian sects in general to one another'.2 After that it would be only a question of time before the Christians saw the error of their ways and embraced once again the old faith that they should never have left.

  Such reasoning, over-simplified though it may be, must seem to modern minds quite impossibly naive. Julian was, however, that unique combination - a Roman Emperor, a Greek philosopher and a mystic. As an Emperor, he knew that his Empire was sick. It no longer functioned as it had in the golden age of the Antonines two centuries before. The army had lost much of its old invincibility and was now, more often

  1 Oration XVIII, 14).

  2 Ammianus Marcellinus, XXII, v, 4.

  than not, barely able to keep the peace along the frontier. The government was inefficient, plagued by pluralism and corruption. The old Roman virtues of reason and duty, honour and integrity were gone. The Emperors themselves, his immediate predecessors, had been sensualists and sybarites, living in an unreal world of fantasy and self-indulgence; still capable, perhaps, of leading their forces into battle when absolutely necessary but happier by far to recline in their palaces, surrounded by their women and their eunuchs.

  All this, clearly, was the result of moral degradation. As a philosopher, however, Julian was not prepared to leave it at that. He was determined to discover the cause of the decline; and, because he was a deeply religious man living in an age in which men instinctively sought spiritual solutions to worldly problems, he concluded that this all-important question could be answered in a single word: Christianity. Here, as he saw it, was a faith that rode roughshod over the old virtues, emphasizing instead such effete, feminine qualities as gentleness, meekness and the turning of the other cheek. Worse still, it preached the disastrous creed of free and easy absolution. In a curious little composition entitled The Caesars, composed for the Saturnalia of December 362, Julian makes his views clear enough - picturing Jesus (who has taken up his abode with Incontinence) 'crying aloud to all comers: "Let every seducer, every murderer, every man guilty of sacrilege, every scoundrel, come unto me without fear. For with this water will I wash him and straightway make him clean. And though he should be guilty of those same sins a second time, let him but smite his breast and beat his head and I will make him clean again.'"

  In a word, Christianity had emasculated the Empire, robbing it of its strength and its manhood and substituting a moral fecklessness whose effects were everywhere apparent. Comparisons with other places and periods are always dangerous; yet to say that Julian looked on the Christians of the fourth century in something of the same light as a conservative of the old school might have looked on the hippies and Flower Power people in the 1960s might not be too wide of the mark.

  Conservatives of the old school, however, are not normally mystics. Julian was. Dearly as he loved philosophical and theological debate, his approach to religion was always emotional rather than intellectual. Seldom during his short reign did he miss an opportunity of publicizing his views - shocking many of his subjects, pagan as well as Christian, by descending to the market place to give public lectures and firing off long, impassioned treatises and tracts in refutation of those contemporary thinkers whom he thought wrong-headed. When he took up his pen, he worked furiously, frenziedly and at almost unbelievable speed. The 17,000 words of his Hymn to Cybele were, he tells us, written in a single night. Unfortunately, it reads like it. Julian's style is diffuse, undisciplined and oddly self-indulgent - all those faults that he most deplored and that were most conspicuously absent from his daily life: a style that might have found favour among some of the woollier of the neo-platonists whom he admired, but that would have cut little ice with Socrates or Aristotle. No matter. He wrote, as he earnestly believed, under divine guidance. The gods were always with him, inspiring his tongue, directing his pen, for ever ready with a sign of encouragement or warning to lead him in the path of righteousness and truth. Never, one suspects, never for a single second, did he bethink himself that he might be wrong, or that the old religion might not, after all, prevail.

  It appeared, on the other hand, in no great hurry to do so. In the summer of 362 Julian transferred his capital to Antioch, in preparation for the Persian expedition that he was preparing for the following year; and as he marched through the heartland of Asia Minor - covering the 700 miles in something under six weeks - he was concerned to note that the Christian communities, having overcome their initial fears that the Emperor might institute a new wave of persecutions, had settled down as before and were showing no sign whatever of tearing each other to bits; nor were the pagans - who represented an almost infinite variety of beliefs, from the primitive animism of the peasantry to the arcane mysteries evolved by the neo-platonist intellectuals - noticeably stronger or more cohesive than in Constantine's day. (The overwhelming majority of them probably practised no religion at all, or did so more out of respect for tradition than any real spiritual conviction.) In vain did Julian journey from temple to temple, personally officiating at one sacrifice after another until he was nicknamed 'the butcher' by his subjects. In vain did he try to impose upon his fellow-pagans an organized priesthood with its own hierarchy on the Christian model, urging them to establish hospitals and
orphanages, even monasteries and convents, in order, as it were, to beat the Christians at their own game. The prevailing apathy was unshakeable. Ruefully, Julian himself told the local citizens the story of his visit to the great festival of Apollo, held annually at Daphne, the rich residential suburb of Antioch:

