Julian the Apostate, Part 1: Man and Emperor

the emperor julian reigned for a very short time however he was large in the historical imagination of many modern people i even once met someone who had bought a old Roman coin with Julian's name on it and wore it as a necklace a lot of people especially people who are anti-christian or even atheists admire Julian and because he has such an enduring impact and he happens to be someone who I've studied a fair amount I decided to do a brief series of videos and two parts the first part will be about Julian the man in the Emperor and the second part will deal with Julian as an intellectual and as a religious figure so without further ado let's begin part one Julian as a man and Emperor Julian was the last member of the Constantinian dynasty to hold power now his paternal grandfather was Constantius the first chorus who was the last member of the Tetrarchy system that was set up by Diocletian when Diocletian and his other western colleague retired in 305 Constantius Chlorus succeeded to become augustus the senior emperor but he died prematurely his son constantine was actually not included in the succession system but he decided to take power anyway so he came to power he slowly but surely defeated all of the other people trying to vie for power in the empire and he United all of Rome by 324 at some point after around 312 Constantine converted to Christianity and the majority of his relatives also converted during that period Constantine had a half-brother named Julius Constantius who was Julian's father and Julius Constantius was a fairly accomplished guy in a senior official under Constantine having held the rank of consul in three 35 um then you have Julian's paternal a maternal grandfather who was a high-ranking eastern official a prefect and he had a daughter named vassal ina Julian's mother and she was of Greek origin and identified as Greek which probably played a big role in why Julian always saw himself as a Greek first in a Roman second as for Julian himself he was born in about the year 331 or 332 he was one of the younger children he had a brother who was about 5 to 6 years older named Galvez and we'll see that Julian's childhood after about the age of 5 or 6 was actually deeply unhappy something that's been written about quite a bit by modern scholars and alluded to by Julian and his own writings although he died when Julian was only about five years old Constantine had a huge influence in Julian's life Constantine was a larger-than-life figure who along with his predecessor Diocletian fundamentally changed the way that Rome was ruled and in one way he did that was if you look at his art you see that Constantine kind of represents himself as if not quite a god then certainly something more than human whereas a lot of earlier emperors had portrayed themselves as being sort of these soldiers or these sort of super senators who were you know whatever else mortal Constantine portrayed himself as this larger-than-life figure his bust here is about 10 or 12 feet tall obviously human heads do not come in that size and we'll see when we look at representations of Julian that he directly rejected all of Constantine's pretensions and Constantine's vision for what a Roman Emperor should look like and how a Roman Emperor should comport himself here's the territorial extent of the Roman Empire upon the death of Constantine Constantine had three sons that we saw earlier on the genealogy chart and they were going to divide the Empire equally and ultimately feud for it before Constantius the second Constantine the second and konstanz could begin their contests to become the new soul Emperor they decided to liquidate the potential rivals within their family who were not sons of Constantine and unfortunately for Julian that included his father Julius Constantius and the vast majority of that branch of the family now the only real two survivors there were Gullah sealians older brother and Julian himself I think he might have had an even younger sibling but I don't recall what happened to that sibling or if that person even reached adulthood now in the meantime Constantius ii would go on to defeat his two brothers and he United the Empire however by the early 350 s or so he was already in his 30s and he had not soured in the offspring and he was under pressure to have an error just in case something were to happen since Constantius often led military campaigns and was obviously in danger of dying in battle and not uncommon fate during most of this period gulleson Julian were being raised in Cappadocia which was more or less rural Turkey and they were raised under the guidance of a Christian Bishop as I mentioned earlier both of their parents were Christian and they were raised as such now godless would be called away and we'll talk about his life and career in a moment and but Julian basically had access to a large library in Cappadocia and he became someone who was interested in subjects like philosophy in history and rhetoric so he ultimately wanted to become a scholar since politics was going to be out of the question and he devoted himself to that life following the elevation of Julian's brother Gulledge he was much more free to travel about and pursue his studies and at one point before he himself was made Caesar and thrust in the service he was actually able to study for several months at Plato's Academy it was during this period from about 350 to 355 when he was either studying in Asia Minor or it happens that Julian really developed the ideas and religious beliefs which later made I'm Julian the apostate however that is the subject for the next video back to our main subject by 350 Constantius had one out and he was looking for support so he summoned gulleson made him his Caesar Gullah sold out east in Antioch and his generals were successful in putting down a Jewish revolt and in doing some other