Of the many strange and violent deaths experienced by the leaders of the Roman state, the death of the Emperor Julian was perhaps the most mysterious. He died on 26 June 363 CE following a wound from a spear received in the Battle of Maranga in modern day Iraq.
According to the Coptic Church, Saint Mercurius miraculously killed the apostate emperor from afar.
It was reported that the spear held by a Saint in an icon in a monastery was covered in blood.
His death was also announced to various future saints.
Basil of Caesarea, a former associate of the emperor when they were both students in Athens, had a vision: the heavens split open and he saw Jesus, sat on a throne in splendor, order St Mercurius, in a voice like thunder, ‘Go and kill Emperor Julian, the enemy of the Christians’. (Note that this particular vision was recorded nearly 200 years later in John Malalas’ History).
St Mercurius was not the only suspect.
Libanius, the fourth century politician and intellectual, claimed in his funeral eulogy to Julian read in Antioch that a Christian on his own side had inflicted the wound. He later retracted this statement to claim it was a Lakhmid cavalryman, allied to the Persian Empire. Libanius quite possibly heard the rumors circling Antioch as the defeated army returned.
What began as an anti-Christian suspicion, later became a celebrated act of rebellion.

The Emperor Julian
In a line of Christian Emperors from Constantine the Great on, Julian was the only explicit pagan.
He was born into the imperial family in 331 CE. When his uncle, the Emperor Constantine, died in 337 CE, Julian was caught up in the dynastic struggles of his cousins. After he came out on top, Constantius II ordered the murder of much of his own family (including Julian’s father, his mother died in childbirth). Julian and his elder half-brother Gallus were essentially exiled. As a young man, he was educated as a Christian and given access to the library of the Christian bishop, George of Cappadocia. He was an inward looking and intellectual individual with little meaningful adult contact.
His brother was made a junior emperor to his father’s murderer, Constantius II, but was executed three years later after he proved unfit to rule.
Julian’s one desire was to become a philosophy student at Athens. This was finally allowed, but within weeks of arriving at Athens, he was ordered by Constantius II to Milan and to be made junior emperor and permanent resident in Gaul, a military role he performed with some credit for four years.
In 360, his soldiers revolted and Julian found himself named emperor and in open conflict with his cousin and his cousin’s much better army.
The psychological tensions of such a life are clear.
No wonder Julian sought comfort in religion, but uniquely for his time and family it was not Christianity.
Before they could meet in battle Constantius II died. Julian peacefully assumed the role of senior Emperor (‘Augustus’) and became publicly pagan.
In the words of a later more critical writer:
‘as soon as his benefactor died, Julian cast aside his mask and all its trappings and thereafter barefacedly flaunted for the world to see all those impious superstitions which he had previously concealed’.
John Chrysostom, Homily of St Byblas
We might be more judicious today.

In Julian, his novel of 1964, Gore Vidal followed this line and saw the Emperor’s murder as a reaction to his religious policy which sought to reverse the gains experienced by Christians in the years following Constantine’s ‘conversion’ fifty years before.
Of all the historical novels I have read about the Roman Empire, Julian has the profoundest sense of power, its trappings and pitfalls, the limitations of absolute power and its potential for disruption.
The novel is not a distorted portrait of Gore Vidal, but his personality shines though I would argue in three major themes: power, sexuality and religion.
Power
Gore Vidal (1925 – 2012): brilliant recontour, intellectual, author, politician and total bitch.
Gore grew up in Washington D.C. He was born into a powerful political family, if not of the first rank than at least of Aristocratic standing. His maternal grandfather T.P. Gore was one of the first two Senators for the State of Oklahoma for the Populist wing of the Democratic Party, although his political positions, first as a pacifist and non-interventionist, put him at odds with Woodrow Wilson, and then as an opponent of government spending, at odds with FDR. He never rose to a powerful position in the American state, but was nevertheless a politician of some prominence in Washington.
Gore was largely brought up by his grandparents. As a child he would read to his grandfather, who had grown blind. This was how the young Gore learnt American history and literature, literally at the knee of someone who had experienced much of it.
