it; ■ '■■\\ .&^' ""■■ c^"' .j:^ ,<^ -^^^ ^v^^ ^. c"^^^ ,-i> .S .^>'•^^ <^^"^^: V > ^y. v^^ -^ ' 'f. '^>. .^^'~ .-S^-"^. S^ ■^. V "'! _ "^ . '~'^JA/^ ■J- .. ^^^ -^.^" ^■^.. ..^%, .^:^^% "^z <^' ^r ■<-' '-is ->' o.\ 'v" c^"^^' ^\v.v ' '^ .^^ 0' ^^ V^^ ^' * o^ ^^'^^. 1 '^ is' b '^;^^.-^G^ A^ c'^ "^ct- - i' -^ _<$^v\r ^l- ' 8 1 -V V V^ s^:^ ^ c:^^' :^ i:(^v .= .^'^ *;^^^ o>^ '^^ ..r .0 o ,-^" ■:>-^r> ^^^^m ^. >a\' -.S" >^' -'-^ ^ .^" ^.^, '> Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive in 2010 with funding from Tine Library of Congress http://www.archive.org/details/emperorjulianOOrend THE EMPEROR JULIAN PAGANISM AND CHEISTIANITY WITH GENEALOGICAL, CHRONOLOGICAL AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDICES. BEING THE HULSEAN ESSAY FOR THE YEAR 1876. BV GERALD HENRY RENDALL, M.A. FEtLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. DEIGHTON, BELL, AND CO. LONDON: GEORGE BELL AND SONS. 1879 <: PATRI CARISSIMO CVI REFERO ACQEPTVM SI QVID VEL POTVI VEL POTERO HAS DEDICO PRIMITIAS THE LAST OBACLE A.D. 361. EiVare t0 ^aaikrfC, xo-P-o-l iriae daldaXos avXd' ovKiri ^ol^os ^xet Ka\6j3av, ov /j.dvTi8a McpvTjv, ov trayav 'Kakiovaav aTrea^ero Kal \d\ov vdaip. Dark the shrine and dumb the fount of song thence welling, Save for words more sad than tears of blood, that said : Tell the king, on earth has fallen the glorious divelling, And the watersprings that spake are quenched and dead. Not a cell is left the God, no roof, no cover; In his hand the prophet laurel flowers no more. And the great king's high sad heart, thy true last lover, Felt thine answer pierce and cleave it to the core. And he bowed down his hopeless head In the drift of the wild world's tide, And dying. Thou hast conquered, he said, Galilean; he said it, and died. PREFACE. I OWE it to the indulgence of the Trustees of Mr Hulse's benefaction that I have been enabled to mend and finish much that was faulty and imperfect in this Essay as sub- mitted more than two years ago to the Examiners. The Introduction — which makes no pretension to research and merely gathered up some thoughts suggested by preliminary reading — has been abridged, and rigorously stripped of all expansions and unnecessary illustrations. What remains of it I have spared rather from tenderness for its prescriptive right to appear in print than from any sense of its intrinsic worth. The body of the work has been treated to pruning here and readjustment there, and to more of augmentation than either. I have not stinted fulness of treatment, more sanguine of making my Essay thorough and true, than popular or entertaining. Chapters ill. and vii. have been so rewritten as* to be almost new, and the same may be said of much of the last Chapter. The Appendices, though prepared in germ, were of course not inflicted upon the first readers of the Essay, and aspire only to be serviceable to this or that special student. Ancient and modern authorities — as the closing Appendix may attest — furnish wide fields for the student of Julian's acts and motives. Through by far the greater part of these I have found time and opportunity to roam. Much as I am in debt to judgments passed by other minds on materials open to all, I trust that no facts are now imported into this Essay which do not find warrant in the pages of the old writers. Whatever in the first scramble of Prize Essay X PREFACE. writing I jotted down at second hand, I have since been able to verify, and according to its proper weight and con- text co-ordinate or exclude. References to the prime au- thorities — to Julian's own works in the margin, to the writings of others in the foot-notes — I have appended freely, but — except where conscious of a direct debt in thought or expression — have not been at ill-spent pains to multiply corroborative citations from later critics. Two hundred years ago the Apostate's career furnished English Pamphleteers with food for piquant and voluminous controversy. A century has run since the great author of The Decline and Fall compiled his masterly narration of Julian's successes and failures : it must remain the wonder and despair of rivals. It seems indeed to have scared com- petitors from the field. French brilliance, German thought, Danish imagination have all had their say, but Gibbon's countrymen have honoured their greatest by silence. It needed some external impulse to call out a successor, and a gentle violence to drive him into print. I can only be grateful that Alma Mater has supplied both incentives for