things however Gullah and his wife constantina who was a cousin are not cousin but sister of Constantius got themselves in the trouble by holding Witchcraft Trials against the wealthy people in Antioch and confiscating their wealth now constan theist became concerned about this and also with the high-handed activities of godless in general so he tried to summon Gollust to italy to get him under control and to finally lure him in Constantia said that he would make gaul was his co Augustus and not just a Caesar but he had to meet him in person Ghul was you know was really eager to get this extra power so he was travelling west and on the way he stopped in Constantinople and when he was holding the chariot races he did things that only the augustus was allowed to do like personally crowning the winners well that really angered Constantius and he came to believe that he couldn't trust call us because golus was clearly ambitious and if as we've seen from his activities in the east definitely ruthless and possibly a little unhinged and crazy the 4th century was a time with a lot of religious zealots and crazy people and it appears that gaul us was one of them so Constanta has had gulfs executed in 360 and at that time he also had julian brought to his court because he was afraid that Julian would take his brother's death as being a threat and that he would try to take up the mantle of his brother in through 55 Julian became Caesar which means that in my previous segment I messed up that eight it should be 350 when Julien joined Constance anteus and not 360 my bed um so when Julian was elevated to become Cesar he actually went to gull this time Constantius would rule the east and send his junior colleague to the west the East had about three-quarters of the Empire's population and wealth so that was clearly a more lucrative job and also a source of greater danger potentially while in gull Julian inherited some of the difficulties that have brought Constantius there namely dealing with the Ryan frontier and the activities of the allamani Julian married his cousin Elena who was the sister of Constanta is now Julian does not appear to have been someone who had a very strong interest in sex while still married to Hellena he was giving an account of a mutiny and he mentions that they were sleeping in separate rooms despite the fact that it was cold so apparently he was not really all that interested in sex with his wife and after she died in the year 360 he never remarried and apparently never had any sexual liaisons with any other women so that is another aspect of Julian's personality and it also is a part of this general 4th century religious austerity and specifically the sort of celibacy that people who were ruling the neoplatonism the way that Julian was were practicing at this time as Caesar and goal Julian did hold the ultimate authority for governing and defending the Western Empire and I imagine that Constantius figured that Julian would take a fairly passive role away that his brother had done and what his generals do all the fighting for him after all Julian was already about 24 or 25 years old and never been formally trained for military and political leadership however Julian decided to really dedicate himself to learning military affairs the same way that he dedicated himself to learning philosophy and he be came a pretty good soldier I wouldn't necessarily say great but he was definitely above-average and we see that in the course of his campaign and goal over that five year period he was definitely playing the leading role he was actively fighting in the ranks and he was making all the big decisions himself and not relying very heavily at all upon his generals at least after the first couple years most of the economic and political power in the Roman West at this time was in the cities along the frontier on the Rhine River here is a reconstruction of the city of Cologne as it might have appeared in Julian's time so Julian would be campaigning up and down the Rhine on both sides of the river for the period between about 355 and 360 and he would do so mostly with success sometimes more success than others but it certainly never with anything like a major catastrophe Julian's greatest battlefield victory came at Strasbourg in the year 357 he and his army though outnumbered possibly around 30,000 to maybe 15,000 decided to square off Julian was cautious about engaging but his troops urged him in the battle and many people have taken that as evidence that the Roman army of this period was less disciplined since they tended to try to influence their commander however that was not an uncommon thing throughout ancient warfare so I wouldn't necessarily interpret it that way what it did show those that the Roman troops were a very high quality as they were able to defeat this much larger force and they did so taking fairly minimal casualties around maybe 240 so lost versus inflicting maybe around 10,000 total casualties on the enemy including a about a thousand men who drown in the Rhine River as they were routed by the Romans though the battle looked lopsided it was apparently pretty closely contested and rather than being a battle that was won through texts brilliance in the part of Julian it seems to have been a battle that was one more through the skill of the soldiers nevertheless Julian took great pride in that battle and it seems to have possibly been commemorated on at least one coin at a certain point back east Constantia ii found himself in a difficult situation after an invasion by the persians and the fall of the important city of Amida he ordered about half or so of Julian's army to head east and reinforce him now some of the elite units in the Western Army including the petulant AC unit sound like a very cheerful group of guys they decided to mutiny and put Julian in charge so that they could avoid service in the east well at