Letters of Julian/Introduction

by Julian

Introduction to the letters

The more important letters and edicts in this volume are hardly intelligible to a reader unfamiliar with the historical background. The following brief summary of Julian's career is intended to explain the allusions in the text and to supplement the Introduction in Vol. 1. In his more formal works, especially the manifesto To the Athenians written in 361 as an apologia for his rebellion against the Emperor Constantius, and the Misopogon written in 362, a satire on his own austere habits addressed to the citizens of Antioch, Julian himself relates the main incidents of his childhood and youth. For the last ten years of his life, 353-363, the best authority is Ammianus Marcellinus, the Latin historian, an eye-witness.

Flavius Claudius Julianus was born at Constantinople in 331, the only son of Julius Constantius, half-brother of Constantine the Great, and Basilina, a highly educated woman and devout Christian, who died when Julian was a few months old. From his father's earlier marriage there survived a son, Gallus, a daughter, probably named Galla, who married her cousin the Emperor Constantius II, and another son whose name is unknown. Soon after the death of the Emperor Constantine in 337, the Emperor Constantius removed possible rivals by the murder of certain relatives, among whom were Julian's father and half-brother. Gallus and Julian survived. The latter was sent to Nicomedia in charge of a relative, the Bishop Eusebius, and his education was entrusted to the Christian eunuch Mardonius who had taught Basilina Greek literature. In Misopogon 353b, Julian says that Mardonius was "of all men most responsible" for his literary tastes and austere morals.^[1] Julian also studied at Constantinople with the Christian sophist Hecebolius.^[2] During this period he used to visit his grandmother's estate in Bithynia, which is described in Letter 25. In 345, when Julian was fourteen, Constantius, who in the twenty-four years of his reign that followed the murder of Julius Constantius lived in apprehension of the vengeanee of his sons, interned Gallus and Julian in the lonely castle of Macellum (Fundus Macelli) in Cappadocia. In his manifesto To the Athenians 271 c,d, Julian speaks of their six years of solitary imprisonment at Macellum, and says that the cruelty and harshness of Gallus who proved to be a sort of Christian Caligula, were increased by his life there, while his own love of philosophy saved him from being equally brutalised. From Letter 23 we learn that he was able to borrow books from George of Cappadocia, who later became Bishop of Alexandria and was murdered by the Alexandrian mob in 361. Julian at once wrote Letter 23 to demand his library.

In 351 Constantius, who had once visited the brothers at Macellum, released them, raised Gallus to the rank of Caesar and gave him his sister Constantia in marriage. Constantius had married as his first wife Galla, the sister of Gallus; she had lately died. Gallus was sent to Antioch to govern the provinces of the East. There he and Constantia, whose cruel and suspicious temper matched his own, embarked on a four years' reign of terror which is described by Ammianus.^[3] Constantius meanwhile, at Aries, where he spent the winter of 353, and later at Milan, was just as suspicious and ruthless, but in Gallus Caesar tyrannical conduct seemed to his cousin the prelude to usurpation. He was therefore recalled to Milan in 354. Constantia died of a fever on the journey, and Gallus, escorted by the Emperor's agents as a virtual prisoner, was taken by way of Constantinople to Pola (where in 326 Crispus, the son of Constantine, had been put to death by his father), and was there beheaded, towards the end of 354. Julian later avenged himself on those whom he believed to have been accessory to the death of his brother.

Meanwhile he had devoted four years to study, first at Pergamon with Aedesius and Chrysanthius, the disciples of Iamblichus; but on hearing from Aedesius of the marvels wrought by his pupil Maximus of Ephesus the theurgist, he hastened to Ephesus.^[4] Julian had been under Christian influences from his childhood, but he was an ardent admirer of Greek literature and philosophy and naturally inclined to superstition. With Maximus he studied the teachings of Iamblichus the Neoplatonist, and though he did not openly profess paganism until 361, he says in Letter 47, written in 362, that for twelve years he has ceased to be a Christian.

The Syrian Neoplatonism of the fourth Christian century which followed the teachings of Iamblichus was a religion rather than a philosophy, and was well suited to his love of the mystical and marvellous; for the rest of his life he was the devoted disciple of Maximus. But his apostasy from Christianity was carefully concealed, and his first panegyric on Constantius, Oration 1, written in 355, is entirely noncommittal, refers vaguely to "the deity" and "providence," and might have been composed by a Christian.

In the second panegyric, Oration 2, written in Gaul at a safe distance, he frequently invokes Zeus, and assumes the reality of the gods of Homer in language that goes beyond what was allowed by literary etiquette in rhetorical works of this sort. It could not have been written by a Christian. His brother Gallus, some time between 351 and 354, heard rumours of his devotion to Maximus, and sent his own spiritual adviser Aetius to remonstrate with Julian. Letter 82 (Gallus to Julian), the earliest letter in this volume that can be dated, expresses the relief of Gallus at the reassuring report of Aetius as to Julian's adherence to the Christian faith.

On the death of Gallus in 354 Julian was summoned to the court at Milan, and on the way thither visited Troy and had the interview with Pegasius which is described in Letter 19. Ammianus says^[5] that Julian's life was in danger at Milan from the plots of enemies, who accused him to Constantius of having met Galltis at Constantinople in 354, and of having left Macellum without permission. Julian denies the first of these charges in Oration 3. 121a, and in To the Athenians 273 a. He was saved by the intercession of the second wife of Constantius, the Empress Eusebia, who, after seven months of suspense, obtained for him his single audience with the Emperor and permission to go to Athens to study. We know little of his brief stay of about two months in Athens in 355, but he was almost certainly initiated into the Mysteries at Eleusis,^[6] and probably attended the lectures of the aged Christian sophist Prohaeresius, to whom in 361 or early in 362 he wrote Letter 14. Among his fellow-students were two Cappadocians, Gregory Nazianzen, who after Julian's death wrote bitter invectives against the apostate and an unflattering description of his appearance and manners, and Basil the Great, to whom Julian addressed Letter 26. From Athens the Emperor recalled Julian^[7] in September to Milan, where after some delay he was raised to the rank of Caesar on November 6, 355, given the task of pacifying the Gallic provinces, and married to Helena, the sister of Constantius. She was much older than he, had little influence on his life, and died in Gaul, without issue, not long after Julian had been proclaimed Augustus by the army. The motives of Constantius in making Julian Caesar are not clear. Eunapius says that he hoped his cousin would be killed in Gaul. Eusebia may have persuaded the Emperor that their childlessness was a punishment for his treatment of his relatives. The Gallic provinces were overrun by barbarians, and Constantius could not go there himself because he was occupied on the Danube with the Sarmatians and the Quadi, and by the threat of the Persians in Mesopotamia. Julian set out for Gaul on December 1, 355, with a small troop of 360 men who "only knew how to pray" as he says in frag. 5. Eusebia gave him a library of books which he took with him. His task was to expel the hordes of Germans who, having been invited by Constantius to assist in suppressing the usurper Magnentius, had remained to overrun and devastate the country, and had destroyed the Roman forts on the Rhine. In his five years of campaigning in Gaul,^[8] though he was continually thwarted by the officers whom Constantius had sent to watch his movements, Julian pacified the provinces and restored their prosperity, recovered 20,000 Gallic prisoners from Germany, expelled the Germans, defeated the Franks and Chamavi, restored the Roman forts, and crossed the Rhine four times. In August 357 he won the famous battle of Argentoratum (Strasbourg), which was fought somewhere between Saverne and Strasbourg, and sent Chnodomar, the king of the Alemanni, captive to Constantius. He spent the winter of 358-359 at Paris, whence he wrote to his friend the physician Oribasius, at Vienne, Letter 4, of which the first part, with its dream,^[9] is highly sophistic but expresses vague fears that he and Constantius may be involved in ruin together; the second part describes his opposition to the pretorian prefect Florentius, his persistent enemy, whom he forbade to recommend to Constantius increased taxes on the Gallic provincials. In this letter Julian wishes that he may not be deprived of the society of Sallust, his pagan friend and adviser, but Sallust was recalled by the suspicious Constantius in 358.

While he was in Gaul, Julian continued his studies, corresponded with sophists and philosophers such as Maximus, Libanius and Priscus, wrote Oration 2, a panegyric of Constantius; Oration 3, a panegyric of Eusebia; Oration 8, to console himself for the loss of Sallust; an account of the battle of Strasbourg which has perished; and perhaps the treatise on logic which we know only from the reference to it in Suidas.^[10] To some of these works he refers at the end of Letter 2, To Priscus. That he wrote commentaries on his Gallic campaigns has been maintained by some scholars but cannot be proved.

Constantius, who had already suppressed four usurpers, either full-blown or suspected of ambition, Magnentius, Vetranio, Silvanus and Gallus Caesar, was alarmed at the military successes of his cousin, who had left Milan an awkward student, ridiculed by the court, and had transformed himself into a skilful general and administrator, adored by the Gallic army and the provincials. The Emperor was on the eve of a campaign against Sapor, the Persian king, and needed reinforcements. It was an opportune moment for weakening Julian's influence by withdrawing the flower of his troops for service in the East. Accordingly, in the winter of 359-360, Julian received peremptory orders, brought by the tribune Decentius, to send to the Emperor, under the command of Julian's officers Lupicinus and Sintula, the finest of his troops, in fact more than half his army of 23,000 men. Many of these were barbarian auxiliaries who had taken service with Julian on condition that they should not serve outside Gaul, and the Celtic troops, when the order became known, were dismayed at the prospect of leaving their lands and families at the mercy of renewed invasions of barbarians. Florentius was at Vienne, and refused to join Julian in Paris and discuss the question of the safety of Gaul if the troops should be withdrawn. Meanwhile two of the legions requisitioned by Constantius were in Britain fighting the Picts and Scots. But when the others reached Paris from their winter quarters in February 360, on their march eastwards, their discontent resulted in open mutiny, and Julian, whose loyalty towards Constantius up to this point is unquestioned, failed to pacify them. They surrounded the palace^[11] at night, calling on Julian with the title of Augustus, and when, after receiving a divine sign,^[12] he came out at dawn, he was raised on a shield and crowned with a standard-bearer's chain in default of a diadem. Julian sent by Pentadius and the loyal eunuch Eutherius a full account of these events to Constantius, who replied that he must be content with the title of Caesar. Constantius had already gone to Caesarea to prepare for his Persian campaign, and decided to meet the more pressing danger from the East before he reckoned with Julian. The prefect Florentius fled to the Emperor and was made consul for 361. Constantius sent Nebridius the quaestor to succeed Florentius in Gaul, and Julian accepted him as prefect. Julian left Paris for Vienne by way of Besancon, which town he describes in Letter 8. Thence he led his troops to another victory, this time over the Attuarii, who were raiding Gaul, and on November 6, 360, he celebrated his quinquennalia or fifth year as Caesar. He had not yet declared his change of religion, and in January 361 at Vienne, where he spent the winter, he took part in the feast of the Epiphany. In July he set out for the East, determined to win from Constantius recognition of his rank as Augustus, either by persuasion or by force. His troops were divided so as to march by three different routes, and he led the strongest division through the Black Forest (see frag. 2) and along the Danube. Sirmium (Mitrovitz) welcomed him with acclamation in October, and he went into winter quarters at Naissa (Nish). Thence he addressed to the Roman Senate, the Spartans, Corinthians and Athenians manifestos justifying his conduct towards Constantius and proclaiming his design to restore the Hellenic religion. Of these documents only the letter to the Athenians survives, and a brief fragment of the letter to the Corinthians (frag. 3). Meanwhile, as he informs Maximus in Letter 8, he and his soldiers openly sacrificed to the gods. He now regarded himself as conducting a war in the name of Hellenism. Some time in 361 he wrote the Kronia (Saturnalia), and says in Oration 4. 157 c that he sent it to his friend Sallust. Of this work Suidas has preserved a few lines (frag. 4).^[13]

Meanwhile Constantius, who had achieved nothing conclusive against the Persians, had married, at Antioch, his third wife Faustina. Their only child, a daughter, was married later to the Emperor Gratian, but died young. Constantius had now no choice but to lead his army to defend Constantinople against Julian. But at Tarsus he fell ill, and on November 3, 361, died of a fever at Mopsucrene in Cilicia. When Julian heard the news he wrote Letters 8 and 13, in which he thanks the gods for his escape from civil war. He entered Constantinople in triumph as Emperor on December 11, 361.

