The Philosopher Prince

by Paul Waters

  ‘Quite a show,’ said Oribasius, raising his black brows, ‘you look almost like an emperor.’

  Julian grinned. ‘Thank Malchos here.’ The slave, a dark-eyed Syrian, fluttered his hand as if to say it was all part of a day’s work. I smiled to see it. Julian never forgot such people.

  ‘The crowd will like it,’ said Oribasius, walking around him and eyeing the gleaming, heavy robes.

  ‘Ah! The crowd. Sooner give me the German frontier, where I know my enemy.’ Forgetting to hold still he stepped forward, then quickly reached up and touched at the headgear. ‘Is this on right? By heaven, I hardly dare move. I feel like a trussed-up peacock.’

  The people in the room laughed; but Julian looked grimly ahead at the sunlit stairwell. He was always uneasy with the urban crowd, saying they were like an untamed beast, fickle and dangerous. He liked to claim he got this from his beloved Plato; but in truth I think it was mostly that he was shy, and preferred the company of a few good friends who shared his mind.

  Oribasius said, ‘If you keep still it won’t fall off. The people have come for a spectacle, and you are part of it. They expect to see a god among men.’

  Julian frowned and drew down his brows. ‘Then what they want is a lie. An emperor ought to be no more than a citizen, a man among equals.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Oribasius, sighing. This was a familiar point between them. ‘Once perhaps it was so… But now is not the time for such experiments; the people cleave to their myths, and besides—’ But the rest of his words were lost in a blare of trumpets echoing from outside.

  ‘It is time,’ said the master of ceremonies.

  ‘And soon may it end,’ muttered Julian.

  He took a step forward, then turned to me, hoping, I suppose, to defer the final moment. ‘Tell me, Drusus, what can be more purposeless than spending the day watching chariots circle a track?’

  ‘Go!’ I said laughing; and at this he smiled back. Then he drew his breath, like a diving-boy about to leap from a high rock, and slowly mounted the flight of sun-dappled steps.

  The rest of us watched his shadow recede. My short-cropped hair prickled on the back of my neck. On this moment, as Julian knew more than anyone, his whole future hung. If he could not carry Vienne he could not carry Gaul, and, without that, the other provinces would surely not follow. This was the citizens’ chance to reject him.

  The shadow disappeared. There was a terrible silence. Then it began, a great sweeping rising roar, like the onset of battle or a torrent in a flood. It filled the chamber of the anteroom, resounding off the walls, until we could no longer hear our own voices, or our relieved laughter. But we knew what to do, and at the tribune’s signal we climbed the steps, emerging into the glare of daylight and the great open bowl of the hippodrome. All around, the people were cheering, arms raised in salute, their bright-coloured ribbons – red and white and green and blue – streaming from their hands. And at the rail stood Julian, with palms upturned, accepting with the traditional gesture their joyful cries of acclamation.

  In January the holy day fell which the Christians call Epiphany. The bishop of Vienne, a tall, coarse-featured man who dressed expensively and affected a learned air, made it clear he expected Julian to attend the rite.

  ‘I shall not go,’ declared Julian to his friends. ‘I cannot continue this pretence. Men will condemn me as a hypocrite.’

  ‘You have only twenty-three thousand men,’ said Eutherius. ‘There are Christians among them.’

  ‘What of it? Most are not.’

  ‘Those that are not accept you as you already are. It is not the time to stir a dog that slumbers.’

  Julian turned to Marcellus. ‘You are not a Christian,’ he said. ‘Nor are you, Drusus. And the men do not complain.’

  ‘But,’ said Eutherius patiently, ‘Marcellus is not Augustus.’

  Julian frowned. ‘Surely they know by now.’

  Oribasius, who was also present, said, ‘You have declared nothing in public. People believe what they want to believe.’

  ‘Moreover,’ said Eutherius, ‘at every city along the route east, there will be Christians – and powerful bishops to urge them on. If you anger the bishop here, the others will soon know of it, of that you can be sure. No; too much is in the balance. You cannot afford to find gates closed against you.’

  ‘Andthus,’ said Julian bitterly, ‘bishops rule even emperors.’