work that has been full of pleasure in the execution. To De Broglie preeminently among Frenchmen, to Neander, to Miicke, to Strauss, and in a less degree to Rode, Semisch and the like among Germans, I tender thanks for the suggestive labours of which I have reaped the fruits, the value and helpfulness of which I inadequately requite by this general acknowledgment. I must close with thanking my friend and brother-fellow Rev. V. H. Stanton of Trinity College for hi§ kindness in reading my proofs as they passed the Press, and aiding me with wise corrections and suggestions. G. H. R. TABLE OF CONTENTS. •pages 1 — 22 PAGE 26 Intboductiok CHAPTEE I. Eeligious Policy of Constantine and Constantius OHAPTEE II. Julian's Boyhood, Youth, Educatiou, and Cassarehip 35 CHAPTEE III. Neo-Platonism 62 CHAPTEE IV. Julian's Theology 74 CHAPTEE V. Julian's Idea of Eeligion ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 103 CHAPTEE VI. Julian's Personal Eeligion ... ... ... ... ... 127 CHAPTEE VII. Julian's Administration ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 150 CHAPTEE VIII. Persecution under Julian ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 176 Section I. Acts of Persecution, p. 176 — 203. Section II. Educational Policy, p. 203—216.. Section III. Estimates of Julian, p. 216 — 227. xil TABLE OF CONTENTS. CHAPTER IX. PAGE Jalian and Chrietiauity 228 CHAPTER X. Julian and HelleniBiii ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 240 CHAPTER XI. Vioisti Galilaee 1 264 Appendix A. Genealogical Table of the family of ConBtantius Chlorus 280 Appendix B. Chronological Tables of Julian's life 281 Appendix C. Synopsis of Literature upon Julian 231 INTRODUCTION. R. E. INTKODUCTION. § 1. Roman Religion. The birth of Christ sounded the knell of Paofanism. Though Inteobtjo- from distant and despised Judsea the wailing of the ban- .' shee was inaudible to Roman Paganism, at almost the same Homan time the ancient religion of Rome underwent a final revolu- ^'^^^^ tion. Old faiths had long been refluent. At the close of the Republic they were abandoned and replaced by new. The inauguration of the Empire of Rome synchronizes in some sort, and by no means accidentally, with an abdication of Em- pire by the old gods. Amid the varying types of Paganism, representing sometimes Greek eestheticism, sometimes Scy- thian savagery, sometimes Oriental sensuousness, sometimes Egyptian repose, it had been the pride of Roman Paganism 1. patri- to be above all else patriotic. Lacking the exuberant rich- ° ^'^ ness of Hellenic art and poetry, spurning alike the mystic piety and the voluptuous self-abandonment of the hot East, it strove with characteristic earnestness and consistency to be intensely national. Even before the Republic fell the power and the genius of the primitive religion died utterly out, Rome haughty, self-reliant, mistress of the world, needed no longer the aid of gods to win her victories ; the soul of Roman religion had evaporated, and the young Empire proclaimed its disappearance. Before imperialism and cosmopolitanism the very conception of patriotism had withered : it could not breathe or live in that atmosphere. Next after being patriotic Roman religion had been 2. moral. moral : it had personified (such was its one effort of imagi- 4 I^'TOOD^cnoN. ijrrBODTTc- nation) the moral virtues, and set these personified abstrac- TioN, i\qy^q iq superintend every sphere and occupation of life. But in an age of much superficial culture and still more of vast material civilisation, bringing with it luxury and enervation and their habitual concomitants ■widespread social and personal immorality, the homeliness and simplicity of the old faith had been abandoned. Faith, early cramped by the pedantry of a fatuous theology, had first degenerated into formalism, and then fallen an easy prey to rationalism, scepticism or all-pervading Hellenism. As a system of faith extinct, as an agent of morality powerless, as a lever of patriotism decayed, it was chiefly as a political mechanism that the ancient religion sur\'ived. Augur could not face augur without a smile, but neither was the worse augur for that. The old forms were of service still. They subsisted on - ' the strength of their weakness. They were too harmless to evoke opposition : they were too useful to invite abandon- ment. They answered their purpose sufficiently well, and to supply their place would have been tiresome. To the consolidation of Imperial government corresponded a consolidation, so