The greater number of the letters in this volume that can be dated were written after Julian's accession, in 362, from Constantinople and Antioch. He lost no time in inviting to his court his friends Maximus from Ephesus (Letter 8), Chrysanthius from Sardis,^[14] Eutherius the eunuch, his trusted court chamberlain (Letter 10), Eustathius (Letter 43), Priscus,^[15] and Basil (Letter 26). Chrysanthius and Basil did not accept this invitation, and Julian, when he had failed to persuade Chrysanthius to follow the example of Maximus and disregard the omens which were unfavourable to their journey, appointed him high priest of Lydia.

In contrast with the wholesale butchery with which Constantius had begun his reign, Julian appointed a commission, partly composed of former officers of Constantius, to sit at Chalcedon across the Bosporus and try his enemies, especially those who had abetted the cruelties of Constantius or were accessory to the death of Gallus. Ammianus, 22. 3, describes the work of this commission, on which were Sallust, Mamertinus and Nevitta the Goth. Among those condemned to death were the notorious informer and agent of Constantius, Paul, nicknamed "the Chain,"^[16] the eunuch Eusebius, chamberlain of Constantius (see Letter 4, p. 11), and the ex-prefect, the consul Florentius, whose oppression of the Gallic provincials is described in the same letter. Florentius managed to conceal himself till after Julian's death.

On February 4, 362, Julian proclaimed religious freedom in the Empire, and ordered the restoration of the temples. All who had used them as quarries or bought portions of them for building houses were to restore the stone and marble.^[17] This often caused great hardship to individuals, and even Libanius, a devout pagan, more than once in his letters^[18] intercedes with local officials on behalf of those affected by Julian's edict. The Emperor recalled the ecclesiastics who had been exiled by the Arian Constantius, among them Aetius, to whom he wrote Letter 15, and the famous orthodox prelate Athanasius, for whom see Letters 24, 46, 47.^[19] It was perhaps easier to restore the temples than the half-forgotten ritual of the gods, but Julian enlisted the aid of a learned pagan, the Roman antiquarian and senator, Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, whom in 362 he appointed Proconsul of Achaia, while for the rites appropriate to the oriental cults he certainly consulted Maximus of Ephesus, who initiated him into the Mysteries of Mithras.

Constantius, fully occupied with the persecution of non-Arian Christians, had not persecuted pagan intellectuals such as Libanius and Themistius the philosopher, while even pagan officials such as Sallust had been promoted in his reign. But Julian gave instructions that pagans should be preferred to Christians for public offices (Letter 37), and, as the progress of "Hellenism" proved slower than he had hoped, he grew more intolerant. For evidence of definite persecution of the Christians in his brief reign we depend on Gregory Nazianzen, Socrates, Sozomen and other historians of the Church. But certain administrative measures referred to in the letters were aimed at the Christians. As a part of Julian's general policy of exacting service in their local senates from all well-to-do citizens, he deprived Christian clerics of their immunity from such service;^[20] funerals were no longer allowed to take place in the daytime according to the Christian custom;^[21] and one of his earliest reforms in connection with the use of the public post, the cursus publicus, directly affected Christian ecclesiastics. The privilege of free transport and the use of inns, horses and mules at the expense of the State had been granted to ecclesiastics by Constantine in 314; and in the reign of Constantius, when the bishops were summoned from all parts of the Empire to one synod after another, the system of public transport broke down under the burden.^[22] In an edict preserved in Codex Theodosianus 8. 5. 12, dated February 22, 362, Julian reserves to himself, except in certain cases, the right of granting evectio, or free transport. In Letters 8, 15, and 26 he authorises his correspondents to use State carriages and horses. Libanius says that this reform was so thoroughly carried out that often the animals and their drivers had nothing to do.

But such withdrawals of privileges were pinpricks compared with the famous edict^[23] in which Julian reserved to himself the control of the appointments of teachers, and the rescript, Letter 36, in which he forbade Christians to read the pagan authors with their pupils. This meant that they must cease to teach, since all education was based on the reading of the poets, historians and philosophers. The Christian sophist Victorinus, who was then lecturing at Rome, and Prohaeresius at Athens, must resign their chairs. Julian offered a special exemption to Prohaeresius, but the sophist, says Eunapius,^[24] refused the privilege. He could afford to wait in patience, for, like many another distinguished Christian, he consulted the omens through the pagan hierophant of Greece, and learned indirectly, but to his own reassurance, that Julian's power would be short-lived. Even Ammianus the pagan historian deplored the bigotry and malice of Julian's attempt to suppress Christian educators. "It was," he says, "a harsh measure, and had better be buried in eternal silence."^[25] The Christians interpreted it as excluding their children from education; Theodoret, 3. 4. 2, says as much, and quotes a saying of Julian's (frag. 7), whose context is lost, to the effect that the Christians arm their intellects to oppose Hellenism by means of the Hellenic masterpieces. Socrates, 3. 12. 7, quotes another saying of the same sort (frag. 6). These two quotations perhaps belong to lost rescripts aimed at Christian teachers, which followed the extant edict and rescript. Well-educated Christians can hardly have been consoled by the enterprise of a father and son named Apollinarius, who "within a very brief space of time," says Sozomen, 5. 18, converted the Bible into epics, tragedies, comedies, odes and dialogues for the education of Christian youths. But Christian teachers did not suffer much inconvenience, for Julian's prohibition can hardly have been enforced in the few months that preceded his death. The edict was rescinded by the Emperor Valentinian.

In his dealings with the Jews, Julian reversed the policy of Constantius and Gallus Caesar, who had treated them with extreme harshness.^[26] He freed them from the taxes levied on them as Jews, and invited them to renew their ancient sacrifices. When they replied that this could be done only in the Temple at Jerusalem he promised to rebuild the Temple, and restore Jerusalem to the Jews. He may almost be called a Zionist. The historians of the Church say that Julian desired to nullify the prophecy of Christ, that not one stone of the Temple should remain on another, and exult in the fact that his project had to be abandoned, owing to the earthquakes that were experienced in the East in the winter of 362-363. Julian himself speaks of his plan of rebuilding the Temple,^[27] and Ammianus says that the work was entrusted to Alypius, the ex-Governor of Britain, to whom Julian when in Gaul wrote Letters 6 and 7, and that it was abandoned owing to mysterious "balls of flame" which burned the workmen. Almost the same account is given by Philostorgius 7. 9, Theodoret 3. 15, and other historians of the Church. Nevertheless, Lardner in Jewish and Heathen Testimony 4. p. 47, and Adler in the Jewish Quarterly Review, 1893, deny that the work was ever undertaken, and assert that Ammianus derived his account from Gregory Nazianzen's spiteful Invective against Julian, and that the Christian historians were taken in by Gregory's invention. But Ammianus was with Julian at Antioch that winter and on the march to Persia in 363, and must have known the facts. He did not need to depend on Gregory for information; Gregory does not, in fact, mention the appointment of Alypius, nor would Gregory have been likely to write his detailed account of the zealous cooperation of the Jews in the building if he could have been refuted by any resident of Jerusalem. We may therefore believe that the enterprise was begun but was given up because of earthquakes, and possibly also because Julian had withdrawn to Persia. The rescript To the Community of the Jews (Letter 51), though it is cited by Sozomen 5. 22 and Socrates 3. 20 as Julian's, has been condemned as a forgery by Schwarz, Klimek and Geffcken, was considered "tres suspect" by Bidez and Cumont in 1898 (Recherches) and is rejected outright by them in their edition of 1922. Their arguments are based on the general tone of the document, and the strange reference to "my brother" the Jewish patriarch, but while the rescript may have been rewritten or edited in a bureau, it probably represents the sentiments of Julian and is consistent with his attitude to the Jews as expressed in the treatise Against the Galilaeans. It has therefore been placed with the genuine letters in this volume.

The appeal On behalf of the Argives (Letter 28), was accepted as genuine by all editors before Bidez and Cumont, and by Schwarz, Geffcken and Asmus, and was formerly assigned by Cumont to the year 355, when Julian was a student at Athens. Bidez and Cumont (1922) now accept the theory of Keil^[28] that it is not by Julian, but was composed in the first century A.D. as a letter of recommendation (ἐπιστολὴ συστατική). Maas, however, maintains that it was written by the high-priest Theodorus in Julian's reign, and that the proconsul's rejection of its appeal is referred to in Julian's letter to Theodorus, p. 37. But there is nothing in it that could not have been written by Julian, and it would be natural for him to defend ancient Argos, which had probably remained Hellenic, and her sacred festivals against Romanised and Christianised Corinth, the provincial metropolis. Julian disliked beast shows^[29] as much as Constantius had loved them, and the tribute exacted from Argos was used to pay for such shows (see p. 89). He asks a favour rather than gives orders as an Emperor, but this was consistent with his custom of referring such appeals as that of the Argives to the governors of the provinces.^[30] We do not know from other sources when the Argives began to pay tribute to Corinth, though there is abundant evidence that under the Empire the minor cities of Greece did pay tribute to Corinth instead of to Rome. On the whole I see no reason for suspecting the authenticity of this document, or for assigning it to Julian's student days at Athens.

In May or June 362 Julian left Constantinople for Antioch, the capital of the provinces of the East, and about this time he wrote Letter 35 to Aristoxenus, asking him to meet him at Tyana, and Letter 29 to his uncle at Antioch, whom he had appointed Count of the East (Comes Orientis); he refers to their approaching meeting at Antioch (p. 105). On the way he visited and wept over Nicomedia, which had been destroyed by an earthquake in 358,^[31] and Pessinus, where he sacrificed to Cybele the Mother of the Gods at her ancient shrine. From Letter 42 to Callixeine it appears that as a consequence of his visit he appointed her priestess of Cybele at Pessinus. That the citizens of Pessinus had displeased him by a lack of enthusiasm for the restoration of their famous cult may be gathered from Letter 22, p. 73. Julian also visited Tarsus, in whose suburb near the river Cydnus he was destined to be buried in the following year. He arrived at Antioch towards the end of July, and wrote Letter 41, the rescript to the citizens of Bostra, on August 1.^[32] In January 363 he entered on the consulship (see Letter 54).

