God Against the Gods (26 page)

“I was initiated by those guides, in the first place by a philosopher who trained me in the preparatory discipline,” Julian reveals in an oration composed shortly before his death, “and next by that most perfect philosopher who revealed to me the entrance to philosophy.”
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The Greek word that Julian uses to describe his “initiation” is a technical term that refers to the rites by which the deepest secrets of a mystery religion were formally revealed to an acolyte,
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including the “red baptism” of the taurobolium as used in the cults of both Mithra and the Great Mother. Elsewhere in his writings, Julian suggests that he made the decision to embrace paganism when he was still living in captivity at Macellum. “Julian was no Paul on the road to Damascus,” writes biographer Robert Browning. “It was rather the climax of months, or maybe years, of moral and intellectual struggle in the sinister solitude of his idyllic palace in the arid heart of Asia Minor.”
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But it was at Ephesus that Julian was conducted into a pagan shrine, not as a Christian sightseer but as an ardent convert to paganism.

Several candidates have been proposed to identify the unnamed “guides” who initiated Julian into the pagan mysteries. Mardonius, his childhood tutor, may have been one of them. Later, at Pergamum, Julian studied under several of the disciples of the late Iamblichus (c. 250-c. 325), a prominent Neoplatonist whose eerie rituals of sacrifice once attracted crowds of credulous pilgrims and who was said to “emit a golden glow and float at knee-height or more above the ground.”
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Julian himself describes Iamblichus as “god-like”
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and he sent a series of rich gifts to one of his followers, Aidesios, in an effort to persuade the old man to grant him instruction and initiation. What Julian sought in Neoplatonism were the ecstasy and mystery that attracted so many other earnest seekers to the mystery religions that competed with Christianity in ancient Rome.

“If you are initiated into our mysteries,” promised Aidesios to a tantalized Julian, “you will be ashamed to have been born a man.”
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But the man who actually administered the rites of initiation to Julian during his student years was probably Maximus of Ephesus (d. 370), a relative of Aidesios and an accomplished magus whose feats of legerdemain included making a torch in the hand of a statue of Hecate, goddess of sorcery, burst into flame and the goddess herself break into a smile and even laugh out loud.
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Indeed, he was regarded by his own ardent followers as a master of theurgy, the term used to describe the blend of high mysticism and stage magic as practiced by the Neoplatonists. “He seems to have been the kind of half-charlatan,” observes Browning, “who deceived himself before he deceives others.”
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Maximus consented to introduce Julian to the mystery of the Great Mother of the Gods and escorted him into the crypt where the ritual was conducted and the secrets were disclosed. At last, the forbidden knowledge that Julian had so long sought was revealed.

“This initiation, with its words and music and incense and light filling the senses and charging the emotions, was a key experience in Julian’s life,” explains Browning. “He now belonged to the elect, of whom more was demanded than of ordinary men, and to whose souls was promised a rebirth in the higher order of being. He had crossed a bridge that could never be recrossed.”
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Like all authentic pagans, young Julian did not confine himself to a single god or a single set of rituals. He was soon initiated into the cult of Mithra, the Persian deity who was now fully conflated with the solar god called King Helios or
Sol Invictus
, and “the great and unspeakable mysteries” of Eleusis,
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where the goddess Demeter and her daughter, Persephone, were worshipped. According to ancient Christian historians, Julian “sought by the Taurobolium and other expiatory rites to wash away from his body the traces of baptism, and especially from his hands the sacred touch of the Eucharist.”
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Yet Julian himself, otherwise candid and even chatty, always honored the strict vows of secrecy that were required of initiates into the mystery religions: “He trembles,” writes Edward Gibbon, “lest he should betray too much of these holy mysteries.”
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All these daring new experiences were thrilling and fulfilling to the ardent young man—Maximus, it is said, told Julian that he “housed within himself the soul of Alexander the Great” and “was destined to equal and even to surpass Alexander’s deeds”
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—but they all represented a terrible risk. Julian may have been granted the freedom to travel and study, but he was always accompanied by an imperial entourage that surely included a few watchers who reported back to the emperor. The sacrificial offerings and nocturnal rites in which Julian participated were now criminal offenses, and
his
presence at such ceremonies would have been treated as high treason precisely because he was a prince of the blood. “Predictions had been widely spread that Christianity was soon about to fall,” explains Augustus Neander, “and that a restorer of the ancient religion should rule over the Roman empire.”
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Constantius II would have acted swiftly to prevent Julian from serving, wittingly or not, as the figurehead of a pagan counterrevolution.
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Although Julian may not have avoided suspicion, he certainly avoided detection. To conceal his new faith from the spies in his entourage, Julian put on a show of Christian piety, going to church on Sundays and feast days and making pilgrimages to the shrines of martyrs. That is why, when he visited the shrines of Athena and Achilles in the company of Bishop Pegasius, he masqueraded as a Christian sightseer and concealed the fact that he had already been welcomed into more than one pagan cult. Still, as he embarked from Ilion and resumed his journey toward the court of Constantius II, Julian dreamed of the headless body of his half brother, and he must have wondered if what awaited him in Milan was the same fate that had already befallen Gallus—arrest, trial and execution.

“The Beautiful and Virtuous Eusebia”

Julian’s anxieties were only aggravated upon his arrival in Milan. Constantius II declined to grant him an audience, and he remained in the quarters assigned to him, once again under close surveillance and living as a virtual prisoner of state. The only friendly words came from Eusebia, the young second wife of Constantius II, who became his self-appointed benefactress. She began to send welcoming and ingratiating letters to the young Julian by means of the palace eunuchs, and she prevailed upon her husband to receive him at court. At last, the emperor consented to see his cousin and, remarkably, Julian found himself in polite if not exactly friendly discourse with the man who was, after all, the murderer of both his father and his half brother.