to say, of State religion. We are as- tonished to find Augustus actually taking in hand a religious revival ; and emperor after emperor follows in his suit. Strange to say, when religion seemed most dead, there was a general restoration of temples, a new importance attached to worship and ceremonial, a higher regard for the sacred offices, a refreshed reverence paid to the Gods. This did not mean that the old faith was repossessing its lost dominion, but that a revolution in religion had occurred. Achieved facts received recognition, and religion was openly remodelled in accordance with their teaching. Imperial religion presents as necessary and violent a contrast to the religion of primi- tive Rome, as Imperialism itself to senatorial ' rule. Its sole unity was of a political character. The Emperor's power needed every support that it could find, and religion promised to be one of the most valuable. It was effective as a police agent; it could be conveniently turned to a moral purpose, where policy and morality went hand in hand ; and in a few Imperial- ism and Relifjious Revival. Nature of the Beviral INTRODUCTION. '-) cases its time-honoured prerogatives enabled it to discharge Inteobuc- as effectively and less offensively a censorship which required 1' something more than a statutory sanction. When the monarch became the fountain-head of law and authority, religion contributed its quota to his elevation. It was not enough that the Emperor should be Pontifex Maximus, the head of the religion; not enough that a lineal connexion should be established between the mythical Gods and the Imperial house ; the Emperor was made the object of religion as well. The deification of the Emperors proved a project as happy in result as it was audacious in conception. . It was no wonder that Emperors should foster religion which, more than anything else, conferred on them a prestige literally supernatural. In a manner, too, religion by this very step retained in a changed dress its old characteristic of nationality. Patriotism proper had of course died out ; cos- mopolitanism had transformed it into submission instead of self-sacrifice : loyalty to the State had become obedience to the Emperor. As patriotism has been the ruling element in the old religion, so in the new the key-stone of the whole was reverence clustering round the person of the Emperor. But the fossilisation of the old State religion, and its vir- ProHsion tual abandonment of all religious pretensions, could not kill the ous needs. relioious instinct. That remained active as ever, and needed to be provided for. This was done in the simplest and at the same time most comprehensive way, by giving it free scope. Eveiy trace of the old jealous exclusiveness was for- gotten. Just as the constitution of Home swelled from city to state and from state to world-embracing empire, so religion became as broadly cosmopolitan as the Empire itself. Hence- forth Eoman Paganism loses aU unity except that of political allegiance already described. Strictly speaking it does not admit of treatment as a single whole. It breaks into innu- merable forms of faith and worship, which alike by their complexity and independence defy analysis. But this multi- tudinous assemblage of creeds was constantly subjected to the action of various forces, intellectual, emotional, spiritual and mystical, the general drift of which can be roughly INTRODUCTION. iNinODUO- TION. measured and traced. This we will attempt to do, at least in the case of those which bore most directly on the state of things preceding the era of Julian. Stoicism. Its cha racter. § 2. Philosophies Old and New. The intellectual currents of the time are mirrored in the fortunes of the more conspicuous schools of pliilosophy. Stoicism has first claim upon our attention. It produced its noblest representatives from a soil with so little outward promise as the Empire. Almost alone among the sages of antiquity, does Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor, with Epictetus, the Roman slave, deserve the e^Dithet of 'holy,' not unjustly accorded by Pagans to his colleague and father-in-law Antoninus. The influence of Stoicism was necessarily very partial : it was congenial only to the narrow circle of minds of a tone so pure and elevated and self-suflicing as to cherish virtue for the innate love and reverence they had for it. Through them it influenced others, but indirectly and imperfectly. For Stoicism, aiming at perfect airaOeia, and inculcating