These imperial tics, however, were only the symptoms of imperial decay. The real source of the contagion as far as Julian was concerned was Christianity. Persecution had clearly not worked in the past, and he saw no need for it now Internal feuds had racked the religion for decades, and all he had to do was to encourage it to destroy itself. Publishing an edict of toleration, he invited all the exiled Christians back to their homes and sat back to watch the Arian and Nicene factions tear each other apart. Paganism, he was sure, was the superior religion, and, given a choice, his people would willingly return to it. After quickly lifting the ban on pagan practices, he crisscrossed the empire, reopening temples and conducting so many sacrifices that his bemused subjects nicknamed him “the Butcher.”
It was all to no avail. Paganism was a spent force only dimly half-remembered by its former adherents, and no amount of public prodding would bring it back. Impatiently, Julian decided to turn up the pressure by announcing that pagans were to be preferred over Christians for the appointment of public offices. When this failed to have the desired effect, he made it known that violence against Christians would not be prosecuted. After several bishops had been lynched, the emperor escalated it even further, forbidding Christians from teaching in the empire’s schools.
Most of the best philosophers and teachers were by this time Christian, and their disenfranchisement came as a severe blow to Byzantines of every class. Even Julian’s friends thought he had gone too far, and his usually flattering biographer, Ammianus Marcellinus, called it “a harsh measure better buried in eternal silence.”* But none of these Draconian measures, animal sacrifices, or scolding letters exhorting his pagan subjects to resume their faith seemed to have any effect. Something else was needed.
Constantine had Christianized the empire by winning the battle of the Milvian Bridge, and Julian thought that he could therefore reverse it with a great victory for paganism. An appropriate enemy was readily available in the hostile power of Persia, which was even now attacking the cities of the East.* The campaign against them was long overdue. Julian’s famous uncle had wanted to crown his career with a great victory against Persia, and now Julian would complete that task—not to vindicate Christianity, but to destroy it.
In the spring of 362, he set off on a tour bound for Antioch, the glittering metropolis of the East, to plan his campaign. When he reached the city, its citizens welcomed him with open arms. Used to the splendor and luxury of the imperial court, they were soon bitterly disappointed by the austere emperor and his endless censorious speeches castigating them for their lack of faith. Plummeting popularity and barely muted grumbling, however, had no effect on Julian, and he continued his attempt to revive paganism. Messengers were sent to Delphi, with instructions to ask the oracle for a prophecy. Delphi was the most famous oracle in the Roman world, and its priestess’s chewing on laurel leaves and inhaling fumes had been relaying Apollo’s messages for over a thousand years, but the ancient world was gone, and the answer the oracle gave was the last one ever recorded. “Tell the king,” she said, “on earth has fallen the glorious dwelling, and the water springs that spoke are quenched and dead. Not a cell is left the god, no roof, no cover. In his hand the prophet laurel flowers no more.”† It was a fitting epitaph—had he only known it—to Julian’s attempt to repaganize the empire.
The emperor, however, stubbornly refused to give up. If paganism wouldn’t recover, then Christianity must be crushed. Christ had prophesied that the Jewish temple wouldn’t be rebuilt until the end times, and in order to disprove this and cast Jesus as a false prophet, he ordered it to be rebuilt. Work started quickly enough, but an earthquake (and, according to Christian sources, “great balls of fire”) shattered the foundations, forcing the terrified overseers to abandon the project. Tempers were rising daily, and in Antioch the mood had become dangerously seditious. Matters weren’t improved when the emperor paid a visit to inspect the city’s famous temple of Apollo. Disgusted to learn that a Christian martyr had been buried within its precincts, Julian tactlessly ordered the body exhumed immediately. Outraged riots swept the city, and order was only restored when he forcibly arrested and executed several Christian agitators. A few weeks later, a pagan worshipper left candles burning unattended in the temple, and the entire structure caught fire and burned to the ground.
Blaming the conflagration on the city’s Christian population, Julian closed their cathedral and confiscated their gold plate, using it to pay the soldiers he was gathering. By this point, the city was on the brink of revolt, and he was even losing the support of his pagan subjects. Mocked openly in the streets for his beard and his anti-Christian measures, every day seemed to bring both sides closer to the breaking point.* Finally, in March 363, Julian’s great army was ready, and to everyone’s immense relief he gave the order to march east.
The campaign against Persia had all the markings of a tragedy even before it began. The idealistic young emperor was determined to find the glory that would refurbish the tattered standard of his religion in a vain and unnecessary war, regardless of the cost. Nothing seemed to go right, but Julian stubbornly pressed on. The Persians offered little resistance, doing their best to keep out of the way of the superior Byzantine force, but the locals diverted rivers to flood the army’s path, and it was high summer before Julian reached the Persian capital of Ctesiphon. Julian’s Gaulish troops were unused to the heat, and Ctesiphon’s high walls couldn’t be taken without a long siege. With the burning sun beating down on them, constant harrying attacks, and rumors of a large Persian army approaching, Julian was reluctantly persuaded to abandon the attempt.
