The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01

by John Julius Norwich

  Julian arrived at Athens in the early summer of 355. He had not been there long before he caught the eye of a fellow-student. 'It seemed to me,' wrote St Gregory Nazianzen later,

  . . . that there was no evidence of a sound character in that oddly disjointed neck, those hunched and twitching shoulders, that wild, darting eye, that swaying walk, that haughty way of breathing down that prominent nose, those ridiculous facial expressions, that nervous and uncontrolled laughter, that ever-nodding head and that halting speech.1

  As one of the Empire's leading Christian theologians, Gregory was admittedly parti pris; the portrait he paints is hardly an attractive one. And yet, despite its obvious exaggerations, it still has a somehow authen-

  1 St Gregory Nazianzen, Orations, V, 23.

  tic ring, and it is at least partly corroborated by other descriptions that have come down to us. Julian was obviously not a handsome man. Burly and stocky, he did indeed hold his head at a curious angle; he had fine, dark eyes under straight brows, but their effect was spoiled by the overlarge mouth and sagging lower lip. In manner - not surprisingly in one who had grown up without a single friend of his own age - he was awkward, uncertain and quite painfully shy: not the sort of material, in short, of which Emperors are made. But then he had no ambitions in that direction. He asked no more than to be allowed to remain at Athens, with his teachers and his books; and, when the call came to present himself before Constantius at Milan, he himself tells us how he prayed to Athena to bring him death rather than allow him to set forth on so fateful a journey.

  But his prayers went unanswered; the Emperor's command could not be disobeyed. On Julian's arrival at Milan the situation proved to be just as he had feared. After an agonizing wait of several days, he was duly received by Constantius — the two had met only once before, some seven or eight years previously at Macellum - and informed that he was henceforth a Caesar. His hair was trimmed short, his scholar's beard shaved, his ungainly body squeezed into a tight-fitting military uniform; and on 6 November he received his formal acclamation from the assembled troops. As he acknowledged their doubtless somewhat perfunctory cheers, he - and they - could hardly have failed to remember the unfortunate Gallus, acclaimed in similar fashion not five years before and already twelve months in his grave. The Emperor's words, as he presented the new Caesar to the legions, were nothing if not affectionate; but Julian knew that, if he were to avoid the fate of his half-brother, he would have to tread warily indeed; and the interminable panegyric which he composed at this time in praise of Constantius leaves us in no doubt that he intended to do so.

  There has long been a tradition - initiated, in fact, by Julian himself - to the effect that when he was sent into Gaul as Caesar in the late autumn of 355 it was as little more than a figurehead: that, as Libanius was later to put it in his funeral oration, 'he had authority to do nothing save to wear the uniform'. There were even suggestions that he was being deliberately sent by Constantius to almost certain death. All this was, of course, nonsense. The Emperor could boast a formidable record of family murders already; had he seriously wished to eliminate Julian - who, as a wandering scholar, had presented no conceivable threat to his security he would have found a far quicker and surer way of doing so. (And he would hardly have given Julian the hand of his sister Helena in marriage, as he also did at this time.) Besides, the need for a Caesar in the West was genuine and undeniable. The truth seems to be that Julian, on assuming what he had expected to be the unfettered command of the army in Gaul, was piqued to discover that both the Praetorian Prefect and the magister equitum - the civil and military commanders respectively - were directly responsible to Constantius himself. Here, he believed, was a deliberate attempt on the part of the Emperor to diminish his authority. The thought that he was not yet twenty-four and totally without experience in the field does not seem to have struck him.

  But he learned fast. It was he, rather than his cautious generals, who led the whirlwind campaign in the summer of 356 that took his army from Vienne to Autun, Troyes and Rheims and thence to Metz, through the Vosges to Coblenz and finally to Cologne - which had been taken by the Franks ten months before and which he now recaptured for the Empire. The following year saw a still greater triumph near Strasbourg, in which 13,000 legionaries smashed a Frankish enemy of 30,000 or more, leaving some 6,000 dead on the field at a cost of just 247 of their own men. The next two years brought still further victories. By the end of the decade the imperial rule had been re-established for the whole length of the frontier, with Julian himself now settled in Paris and, finally, in undisputed control.

  In the East, on the other hand - to which Constantius, after a brief visit to Rome, had long since returned - the situation was a good deal less happy. In 359 the Emperor had received a letter from the Persian King:

  Shapur, King of Kings, brother of the Sun and Moon, sends salutation . . .

  Your own authors are witness that the entire territory within the river Strymon1 and the borders of Macedon was once held by my forefathers; were I to require you to restore all this, it would not ill become me . . . but because I take delight in moderation I shall be content to receive Mesopotamia and Armenia, which was fraudulently extorted from my grandfather. . .

  I give you warning that if my ambassador returns empty-handed I shall take the field against you, with all my armies, as soon as the winter is past.