least that's the official story but many scholars suspect that actually Julian was the architect of the basically riot which ultimately had him proclaimed emperor in Paris now Julian has a description of it and in that description he claims that he was totally innocent and that he was forced to become Augustus against his will and there's a little bit of evidence for that as in some of his early coins he lists both himself and Constantine ii as co a gusty but ultimately we do know that he hated his cousin and that he did engage in a civil war ultimately that civil war was resolved though because after Julian dealt with the problems at home he was marching east and marching towards Constantinople to confront his cousin when Constantius fairly suddenly just dropped dead at the age of 44 and without in the heirs Constanta is his troops and officials basically pledged a loyalty to Julian and that was the end of the Civil War given his hatred of Constantine in Constanta is the second you would think that Julian would radically break with any traditions that they adhered to however what we see in his coinage and a lot of his public representations that he actually did mostly as a constant any in prints here is a you know fairly typical Roman coin in this period where we see Julian dragging the long haired barbarians by their hair and a symbol of victory and bringing civilization this was a very common sort of 4th and 5th century trope on coins and it shows that Julian was adhering their tradition and at least this coin and here is a much debated bull coin that Julian released now a lot of people think that this bull represents the bull of Mithras and that it was part of Julian's effort to try to return the Roman Empire to pagan worship however other people have interpreted the bull as being a traditional figure from Roman paganism so the paganism of the city of Rome from before the introduction of Eastern mystery cults such as Mithra ISM and Christianity and that the bull was supposed to represent war outside of Rome's samarium outside of it some sort of God protected boundaries so either way though we see that Julian was beginning to experimentally different coins however as we'll see his reign was not very long and that probably accounts for why many of his coins seem fairly conformist despite the fact that he clearly was his own man in November of 361 Julian found himself as the sole emperor of the Roman Empire at about the age of 30 or so and unless I'm mistaken he was the third or fourth last Roman to rule both the east and the west by himself without a colleague now Julian went to work immediately trying to purge the administration of disloyal people and he especially had it out for people who had worked for Constantine's the second and were close to him so he tried to purge his administration of people who were ardent Christians or who might still be loyal to the memory of Constantius and might bear him some ill-will he had of course rebelled against Constance's and had tried to oust Constantius from power constan theists have lost a lot of ground in the east when he was forced to try to deal with Julian at the same time so Julian's first order of business was to try to reclaim the lands that have been lost in the East and maybe even achieve glory in his own right by gaining new lands or restoring the borders that Trajan had set in the East so Julian went through Antioch and decided to build up his force over the winter of 362 363 so ironically the forces who backed him for Emperor to not go east ended up going east just under Julian now he was deeply despised by the people of Antioch and if I had to guess I would think that it has to do a lot with his brother Gollust now golus had held treason trials and trials about witchcraft when he was in the city and now he's got a younger brother who held pagan beliefs the people of Antioch for the most part had become heavily Christianized so they were distrustful and scornful of Julian's practices Julian had a lot of open sacrifices and he was friendly with the famous pagan rhetorician Libanius who was a native of Antioch and due to Julian sort of flamboyant paganism and his use of things like his beard as an identity marker the clean-shaven Christians of Antioch were not very receptive rather than really persecuting them or going after them viciously however Julian really tried to kind of befriend them in a way and when their respect so he good-humouredly accepted most of jokes his expense and he wrote a play about it called my stop again the beard hater where he talks about how the people of Antioch really didn't appreciate him and although there is a little bit of hidden butthurt there at least Julian tried to be a man about it and he tried his best to win them over however it ultimately didn't work and the citizens of Antioch were not sad when they learned of his death Julian's plans for the invasion of Persia were truly ambitious it was going to be a massive pint sir attack between two very large Roman armies one army would be under one of his generals up north who would team up with the Armenians and then march south and the other army was under Julian himself and it was marching directly at the Persian capital of Kotecha thon which is I guess relatively close to the ancient city of Babylon or the modern city of Baghdad if that helps to sort of contextualize it now Julian's northern army never quite got there in time and Julian was put in the dire straits by a lack of supply and the fact that his Calvary was inferior to that of the Persians which made it difficult for him to really gather supplies and keep his men fed during um the retreat from catice ofon when he was trying to find a better spot to camp his army there was a sudden skirmish which erupted and Julian wrote into the thick of it he of course was a very brave warrior and had no fear of death and he was trying to rally his men