  But he attended the rite, walking in procession with the smiling, nodding bishop and his acolytes, past the majestic empty temples with their neglected rain-stained facing, like a man on his way to have a tooth drawn.

  I do not know if it was this day that made up his mind to go against Eutherius’s advice; but shortly after, Julian issued the first of his edicts on religion. Constantius had forbidden, upon pain of death, the worship of the old gods. Henceforth, decreed Julian, men’s consciences were free; their minds were their own, and they might worship as they chose. Truth, though one, was many-faceted. It was not for him, nor for any man or any bishop, to dictate its aspect to others.

  The bishop of Vienne did not agree. I was with Julian and Eutherius in the great library of the imperial palace, a vaulted light-filled room of book-niches and pink-veined marble columns, which Julian had made his workroom, when he was announced.

  The bishop appeared at the far door and for a moment paused and stared. He had lost his bland, complacent look. His face was pinched and harassed.

  ‘I have heard a most troubling rumour,’ he cried, hurrying across the vast room. ‘No doubt it is nothing more than foolish tittle-tattle, but I have been questioned on it, and thought it best to visit you in person, and lay the matter to rest.’

  His eyes passed over the rows of books with a look of disdain, and then settled on Julian, who was dressed, as usual, in his plain soldier’s tunic. Against the bishop’s heavy embroidered robe, woven with gold and purple, he might have been one of the servants, or a broad-shouldered minor librarian.

  ‘What is it that you have heard?’ enquired Julian pleasantly.

  ‘That you intend to oppress your own church. It is absurd, of course. The noble Julian is a nephew of the holy Constantine, after all.’

  ‘Indeed it is absurd,’ said Julian. ‘I intend to oppress no one – no one at all.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Yet you are willing to tolerate heretics, and the pagan worshippers of idols.’

  ‘I leave each man free to worship as he will, without fear of persecution.’

  The bishop drew in his breath and glared. In a scandalized tone he said, ‘Then it is true… Must I remind you that idolaters are an offence to God?’

  ‘If that is so, then persuade them by your words and by your example, as Christ himself did. Use the power of your arguments, Bishop, if you have any. But I will not permit men to be dispossessed merely because they do not agree with you, or dragged against their will to your altars.’

  The bishop’s eyes narrowed. ‘These are nothing but a sophist’s quibbles,’ he cried. ‘Men must be compelled.’ ‘By violence?’

  ‘The sick man does not always welcome the cure.’

  Julian paused, and for a long moment the two men looked at one another, uncomprehending, like two figures across an unbridgeable ravine. As for me, a chill had settled on my heart. I had heard such words before, from the bishop of London, on the day I stood as a young tribune in his ornate palace, listening powerless as he announced to me the triumph of unreason.

  ‘The sword or the flame,’ said Julian eventually, ‘does not change a man’s opinion; I should have thought that you of all people, who venerate a long line of saints and martyrs, would have learned that lesson. Or has power made you forget your humanity and your compassion? Power is a strong wine, Bishop; take heed that you do not grow drunk on it.’

  But I could tell from the bishop’s flushed, hard-set face that he had ceased to listen. He waved Julian’s words aside with a snap of his hand, like a man sweeping a trouble
some insect from before his eyes. In a stubborn, flat tone he said, ‘God gave us power for a purpose.’

  ‘Perhaps you are right. But God gave us reason also, to know how to use that power wisely. There is nothing good for man that is not affirmed by choice. I will govern an empire of citizens, not slaves; men who may speak freely, without fear and without compulsion – as you yourself do now, here, with me.’

  The bishop eyed him. ‘The Evil One deceives you. I will pray for you.’ And then he turned and left, strutting discontentedly out in his shining robes.

  Julian watched him depart.

  ‘You should not bait him,’ said Eutherius.

  ‘No? – Well; perhaps not. But they will not be content until they have extinguished every glimmer of contrary belief. Intolerance is at the very heart of their piety.’

  We spent that winter waiting for fresh word from Constantius.