In the Misopogon (Loeb Library, Vol. 2), Julian has himself described his nine months' stay at Antioch. The city was predominantly Christian and opposed to his restoration of paganism, so that when the celebrated temple of Apollo in the beautiful suburb of Daphne was burned in 362, he ascribed it to the malice of the Christians. The citizens, who were notoriously pleasure-loving and luxurious, openly ridiculed his austere way of life and disliked his reforms. During the winter he wrote the treatise Against the Galilaeans. When he left Antioch on March 5, 363, for his Persian campaign he announced that he would spend the coming winter, not at Antioch, but at Tarsus. This showed that he expected a short campaign. In the extant letters he does not mention his disappointment with his reception at Antioch, though in Letter 58, 399 c, written on March 10 or 11 at Hierapolis, he alludes to his interview with the delegates from the senate of Antioch who had followed him as far as Litarbae in the attempt to conciliate his displeasure.^[33] This is his last extant letter.

For his brief and fatal campaign against Sapor in 363 we depend on Ammianus and Eutropius who accompanied him, and on Zosimus. On the march Julian avoided Edessa, which was stubbornly Christian (see Letter 40). At Carrhae, notorious for the defeat of the Romans under Crassus, he assembled his troops. Procopius was sent towards Nisibis with 18,000 men in order to distract the attention of Sapor, and was ordered to meet the Armenian auxiliaries whom Julian had requisitioned in Letter 57, and later rejoin Julian. Meanwhile the Emperor with 65,000 men proceeded to the Euphrates. His fleet of a thousand boats of all kinds he transferred by means of a canal from the Euphrates to the Tigris, and arrived under the walls of Ctesiphon, devastating the country and burning towns and villages as he went. The omens from first to last were unfavourable, his officers were inefficient, and the troops whom he had brought from Gaul began to suffer from the heat.^[34] Though before Ctesiphon he won an important victory over the Persians, he reluctantly decided not to besiege this stronghold, but to try to effect a junction with the forces of Procopius by marching northwards. He burnt his ships rather than take them up the Tigris. But Procopius and the Armenians failed to arrive, and Sapor with his main army was at hand and began to harass Julian's forces from June 16. The Persians were repulsed, but, after about ten days of almost incessant fighting and marching, Julian was mortally wounded in a rear attack on June 26, and died at midnight. On his death-bed he is said to have discussed the immortality of the soul with Maximus and Priscus.^[35] The exact name of the place where he fell is not known, but Ammianus 25. 3. 9, says that when Julian learned that the locality was called Phrygia he gave up hope of recovery, because an oracle had said that he would die in Phrygia. His body was carried with the army on its retreat and was later sent to Tarsus for burial in charge of Procopius. The Christian general Jovian was elected Emperor by the troops.

The letters of Julian must have been collected and published before the end of the fourth century, since Eunapius (A.D. 346-414) used them as a source for his History, and in his Lives mentions several that are not extant. Libanius, not long after Julian's death, wrote to Aristophanes of Corinth that some of Julian's letters were safe to publish, others not, and consoled himself for the Emperor's loss with "these his immortal children." Zosimus the pagan historian, who wrote 450-501, says that from Julian's letters one may best comprehend his activities, "which extended over the whole world." The historians of the Church, notably Socrates of Constantinople, who completed his History about A.D. 440, seem to have quoted from a mixed collection of letters and edicts such as has come down to us. Sozomen, a contemporary of Socrates, quotes nine ot the extant letters and mentions fourteen that have not survived. Such a collection would be entitled Letters because any Imperial edict was called a letter. Julian was an indefatigable letter-writer, and we have only a fraction of his vast correspondence. Many letters must have been suppressed by their owners as dangerous to themselves after his death, or by the Christians because of their disrespectful allusions to Christianity; of those that survive some were mutilated by the Christians for the same reason, while others, such as Letter 81, To Basil, are suspected of being Christian forgeries designed to display Julian in an unpleasant light. On the other hand, documents which could be used as evidence that Julian persecuted the Christians {e.g. Letter 37), or pastoral letters written in his character of pontifex maximus to admonish pagan priests to imitate the Christian virtues of asceticism and charity to the poor (e. g. Letter 20 and the Fragment of a Letter, Vol. 2), would not be allowed to perish. Many letters survived in hand-books as models of epistolary style, a fact which, as Cumont pointed out, adds greatly to the difficulties of correct ascription, because the compilers of such hand-books were often careless about the authorship, form of address, or completeness of such extracts.

The "Letters" in this collection are (1) edicts or rescripts, the majority of which are concerned with the Christians; these were certainly worked over by the Imperial secretaries and are only indirectly Julian's; (2) pastoral or encyclical letters to priests; and (3) private correspondence. As a rule Julian dictated to secretaries, and so fast that Libanius says the "tachygraphers" were unable to keep pace with him, but certain postscripts are marked "with his own hand." After his accession in 361 the plea of lack of time or a shortage of secretaries is frequent, and some scholars have rejected certain purely conventional and sophistic letters, such as 59 and 60, or assigned them to his student days, on the ground that Julian after 355 would not write in that strain, and that his undoubtedly genuine letters always have some definite content. They never reject a letter in which pressure of business is mentioned, though one may see from the correspondence of Libanius that the plea of lack of time owing to affairs is a regular sophistic excuse. The purely sophistic letters have been placed last in the present volume in order that they may not interrupt the sequence of those that can be dated with more or less certainty. But I am not convinced that at any time in Julian's career he had renounced writing like a sophist and bandying quotations with his friends. Nothing could be more sophistic than part of his unquestionably genuine letter to Libanius, in which he expresses his admiration for his friend's speech on behalf of Aristophanes.^[36] There seems to be only one safe criterion for rejecting letters ascribed in the MS. tradition to Julian: when the historical facts of his life cannot be reconciled with the contents of a letter, or if he cannot have known the person addressed, as is the case with the six letters addressed to Iamblichus, or when the contents are too foolish even for Julian in his sophistic vein,^[37] it has seemed better not to confuse the reader by including them, as Hertlein did, with the genuine letters. They are therefore grouped together as apocryphal. After the publication of Hertlein's edition, six letters, ascribed to Julian, were discovered by Papadopoulos-Kerameus in a convent, used as a school for Greek merchants, on the island Chalce (Halki) near Constantinople; they are included in this edition. The text used in this volume is, for the rest of the letters, that of Hertlein (Leipzig, 1876), revised and rearranged in chronological order as far as possible. The marginal numbers correspond to the pages of Spanheim, 1696. The edition of Bidez and Cumont (1922) appeared too late to be used in constructing the present text, but is referred to in this Introduction. All references to Bidez or Cumont in the critical notes refer to their publications before 1922. Their edition includes the Latin edicts of Julian preserved in the Codex Theodosianus and the Imperial edict in Greek, De auro coronario, published by Grenfell, Hunt and Hogarth in Fayum towns and their Papyri, p. 116 foll., and assigned by those editors and by Wilcken to Alexander Severus. Bidez and Cumont support Dessau^[38] in regarding this edict as by Julian, who, as we know from an edict in Codex Theodosianus 12. 13. 1, remitted the aurum coronarium on April 29, 362. Ammianus^[39] mentions this as an instance of Julian's generosity.

Biographical notes

The following biographical notices of Julian's more important correspondents or of persons mentioned in the text, are in alphabetical order and are designed to supplement the notes.

• Aetius of Antioch, nicknamed "Atheist" by his Christian opponents, rose from extreme poverty and obscurity to the position of leader of the faction of the Arian sect called Anomoean because its members held that "the substance of the Son is unlike the substance of the Father." The less radical of the unorthodox, semi-Arians, like the Emperor Constantius, persecuted the Anomoeans. But Gallus Caesar, Julian's half-brother, soon after his promotion in 351 and his appointment to govern the East, came under the influence of Aetius, who, for the next three years while he resided at Antioch, was his spiritual adviser. When Gallus heard that Julian, then studying at Ephesus with Maximus the theurgist, was inclined to "Hellenism," he more than once sent Aetius to admonish his younger brother, who contrived to reassure them both.^[40] After the disgrace and execution of Gallus by Constantius at the end of 354, Aetius was exiled to Phrygia by the Emperor, partly because of his alarming influence and extreme Arianism, partly because of his intimacy with Gallus. Expelled from his office of deacon and repudiated by the Arians, he was still in exile on Julian's accession, when he was recalled to Constantinople and treated with peculiar favour. In spite of the title of Julian's letter of recall,^[41] Aetius was not made a bishop until the reign of Valens. After Julian's death he retired to an estate in Lesbos which had been given him by Julian, but later he went to Constantinople, and in spite of his heresy was made a bishop, though probably without a see. In the histories of the fourth-century Church, such as those of Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret, he is the most important of all the heretics and apparently the most dangerous to the unity of the Church. Philostorgius gives a detailed and fairly tolerant account of his varied life and great influence, and praises his eloquence and learning, whereas the others ridicule as superficial his study of Aristotle, with whose logic this ex-goldsmith of Antioch professed to have fitted himself to found a heresy, and Newman, who intensely disliked his heresy, calls him a mountebank.^[42]

• Alypius, to whom Julian wrote Letters 6 and 7, was, according to Ammianus 23. 1. 2, a native of Antioch. In 358 Libanius in an extant letter (324 Foerster), congratulates him on his success as governor of Britain - his title was Vicarius Uritanniarum, an office subordinate to the prefect of the Gallic provinces - and reports favourably of his young son Hierocles, who had been left at Antioch in the sophist's charge. Seeck and Cumont think that Julian's Letter 6 should be dated 355 or 356, and that his summons to Alypius preceded the latter' s appointment to Britain; but I agree with Geffcken that Julian's language implies that he had been for some time in Gaul, and that he needed the assistance of Alypius for his expedition against Constantius, so that the letter should be dated 360. As there is nothing in Letter 7 to indicate whether Alypius was in Britain or what was the map which he had sent to Julian, I have not altered the traditional order of the two letters to Alypius. If, however, Alypius was still in Britain, Letter 7 will naturally antedate Letter 6 and will fall between 356 and 360. In that case the illness from which Julian had lately recovered may be the semi-asphyxiation which he himself describes in Misopogon 341 d as having occurred when he was at Paris in the winter of 358-9. We know that Alypius was appointed by Julian in 362-3 to superintend the rebuilding of the Temple at Jerusalem (Ammianus 23. 1. 2). The project failed, and Alypius returned to Antioch, where he is mentioned in a letter from Libanius to Basil (1583 Wolf) as a person of distinction. In 372, when the Emperor Valens, in his panic terror of assassination, was persecuting right and left, Alypius was exiled on a false charge of poisoning and his property confiscated (Ammianus 29. 1. 44). Like Priscus and Libanius he is addressed by Julian as "brother," possibly, as Asmus thinks, because they were fellow-initiates in the Mysteries of Mithras.^[43] In the MSS. of Julian's Letters Alypius is entitled "brother of Caesarius" to distinguish him from the dwarf Alypius of Alexandria, whose Life was written first by his friend Iamblichus the philosopher and later by Eunapius. Caesarius held several high offices in the fourth century, and in the reign of Valens, when city prefect of Constantinople, was imprisoned by the usurper Procopius (Ammianus 26. 7. 4). Several letters from Libanius to Caesarius are extant.