unfortunately for him he didn't take the time to put on his breastplate and a Persian spear went right through him he didn't die immediately and it's reported that on his deathbed he was talking about philosophy and trying to die in the way that Socrates supposedly died and Plato's Crito however whatever the truth of his death might be Julian ultimately did die and he left his army in a very bad situation and his successor Jovian ultimately had to make major territorial concessions to the Persians which were so bad that they undermined his credibility altogether and that led to a new round of Roman civil wars for the most part we actually don't know much about ancient ruler [Music] we also in general don't know a lot of personal information about most ancient people however Julian is one of the few exceptions to that general rule 55 or so of Julian's letters were preserved and have been transmitted to posterity now some of those letters are probably spurious but most of them seem to be genuine and in those Julian discloses his thoughts and feelings now a lot of his letters are really riddled with quotes and allusions to literature and mythology and other things that it's hard to really get through them and they don't really reveal all that much however Julian also was classmates with two future Saints in the Orthodox Church and they had strong opinions of him especially after he came out as being an apostate we also have an account of him from the contemporary story and omnium it's on the honest Marcellinus who was an admirer of Julian but not an uncritical one the general portrait we get from these letters and from the accounts by people who knew him is that Julian was a very interesting man now he tended to be fairly nervous and a little bit high-strung he had large eyes I believe that some of the sources say that his eyes were a little bit watery a little bit oversized he had sort of a hooks nose he was a little bit on the short side at least for someone of aristocratic or noble royal lineage and his statue pictured here is maybe five foot four or five foot five and it's probably about what he actually looked like and not some idealized version or some oversized thing like we see with Constantine's head that's part of Julian's personality I wouldn't necessarily call him humble since that's not a very common or realistic trait for rulers however he does not seem to have suffered from megalomania um Julian someone who was very intelligent and a quick learner he became a competent general even if he was not a second Trajan Julian had a lot of energy as a lawgiver we know that he was very concerned with administering justice in a way that was right even though his activism was very untraditional and did not go over well with a lot of the people who were his fellow government operatives and we also know that he was an extremely religious man he's someone who was very dedicated to the--our G which was sort of this mystical practice of religion and he was very rtainly anti-christian and did a lot of things to try to promote the revival of traditional religion but we'll get in the more of that kind of stuff in the second video now my personal feelings on Julian or that he's a very fascinating guy I find it interesting that we can see his thought progress he does a pretty good job of disguising the true extent of his hatred for Constantius and mostly actually in his writings that were meant for public consumption takes a lot more shots at constantine the great in the Caesars Julian makes Constantine the guy who is the manifestation of vice and sin because Jesus is the great enabler of such behaviors now um Constance or Julie and I can see why he would be annoying the people he tends to talk too much and he tries to really show off his learning to an extent that could probably be very annoying so I mean I can see Julian as being a pretty balanced guy and someone who would be a mixed blessing if you knew him so that's about all I had to say about Julian the man as a ruler Julian was much like his namesake from Trailer Park Boys his reach exceeded his grasp now Omni Ana's who was a personal friend of Julian and clearly admired him greatly on many levels would it meant that Julian had some flaws and one of those flaws that Julian tried way too hard to intervene in court cases and impose his own judgment rather than relying on laws and traditions that most Romans held sacred so that was something which got Julian into trouble with the people around him um Julian was someone who had these grand that had sort of a grand vision of a Roman Empire which would revert to traditional religion and it's not really clear if he would have been able to pull that off even had he lived um he also did not need to mount the massive Eastern expedition that he did melt and had he refrain from doing so or from relying on a massive pincer maneuver with a general relying heavily on Armenian support then he might not have found themselves outnumbered and you know cut off at catice upon the way he did so as Emperor overall I think Julian comes out as fairly average now had he lived had he survived even after losing the Persian campaign his energy and dedication to excellence makes me think that he could have accomplished a great deal and gone down as one of the better emperors however we can only judge him by what he actually did and what he did was kind of a mixed bag so that's my judgment he is a fairly average Emperor who had an outsized personality and impact so until next time when we talk about Julian's intellectual achievements I am through citing the historian good night

Channel: Thersites the Historian

Views: 27,508

Rating: 4.8862877 out of 5

Keywords: Roman Empire, Late Roman Empire, Paganism, Christianity, Julian the Apostate, Ancient History, Neoplatonism

Id: kSDqEdiZkTw

Length: 28min 45sec (1725 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 10 2017