an ideal of unapproached severity, provided neither lever nor fulcrum to lift earth-bound souls to the ' toppling heights of duty ' set before them. On the religious side it never soared like Platonism, for its conception of religion was limited to Defects of duty and conduct. Neither transporting the emotions, nor kindling the imagination, it failed in effectiveness of appeal to the individual and unregenerate soul : it could not work conversions. Its thinly masked materialism, its pantheistic degradation of the deity, its dreary fatalism, all combined with its forbidding severity to narrow and restrict its influence. It was, and was found out to be, wanting. It imparted to the best of its disciples a profound undertone of sadness and desolation. True it nerved a Thrasea Paetus here and a Helvidius Priscus there, fired a Lucan or embittered a Persius, but it never, for good or for evil, so much as touched the common crowd. For them it was useless. It provided no personal God ; it ofFei'ed no explanation of pain or misery Stoicism. INTRODUCTION. 7 or present evil ; it promised no release from sin, no mode of Intkoduo- sanctification ; it enunciated that he who offended in one ^i2f ' point was guiltj of all ; and yet in its entire annals it could not find^ one ideal wise man to satisfy the requirements of its law, and be the exemplar of them that came after : finally, it cut off hope in denying immortality^. For such defects not even its lofty universalism could atone. The first centuries of the Christian era show Stoicism Transfor- becoming forlornly conscious of its own inadequacy. It ^of^^°^g^1^ ceased either to originate or refute. Its constructive and scholastic age alike were past. Wearied with fruitless dis- putation, hopeless of a sound criterion of truth, baffled or else satisfied in its researches into nature, it elaborated no further its treatises on formal logic or metaphysics, abstained from multiplying or exploding new theories of physics, and devoted itself to ethics alone. Facere docet philosophia non dicere, 'Conduct not theory is the end of philosophy,' writes Seneca; while Musouius, in the same spirit, reduced philo- sophy to the simplest moral teachings. Even here it had no heart to argue longer, and refine upon the relations or inter- dependence of differing forms of virtue. In an age of flat unbelief and timorous superstition, of hopeless dissatisfaction and of passionate longing after securer truth, Stoicism despair- ingly conscious of universal and increasing degeneracy, fruit- lessly battling against sin within and without, ceased to teach didactically, and wearily addressed itself to preach its gospel of sad tidings, or sadly to commune with its own soul and be still. Its very sternness became strangely and wist- fully indulgent towards human frailty. Its great doctors Stole become homilists or devotional writers, throwing themselves ^' ^^'^ ""^' with vehemence or tenderness or importunate appeal upon the promptings of man's inner self, not endeavouring to con- 1 In despair it sometimes cited Cato (Zeller, Stoics &c., p. 257 n.),,ox again Antoninus. Cf. Merivale, Boyle Lectures, p. 96. ^ So at least earlier Stoics ; and so too, to the popular understanding at any rate, M. Aurelius; though the convergence of Stoicism towards Platonism, represented by Seneca, taught a future life with Purgatory and Elysium, and indeed a quasi-immortality. ZeUer, Stoics Epicureans and Sceptics, pp. 206—209. 8 INTRODUCTION. Introduc- vince the intellect but to move the heart. In its old age ' "°^ ' Stoicism fathomed new deeps in its vaunted " conformity to nature." Stoicism To Paganism Stoicism was not antagonistic. It did and Pa- indeed in its esoteric teachinsr scornfully reject the current gamsm, ° j j mythologies, and deny the efficacy of prayer or ceremonial worship, but even here, by virtue of free allegorizing of ancient myths, of faith in prophecy dreams and divination (to which a doctrine of predestination was made to lend some rational support), and of belief in Sai/iove? and guardian genii, the Stoic philosopher found various points of approxi- mation to the popular beliefs. In its exoteric utterances however it went far beyond this. In the supposed interests of morality Stoicism pertinaciously upheld existing modes of faith and worship, and strove to confirm by a religious sanc- tion individual conscientiousness and public virtue. Thus Marcus Aurelius, an Agnostic as regards his personal con- victions, was yet as Emperor