• Aristophanes of Corinth, about whose reinstatement Julian wrote to Libanius when they were at Antioch towards the end of 362 (Letter 53), was an official of no great importance, but the detailed account of his life which Libanius addressed to Julian at that time (Oration 14, Vol. 2, Foerster) is a curious record of the vicissitudes of official life in the fourth century. Aristophanes was the son of a rich senator of Corinth and was educated in rhetoric at Athens. He was involved in a ruinous lawsuit and robbed of part of his patrimony by his brother-in-law Eugenius, a favourite of the Emperor Constans, and since, while Constans ruled Greece, it was useless to oppose Eugenius, Aristophanes retired to Syria, some time before 350. There he was appointed an Agens in rebus, and, as a sort of Imperial courier, travelled all over the Empire. In 357 he was sent to Egypt with the newly-appointed prefect Parnassius. There they incautiously consulted an astrologer. How dangerous was this proceeding under the Empire, since it aroused suspicion of treasonable interest in the length of the Emperor's life or reign, may be seen from the accounts in Ammianus of the reigns of Constantius and Valens and their wholesale persecution of alleged conspirators. After a trial at Scythopolis (Ammianus 19. 12. 10), conducted by the cruel agent of Constantius, Paul, nicknamed "the Chain," Parnassius was exiled in 359 or 360, while Aristophanes was tortured and barely escaped with his life. He was condemned to travel throughout Egypt under the escort of a soldier and a herald, who proclaimed wherever they went that any Egyptian whom Aristophanes had defrauded might come forward and denounce him. Libanius, who, like all fourth-century writers, gives the Egyptians a very bad character, argues that, if even the Egyptians could not trump up a charge against Aristophanes, he was at least innocent of the charges of peculation that had been brought against him at Scythopolis. He was released by the death of Constantius in 361. No doubt the strongest argument that Libanius used in favour of Aristophanes was the fact that he was a devout pagan who at his trial had openly sworn by the gods. Libanius asked for his protege some office that would rehabilitate him in the eyes of the Corinthians, and in Letter 53 Julian says that he will confer with Libanius as to what this shall be, but we know only that Aristophanes did receive some office and returned to Corinth. Julian was more interested in the eloquence of Libanius than in the fortunes of Aristophanes. Seeck, however, in Die Briefe des Libanius states that Julian appointed Aristophanes to the highest office in Greece, the proconsulship of Achaea, and places him in the lists of proconsuls for 362-3. But already in 362 Julian had given that honour to a man of the highest character, whom he greatly admired, Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, and since we know from Zosimus 4. 3. 3 that Praetextatus still held the office in September 364, when he was able to persuade the Emperor Valentinian not to enforce against the Greeks the edict forbidding the nocturnal celebration of religious rites, there is no room for Aristophanes as proconsul of Achaea; nor is it likely that so strict a moralist as Julian would have conceded so great a distinction to a man for whose loose morals even Libanius felt bound to apologise in his oration.^[44] Libanius in a letter (758) expresses his delight at Julian's praise of his speech and says that it shall be published with the Emperor's letter; they do occur together in some MSS. In 364, after Julian's death, Aristophanes wrote to Libanius asking that he might see the correspondence of Julian and Libanius. The sophist replied (1350 Wolf) by reproaching him with having soon forgotten "the divine Julian," and says that he can send only such letters as it would be safe to publish. It was, in fact, a dangerous time for the friends of Julian, who were regarded with suspicion by the Christian Emperors Valens and Valentinian, and, for the most part, lost their offices.

• Arsaces, or Arsacius, to whom is addressed Letter 57, was king of Armenia in the reigns of Constantius and Julian, and, since Armenia was the buffer state between Rome and Persia, he was courted by Romans and Persians alike, whenever they were at war. In his Oration 1. 20 d, Julian describes how in the Eastern campaign of Constantius in 337 the Armenians for a time went over to the Persians. When in 361 Constantius was about to inarch against Julian, leaving his Eastern frontier insecure, he summoned Arsaces to Caesarea in Cappadocia and strengthened the old alliance of Rome and Armenia by giving him in marriage Olympias, the daughter of the prefect Ablabius, who had been betrothed when very young to the Emperor's deceased brother Constans (Ammianus 20. 11). Athanasius reckoned it among the impieties of the Arian Constantius that he had "given over to the barbarians" one who had been all but a Roman Empress. Constantius immediately on his accession had put to death the prefect Ablabius, the low-born favourite of Constantine whose ambitious career and violent end are related in the Lives of Eunapius; he now disposed of Ablabius' daughter as he had disposed of his own two sisters, giving one to Gallus and the other to Julian in order to secure their loyalty when they were promoted to the Caesarship. Arsaces remained faithful to Rome and so lost his kingdom and his life to the Persians (Ammianus 27. 12), but his failure to arrive with his auxiliaries to aid Julian at Ctesiphon contributed to the breakdown of the campaign (Ammianus 24. 7). Letter 57 is bracketed by Hertlein as spurious and rejected by all modern editors on account of its bombastic style, and its authenticity is dubious. But it was cited by Sozomen 6. 2, in the fifth century, and, if a forgery, was forged early enough to take him in. He criticises its "unbounded arrogance" and speaks of its "blasphemies against Christ"; since these are not in Letter 57 he may have seen a somewhat different version. As for the style, since Arsaces was a Christian and a barbarian, Julian may have thought that threats would serve him better than cajoleries, and in any case we cannot tell in what language he or his secretaries might see fit to address a ruler who owed his throne to the Romans and might be suspected of intending treachery in the coming campaign. Accordingly, though its authorship is doubtful, I have not placed this letter with the apocrypha.

• Artemius, military governor of Egypt (Dux Aegypti) in 361, is mentioned, though not named, by Julian in Letter 21, To the Alexandrians. He was in high favour with the Emperor Constantius and an ardent Christian. In Alexandria he was hated by the pagans because he despoiled the temples, especially the famous Serapeum, the shrine of Serapis, and not less by the orthodox Christians for his support of the Arian Bishop George. In 362 Julian summoned him to Antioch, deprived him of his office, and had him beheaded on October 20, 362, a day that was consecrated by the Church to his memory as a saint and martyr. There were several reasons why Julian detested Artemius. He was a friend of Constantius, had been foremost in suppressing the pagan cults, and was supposed to have been accessory to the murder of Gall us Caesar, though this last charge Artemius denied. The fullest account of his defiance of Julian at Antioch, his religious controversy with the Emperor, his tortures and death, was preserved by the late fourth-century historian of the Church, Philostorgius (pp. 151-176, Bidez). Ammianus is strangely in error when he says (22. 11. 3) that the news of the death of Artemius was the signal at Alexandria for the outbreak of the populace which resulted in the murder of Bishop George, whose oppression of the citizens Artemius had supported with his troops (Sozomen 4. 30). Ammianus was at Antioch and must have known the date of the death of Artemius; he should also have known that George was murdered nearly a year earlier, in December 361, when the death of Constantius was announced. Artemius, according to Philostorgius, was one of those who resisted Julian's blanda persecutio of bribes and eloquent arguments to which so many succumbed, and this accounts for the fact that he was not punished till some time after Julian's accession.

• Atarbius^[45] to whom the Emperor Julian wrote Letter 37 telling him not to persecute the Galilaeans, but to prefer the god-fearing, i.e. the pagans, was a native of Ancyra and himself a pagan. At that time, 362, he was governing the province of the Euphrates with the title Praeses Euphrates sis. The letter as we have it is abrupt and is probably a fragment of a longer letter or edict, often quoted no doubt by the Christians as evidence of their persecution and exclusion from office in Julian's reign. On the general question of Julian's treatment of Christian officials or candidates for office the historians of the Church give divergent accounts, but Socrates 3. 13. 2 and Sozomen 5. 18 say that he would not appoint them to govern provinces, on the ground that their law forbade them to inflict capital punishment. Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 7, says that Julian bribed the Christians to sacrifice to the gods by promising them appointments, and Jerome says that many could not resist this blanda persecutio. In 362-363 Libanius wrote several letters, which are extant, to Atarbius, and especially in Letter 741, Foerster, praised his mild administration of the Euphratensis. In 364, when Libanius wrote to him Letter 1221 Wolf, Atarbius was Consularis Macedoniae.

• Athanasius, the saint and orthodox bishop of Alexandria about whom Julian wrote Letters 24, 46 and 47, is the most notable Christian with whom on his accession Julian had to deal. He became bishop of Alexandria in 326 and died in 373. But of that time he spent about twenty years away from his see, and went into exile or hiding five times, once under Constantine, twice under Constantius, who supported the Arian heresy of which Athanasius was the determined opponent, once under Julian, and finally for four months under the Arian Emperor Valens in 367. With the death of Valens the Arians lost practically all their influence and the orthodox prelate had won in the end. When, in 362, Julian proclaimed an amnesty for the non-Arian ecclesiastics who had been persecuted by Constantius, Athanasius returned in February to his see at Alexandria. His enemy, the Arian Bishop George of Cappadocia, who then held the bishopric, had been murdered on December 24, 361, when the news of the death of Constantius became known at Alexandria. George was obnoxious to pagans and Athanasians alike, but though Philostorgius 7. 2 says that Athanasius incited the people to murder George, the silence of Julian on this point and the testimony of Socrates 3. 31 and Sozomen 3. 7 that Athanasius was innocent, indicate that the charge was due to the malice of the Arians. Tumults similar to that which resulted in the lynching of George occurred elsewhere in the Empire, and the Christian writers in their invectives against Julian accuse him of having recalled the exiles in order to foment the strife of the Christian sects, whose quarrels were so bitter and unremitting that the story of the reigns of Constantine, Constantius and Valens is mainly that of a heated theological controversy. Julian in Letter 21 rebuked the Alexandrians, though not as severely as they deserved, for the murder of George, and with indecent haste demanded for himself in Letter 23 the books of the dead bishop, whose library he had used in the past, perhaps in his years of retirement at Macellum in Cappadocia; he may have wished to use them again for his tract Against the Galilaeans, which he composed at Antioch in the following winter. When Athanasius after his return proceeded to exercise his functions, Julian in an edict addressed to the Alexandrians, Letter 24, banished him from Alexandria, and wrote a sharp rebuke to the prefect of Egypt, Ecdicius Olympus, ordering Athanasius to be expelled from Egypt before December 1. Accordingly, on October 23, 361, Athanasius left Alexandria, saying, "It is but a little cloud and it will pass" (Sozomen 5. 15). In the late autumn of 362 the Alexandrians sent to Julian at Antioch a petition for the recall of Athanasius, but he refused their request in a document (Letter 47) which is partly an edict, partly a theological argument for paganism, and contains the statement, useful for his biographers, that he had finally renounced Christianity twelve years earlier, i. e. in 350. Athanasius remained in hiding near Alexandria and at Memphis until Julian's death in 363, when he resumed his bishopric.