Gore didn’t get on with his mother, but her second husband, later married Janet Lee Bouvier, the mother of Jackie Kennedy, making him a step-brother-in-law to President Kennedy and then to Aristotle Onassis (he claimed to prefer Aristotle). In 1960, he also campaigned to represent upstate New York for the Democratic Party. Perhaps his experience of growing up among political families and then his closeness to Camelot made him quite cynical about the Kennedy clan and power in general.
Gore’s grandfather saw his daughter as part of a decadent Washington set of lobbyists and dynasts.
Gore obviously knew a lot about politics – both in general terms, and more particularly about specific issues, as anyone who has read his essays or watched his televised debates with William Buckley can attest.
Gore also understood the more violent and coercive side of politics. Coming of age and serving in the navy during the Second World War, he experienced first hand the brutal reality of American democracy. He critiqued the ‘American Empire’ throughout his career and condemned US military intervention around the world.
This combination of factors is part of Julian. The army and the court are both important sources of power. The court is made up of eunuchs, while the military includes large numbers of Germans. Julian’s attempt to return to traditional Greek pieties must be understood against this background.
When we make a hero out of Julian, and the temptation is appealing, we run the risk of condoning totalitarian rule if we feel it is in our interests.
In the novel and historically, Julian presented himself as restoring traditional forms of religion and reducing the privileges accorded to Christian officials. For example, he removed the right of bishops to travel for free and banned Christians from holding certain important imperial offices. This was to ensure that his religious policies would be enforced at a local level. Indeed, the ability to enforce imperial edicts has been much debated. In the novel, one of the characters acknowledges that Theodosius II decrees haven’t been followed in Antioch. As the historian Robert Browing writes there was “an appearance of Christianization that did not correspond with reality”.
His most notorious edict was to require all public teachers to be approved by the Emperor.
While some modern scholars have sought to explain the edict as part of a general restoration, it was widely seen as an attempt to ban Christians from teaching the classics. The purpose was perhaps less to stop Christians teachers indoctrinating the young, than to disincentivize Christians.
Many people condemned it.
Ammianus Marcellinus, a staunch supporter of Julian called the education policy in his history: “inhumane and worthy to be buried in eternal silence” (Amm. Marc. 22.10.7). It would ‘deny Roman citizens of their culture’.
***
Julian only reigned as sole emperor for about 18 months.
He never had time to enforce his policies. Might he have gone much further than other emperors had he lived?
Counterfactuals are not a great way to do history. To some degree, what happened is sometimes the only thing that could have happened given all the different forces operating and what we can recover and understand as historians is reliant on evidence which might be fragmentary or one-sided. However, reflecting on counterfactuals allows us to consider the possibilities open to historical actors which can bring great insight to specific moments. One of the strengths of historical fiction (whether novels, films, video games, comic books) is that it allows us to reflect on counterfactuals without impeding on the historical evidence.
Gore hints at a growing tendency to frustration and autocracy in Julian.
“That is no way to approach the sacred presence,” and I splashed Oribasius very satisfactorily. He laughed. My uncle Julian laughed, too, for I had soaked him as well. Then I was alarmed. In just this way are monsters born.”
Julian, p. 288
Julian is ever vigilant of himself. In the novel, he models himself on Marcus Aurelius but whereas Marcus learnt from a good family and friends, Julian was brought up in ‘a family of murderers in an age diseased by the quarrels and intolerance of [Christianity]’ (p. 22)
And yet he grows to love the adulation he receives, cheers in the hippodrome and positive responses to his speeches: ‘How one’s style improves with greatness!” (p. 143) he jokes.
More chillingly, towards the end of his reign as he suffers setbacks in his religious policies, he considers the violent attempts by earlier Emperor’s to curb the growth of Christianity. Attempts that failed. The historical number of deaths suffered by Christian martyrs during the persecutions may have been exaggerated but they were important symbols for the faith of Christians.