  I hurried there from the temple of Zeus Kasios, believing that at Daphne if anywhere I should enjoy the sight of your wealth and public spirit. And, like a man seeing visions in a dream, I pictured to myself what a procession it would be - the beasts for the sacrifice, the libations, the choruses in honour of the god, the incense, and the youth of your city gathered about the sacred precinct, their souls dressed in reverence and they themselves clothed in white raiment. But when I entered the shrine I found neither incense, nor barley-cake, nor a single beast for sacrifice . . . And when I enquired what sacrifice the city proposed to offer to celebrate the annual festival of the god, the priest answered: 'I have brought from my own house a goose as an offering, but the city has so far made no preparations.'1

  If the pagans could not be galvanized into life, there was no alternative but to increase the pressure on the Christians; and on 17 June 362 Julian published an edict which, innocuous though it appeared at first sight, struck a body-blow at the Christian faith. For any schoolteacher, it declared, the first and most important requirement was an irreproachable moral character. In consequence, no teacher would henceforth be permitted to follow his calling without first obtaining the approval of his local city council and, through that, of the Emperor himself. In an explanatory circular Julian made it clear that in his view no Christian who professed to teach the classical authors - who in those days occupied virtually all the school curriculum - could possibly be of the required moral standard, since he would be teaching subjects in which he did not himself believe. He must consequently abjure either his livelihood or his faith.

  This edict has been denounced by Christian writers down the ages as the most heinous of Julian's crimes against the Church. Even in his own day, the pagan Ammianus Marcellinus considered that it 'deserved to be buried in eternal silence'. Its effects, moreover, were felt far beyond the academic world. Christian demonstrations were held in protest, and there were riots when, on discovering that the temple of Apollo at Daphne had been defiled by the burial within its precincts of a Christian martyr (ironically enough, at the command of Julian's own brother Gallus), the Emperor ordered its exhumation and removal. On this latter occasion, several of the demonstrators were arrested. They were later released, though only after at least one of them had been put to the torture; but on 26 October the whole temple was burnt to the ground. Julian retaliated by closing down the Great Church of Antioch, confiscating all its gold plate.

  Tension was now rising fast. Further incidents followed and, as the situation began to escalate, more than one hot-blooded young Christian

  1 Misopogon, 361-1.

  courted - and achieved - martyrdom. There were, to be sure, no out-and-out persecutions of the kind that had been seen under Decius or Diocletian; but Julian - whose emotional stability was a good deal more uncertain than either of theirs - would have been fully capable of instituting such persecutions had he thought them necessary. It was a blessed day indeed for the Christians when, on 5 March 363, he set off for the East at the head of some 90,000 men, never to return alive.

  There was nothing new about the war with Persia. The two vast Empires had been fighting along their common frontier - with occasional deep inroads into each other's territories - for the best part of two and a half centuries. In 298 Galerius's victory over King Narses had theoretically ensured forty years of peace; but in 363 Narses's second successor, Shapur II, had decided to take his revenge. Shapur was at the time fifty-four years old, and had occupied the Persian throne for the same period - technically, indeed, a little longer, since he is perhaps the only monarch in all history to have been crowned in utero. The quotation from Gibbon is irresistible:

  The wife of Hormouz remained pregnant at the time of her husband's death, and the uncertainty of the sex, as well as of the event, excited the ambitious hopes of the princes of the house of Sassan. The apprehensions of civil war were at length removed by the positive assurance of the Magi that the widow of Hormouz had conceived, and would safely produce a son. Obedient to the voice of superstition, the Persians prepared, without delay, the ceremony of his coronation. A royal bed, on which the queen lay in state, was exhibited in the midst of the palace; the diadem was placed on the spot which might be supposed to conceal the future heir of Artaxerxes, and the prostrate satraps adored the majesty of their invisible and insensible sovereign.