• Basil the Great, commonly called St. Basil, was a native of Cappadocia. He and Julian were about the same age, and were fellow-students in Athens in 355. Basil returned to Cappadocia in 356 and was probably in retreat in a monastery near Caesarea, the metropolis of Cappadocia, when Julian addressed to him Letter 26 inviting him to the court at Constantinople. The invitation was certainly not accepted, but there is no proof that they did not remain on good terms. Basil had other pagan friends, especially the sophist Libanius, with whom he corresponded and to whom he sent pupils from Cappadocia. Basil became bishop of Caesarea in 370 and died in his fiftieth year in 379. There is no good reason for doubting the genuineness of Letter 26, or for supposing that it was addressed to some other Basil than the famous bishop. But Letter 81, in which Julian demands from Basil a large sum of money as a fine on Caesarea, and threatens to punish the citizens still more severely if he is not obeyed, is generally regarded as spurious, and equally spurious is Basil s defiant answer, which is extant among the saint's correspondence as Letter 41. Even in Byzantine times both letters were regarded as unskilful forgeries, alien to the character of the writers to whom they were ascribed. The main argument against the authenticity of Letter 81 is the peculiar language, which is like nothing that we know to be Julianic. A minor point is that he regularly calls the Danube by the name Ister, whereas the writer of the letter does not. Further, the silence of Gregory Nazianzen as to the demand of money from Basil is strange in one who had been a fellow-student of the two men at Athens, and in his invectives against Julian would hardly have omitted this outrage if Basil had been involved. Moreover, the last words of Letter 81 are said by Sozomen 5. 18 to have been addressed by Julian "to the bishops," and he says that the bishops made the retort which appears at the end of Basil's alleged reply: ἀνέγνως ἀλλ᾽ ούκ ἔγνως· εἰ γὰρ ἔγνως, ούκ ἂν κατέγως. "What you read you did not understand. For if you had understood you would not have condemned." But Julian's hostility to Caesarea was a fact. Cappadocia as a whole was Christian, and its capital was, as Sozomen 5. 4 says, "Christian to a man." Under Constantius the citizens had pulled down the temples of Zeus and Apollo, and in Julian's reign they invited martyrdom by destroying the temple of Fortune, the only one that remained. Sozomen relates their punishment by Julian, which probably occurred while he was at Antioch in 362-363. The city lost its complimentary name of Caesarea, and was obliged to resume its old name Mazaca; it was expunged from the catalogue of cities, and its church treasures were confiscated, Libanius, Oration 16, describes its fate as a warning to the recalcitrant. That Julian was displeased with the Cappadocians in general may be seen from the tone of Letter 35, To Aristoxenus, whom he asked to meet him at Tyana on his way to Antioch; nor did he visit Caesarea the metropolis, or Macellum, where he had spent so much of his youth. His death probably prevented the punishment of Caesarea from being fully carried out.

• Ecdicius, probably called also Olympus, to whom Julian wrote Letters 23, 45, 46, 49, was prefect of Egypt 362-363. The letters all refer to the affairs of Egypt. Julian commissions Ecdicius to secure for him the library of Bishop George; scolds him for not having taken instant action against Athanasius; tells him the height of the Nile flood; and orders him to encourage the study of music at Alexandria. Ammianus 22. 14 says that in 362 Julian received from the prefect of Egypt a report on the sacred bull Apis, but does not give his name. In Codex Theodosianus 15. 1. 8, Ecdicius appears by name and receives rescripts from Julian. As the name of the prefect at this time appears also as Olympus, Seeck is probably right in assuming that he had, as was not unusual, two names, and that either could be used. This may be the Ecdicius who studied in Athens with Libanius in 336-340, later corresponded with him, and sent him pupils. On August 20, 363, Ecdicius announced to the Alexandrians the death of Julian in Persia. In informing Ecdicius about the height of the Nile flood Julian, who was at Antioch, wrote what Ecdicius must have known. Julian took a special interest in the Nile flood because he had, on his accession, ordered that the Nilometer, the measure used to gauge its height, should be restored to the temple of Serapis, whence it had been removed by Constantine to a Christian church; Socrates 1. 18, Sozomen 5. 3.

• Elpidius "the philosopher," to whom is addressed Letter 65, is not otherwise known, and the letter, which is a purely formal type of excuse for the brevity of the writer, was probably preserved on that account in epistolary hand-books. It is placed by Cumont with the spurious letters, though there is nothing against it but its lack of content. Two men named Elpidius attained to high office in the fourth century, and one of them was a favourite with Julian because he had renounced Christianity and become a zealous pagan. He was with Julian at Antioch in the winter of 362 as Comes rerum privatarum, and Libanius, in Letter 33, written when Julian was in Gaul in 358, says that Julian, though younger than Elpidius, has exercised a good influence on him, and that in his conversation Elpidius echoes Julian's ideas and is as anxious as Libanius himself regarding Julian's future. This probably alludes to the renunciation of Christianity by Elpidius which was to follow Julian's accession (see, too, Libanius, Oration 14. 35). It was to him that Libanius applied when he grew anxious as to the fate of Aristophanes (see Letter 758, Foerster). The other Elpidius, a Christian, was prefect of the East in 360, and was also at Antioch with Julian in 362. He is often mentioned by Ammianus and Libanius. Neither of these men could correctly be called a philosopher, but it is possible that Julian might so address the former, who was among his intimates.

• Eustathius, to whom Julian addressed Letters 43 and 44, was a Neo-Platonic philosopher but apparently not a miracle-worker of the type of Maximus. He was a distinguished orator, and in 358 was sent by Constantius on an embassy to the Persian king Sapor, having been chosen for this mission, says Ammanius 17. 5, ut opifex suadendi. His extraordinary, though short-lived, influence over Sapor is described by Eunapius (pp. 393-399, Wright). He married Sosipatra the clairvoyant, whose miraculous childhood under the tutelage of Chaldaean thaumaturgists is related by Eunapius. Eustathius had poor health and died soon after Julian had given him permission to return to his native Cappadocia. His widow continued her teaching, and their son Antoninus had a distinguished career as a priest and teacher in Egypt, where his prediction of the destruction of the temples came to rank as an oracle (Eunapius, Lives, pp. 415-425). The letter of Eustathius, p. 291, in which he describes his comfortable journey, appeared in the editions of Martin, Estienne and Hertlein with the wrong title, To Libanius. Cumont restored the correct title from Parisinus 963. It has accordingly been placed in this volume with the apocryphal letters. Eustathius was a kinsman of the philosopher Aedesius, and when the latter migrated to Pergamon he left his interests in Cappadocia in charge of Eustathius. Libanius and Basil corresponded with Eustathius, and in Letter 123, written in 359, Libanius calls him "the most renowned of philosophers."

• Eutherius, to whom Julian wrote Letter 10 announcing his safety and his desire that the other should join him in Constantinople, is otherwise known from the account of his life in Ammianus 16. 7. He was an Armenian, a eunuch of unusual virtue and intellectual attainments, who had been kidnapped and sold to some Roman merchants, rose to a position at Court, became adviser to Constans, and later high chamberlain to Julian when the latter was made Caesar. Eutherius went with Julian to Gaul as his trusted adviser, and had the courage to reprove his master for that un-Roman levity of character which Ammianus says he had acquired by his residence in Asia. Eutherius was sent by Julian to the Court at Milan in 356 to counteract the plots of Marcellus, his late master of horse, and he successfully defended the loyalty of Julian before Constantius; again in 360 Julian sent him to Constantius with the letters in which he sought to justify his action in accepting the title of Augustus from the army in Gaul. After Julian's death, Eutherius, who was a pagan, retired to Rome, where he spent his old age respected by all. Ammianus says that though he has ransacked history he can find no eunuch who in wisdom and accomplishments can be compared with Eutherius. He must have possessed extraordinary tact to have been loved by Constantius, though he was a pagan, and by Julian, though he was the favourite of Constantius.

• Evagrius, the rhetorician to whom Julian wrote Letter 25, making him the present of a small estate in Bithynia, is otherwise unknown, though he is possibly to be identified with the man of that name who joined Julian at Nisli in the autumn of 361 (Letter 8, To Maximus). Neither the Comes rerum privatarum under Constantius, whom Julian banished on his accession (Ammianus 22. 3. 7), nor the friend of Libanius who appears in his correspondence and in that of St. Basil, is likely to have received this gift from Julian, but we know nothing definite on this point. Julian tells us in his Letter to the Athenians, Vol. 2, 273 b, that Constantius had kept all his father's property, so that he had the use only of his mother's estate before he was made Caesar. On the other hand we have the statement of Eunapius (Lives, p. 428, Wright), that there was at the disposal of Julian when a student, "ample and abundant wealth from every source." In his fragmentary Letter to a Priest (Vol. 2, 290 d), Julian says that his grandmother's estate was taken from him for a time only, and boasts of his own generosity in giving when he had little to spare. The date when he gave the small country-place to Evagrius cannot be precisely determined. In the absence of direct evidence I have dated it shortly after his accession; so, too, Schwarz. Cumont places it first in his edition and thinks that it was written from Gaul before 358. In favour of his view is Libanius, Letter 369 (Foerster), written to Julian in Gaul, in which he praises his generosity in having given to his friends houses, slaves, lands and money. On the other hand, it is equally likely that the estate which Julian's uncle, Count Julian, asked for too late in the summer of 362, was this very estate in Bithynia, and that it had been recently given to Evagrius.

• Hecebolius was a time-serving sophist who taught Julian rhetoric when he was at Constantinople as a boy in 342. In all editions earlier than Bidez and Cumont, two letters are entitled To Hecebolius, namely those numbered 40 and 63 in this volume. The first of these is almost certainly not addressed to Julian's old teacher, who had now changed from Christianity to Hellenism, but to some official at Edessa. Cumont entitles it To the people of Edessa. Letter 63, rejected by Schwarz, Cumont and Geffcken because of its flowery style and lack of serious content, contains Julianic phrases and is just such a letter as one would expect an Imperial sophist to write to a sophist. Socrates 3. 1 says that Hecebolius taught Julian, and in 3. 13 describes his shamelessness in changing his religion three times in order to win Imperial favour. Libanius, Oration 18, calls Hecebolius a rascally sophist, but does not mention his name, perhaps because he was writing after Julian's death, when it was not safe to attack openly one who had just become reconverted to Christianity.