  The new prefect, quiet dark-faced Nebridius, Constantius’s nominee, had travelled south with us from Paris. I felt sorry for him: he was a decent, honourable man placed in an impossible position; and though Julian was careful to treat him with courtesy, and permitted him to carry out the duties of his office, he dared not trust him – and Nebridius knew it.

  He must also have known, for he was no stranger to the ways of the court, that Constantius would never again trust him either. Thus caught between Scylla and Charybdis, he came to Julian and offered to resign. Julian thanked him, and asked him to remain. Partly this was out of affection: he liked Nebridius and they had always got on well enough; but partly too it was policy, for he knew, if he allowed him to go, that Constantius would assume Julian had driven Nebridius from office.

  So Nebridius remained, and acted as any man of honour when forced into such a situation: he stayed loyal to his principles and trusted to his old Etruscan breeding, performing his duties diligently and refusing to be drawn into intrigue, either against Julian or against Constantius. And, as always with such men, there were those who hated him for it.

  Marcellus and I passed the fallow time of winter riding out along the valley, and up into the hills with their oak and ash trails. Returning from our happy expeditions to the pink-stone city beside the Rhone, I wondered if word had finally come from Constantius. But each time there was nothing, and as the weeks passed Julian’s well-meant hope of a settlement hardened into contempt.

  He talked more often now of feelings he had kept buried: of how Constantius had slaughtered his family and left him to grow up an imprisoned orphan; he recalled the loneliness and fear of his childhood, and how he had been summoned from his happy life among the professors at Athens, where he was no threat to anyone, and sent to Gaul, only to be blamed for his success – which, as he saw it now, had been his undoing.

  Then, at last, when the fruit trees in the meadows beside the Rhone were showing their first spring blossom and the green slopes of the hills were speckled with yellow flowers, a messenger arrived from the East.

  Marcellus came to find me. I was with a young infantry tribune, reviewing an inventory of new weapons from the workshops of Gaul and Spain. He glanced round the door, threw me a secret smile, and waited till the tribune had left with the scrolls in his arms.

  ‘What news?’ I asked, as he strode in across the marble floor. ‘Will Constantius settle? He has kept us waiting long enough.’

  ‘I think that was his intention,’ he said. His hair, which he had let grow during the winter, had lately been trimmed to a bronze fuzz, soft to the touch, exposing his ears and the white nape of his neck. He ran his hand to it, then looked vaguely surprised that his mane of winter hair had gone.

  ‘Constantius sent one of his tame bishops – a prosing old fool who brought nothing new at all. He says Julian must renounce the title of Augustus; he must dismiss the men he has appointed, surrender himself, and trust in the hope of a pardon.’

  ‘A pardon?’ I cried. ‘Constantius has shown what his pardons are worth!’

  ‘Yes; that’s what everyone is saying. He has delayed us with excuses while he prepares his forces. He intends to destroy us.’

  We found Julian standing over the great square map-table in the library. Nevitta was beside him, his face set in an expression of tight-jawed outrage. As we arrived, Jovinus and Dagalaif strode in from a far door. Eutherius was there too. I had not noticed him at first. He was sitting apart, in a patch of shade beside a pool of brilliant southern sunlight, with his large hands folded on the lap of his turquoise robe.

  Though no one was speaking, I had the sense that we had walked into the midst of an argument. Turning to me Julian said, ‘Has Marcellus told you? – Good. But listen, there is more.’

  He took up a heavy formal-looking letter that lay open on the table. I recognized the imperial seal. ‘Our agents,’ he said, passing the document, ‘have intercepted this. Constantius is urging the barbarians to break their treaties and invade Gaul.’

  I glanced at the letter. It was directed to a German chieftain by the name of Vadomar, who held territory in Raetia.

  ‘He has done so before,’ I said, and I mentioned the destruction Constantius had brought to Gaul in his war against Magnentius, when he had invited the German tribes in.

  Julian nodded vigorously, in the way he did when he was agitated. He hardly needed reminding of it. He had spent the past five years trying to repair the damage.

  ‘It is a deliberate insult!’ Nevitta burst out, with such sudden vehemence that for a moment everyone looked at him surprised.