  Constantius had no intention of surrendering any of the disputed territory to King Shapur. He was, however, fully aware that he now faced the greatest challenge of his reign, and in January 360 sent a tribune

  1 The modern Struma.

  to Paris demanding huge reinforcements for the army of the East: four auxiliary units formed of members of Gallic or Frankish tribes loyal to the Empire were to leave at once for Mesopotamia, while all other units were to make available 300 men each. By Caesar and soldiery alike, the imperial command was received with horror. Julian was faced with the prospect of losing, at a single stroke, well over half his army; he had moreover promised the Gallic detachments that they would never be sent to the East. They for their part knew that, if they allowed themselves to be marched away, they would be unlikely ever again to see their wives and families. These would be left destitute behind them, an easy prey for the barbarian bands who, finding the frontier almost unguarded, would once again come swarming into imperial territory.

  We shall never know for certain just what took place in Paris during those fateful spring days. According to Julian's own account - in a letter which he wrote to the people of Athens late in the following year - he was determined that the Emperor's orders should be obeyed, however unwelcome they might be to him personally. He summoned all the units in question to Paris, told them the news and exhorted them to accept the inevitable, emphasizing the unprecedented opportunities and rich rewards that awaited them when victory was theirs and, in a further effort to reconcile them to their fate, promising that their families would be transported with them to the East at public expense. But the legionaries, their anger now further inflamed by the anonymous pamphlets that were being circulated from hand to hand, vilifying Constantius and declaring him unworthy of imperial office, would have none of it. By evening, Julian saw that he was faced no longer with disaffection but with open mutiny. Yet even then - he called upon all the gods to witness — he had no idea what was in his soldiers' minds. Were they planning to proclaim him as their Augustus, or to tear him to pieces?

  Just about sunset, when Julian had retired to an upper chamber of the palace for some much-needed rest, a trembling chamberlain came to report that the army was marching on the palace. 'Then,' wrote Julian,

  peering through a window, I prayed to Zeus. And as the shouting grew louder and the tumult spread to the palace itself I entreated the god to give me a sign; and he did so, bidding me cede to the will of the army and make no opposition against it. Yet even then I did not yield without reluctance but resisted as long as I could, refusing to accept either the acclamat
ion or the diadem. But since I alone could not control so many, and since moreover the gods, whose will it was, sapped my resolution, somewhere about the third hour some soldier or other gave me the collar;1 and I put it on my head and returned to the palace -lamenting, as the gods knew, in my heart.

  Does Julian, perhaps, protest a little too much? There is no evidence that he conspired against Constantius, nor that he would ever have wavered in his loyalty if that fateful order for reinforcements had not ultimately made loyalty impossible. But his four and a half years in Gaul had taught him courage and confidence and had given him, for the first time, political ambitions. By now, too, he seems to have believed himself divinely appointed to restore the old religion to the Empire; and it seems unlikely to say the least that, once he had received - or thought he had received - the sign from Zeus, he should have continued to show much reluctance to accept the diadem.

  The only difficulty was that no diadem existed. Ammianus Marcellinus - a member of the imperial bodyguard, who was almost certainly in Paris at the time and was probably an eye-witness of much of what took place - writes that the soldiers first proposed to crown Julian with his wife's necklace; when he objected that female adornments would be unsuitable for such a purpose they suggested the frontlet of a horse, but once again he demurred. At last one of the standard-bearers tore the great gold chain from his neck - an emblem of his office - and placed it on Julian's head.

  The challenge, unwilling or not, had been flung down. The die was cast. There could be no going back.

  Julian was in no hurry to march to the East. The distance involved was immense, and he was far from certain of the loyalties of the many imperial garrisons stationed along the road. If they were to maintain their allegiance to Constantius, he might well find his way blocked - and, quite possibly, his retreat as well. He preferred to bide his time, to send ambassadors to his cousin informing him of what had occurred and suggesting some kind of accommodation between them.

  The envoys found Constantius at Caesarea (now Kaiseri) in Cappadocia - ironically enough, on that very estate of Macellum where he had kept the adolescent Julian six years a prisoner. On receiving the messsage he flew into so furious a rage that they at first feared for their lives. For the moment, tied down as he was in the East, all he could do openly was to send Julian a stern warning; in secret, however, he began encouraging the barbarian tribes to renew their offensive along the

  i See below.

  Rhine. That way he might at least tie his rival down and prevent him from any eastward advance. In the short term this plan proved moderately successful, and for much of the remainder of the year Julian found himself fully occupied on the frontier. Then in late October he moved south to Vienne, where on 6 November he celebrated the fifth anniversary of his inauguration as Caesar - wearing, Ammianus tells us, 'a splendid diadem inlaid with precious stones, though when first entering on his power he had worn but a paltry-looking crown like that of a president of the public games'.