For ten days, the army stumbled back, suffering incessant skirmishes as their enemies became increasingly bold. Then, on the morning of June 26, the Persians suddenly attacked. Showing his customary bravery, Julian leaped out of his tent and went crashing into the thick of the fray without pausing to fully strap on his armor. There, in the chaos of the battle, he was struck in the side with a spear. His men rushed to him, lifting him up from where he had collapsed in the dust. The spear was quickly pulled out, releasing a gush of blood, and he was carried back to his tent. The wound was washed with wine, but the tip had pierced his liver, and Julian knew it was fatal. There in his tent, with the sounds of battle already receding, he closed his eyes and stopped fighting. Scooping up a handful of his blood, he threw it towards the sun and, according to legend, died with the words “Vícístí Galílaee”* on his lips.
The words were wiser than the dying emperor meant them to be. The old religion was disorganized and decentralized, a fashionable relic for the cultural elite. It couldn’t compete with the personal revelation of Christianity for the hearts and minds of the masses, and its complex jumble of gods and rituals ensured that it was too divided for its partisans to cohesively unite behind it. Even had he lived, Julian wouldn’t have been able to change that—the old world that he had fallen in love with in his youth was irretrievably gone. Hopelessly romantic and frustratingly stubborn, the emperor had squandered his energy and imagination foolishly trying to revive a moribund religion at the expense of the one that would define the empire for the next thousand years. Rome and its polytheistic days belonged firmly in the past, and even Julian’s pagan subjects seemed bewildered by his numerous sacrifices. As one of them dryly put it, “Perhaps it was better that he died, had he come back from the east there would soon have been a scarcity of cattle.”*
His body was brought, ironically enough, to Tarsus, the birthplace of Saint Paul, and the last pagan emperor was laid to rest with all his immense promise unfulfilled. At his death, the Constantinian line came to an end, and the gods of Mount Olympus were consigned to decorative mosaics and whimsical scenes on palace floors to amuse bored emperors.
The vast pagan literature of the classical world, however, didn’t pass away. It was too deeply ingrained in Roman culture, too entwined with intellectual thought, to be so lightly cast off. The future was with Christianity, but no one who considered
him-or herself Roman could completely reject the classical world. Unlike their western counterparts, early Byzantine church fathers recognized the benefits of pagan philosophy, arguing that it contained valuable insights and that careful reading would separate the wheat of moral lessons from the chaff of pagan religion.† Byzantine universities, from Constantinople to the famous Academy of Athens, would preserve and cultivate classical writing throughout the empire’s history, and even the Patriarchal Academy in Constantinople taught a curriculum that included study of the literature, philosophy, and scientific texts of antiquity. This sharply contrasted with the West, where waves of barbarian invasions would shatter civilization and break the bonds with the classical past. In thought and in power, the future was with the East; from now on the world would be ruled from Byzantium.
*True Roman that he was, Julian was also disgusted by the Germanic beer that was consumed in such large quantities by the locals. Referring to the offending brew, he wrote: “I recognize thee not; I know only the son of Zeus [referring to Dionysus, the god of wine]. He smells of nectar, but you smell of goat.”
* The irony here, of course, is that the soldiers who rebelled at the prospect of being summoned east ended up following Julian to Constantinople and then Persia, a clear example of the respect the emperor commanded in his men.
†Marcellinus Ammianus. W. Hamilton, ed. and trans. The Later Roman Empire (AD354–378) (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986).
*In his attempt to roll back the clock, Julian took to sitting among the senators while they deliberated—as Augustus had done—claiming that even he was not above the law. He had no intention, however, of returning to the more collegial rule of the late republic. In his fanatical quest to destroy Christianity, he was among the most heavy-handed of emperors.
*Marcellinus Ammianus. W Hamilton, ed. and trans. The Later Roman Empire (AD 354–378) (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986).
*The Persians looted their way across the frontier, but were unable to sack the major Roman city of Nisibis. Thanks to the prayers of a local bishop, an army of gnats and mosquitoes came to the rescue, biting the trunks of the Persian elephants and driving them mad.
†Wilmer C. Wright, Julian: Volume III (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
*Constantine and his sons had set recent imperial style by remaining cleanshaven, but Julian, perhaps in homage to the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, proudly wore one. He passed his time in Antioch writing two books: Misopogon and Against the Galileans. The first, translated as “Beard Hater,” was a withering attack on the people of Antioch, while the second was a scathing critique of Christianity.
*“Thou hast conquered, Galilean”—a reference to the triumph of Christianity.
*Ammianus Marcellinus. The Later Roman Empire (AD 354–378), W. Hamilton, ed. and trans. (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986), p. 298.
†The most famous example of this was the fourth-century father Saint Basil of Caesarea, who wrote a treatise entitled To Young Men, on How They Might Derive Profit from Pagan Literature.