Later Christian writers have identified a handful of Christians who received the crown of martyrdom during the reign of Julian. John Chrysostom claimed that Julian executed two soldiers in Antioch: Juventinus and Maximus. They had criticized the emperor during a night of heavy drinking and were sentenced for high treason. The two figures are only known from Christian authors who argued they were killed for their faith, but we must be alert to the fact that they may have been killed for treason. Libanius reports a conspiracy of soldiers in Antioch. Libanius even went so far as to say the conspirators had not been killed. As H. C. Teitler, a contemporary historian, argued, Julian was noted for his clemency.
Yet the novel largely avoids the scandalous aspects of the day, unlike for example I, Claudius. Eusebia, the wife of the Emperor Constantius, Julian’s cousin and rival, is said to induce Julian’s offspring, but it is off-stage, almost incidental, just a hint. (Ammianius Marcellinus also reported this rumour). Infant mortality was high in those days and this allegation is never taken seriously enough either to confirm or deny. It’s part of the claustrophobic background of the court. Like I, Claudius Julian is presented as unintentionally becoming emperor. He was forced against his will to rebel against a man he hated by his soldiers. The politics is more subtle.

Memoirs
As a historian, whether of his own time or others’, there is something gloriously bitchy about Gore.
He knew several politicians and celebrities, but never put them on a pedestal. He may have been a star fucker, but he had no stars in his eyes. His revelations are eye opening. God alone knows how he managed to publish his memoirs, Palimpsest, in 1996. Maybe he waited until everyone was dead.
The idea of the memoir was something he returned to throughout his literary career. His most memorable fictional character must be Myra Beckenridge from the eponymous novel published in 1968 (later played by Raquel Welch). Myra says:
“More than ever am I convinced that the only useful form left to literature in the post-Gutenberg age is the memoir: the absolute truth, copied precisely from life, preferably in the moment it is happening.”
Myra Beckenridge, page 17
She is just one of the narrators in the novel and is not a very reliable one at that. The ‘absolute truth’ is hard to reach, but alternative insights bring us closest to it. It also allows us a bit of fun in creating narrative distance and irony.
Julian is structured in a similar way to Myra Beckenridge. The book is ostensibly the memoirs of the Emperor, reviewed 30 years later with editorial notes by his associates Priscus and Libanius. History records these two figures as intellectuals, but in Gore’s hands they are waspish and worldly. Bitches.
Narrative and history are one form of power in the novel and Gore was an inveterate, if stylish, score settler.
The tone of Gore’s memoirs is mirrored in an editorial note by Priscus in Julian:
“There was a funny story going around at about this time, no doubt apocryphal. Julian and Macrina were overheard while making love. Apparently all during the act each one continued to talk. Macrina is supposed to have confuted the Pythagoreans while Julian restated the Platonic powers, all this before and during orgasm.”
Julian, p. 152
In his own memoirs written 30 years after Julian, when recounting similar rumors of his own contemporaries, Gore would remove any suggestions as to whether the tales were apocryphal or not.
Memoirs of Hadrian by MargueriteYourcenar
Revisiting the classic historical romance on the 120th anniversary of its creator’s birth and during Pride Month 2023.
Homosexuality
Gore never considered himself to be ‘gay’. Rather he saw sexuality as a spectrum and thought everyone would have sexual desire for the same or other genders at different points. He learnt this first hand. He claimed to have had sex with thousands of men, many of whom would not have considered themselves gay. His first love was Jimmie Trimble, a marine who later died in Iwo Jima on 1 March 1945. He wrote movingly of his loss in Palimpsest. It also inspired his first successful novel The City and the Pillar, published in 1948 the same year as the first Kinsey Report which claimed that 37% of men had at least one homosexual experience (Gore knew Kinsey in the 40s).
Indeed sexuality, and more explicitly male homosexuality, was an important theme of Gore’s novels.
Yet, it is largely missing in Gore’s characterisation of Julian, or at least is hidden.
Might we see the novel as queer-coded?
Gore was thinking about leaving Hollywood to work on a long planned novel about Julian when he was asked to help out on the script for Ben Hur by its producer Sam Zimbaugist. Gore has always claimed that writers were more important in Hollywood at the time than directors and claims it has as much right to be called Gore Vidal’s Ben Hur, as it does William Wyler’s.