• Himerius, to whom is addressed Letter 69, cannot be identified with certainty; but at any rate we may be sure that he is not the famous Bithynian sophist whom Julian invited to join him at Antioch in 362, since the reference to the family of the widower with whom the writer of Letter 69 condoles does not suit what we know of the sophist's private life from his own extant works. Since two MSS. give Julian's correspondent the title "Prefect of Egypt," Cumont identifies him with the Himerius whom we know, from the letters of Libanius, as the father of Iamblichus II; he was the son (or son-in-law?) of the more famous Iamblichus, the philosopher. From Libanius we learn (Letter 573) that this Himerius was an official of some sort, and we know that he died before 357. In that case Julian, if he wrote this letter to him, did so in his student days or from Gaul, after he became Caesar. Cumont suspects its genuineness. The difficulty about this identification of Himerius, son of Iamblichus, with the prefect of the MS. tradition is that we know of no prefect of Egypt of that name, and it does not occur in the list of prefects from 328 A.D. Schenkl therefore suggests (in Rhein. Mus. 72) that the real title may be To Hierius, since there was an Egyptian prefect of that name in 364, who succeeded Ecdicius Olympus. Hierius was not appointed until after Julian's death, but the title may have been added to the letter after he had received the office. The letter is in Julian's manner, and there are no good grounds for rejecting it. The name of Julian's correspondent appears in the MSS. in various forms, as Amerius (retained by Hertlein), Hemerius, and Himerius. (See under Sopater.)

• Iamblichus of Chalcis in Coele-Syria, a pupil of Porphyry, was the chief exponent of the Syrian school of Neo-Platonism in the first half of the fourth century. His Life was written by Eunapius (pp. 363-373, Wright), who shows him performing feats of magic, but reluctantly, at the instance of his disciples. The six letters to him which were ascribed to Julian in the MSS. tradition, namely 74-79 of this edition, cannot have been written by the Emperor, who was a mere child when Iamblichus died in the latter part of the reign of Constantine and was succeeded in his school by Aedesius. The letters are therefore either forgeries or were written by some other admirer of Iamblichus whose name may have been Julian. Their writer seems to have marched with the Emperor from Pannonia to the Dardanelles in 323 when the Emperor was proceeding to Nicomedia in pursuit of Licinius, and he dwells on the hardships he had endured in war, sieges, and other dangers. Cumont in his edition (1922), as in 1889 (Sur l'authenticite de quelques lettres de Julien), though less confidently, ascribes these letters to the sophist Julian of Caesarea, who taught rhetoric at Athens down to 340 A.D., when he was succeeded by Prohaeresius; but he fails to account for the silence of Eunapius in his Life of Julian of Caesarea (pp. 467-477, Wright) as to any such experiences as are alluded to in these letters. Nor does Eunapius indicate that Julian of Caesarea, who left no writings, was interested in philosophy as well as rhetoric; rather he shows us a typical teacher of rhetoric at Athens whose glory was that he had trained the famous Christian sophist Prohaeresius, and had triumphed over the jealousies of his rivals, the other Athenian sophists. The theory that this group of letters was addressed by the Emperor Julian to the younger Iamblichus, the famous philosopher's grandson, who with his father Himerius and his uncle Sopater are known to us chiefly from the correspondence of Libanius, is untenable. Iamblichus II, though he was a philosopher and is mentioned with admiration by the Emperor Julian in Letter 2, was not distinguished enough to account for the servile flattery expressed in these letters; and the writer, if he had been addressing the grandson, would hardly have failed to mention his famous grandfather. Moreover, the events alluded to are irreconcilable with what we know of Julian's life. There are in these six letters certain parallels of thought and language which favour the theory that they are by one man; but there are also similarities with the genuine works of Julian, and such parallels cannot be safely counted as evidence either of forgery or of Julianic authorship; they are more probably the common epistolary mannerisms of the fourth century.

• Julian, the Emperor Julian's uncle, brother of his mother Basilina, and son of Julius Julianus, to whom are addressed Letters 9 and 29, was persuaded by his nephew, after the death of Constantius, to renounce Christianity and to devote himself to the restoration of the Hellenic religion. This he did with such zeal that he became peculiarly odious to the Christians, especially in the East, where he resided at Antioch as Comes Orientis (Count of the East). There he died of a painful illness during Julian's visit to Antioch in 362-363. Sozomen 5. 8, Theodoret 3. 12, and Philostorgius 7. 10 recount his persecutions of the Christians and his terrible end. In Letter 29 the Emperor Julian directs his uncle, who had preceded him to Antioch, to restore the columns of the famous temple of Apollo in the suburb of Daphne; that this was done, and that the sight of the colonnade irritated the Christians, may be gathered from Ammianus 22. 13. The temple was burned down on October 22, 362, while the Emperor was in residence at Antioch, and the Emperor suspected that this was Christian vengeance, partly for the removal of the bones of St. Babylas from Daphne, partly for the rebuilding of the colonnade. Count Julian's nephew mentions his death in Vol. 2, Misopogon 365 c, and praises his administration. He was a correspondent of Libanius, and we have the letter of congratulation, 701, Foerster, sent to him by the sophist when the Emperor appointed him Count of the East in 362.

• Libanius of Antioch, the famous teacher whose speeches Julian studied at Nicomedia in 344-345, and to whom he wrote many letters (of which only three, 52, 53 and 58, survive), has left more works, chiefly rhetorical, than any other sophist of his time. His Life by Eunapius is in some respects disparaging (see Eunapius, Lives, Wright, pp. 333-336), and we can best judge of his career from his own letters, more than 1600 of which are extant, and his numerous orations. He was born in 314, and may have survived as late as 395. From his works may be gathered many details about the officials of the fourth century and the conditions of education. He corresponded with Christians and pagans alike, but the death of Julian was a severe blow to his hopes for the future of Hellenic studies, which he lived to see on the decline, giving place to Latin and Roman law. He himself knew no Latin, and was chagrined when a school of Latin was founded at Antioch in order that students might not have to go to Rome to learn the language. Libanius was with Julian at Antioch in the winter of 362-363, and two of the extant letters to him from Julian were written at that time; the third, 58, is Julian's last extant letter and was written when the Emperor was at Hierapolis on his way to Persia, in March 363. Hertlein, like all earlier editors, published four letters to Libanius, but Cumont (Recherches) has shown that Hertlein 74 and 14 are one letter, and they are so arranged in this volume as Letter 53. We have the answer of Libanius (760, Foerster) to Letter 52, and his answer (758, Foerster) to Letter 53. Libanius' Monody on the temple of Apollo at Daphne, after it had been destroyed in 362 by fire, and his Orations, namely 12, To Julian, delivered in January 363; 13, To Julian, welcoming him to Antioch in 362; 14, For Aristophanes, 15, To Julian, on behalf of Antioch, after the Emperor had left the city in 363 declaring that he would not return; 17, the Monody on Julian, which was published almost two years after Julian's death; 18, the Epitaph on Julian, published probably in 364; and 24, On Avenging Julian, addressed to the Emperor Theodosius, are invaluable documents for the attitude of a cultured pagan to Julian's restoration of Hellenism, and for his life and reign. We depend the more on these orations and the letters of Libanius, because the History of Eunapius, which was in great part devoted to Julian, exists only in a few fragments. To the enthusiasm of Libanius the Christian fathers, such as Socrates, Sozomen, Philostorgius, Theodoret and, most embittered of all, Julian's fellow-student, Gregory Nazianzen, opposed their accounts of his persecution of the Church and their criticisms of his character and motives. Both estimates of Julian may be corrected by the moderate and impartial account of one who was no sophist, and who, though a pagan, was apparently little influenced by desire for a Hellenic restoration, the Latin historian Ammianus Marcellinus. Socrates 3. 1 is the authority for the statement that Constantius, when he sent Julian, then a boy, to Nicomedia, expressly forbade him to attend the lectures of the pagan Libanius.

• Maximus of Ephesus, whose Life was written by Eunapius (Lives, pp. 431-461, 543-545, Wright), had obtained great influence over Julian in the latter's student days, when he first, as Eunapius relates, studied with Aedesius at Pergamon, but on hearing of the miraculous communications with the unseen powers of the theurgist Maximus, the pupil of Aedesius, proceeded to join him at Ephesus. In Letter 8, written soon after the death of Constantius, Julian invited Maximus to his Court, and in spite of the unfavourable omens described by Eunapius in his Life of Maximus, pp. 441-445, omens which prevented the more cautious Chrysanthius from obeying Julian's summons, Maximus joined him at Constantinople early in 362. This pseudo-philosopher remained with Julian, and was present at his death-bed. On his return from Persia, Maximus, who had many enemies, paid the penalty of the arrogance and display in which Julian had allowed him to indulge, and after various ups and downs of fortune was executed at Ephesus under the Emperor Valens in 371 on the charge of having been concerned in a conspiracy against the Emperor (Ammianus 29. 1; Zosimus 4. 15). Maximus seems to have initiated Julian into the Mysteries of Mithras, and Julian was wholly in sympathy with the theurgy of this clever charlatan. Of the three extant letters entitled To Maximus, Letters 12 and 59 are rejected by Geffcken for their sophistic style, and Cumont in his edition places them with the "spurious or doubtful" letters. But there is nothing in them that Julian might not have written, and one rather uncommon illustration in 59, the Celtic test of the legitimacy of children, was used by Julian in Oration 2, 81 n, and is probably reflected from his experience in Gaul. There is no evidence for the date of Letter 59, but it is not unlikely that Julian was writing to his teacher from Gaul, and therefore used this illustration while it was fresh in his mind.

• Nilus Dionysius, to whom Julian addressed Letter 50, is not otherwise known, unless he is to be identified with the Roman senator of whom Libanius says in Oration 18. 198 that Julian punished his impudence by a letter, when he might have confiscated his property. There is also a possible reference to Nilus in Libanius, Letter 758, Foerster, To Julian, where Libanius says that while he and Aristophanes were waiting for Julian's decision (see under Aristophanes), they feared that Julian might inflict on Aristophanes τὸ Νείλου κακόν, "the punishment of Nilus "(?). Both these references are uncertain, though Asmus, Geffcken and Cumont relate them to Julian's letter To Nilus. We know only what can be gathered from Julian, namely, that Nilus was a senator (446 a) of dubious morals, who had been recommended to the Emperor by one Symmachus; Julian, in a lost letter, had invited him to Court with the intention of giving him an office, but Nilus, who was perhaps a Christian, though Julian does not say so, held back until he received a second and more peremptory summons, which is also lost. Nilus certainly came to Antioch and was snubbed by the Emperor (446 b), and later wrote to him to excuse himself for his silence (443 c) and to say that he would come if again invited. In his answer to this communication Julian descends to personal invective of the sort that he used in his Oration 7, Against the Cynic Heraclius, but there is nothing to prove that Nilus himself was, as Asmus thinks, a Cynic. Nilus had irritated Julian by praising Alexander (a favourite commonplace of Julian's own, though in this case he found something disparaging to himself), had praised Constans and Magnentius (446 a), and had asked for a reply (446 b). Erudition is always in place in a Greek or Roman invective, and so Julian's innuendoes against the character and career of Nilus are interwoven with allusions to the historians of Alexander, to Phaedo of Elis (for whose Simon see Wilamowitz in Hermes 14), Demosthenes, Philostratus, Babrius and other authors. Asmus in Philologus 71 maintains that in Letter 50 we have a contamination of two letters, and that one was written in December 361, the other at the end of 362. But though the arrangement of the letter is strange (for example, five paragraphs begin with the word ἀλλά), we cannot, in our ignorance of the circumstances, and of Julian's real grievance, attempt to rewrite it. We are not even sure as to the man's name. Julian calls him "Dionysius" (444 d, 445 b), and in some MSS. alludes to him as "Nilus" (444 d); Laurentianus 58 has the title Against Nilus, while the earliest editor Rigalt and all others before Cumont entitled the letter To Dionysius because of Julian's use of the name in the letter.