4
BARBARIANS AND CHRISTIANS
Of all the problems that faced the Roman Empire at the end of the fourth century, none was more serious than the barbarian threat. Ever since the days of Augustus, Roman armies had learned to be wary of the dark German forests and bloodcurdling cries across the frozen Rhine. For nearly three hundred years, the barbarians had remained just beyond the borders of the empire, occasionally making raids across the frontier, but for the most part were restrained by their ever-shifting alliances and fear of Roman arms. By the time of Julian the Apostate’s death, however, all that had begun to change. From the east came a new and terrifying power, wild Huns so barbaric that the frightened Germanic tribes ignored the decaying imperial forces guarding the frontiers and came flooding across. This time, however, they came as settlers, not invaders, and the prize they sought was land, not gold. The influx of new people, unwilling to assimilate, provoked an identity crisis within the Roman world and stretched the creaking empire to its breaking point. The pressure would redefine what it meant to be a Roman and nearly bring down the classical world.
The particular genius of Rome had always been in its conception of citizenship, a fact made more extraordinary since it came of age in a world which more often than not restricted citizenship to individual cities. Fifth-century Greece, which had so dazzled the Mediterranean with its brilliance, remained at its heart a patchwork collection of city-states, and for all its glory could never quite transform a Spartan into an Athenian or an Athenian into a Spartan. Locked firmly behind their walls, the cities were unable to refresh themselves, and after a few remarkable generations the luster all too quickly burned itself out. The Romans, on the other hand, had expanded the concept beyond the narrow confines of a single city, spreading citizenship in the wake of its legions. Athens in all its splendid exclusivity had remained just a city; Rome had embraced the world.
Yet for all the empire’s inclusiveness, the Romans tended to look down their noses at the peoples just beyond their borders. Those outside of the Roman orbit lacked citizenship and were therefore barbarians, uncivilized regardless of their cultural achievements. Of course, the astute among them realized that their own ancestors had once been considered as barbaric as the tribes beyond the Rhine and were perfectly aware that a few centuries in the imperial melting pot had made Romans of them all. The most recent flood of newcomers, however, seemed different. The empire had always been able to absorb new people into its expanding body, and the immigrants had proved more often than not to be a source of strength, but times had changed. The empire was now on the defensive, and the Germanic peoples crossing its borders wanted its land, not its culture. They were coming on their own terms, unwilling to be absorbed, speaking their own languages, and retaining their distinct cultures. The influx of new blood was no longer the source of strength it had always been. For many of those watching the traditions of millennia getting swept away, the strangers seemed like a frightening wave threatening to overwhelm the empire.
It would have been difficult at the best of times to absorb the sheer volume of newcomers, but, unfortunately for the empire, this massive wave of immigration came at a time when remarkably shortsighted rulers sat on the imperial throne. There had been a depressing decrease in quality ever since Julian’s death. His immediate successor had left a brazier burning in his tent one night and suffocated only eight months into his reign, and this left the throne to a pair of rather boorish brothers named Valentinian and Valens, who split the empire between them and tried to shore up the crumbling frontiers. Valentinian, the older of the two, managed to keep the West together for eleven years, while at the same time maintaining a restraining influence on the brash young Valens, but he could never control his own temper and suffered a fatal aneurysm in the midst of a characteristic rant. His sixteen-year-old son, Gratian, inherited the throne but was too young to assert himself, and this left the mercurial Valens as the driving force behind imperial policy.
With the Roman stage conspicuously empty of statesmen, the Visigoths and Ostrogoths asked permission to settle in Roman territory. They had left the frozen lands of Germany and Scandinavia behind and had come in search of new lands, something the fertile Eastern Empire seemed to have in abundance. They promised to provide troops in exchange for land, and the emperor obligingly agreed, allowing two hundred thousand Goths to cross into imperial territory and lumber toward their new homes in Thrace.
In theory, Valens’s plan to bolster the depleted imperial army with Germanic troops and at the same time repopulate devastated lands was an excellent idea, but it was doomed from the start. There was no way that the eastern government could handle such a staggering influx of immigrants, and Valens hardly even bothered to try. Shipments of food promised to the Goths arrived rotten or of such low quality as to be barely edible. Local merchants fleeced the starving newcomers, and several magistrates even started kidnapping them and selling them into slave
ry. Provoked beyond endurance, the Goths erupted in revolt.
Valens, whose shortsighted policies had largely been responsible for the debacle in the first place, wrote to his nephew Gratian to plan a joint campaign and set off in August 378 along the Via Egnatia with an army forty thousand strong, determined to teach the newcomers a lesson. As he approached the Gothic camp near Adrianople, he got an erroneous report that the Goths numbered only ten thousand, and he decided to attack at once without checking to see if the report was true. Throwing caution to the wind in his desire to prevent Gratian from sharing in the glory of vanquishing the Goths, he plunged forward with the entire army. It was a disastrous mistake. The day was unseasonably hot, and the Romans were parched, exhausted from their long march, and in no condition to fight. The Ostrogothic cavalry mercilessly swept down on them, easily splitting their ranks and cutting off all hope of escape. By the time the carnage ended, Valens, two-thirds of his army, and the myth of Roman invincibility lay trampled under the blood-soaked Gothic hooves.
Lost to the West Page 5