One of the main issues facing the film’s creators was that they felt there wasn’t a strong motive which explained the intense antagonism between the two main characters. They were formerly best of friends, but meeting again in Jerusalem after a few years they suddenly fall out. Politics and identity are the ostensible reason, but Gore felt this didn’t quite explain the level of acrimony. It’s a fairly famous story now that he claimed there had been a relationship between the two men.
It is told better in his own words:
“I had just told [Sam Zimbaugist and William Wyler] that Ben Hur and Messala had been boyhood lovers. But Ben Hur, under the fierce Palestinian sun and its jealous god, had turned straight as a die while Messala, the decadent gentile, had remained in love with Ben and wanted to take up where they had left off. Yes, it was The City and the Pillar all over again; fortunately, neither Sam nor Willy had read it. When Ben Hur rebuffs Messala’s advances, a deep and abiding hatred fills Messala to the brim. If not love (Rome spelled backward is “Amor*), then death. I would break the single inherited scene of the meeting and the quarrel in two parts. First, a sort of cryptic love scene; second, the rebuff, ostensibly over politics but actually over unreciprocated love. I doubt if two Hollywood magnates, their studio faced with financial ruin, had ever been so confounded by what they took to be one writer’s mad perversity. When I finished, there was a long silence.
Finally, Willy: “Gore, this is Ben Hur. Ben Hur! ‘A tale of the Christ’ or whatever that subtitle is. You can’t do this with Ben Hur.. “
Sam’s eyes were now shut. He had worked with me on two other pictures; he was used to my “shockingness”; he also appreciated the fact that I had a hit play running on Broadway even as I pitched the story, no small thing in the land of the commercialites. “How do you show this . .. uh, love affair?”
“By never mentioning it. There won’t be a line of dialogue anyone can object to. It will all be in their reactions?”We’d inherited a javelin-throwing contest between Ben Hur and Messala. This was supposed to symbolize the contest between Zionists and Roman overlords. It could also, as easily, represent male sexuality either in contest or in collusion.
I had learned from my days in heavily censored television how to make dialogue that sounded one thing to mean quite another if the actors were able to play counterpoint to the usually obligatory dull point. I explained how, when Ben Hur refuses to join Messala in supporting the Roman occupation, one could see in Messala’s face that the issue was not politics but thwarted love.”
Palimpsest, p. 304-5
Is there a similar moment in Julian?
Talking about the Elysian mysteries in vague terms, Julian says:
“Now: for those who have been initiated, I have in the lines above given in the form of a narrative a clear view of what happens after death. Through number and symbol, I have in a page revealed everything. But the profane may not unravel the mystery. They will merely note that I have told an old story of the hold gods.”
Julian, p. 157
On a literal level this is a useful compromise given that we don’t have that much concrete evidence about the rituals, people did keep schtum about them. On a deeper level, perhaps Gore was encouraging a more suggestive reading of his own novel.
Vidal wrote Julian while living in Rome. The city had a thriving underground gay scene.
Although Julian enjoys sex with women as a student in Athens, he later rejects sexuality completely becoming a celibate, at the time believed to bring individuals closer to a sense of philosophical truth.
In the novel, the female characters are not depicted in the best light. His first love Macrina talks too much, his wife Helena is too old and Julian finds her sexually unattractive, and his sister in law Eusebia has a murderous interest in him. Julian’s closest relationships in the novel are to men including his later editors Libanius and Priscus, but also Maximian the magician and Oribasius the doctor, with whom Julian lives with for a time.
Priscus speculates that Julian had a repressed desire for his brother Gallus, while his closeness to Oribasius leads to gossip.
Julian displays a fear of letting go, of showing a weak side.
In one strange scene, Julian witnesses an evening entertainment led by the powerful palace eunuchs which culminates in the sexual exploitation of young people taken from the streets by the Imperial Guard. The guard themselves are bawdy entertainment for the eunuchs. While the event takes place in the palace itself, it is the eunuch’s quarters, a grand dining space, a space that is both a highly visible symbol of power and power’s invisible appendage.