  It had been fortunate for Constantius that for much of the 350s, when he had been busy in Gaul with the revolt of Magnentius and its aftermath, Shapur too had been occupied elsewhere. For the rest of his reign, however, both before and after that period, the Persian King had caused him almost constant anxiety. The climax came in 359 when, after a prolonged siege, Shapur captured the key fortress of Amida - the present Turkish city of Diyarbekir, which controlled both the headwaters of the Tigris and the approaches to Asia Minor from the East - and went on from there to build up a dangerously strong position in Upper Mesopotamia. By now, therefore, a major Roman offensive was essential if the situation were not to get seriously out of hand; and Julian - conscious as he was of following in the footsteps of Pompey, Trajan and Septimius Severus and even, there is reason to suspect, believing that he might be the reincarnation of Alexander the Great himself - was impatient to achieve similar glory.

  His road ran first of all due east, by way of Beroea - the modern Aleppo - where he slaughtered a white bull on the acropolis as a tribute to Zeus. At Hieropolis he wheeled slightly to the north, crossing the Euphrates and the present Syrian-Turkish frontier - possibly to perform a further sacrifice at the great temple of the Moon at Carrhae, now Harran. From here he followed the flow of the rivers: first the Belikh as far as Raqqa and then the Euphrates itself to the point, just south of Baghdad, where it comes to within some thirty miles of the Tigris and where the army was able to take one of the several minor waterways linking the two. Thus, after a few minor sieges and skirmishes but no real difficulties, Julian found himself on the west bank of the Tigris, gazing up at the walls of Ctesiphon,1 the Persian capital.

  On the opposite shore, however, occupying the land between those walls and the river, was a Persian army, already drawn up and ready for battle; and the Roman generals were concerned to note that it numbered, besides the normal cavalry, a quantity of elephants - always a powerful weapon, not just because their men had no experience of dealing with them but because their smell terrified the horses to the point of panic. None the less, Julian gave the order to advance across the river. The first attempt to land on the further bank was repulsed; but the second, with the whole weight of the army behind it, succeeded and battle was joined. It ended - to the surprise of many on both sides - in an overwhelming victory for Roman arms. According to Ammianus, who was there and who took part in the fighting, 2,500 Persians were killed at the cost of a mere seventy Roman lives.

  The date was 29 May; already by the next day, however, suddenly and without warning, the situation had changed. Doubt and uncertainty spread over the Roman camp. Within the space of a week, the siege of Ctesiphon was abandoned - almost before it had begun - and the army was thinking only of retreat. What had happened? There was much talk among Julian's apologists about Persian skulduggery, and it may well have been a trick of some kind that led him to order the burning of his considerable river fleet - though how much good this would have been to him on his return journey upstream is open to question. But the most

  1 Now a must spectacular ruin, some twenty miles south-cast of Baghdad.

  likely explanation - and that given by Ammianus, who should know - is that the Emperor had at last been brought face to face with military realities: that Ctesiphon was virtually impregnable, and that Shapur's main army - larger by far than that wh
ich had just been defeated — was rapidly approaching. And there was another problem too: despite the recent victory, morale in the Roman army was dangerously low. Food was short, the Persians having pursued a scorched-earth policy for miles around; the rivers were all in flood, with the result that the men were floundering from one quagmire to the next; the heat was murderous; and the flies, Ammianus tells us, were so thick that they blotted out the light of the sun. Julian, he goes on, was still in favour of advancing further into Persian territory; but his generals refused. Even had they themselves been willing, they knew that they could never have persuaded their men to follow. On 16 June the retreat began.

  Continually, remorselessly harried by the Persian cavalry, the army trudged back to the north-west along the left bank of the Tigris. Then, on 26 June, when it had reached a point a short distance downstream from Samarra, it suddenly came under heavy attack. Once again the dreaded elephants were brought into action, once again the air was thick with spears and arrows. Without pausing to strap on his breastplate, Julian plunged into the thick of the fray, shouting encouragement to his men as he fought in their midst; and just as the tide of battle was turning and the Persians were beginning to retreat, a flying spear struck him in the side. Trying to pull it out, he succeeded only in severing the sinews of his right hand; meanwhile, those nearest him lifted him from the ground where he had fallen and carried him to his tent. The spear was extracted from deep in his liver, but the damage was done. He died just before midnight.1