  The coming of spring saw more trouble on the Rhine, put down only after a somewhat discreditable episode in which the chieftain of the Alemanni was invited to dinner by the local Roman commander and -almost certainly on Julian's orders - arrested as soon as he crossed his host's threshold. But by then it had become clear that negotiations between the two Emperors were getting nowhere and that Constantius, taking advantage of a lull in the Persian campaign, was preparing an all-out offensive against his cousin. Julian, we read, was still profoundly uncertain about how best to react: whether to meet him half-way, securing as best he could the allegiance of the troops stationed along the Danube, or whether to wait for him in Gaul, on his own home ground, where he could be sure of his troops. Once again he prayed to the gods for a sign; and once again, we are told, it was vouchsafed to him. Pausing only to make a ritual sacrifice of a bull to Bellona, goddess of war, he assembled his army at Vienne and set out for the East.

  Now the Rhine could not be left entirely undefended; moreover, if the whole story about the refusal of the Gallic troops to leave their homeland were not a complete fabrication, then must have been several units reluctant to follow their Emperor on this new expedition. Julian thus had only some 23,000 fighting men on whom to rely - pitifully few in comparison with the number that Constantius could be expected to hurl against him. To conceal this disparity and to make his strength appear greater than it actually was, he therefore broke up his army into three. Ten thousand were to cross the Alps into North Italy and make their way through modern Croatia; a similar number were simultaneously to march through Raetia and Noricum, an area roughly corresponding to Switzerland and the Tyrol. Finally, a select group of 3,000 under Julian himself were to head through the southern part of the Black Forest to the upper Danube in the neighbourhood of Ulm, there to embark on river boats and sail downstream. All three columns were to meet at Sirmium on the river Sava, some twenty miles to the west of Belgrade.

  Not surprisingly, Julian's detachment arrived first; the impatient Emperor decided against waiting and pressed on to the south, pausing only when he reached Naissus, where he had decided to pass the winter and consolidate. He had been there only three or four weeks when messengers arrived from the capital: Constantius was dead. He, Julian, had already been acclaimed Emperor by the massed armies of the East. The struggle for power was over, almost before it had begun.

  Constantius, the messengers reported, had been at Hierapolis (the modern Mambij, in northern Syria) when he had - most unwillingly -taken the decision to march against his rival. He had retraced his steps as far as Antioch, and had just set out on the 700 miles to Constantinople when he had come upon a headless corpse by the roadside, which he immediately took for an evil omen. By the time he reached Tarsus he was stricken by a low fever, but he refused to stop and dragged himself on a mile or two to the little village of Mopsucrenae. There it became clear that he could go no further; and there, on 3 November 361, he died. Until that last illness he had always enjoyed perfect health. He was forty-four years old.

  To Julian, this was yet another proof that the gods were working on his behalf. Neither then nor later, however, did he show any sign of relief or jubilation. He hastened on to Constantinople, in order to be present when the body of his predecessor reached the capital. On the day of its arrival he himself, dressed in the deep mourning that he had ordered for the whole city, was on the quayside to supervise the unloading of the coffin. Later he led the funeral procession to the Church of the Holy Apostles, weeping unashamedly - and, as far as we can tell, genuinely - as his father's murderer and his own life-long enemy was laid to rest. Only after the ceremony was over did he assume the attributes of Empire.

  And he never entered a Christian church again.

  Within days of Julian's accession to the imperial throne, it was plain to all in Constantinople that the new regime was going to provide a marked contrast to the old. A military tribunal was established at Chalcedon across the Bosphorus to try certain of Constantius's chief ministers and advisers whom the new Emperor suspected of having abused their powers. Some were acquitted, others let off with periods of banishment or forced residence; but several were condemned to death - including two, the sinisterly named Paul the Chain and his collaborator Apodemius, joint chiefs of Constantius's detested intelligence network, who were sentenced to be buried alive. More deserving of sympathy was Ursulus, who had served Julian with distinction in Gaul as his minister of finance and who, though subsequently transferred to the East, had never shown him the slightest disloyalty. Some years before, however, at the siege of Amida in Upper Mesopotamia, he had unwisely cast aspersions on the Empire's military efficiency; and the eastern generals had never forgiven him. Julian had taken care not to be a member of the tribunal himself; as Emperor, however, he could easily have intervened to save his old friend. It was a disappointment to many of his admirers that he did not do so.

  In the Palace itself, the new broom was even more dramatically apparent. Ever since the days of Diocl
etian, the Emperor had been growing more and more of a being apart, separated from his subjects by a court increasingly rigid with ceremonial, approachable only by his senior ministers - in the intervals between their successive prostrations - and surrounded by whole regiments of domestics whose numbers increased with every passing year. As Libanius was later to claim in his funeral oration on Julian:

  There were a thousand cooks, as many barbers, and even more butlers. There were swarms of lackeys, the eunuchs were more in number than flies around the flocks in spring, and a multitude of drones of every sort and kind. There was one refuge for such idle gluttons, to have the name and title of being one of the Emperor's household, and in very quick time a piece of gold would ensure their enrolment.1