• Oribasius, the physician to whom is addressed Letter 4, was, next to Galen, the most important medical writer of the Graeco-Roman period. He is the faithful friend of whom Julian speaks in his Letter to the Athenians 277c, and he was with Julian in Gaul and at Antioch. According to Eunapius, who wrote his Life (pp. 533-537, Wright), he was suspected of having been Julian's accomplice in his rebellion against Constantius. Julian sent him to Delphi to revive the oracle of Apollo there, and received the famous response, preserved by Cedrenus:
  "Tell the king, on earth has fallen the glorious
  dwelling, And the water-springs 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."^[46]
  Eunapius in his History, frag. 24, says that Oribasius admonished Julian to use more self-control when he was angry, to which Julian replied that the advice was good and would not be needed a second time. When they were in Gaul Julian requested him to compile an epitome of the works of Galen, and later he expanded the work into an Encyclopaedia of Medicine in 70 Books. This also, as Oribasius says in his Introduction, was done at Julian's wish. This work, entitled Ἰατρικαὶ συναγωγαί, of which only about half survives, was published in 1808 by Matthaei (Moscow) with considerable omissions, and, complete as far as it survives, by Bussemaker-Daremberg, Paris, 1851, with a French translation. Oribasius was a pagan, but his son Eustathius, to whom he bequeathed his medical writings, was a Christian and a friend and correspondent of St. Basil. Eunapius relates that after Julian's death Oribasius was exiled "among the most savage barbarians" by the Christian Emperors. At the courts of "the barbarians" he rose to great renown and was worshipped like a god because of his wonderful cures. He was therefore permitted to return, and recovered his fortune and position. Suidas says that he was born at Sardis, but probably Eunapius, who gives his birthplace as Pergamon, was better informed. He was, ehowever, practising at Sardis, no doubt after his exile, when Eunapius wrote his Life and described his skilful treatment of the aged Chrysanthius.

• Priscus, whom Eunapius calls "the Thesprotian or Molossian," was born about 305 and died in 395 when Alaric invaded Greece. His Life was written by Eunapius (Lives, pp. 461-465, Wright). Julian made his acquaintance when he studied at Pergamon, and on his accession summoned him to his Court, and he accompanied the Emperor to Persia. On his return to Antioch in 363, Priscus, like other friends of Julian, fell under the suspicion of Valens and Valentinian, but was acquitted and dismissed with honour to Greece, where he continued to teach for another thirty years. He was evidently not considered as dangerous as Maximus by the Christian Emperors, was probably not a theurgist, and was therefore free from the charge of practising magic. He was a correspondent of Libanius. Julian wrote to him Letters 1, 2, and 5, all from Gaul, encouraging Priscus to visit him there, but there is no evidence that the visit was paid. Libanius, Oration 14, 32, implies that towards the end of 362 Priscus was with Julian and Maximus at Antioch, though in Letter 52 Julian complains to Libanius that Priscus has not yet arrived. As all three men were living at Antioch at the time, we cannot lay any stress on this remark, which may refer to a temporary absence of Priscus. Priscus had a wife Hippia, and children. Eunapius says that his bearing was "deliberate and lofty," and that he had secretive manners and sneered at human weakness, in contrast with his teacher, the expansive and democratic Aedesius.

• Prohaeresius, to whom is addressed Letter 14, was an Armenian sophist who succeeded Julian of Caesarea in the chair of rhetoric at Athens and taught there for many years. Probably the Emperor Julian studied with him at Athens in 355. When Eunapius went to study at Athens in 362, Prohaeresius was already eighty-seven and had overcome his rivals, whose persecutions of this too successful teacher Eunapius describes. Earlier in his career he had been sent by the Emperor Constans to Rome to display his eloquence and was there honoured with a bronze statue. When Julian issued his notorious decree forbidding Christians to teach the classics, he made a special exception in favour of Prohaeresius, who, however, refused to benefit by the exemption. Eunapius tells a curious story to the effect that this Christian sophist consulted the pagan hierophant of Greece in order to find out indirectly whether Julian's reign would last much longer, and when the hierophant's answer implied that it would not, * Prohaeresius took courage." This was the sort of conduct that later under Valens cost Maximus of Ephesus his head, but apparently under Julian one could forecast the future with impunity. According to Eunapius, Prohaeresius died in 367, at the age of ninety-two, and he seems to have taught to the last, for the edict of Julian can hardly have "shut him out from the field of education" (Eunapius, p. 513, Wright) for more than a few months, if at all.

• Sopater (or Sosipater),^[47] to whom is addressed Letter 61, cannot be identified with certainty, but, if the letter is Julian's, he is not the famous Sopater, the disciple of Iamblichus I, whose violent death in the reign of Constantine is related by Eunapius in his Lives. If Schwarz, Geffcken and Cumont are right in rejecting Letter 61, chiefly because of the reference to the writer's children (Julian was childless), it may belong to the same period as the six letters to Iamblichus and have been written to Sopater I before 337; but this is impossible to decide. Sopater II, who is mentioned by Julian as his host at Hierapolis in March 363 (Letter 58, 401 c, a corrupt passage), and as having resisted the efforts of Gallus and Constantius to convert him to Christianity, is perhaps the son (or son-in-law?) of Sopater I, who is mentioned by the writer of Letter 78, 418 a. Julian, however, calls him a κηδεστὴς of Sopater I, a vague word which may mean "son-in-law" or even "relative"; the passage is mutilated.^[48]

• Theodorus, to whom Julian wrote Letter 16 rejoicing in his safety, and 20 appointing him high-priest "of all the temples in Asia," was not necessarily a priest, as the office of high-priest was often given to rich laymen; the high-priest presided ex officio over the public games and the provincial assemblies. We know of Theodorus only from these letters of Julian. In Letter 20 he speaks of the teacher they had had in common, probably Maximus of Ephesus, and the word used, καθηγεμών, may indicate that Maximus had initiated Theodorus as well as Julian into the Mysteries of Mithras. Theodorus was certainly a philosopher, and as NeoPlatonism was, under Julian, the religion of the State, he was doubtless a Neo-Platonist of the Syrian school. Julian writes to him with great deference, though he never forgets in a pastoral letter that as Emperor he is Pontifex Maximus instructing a trusted subordinate in the duties of priests. Letter 16 is one of the six letters discovered on Chalce (Halki) in 1885 by Papadopoulos. It has been rejected by Schwarz and Geffcken on account of the difficulty found by all commentators in explaining the allusion in it to a quarrel between Julian (reading ἡμᾱς with the MSS.) or Theodorus (reading ὑμᾱς with Maas) and the proconsul of Achaea, for which incident there is no other evidence. We do not expect to find Theodorus concerned with the affairs of Greece., as his interests were evidently in Asia; nor do we know of any trouble between Julian and the proconsul. Asmus, by altering the text to read "ruler of the Hellespont" (Ἑλλησπόντου for Ἑλλάδος), tries to localise in Asia the quarrel referred to. The letter is decidedly Julianic in manner, and its genuineness is defended by Asmus in Philologus 72. Letter 20, together with the fragment of a letter To a Priest (Vol. 2, pp. 297-339), is important as evidence of Julian's desire, at which the Christian fathers scoffed, to introduce among the pagans certain reforms in the lives of the priests and in the treatment of the poor and of strangers, based on his experience of the charities and the aceticism of the Christian Church. Cumont, following Asmus, regards Letter 20 (89 in his edition) as an integral part of the fragment To a Priest (Vol. 2, Wright), and accordingly includes that fragment in his edition as 89 b. But the similarities between Letter 20 and the fragment in Vol. 2 amount to unnecessary repetition if they occur in one letter, and it is certainly implied in Letter 20 that Julian and Theodorus have not yet met, whereas the fragment To a Priest, which mentions Julian's design to rebuild the temple at Jerusalem, probably, though not certainly, should be dated later, while the Emperor was in residence at Antioch. That that fragment is addressed to Theodorus, rather than to some other priest whose aid Julian had enlisted in his reforms, cannot be proved, and on the whole seems to me unlikely in view of their very similar contents and the tone of 298 b, where καθηγεμὼν is apparently used of a superior official or priest - perhaps Theodorus, who had reported favourably to Julian about the person addressed. On the other hand, the reference may be to Maximus, as in Letter 20.

• Zeno, the physician and professor of medicine at Alexandria, to whom Julian wrote Letter 17, was driven from Alexandria by Bishop George in 360 for reasons unknown, and at the request of the Alexandrians was recalled to his previous dignity of chief physician or head of the medical faculty, ἀρχίατρος, by Julian on his accession. He was famous as a teacher. Libanius in Letter 171, written 359-360, condoles with him on his exile and hints at a coming change for the better, by which he must have meant the rise of Julian to power. Libanius says that though they have never met he owes much to the skill of Zeno's pupils, some of whom had evidently tried to cure his chronic headache. Cumont, following Boissonade, identifies Zeno of Alexandria with another famous teacher of medicine, Zeno of Cyprus, the "healing sophist," whose Life by Eunapius is extant.^[49] But Eunapius does not say that this Zeno practised at Alexandria. He had been the teacher of Julian's friend the physician Oribasius, and Eunapius says that he lived "down to the time of Julian the sophist" i.e. Julian of Caesarea, who died at Athens in 340. It appears, therefore, that Zeno of Cyprus can hardly have been alive in 361. Moreover, Julian would not have failed to mention Zeno's oratorical talent if he had been addressing the teacher of Oribasius. The Alexandrian is, therefore, almost certainly another and a younger man.

Bibliography

Manuscripts:

The Letters. - The oldest MS. of the Letters is Ambrosianus B 4 Milan, tenth century (23 letters); Vossianus 77, Leyden, thirteenth century (27 letters), though much mutilated and damaged, is the most important; Laurentianus 58, fifteenth century, has the largest collection of letters; other MSS. are Baroccianus, Oxford, fourteenth century, Varsaviensis, Warsaw, fifteenth century, Monacensis 490, Munich, fifteenth century, Ottobonianus, Rome, sixteenth century, Harleiamis 5610, British Museum, fourteenth century. Six letters that occur in no other MS. were discovered in fragments of two fifteenth-century MSS. in a convent on the island Chalce (Halki) near Constantinople in 1885 by Papadopoulos-Kerameus, and were published in ὁ ἐν Κωνατανινουπόλει Ἑλληνικὸς φιλολογκὸς σύλλογος 16, Appendix, 1885, in Rheinisches Museum 42, 1887 (with Buecheler's notes), and in Rivista Filologia 17, 1889 (by Largajolli e Parisio, with an Italian translation). The fragmentary MSS. in which alone these letters have survived are known as Chalceni, or X and Y, or X and Xa; they contain also 22 other Julianic letters and the two fragg. have almost the same contents. Studies in the text are: Klimek, Conjectanca in Julianum, Wratislaw, 1883, and in Hermes 1886; Zu Wurdigung der Handschriften Juliani, 1891; Cobet in Mnemosyne 1882; Weil (on the Papadopoulos letters) in Revue de Philologie, 1886; Asmus in Philologus 61, 71, 72, and in Archiv fur Gesch. d. Philosophic, 1902; in Zeitschrift f. Kirchengesch. 16, 23, 31, and Rheinisches Museum, 1908; De Vos in Revue de Philologie 1910; Schwarz in Philologus 1892; Bidez in Bulletins de l'academic des sciences de Bruxelles, 1904. An invaluable detailed account of the MSS. of the Letters is that of Bidez and Cumont, Recherches sur la tradition manuscrile des lettres de l'empereur Julien, Bruxelles, 1898. The introduction to their critical edition of the Letters, 1922, contains a few additions to and corrections of this monograph.