Eusebia, like Constantius II’s first wife, had failed at her principal duty as empress—she had given no sons (or daughters, for that matter) to the emperor. She refused to resign herself to childlessness, and she continued to sip the vile concoctions that various healers offered as a cure for infertility until the day of her death. Indeed, she was apparently not born a Christian, and she remained deeply superstitious even after her conversion. But she was a canny and cagey observer of imperial politics, and she decided that Julian, as Constantius II’s closest surviving blood relation, should serve as a surrogate son and heir if she remained unable to bear children. So she took it upon herself to put Julian forward as a replacement for the son she had failed to produce.

Thanks to her willingness to whisper words of encouragement to the emperor, Julian was given permission to take up residence in a modest villa in Bithynia that had belonged to his mother. (Because Constantius II had seized the whole of his father’s estate, as Julian acidly notes, it was the only private property that Julian owned.) Still later, she succeeded in persuading the emperor to allow Julian to resume his travels and studies, first at Como in Italy and then in Athens, the seat of classical paganism and a place where Julian was able to participate in pagan worship at somewhat less risk than in Milan or Constantinople.

Julian never failed to acknowledge the role that Eusebia played in saving and enriching his life. Among Julian’s writings, for example, are panegyrics to both Constantius II and Eusebia. When praising the emperor, Julian’s words are so ornate and overblown that, in retrospect, they strike us as not merely ironic but openly sarcastic: “The Emperor was kind to me almost from my infancy,” he writes, “and he surpassed all generosity, for he snatched me from dangers so great that not even ‘a man in the strength of his youth’ could easily have escaped them.”
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But when Julian credits “the beautiful and virtuous Eusebia” for saving his life by persuading the emperor not to murder him as he had murdered Gallus, his words are plainspoken and utterly earnest: Eusebia was “zealous in my behalf,” Julian puts it. “I could not have escaped from his hands myself.
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Still, Julian gradually awoke to the danger of drawing
too
close to the wife of the reigning emperor. “She bade me write confidently about whatever I desired,” recalls Julian, who promptly composed a letter in which he begged the empress to seek permission for him to leave the court and return to his studies. But he began to worry about the accusations that might be whispered against both of them when his letter was delivered to the palace. “I entreated the gods to inform me during the night if I should send the letter,” writes Julian—and, while he slept, he was granted the divine instruction that he sought: “They warned me that if I sent it, I would incur a most shameful death.”
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So Julian did not send the fateful letter, but Eusebia was nevertheless inspired to do his bidding, and he succeeded in reaching safe refuge in Athens.

His sojourn at Athens lasted only a few months. Julian was summoned back to Milan, but under wholly new and extraordinary circumstances. Constantius II was troubled by new rumors of conspiracy and new threats of a coup d’état, and he had been persuaded by Eusebia to regard Julian as his best (and perhaps only) ally in the campaign that would be required to keep his crown. Then, too, the Roman empire was troubled anew by the barbarians along the Danube and by the Persians on the eastern frontier—Constantius II sought someone to secure his western flank while he campaigned against these renewed threats to the
Pax Romana
. Just as he had once recruited Gallus to perform the same function, he now resolved to call Julian to serve as his second in command and to watch his back while he went to war against his enemies.

A Comical Soldier

The young man who presented himself at the court of Constantius II in 355 must have struck the emperor and his courtiers as an odd choice to command an army. Julian was “of medium height, with a beard that ended in a point, and endowed with bright eyes of striking beauty,” according to the pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus. “He had elegant eyebrows, a perfectly straight nose, a rather large mouth with a loose lower lip, a neck somewhat bent, and large, broad shoulders.”
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But he disdained the “soft and delicate way of living” and the “effeminate dispositions” favored by the Roman aristocracy,
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and he pointedly affected the shabby robe, careless grooming and shambling gait of the kind of wandering philosopher who might have been seen in the marketplace with a staff and a beggar bowl—thus did he later earn the nickname Cercops, a reference to a mythical race of human beings who had been turned into apes by Jupiter.
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“For though nature did not make [my face] any too handsome, I myself out of sheer perversity have added to it this long beard of mine, to punish it, as it would seem, for this very crime of not being handsome by nature,” Julian later writes of himself in a satirical work titled
Mispogon
(“Beard Hater”). “For the same reason, I put up with the lice that scamper about in it as though it were a thicket for wild beasts. As though the mere length of my beard were not enough, my head is dishevelled besides, and I seldom have my hair cut or my nails, while my fingers are nearly always black from using a pen.”
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Julian is made to seem almost freakish by a Christian contemporary who claimed to detect his future apostasy in his appearance: “There seemed to me to be no evidence of sound character in his unsteady neck, his twitching and hunched shoulders, his wandering eye with its crazy look, his uncertain and swaying walk, his proud and haughty nose, the ridiculous expressions of his countenance, his uncontrolled and hysterical laughter, the way he jerked his head up and down for no reason, his halting and panting speech,” declares Gregory of Nazianzus, a Christian bishop who knew Julian when they were both students in Athens .
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“As soon as I saw these signs, I exclaimed, ‘What an evil the Roman world is breeding!’ ”
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And yet Julian is hardly kinder to himself in his own writings. Indeed, he delights in listing the disdainful and dismissive nicknames that he attracted: “ ‘Nanny-goat,’ ‘a talkative mole,’ ‘an ape dressed in purple,’ ‘a Greekish pedant,’ and ‘a lazy, timid, shady character, tricking out his actions with fine words.’ ”
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On a note of characteristic irony, he admits in
Mispogon
that he finds himself unable to exhaust his shortcomings: “What a small fraction of my offenses have I described!”
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