  From his chair against the wall Eutherius said calmly, ‘An insult perhaps; but there is sense in it also, if we look with a clear head. You cannot leave Gaul with Vadomar at your back, and Constantius knows it. He intends to pin you down until he is ready to march against you.’

  Julian turned to the map that lay spread out on the table. For a moment he considered it. ‘How soon can we have men at the Raetian frontier?’

  ‘Ten days,’ answered Nevitta. He stepped up and jabbed his finger at the map, indicating the road that ran northeast beside the Rhone towards the hills of Raetia. ‘The Petulantes know the terrain. Let my man Libino lead them. He is ready… and we have waited long enough!’ He raised his head and threw a hostile glance at Eutherius. ‘Or do you say we should delay, even now?’

  All through winter the two men had argued, with Nevitta saying the army should strike east as soon as the passes were clear; and Eutherius gently advocating restraint while there was any chance of a settlement with Constantius. In the midst of this dispute Eutherius had said privately to me, in a rare moment when he allowed his exasperation to show, ‘Really, Drusus, our friend Nevitta is not one of nature’s listeners. He has never left the West: he has no conception of the forces Constantius commands.’

  I agreed. I did not say that Nevitta would have disliked Eutherius whatever the cause, or with no cause. Nevitta had been reared in the rough world of the frontier camps. He had a German father; but his features – dark hair and a pointed vole-like face – he got from his mother, who was said to have been a Syrian camp courtesan. His education consisted only in learning to fight and kill; he regarded Eutherius as a bizarre offence against nature, whose silken words, epicene manner and flamboyant dress outraged his very idea of manhood.

  Of course he took care that Julian saw none of this; and, indeed, his dissembling in Julian’s presence was the only true self-control I ever observed in Nevitta. But he was less careful among his loud beer-drinking friends in the cavalry mess, as Marcellus knew, having been there and seen it for himself.

  Eutherius, I imagine, knew too; for he made it his business to know what lay behind all undercurrents of bad feeling. But he was too polished, too much the politician, and too used to ignorant men, to allow himself to let it show.

  Now he returned Nevitta’s glare with an urbane smile. ‘You are quite right, my dear Nevitta; there is no question that Vadomar must be dealt with. As for Constantius, he doubtless means to unsettle us, and if he is fortunate, to cause us to
dispute among ourselves.’

  He paused in case Nevitta missed the point; then continued, ‘So by all means make war on Vadomar. But let us remember also what Constantius’s great weakness is.’

  ‘Well?’ said Nevitta crossly. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Prevarication.’

  Nevitta’s face went vacant.

  ‘He delays… He cannot make up his mind. Decisiveness is alien to him. Vadomar is a distraction – but we must not let our outrage deflect us from our strategy.’

  Nevitta sniffed, disliking Eutherius’s tone. He would save his criticisms for later, in the mess room.

  Then Julian said, ‘Very well, we will send your man Libino to Raetia. Marcellus, go with him. Let Vadomar – and Constantius – see that we do not mean to be taken for fools.’

  Two days later, on a clear, chill morning, I climbed the citadel hill that looks out over Vienne, mounting alone the stepped stone path behind the theatre. From the summit, standing on the porch of the temple, I watched the army depart, with Libino at the head of the column and Marcellus riding beside him.

  The night before, Nevitta had held one of his banquets. Marcellus, who hated them, had attended, because to be absent would have been noticed. Nevitta expected his officers to join in his drunken feasts. But he had returned as soon as he could, and had come to bed saying, ‘Libino will have a thick head tomorrow. He was only just getting started when I left.’

  ‘That sounds like Libino.’

  Libino was one of Nevitta’s strutting young bloods, newly promoted – by Nevitta – and eager to prove himself. I propped myself up on the pillow, watching Marcellus pull off his clothes. I could smell the wood-smoke and wine on him.

  ‘Still,’ he said, padding over to the lampstand in his bare feet and pinching out the flame, ‘it is only a fool who celebrates the victory before the battle. I was sitting beside Jovinus. He says the Petulantes are not happy.’

  ‘Well, everyone knows Jovinus wanted to lead them. He thinks he should have been promoted over Libino.’