The scene recalls contemporary abuses of power- like Jeffrey Epstein and his so-called ‘Lolita Express’, as well as other allegations and conspiracies.
Julian orders the event to stop. His actions show both a subliminal desire for the trappings of power and an awareness and disgust of this in himself.
Julian obviously watches himself closely.
Religion
Religion is the great overt theme of the novel.
Julian is an earnest man, whose attempts to revise paganism are blinkered by his lack of political nous.
His religious beliefs seem a curious mix of Neoplatonism, Henotheism and Theurgism.
Neoplatonism was a broad school of philosophy that was popular in the period in which Julian studied philosophy. The major early philosopher was Plotinus (Julian carried his work into his final campaign in Persia). Building on Plato’s ideas of the ideal forms, an important theory in Neoplatonism was the concept of the One, the source of all other objects or beings. As someone who struggles with philosophic subtleties, I have always seen this belief as mirroring the growing power of monotheistic religions (like Christianity) and henotheistic religious tendencies, while recognising such a reading is both limited and limiting.
Henotheism refers to the worship or privilege of a single god (or set of gods) without denying the existence of other deities. In Greek, ‘Mono’ means ‘only’, whereas ‘Heno’ means ‘one’. The term comes from the nineteenth century in the European study of Hinduism however, it has been applied to ancient mediterranean religions. On the one hand, we see deities merging or combining aspects of other deities. For example, Zeus-Helios-Serapis has been attested in inscriptions. On the other, some people understood particular deities as specific cultural forms of a more universal figure. For example, in Narmouthis (modern day Medinet Madi in Egypt), Isis is described in these terms:
“All mortals who live on the boundless earth,
Hymns of Isidorus, I
Thracians, Greeks and Barbarians,
Express Your fair Name, a Name greatly honoured among all, but
Each speaks in his own language, in his own land.”
Indeed, while Christian orthodoxy rejected the existence of other gods or identified them as demons, we must be open to the fact that ‘Christianity’ was perhaps a more fluid identity in antiquity than we might suspect. On the one hand neoplatonism was followed by some Christians, as likely was henotheism.
In the novel, we see these two trends combine. Julian is trying to find out about the ‘old religion’ from his Christian tutor Mardonius:
“Yet like all things, those gods are manifestations of the true … Homer believed much as we believe. He worshiped the One God, the single principle of the universe. And I suspect he was aware that the One God can take many forms, and that the gods of Olympus are among them. After all, to this day God has many names because we have many languages and traditions, yet he is always the same.”
”What are some of the old names?”
“Zeus, Helios the sun, Serapis…”
“The sun.” My deity. “Apollo…” I began.
“Apollo also had many names, Helios, Companion of Mithras…”
Julian, p. 33
This repeats a line in the historic Julian’s Hymn to Helios “Zeus, Hades, Helios Serapis, three gods in one godhead”.
On a more day-to-day level, there would likely have been a continuation of some beliefs and practices, a process of absorption. Christianity is often said to have borrowed elements from the worship of Mithras, although the reality is more complex as Owen Rees has argued on the Bad Ancient blog. The correspondences between the two religions, as pointed out by Maximus of Epheus, a theurgist, ‘stun’ Julian in the novel and lead to his decision to become an initiate.
Theurgy is the final major force behind Julian’s religion. Theurgy is a form of magic which attempts to evoke presences. It was theoretically connected to neoplatonism, by the idea that emanations proceeded from the One. Several characters despair at Julian’s belief in magic, compared to more solid philosophy or religion. (Maximus was executed in 370 CE following a plot in which the conspirators supposedly asked him to find the name of the emperor’s successor in a process akin to Ouija).
Yet theurgy, henotheism and neoplatonism were combined and inseparable for Julian. On his deathbed, mirroring Socrates, Julian discusses the soul. Priscus reports:
“Then Julian engaged us in a discussion of the Phaedo. What is the precise nature of the soul? What form does it take? In what way does it return to Serapis? I talked philosophy; Maximus talked mysteries. Julian preferred Maximus to me at the end and I could not blame him, for I am bleak and Maximus was hopeful.”