careful to observe all ancestral religious rites : and this not from simple indifference or sheer hypocrisy. The Stoic Pantheist discerned in Polytheism the popular expression of his own more enlightened Pan- theism, and believed that the manifold Gods of the heathen were but partial, and, as it were, fractional representations of the unknown One, whom he had learned dimly to apprehend. Stoicism Towards Christianity, in so far as it differentiated that and Chris- religion from other cults. Stoicism felt very differently. When in the person of Antoninus Stoicism mounted the throne of the world, both from the vigorous suppression of malicious sycophants, and from the tolerance accorded to the most pronounced Scepticism, the Christians hoped much. But neither petitions nor complaints availed to justify their Marcus expectations. Under the just and gentle sway of Marcus Aurelius. Aurelius persecution waxed fiercer than before. Martyrdoms for the first time became numerous : torture apparently was now first employed to enforce apostasy. The records of the churches of Smyrna, of Lyons, of Autun, and of Vienne all testify the same tale. The ribald calumnies of detractors. INTRODUCTION. 9 and the defiant taunts of Christian Apologists, may have Inteoduc- whetted the philosopher's dislike, but from the first Christi- ^^°^ ' anity must have roused his aversion rather than his sym- pathy. The stern Stoic could have little tenderness for these stubborn and rebellious nonconformists. In favour of their religion they could claim neither the ancestral sanction of Paganism, nor the prescriptive liberties of philosophic Scepticism. It was an impertinence for ignorant rustics and untaught artisans obstinately, contemptuously to spurn rites to which the cultivated philosopher yielded at least outward respect. Stoicism, in spirit if not in theory, was too exclu- sive and aristocratic- to suffer common folk to share that intellectual freedom, that elevated atheism, which was the monopoly of the initiated few. Of the inward purity and loftiness of Christian morality Stoicism knew nothing ; the inscrutable courage and resolution imparted by it was im- puted to sheer perversity^; while the irrepressible 8chwdr- merei of Christians, their enthusiasm and fanaticism, their infatuation and aggressiveness, their superstition and their bigotry, were as repulsive as they were unaccountable to the Stoic. Epicureanism — and a wide latitude may be accorded to Epicure- the term — deserves consideration next. In numbers, it dis- '^'"^"*- tanced Stoicism hopelessly : no philosophy was so popular; it seemed to many the only philosophy that could strictly be said to survive^. Intellectually however it was in stagnation. Throughout the Imperial epoch it produced not one exponent of first or even second-rate capacity. In his auction of phi- losophers Lucian lets Epicurus go for two minae : Sceptics and Cynics alone fetch a lower price. For many years before Julian's accession Epicureanism was the one historic school unrepresented amid the chairs of Athens University. The inspired intensity of its great poet-apostle had rapidly burnt out. Men cared as little for the Atomic Theory, as the Gods of Epicurus cared for men. Epicureans, like Stoics, aban- doned physics and metaphysics, and found no ethics worth ^ Kara \j/(.\7]i' irapdra^iv, ws oj UpLariavoi. — M. Aurel. Medit. xi. 3. 2 Bios. Laert. x. 9. 10 INTRODUCTION. Inthoduo- teaching; dilettantes, with a thin veneer of spurious Hellenism, J^ anxiously flattering themselves that they lived after some theory, they enlisted under Epicureanism as giving the most comfortable account of this life and the most absolute assur- ance that there was no life to come. As tutors, rhetoricians, barristers and wits they leavened society. Epicnre- Epicureanism derived much amusement from attacks on inmm and ^j^g popular religion. It derided its superstitions, chuckled over its immoralities, and poked fun at its Gods. In the abandoned flippancy of its attacks it proves how completely religion had lost its hold on the upper classes of society. It did not attempt any semblance of reconstruction; for by the Epicurean the religious instinct was declared not to exist, and where created or inculcated to be bad and deserving of eradication alone. By exposing charlatanism, jeering at faith and ridiculing enthusiasm, he served partly to discredit, and still more to debase sinking Paganism. Epicure- Against Christianity Epicureanism felt no peculiar spite. C'/v]"