Against the Galilaeans. - For the MSS. of Cyril of Alexandria from which Neumann reconstructed this treatise, see Neumann, Prolegomenon to his edition, 1880. In Theologische Litteraturzeilung 10, 1899, Neumann published a new frag, of this work. Asmus, Julian's Galilaerschrift, Freiburg, 1904, is a useful concordance of the works of Julian with relation to the treatise Against the Galilaeans, with some textual criticism. Gollwitzer, Observations criticae in Juliani imp. contra Chrisiianos libros, Erlangen, 1886.

Editions. - See also the Bibliography in Julian, Vol. 1, Loeb Library, Wright.

Editio princeps, Aldus, Venice, 1499 (48 letters), Spanheim, Leipzig, 1696, contains all the other works of Julian and 63 letters, the letter from Gallus to Julian, and Cyril's refutation of the treatise Against the Galilaeans, edited by Aubert; Latin translation. Hertlein's and Neumann's marginal numbers correspond to the pages of Spanheim. Muratorius, Anecdota Graeca, Padua, 1709 (Letters 64, 65, 66, Hertlein; fragg. 12, 13; Letter 57 (Wright), first published). Epistolographi Graeci, Hercher, Paris, 1873, pp. 337-391. Juliani Imp. librorum contra Christianas quae supersunt, Neumann, Leipzig, 1880. Juliani Imperatoris epistulae, leges, poematia, fragmenta varia, Bidez et Cumont, Paris, 1922 (too late to be used for the present text).

Literature. - See also the Bibliography in Julian, Vol. 1, Loeb Library, Wright.

The Letters. - Codex Theodosianus, Leipzig, 1736-45, Bonn, 1847. Sievers, Das Leben des Libanius, Berlin, 1868. Rendall, The Emperor Julian, Cambridge, 1879. Vollert, Kaiser Julians religiose u. philos. Ueberzeugung, Gutersloh, 1899. Mau, Die Religionsphilosophie K. Julians, Leipzig, 1907. Glover, Life and Letters in the Fourth Century, Cambridge, 1901. Chinnock, A Few Notes on Julian and a Translation of his Public Letters, London, 1901. Seeck, Geschichte des Unter gangs der Antiken Welt, Vol. 4, Berlin, 1911; Die Briefe des Libanius, Leipzig, 1906, useful for the prosopography of the Letters of Julian. Geffcken, Kaiser Julianus, Leipzig, 1914, has a good commentary. Libanii Opera, Vol. 10, Epistulae 1-839, Foerster, Leipzig, 1921. Eunapius, Lives of the Sophists and Philosophers, Wright's translation, Loeb Classical Library, 1922. Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae, is the best authority for Julian's career and his Persian campaign. Asmus in Philologus 61, 71, 72, on the Letters. Cumont, Etudes Syriennes, Paris, 1917, La Marche de l'Empereur Julien, is a good description, with maps and illustrations, of Julian's route from Antioch to the Euphrates. Bidez, Le philosophe Iamblique et son ecole, Rev. d. Etudes Grecques 1919. Cumont in Revue de Philologie 16.

Against the Galilaeans. - Warburton, On the Earthquake which prevented Julian from rebuilding the Temple at Jerusalem, London, 1750. Adler, Julian and the Jews in the Jewish Quarterly Review, 1893. Whittaker, The Neoplatonists, Cambridge, 1901. Bidez, Vie de Porphyre, Gand, 1913. Harnack, Porphyrius, Gegen die Christen, Berlin, 1916, cites passages in Julian that may have been echoed from Porphyry. Geffcken, Zwei Griechische Apologeten, Leipzig, 1907, and in Neue Jahrbb. 1908.

Translations. - See also Vol. 1, Bibliography. Talbot, Paris, 1863 (French; the complete works so far as then known). Asmus, Kaiser Julians philosophische Werke, Leipzig, 1908 (German, with notes; no letters). Nevins, Against the Christians, London, 1873. Neumann, Leipzig, 1880 (German; of his text of Against the Galilaeans). Marquis d'Argens, Defense du paganisme par l'empereur Julien en Grec et en Francois, Berlin, 1764, 1767.

References

1. For the influence of Mardonius see Vol. 2 Oration 8, 241c; To the Athenians 274 d: Misopogon 352-353. Julian's knowledge of Latin was probably slight, though Ammianus, 16. 5. 7, describes it as "sufficiens."
2. For Hecebolius see Letter 63, and below, p. xlvii.
3. Book XIV.
4. See the account of his studies at Pergamon and Ephesus in Eunapius, Lives, pp. 429-435, Wright.
5. 15. 2. 7.
6. The evidence for this is Eunapius, Lives, p. 437, Wright.
7. For his grief at leaving Athens see Vol. 2, To the Athenians, 275 a.
8. For the condition of Gaul and his achievements there see Vol. 2, To the Athenians, 278-280.
9. Julian's dream may be, as Asmus thinks, an echo of Herodotus, 1. 108, but the parallel is not close.
10. s.v. Ἰουλιανός.
11. Julian was lodged in what is now the Musee des Thermes.
12. See To the Athenians, 284 c, and cf. Letter 2, p. 5. Ammianus 20. 4 gives a full account of the mutiny and of Julian's speeches to the army and letter to Constantius.
13. Suidas, s.v. Empedotimus.
14. See Eunapius, Lives, p. 441, Wright.
15. Ibid., p. 445.
16. See Letter 53; Ammianus 14. 5. 6; 19. 12.
17. See Letter 29, to Count Julian, p. 99.
18. e.g. Letter 724, Foerster.
19. Cf. the account of the life of Athanasius, p. xxxix.
20. See Letter 39, To the Byzacians. Libanius, Oration 18. 148, praises this reform. For Julian's increase of the Senate at Antioch cf. Misopogon 367 d. Codex Theodosianus 12. 1. 50-56.
21. See Letter 56, the edict on funerals.
22. See Libanius, Oration, 18. 143; Ammianus 21. 16. 18.
23. The Latin edict, dated June 17, 362, survives in Codex Theodosianus 13. 3. 5.
24. Lives, p. 513, Wright.
25. 22. 10. 7: illud inclemens . . . obruendum perenni silentio. He repeats this criticism in 25. 4. 20. Libanius, however, was delighted, and taunted Basil and Gregory as "barbarians."
26. Sozomen 4. 7. 5.
27. Vol. 2, Fragment of a Letter 295 c; Letter 51. 398 a; and Lydus, de Mensibus 4. 53, quotes Julian as saying ανεγειρο . . . . τον ναον του υπσιστου θεου, "I am rebuilding the Temple of the Most High God."
28. In Nachrichtcn Ges. d. Wiss. zu Gottingen, 1913.
29. i.e. public exhibitions of combats of wild beasts, such as were regularly given at the expense of the municipalities at this period.
30. For this policy see Ammianus 16. 5. 13. Heyler's comment on Letter 28 is - cogit rogando.
31. Ammianus 22. 9. 3-5.
32. Julian's first edict from Antioch in Codex Theodosianus 1. 16. 8 is dated July 28, 362.
33. Cf. Libanius, Oration 16. 1, and his Letter 824, Foerster, for his attempt to persuade Julian to forgive Antioch.
34. On the lack of discipline among the Gallic troops, both at Antioch and on the march, see Ammianus 22. 12; 25. 7.
35. The numerous and varying accounts of Julian's death from Ammianus to the Byzantine chroniclers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries have been collected by Reinhardt Der Tod des Kaiser Julian, 1891. The legend that the dying Emperor threw a handful of his own blood in the air and cried νενίκηκας, Γαλιλαῑε, "Thou hast conquered, O Galilaean!" is found in Theodoret 3. 20, Sozomen 6. 2. Others said he was reproaching the Sun, who had betrayed him, and that his words were misunderstood; cf. Philostorgius 7. 15.
36. See Letter 53, 382 d, p. 185.
37. Cf. Letter 80, To Sarapion.
38. In Revue de Philologie, 1901. 2 25. 4. 15.
39. 25. 4. 15
40. See Philostorgius 3. 27 and the letter of Gallus to Julian, p. 288. Sozomen 5. 5 mentions Julian's letter recalling Aetius.
41. See Letter 15 in which Julian refers to their friendship of long standing, and Against the Galilaeans, 333 d, p. 413, where the reference may be to the Anomoean Aetius.
42. The Arians of the Fourth Century, 1833.
43. See Dieterich, Mithras-Liturgie, p. 149.
44. Cumont in his edition, and Geffcken, Julianus, are silent on this point.
45. Hertlein prefers Artabius; both forms occur in the MSS., and in Codex Justinianus 11. 70. 1, an edict of Julian on buildings erected on state lands, is addressed to Atarbinus, possibly the same official.
46. Swinburne's translation, in The Last Oracle, of the Greek text:
    Εἴπατε τῷ βασιλεῖ, χαμαὶ πέσε δαίδαλος αὐλά,
    οὐκέτι Φοῖβος ἔχει καλύβην, οὐ μάντιδα δάφνην,
    οὐ παγὰν λαλέουσαν, ἀπέσβετο καὶ λάλον ὕδωρ.
47. For the variation in the spelling of the name see Acts 20. 4; Sopater of Beroea, Paul's kinsman, who accompanied him to Asia, is called, in some MSS., Sosipater; cf. Romans, 16. 21.
48. The Sopater who is mentioned in the six spurious Letters to Iamblichus is almost certainly Sopater I. Wilhelm, in Rhein. Mus. 72, assigns to Sopater I the letter, partly preserved by Stobaeus 4, p. 212, to Hemerius (or Himerius) from his brother Sopater, a typical sophistic sermon on the ideal ruler to one in high office, a λόγος παραινετικός. Others assign this work to Sopater II of Apamea, who, as we know from the correspondence of Libanius, died about 354, and is not known to have left any writings. In Letter 1448 Libanius tells Sopater II that he has shown the latter's letter to a friend, whose comment was that Sopater was imitating his distinguished father.
49. See Eunapius, Lives of the Sophists, Wright, pp. 336, 529-531.