Julian, p. 464
Such formed the backdrop of Julian’s belief, but a final driver was a hatred of Christianity. This is often explained as a rejection of the morality of his family, the murderous Constantinian dynasty. Julian watches his entire family killed by his cousin Constantius II.Christianity is a faith seemingly preached to Julian only in order to put him out of the way, one way or another. A discussion with an uncle who is also a bishop:
“Of course you will be a bishop since you are imperial. But there is something even more splendid than a bishop.”
Julian, p. 40
“A martyr?”
“Martyr and saint. You have the look of one.”
Julian represents his anti-Christianity in his memoirs as a scholarly study of the philosophical arguments for and against Christinity on the one hand, and a historical analysis based on a reconstruction of the records of the life and trial of Jesus held in the imperial archives and destroyed by Constantine in the 330s (not historically attested). Yet he delights in baiting Christians.
He says he is willing to place Jesus amongst the gods, between Isis and Dionysius (pg. 322). This recalls the emperor Alexander Severus (reigned 222 – 235 CE) who supposedly included Jesus, Abraham, Orpheus and Alexander the Great in his lararium, as well as the theory of the dying gods put forward by James George Frazer in the Golden Bough. His suggestion did not go down well with the Christians.
Julian presents himself as a tolerant emperor and to some degree he was.
Priscus reflecting on Julian’s reign from his vantage point in 390, following the edicts of Theodosius II, writes:
“No other religion ever considered it necessary to destroy others because they did not share the same beliefs. At worst, another man’s belief might inspire amusement or contempt – the Egyptians and their animal gods, for instance. Yet those who worshiped the Bull did not try to murder those who worshiped the Snake, or to convert them by force from Snake to Bull.”
Julian, p. 141
The persecution of Christians notwithstanding, this is a splendid wrangling of Juvenal’s satire 15. The poem begins ‘Who’s ignorant … of those monsters / The mad Egyptians worship?’ and proceeds to describe regional differences in divine animals. The Egyptians are very much ‘roused’ to fury by their loathing of their neighbor’s gods ‘considering those they worshipped / Themselves the only true divinities’.
Gore, if not Priscus, knew his Latin classics.
There is an underlying sense in the novel that religion itself, and not one specific sect or tradition, is a major force of civil disorder in the world. Religion welded to power is deadly.
Julian’s attempts are not separate from this.

Why did Julian fail?
The question then is why did he fail.
In terms of historical study, this is a deep question, in fact it’s possibly not the right question which might be why did Chrsitian succeed, which is hard to answer in a book, let alone in a short blog. Here, I can only focus on how Gore presents this.
In the novel, the reason is a combination of political naivety, the duplicitous power of Christians, a too short reign.
There is also a sense that Julian fails to appeal to the wider public.
Julian is set in the world of the elite: the civil service, the military, the church, the educated elite. Julian fails to gain support from the populace who look on bemused. He gains the name ‘Bull butcher’. He is mocked for his beard.
Compared to Christianity, Julian’s revived Hellenism didn’t offer anything beyond expensive sacrifices. Christianity promised a life after death, which I do think was one factor in its popularity. It was also a religious with clear promotional opportunities for religiously focused people.
Christianity, which if not completely centralised and unified at this time, had enough cohesion to be an important power base in the empire and have the clout to get things done. The disparate shrines and temples, often starved of financial support, just could not compete.
If Julian had survived and had continued to support Hellenism, could he have reversed the dominance of Christianity. Would we today be living in an even more religiously diverse world?
Even is it’s impossible to answer this question, the novel provides a sense of what might have been, an insight into what people might wanted, that allows us a distance to look back on our time, and things that are and might have been, and reminds us of the three strong forces operating in our lives: politics, religion, and sex.
Featured image: 4th-century cameo of an emperor, probably Julian, performing sacrifice (National Archaeological Museum, Florence) by Sailko CC-BY 3.0