Part 880

"Heathenism still possessed a latent power greater than those supposed who persuaded the Emperors that now it could be easily extirpated. The state of affairs in the West differed from that in the East. In the West it was principally the Roman aristocracy, who with few exceptions still adhered to their ancient religion, and with them the great mass of the people. In the East, on the contrary, Christianity had made much more progress among the masses, and a real aristocracy could scarcely be said to exist. In its stead there was an aristocracy of learning, whose hostility was far more dangerous to Christianity than the aversion of the Roman nobility. The youth still thronged to the ancient and illustrious schools of Miletus, Ephesus, Nicomedia, Antioch, and above all Athens, and the teachers in these schools were almost without exception heathen. … There the ancient heathen spirit was imbibed, and with it a contempt for barbarian Christianity. The doctrinal strife in the Christian Church was held up to ridicule, and, alas! with too much reason. For, according to the Emperor's favor and caprice, one doctrine stood for orthodoxy to-day and another to-morrow. To-day it was decreed that Christ was of the same essence with the Father, and all who refused to acknowledge this were deposed and exiled. Tomorrow the court theology had swung round, it was decreed that Christ was a created being, and now it was the turn of the other party to go into banishment. The educated heathen thought themselves elevated far above all this in their classic culture. With what secret anger they beheld the way in which the temples were laid waste, the works of art broken to pieces, the memorials of an age of greatness destroyed, and all in favor of a barbarian religion destitute of culture. The old rude forms of Heathenism, indeed, they themselves did not desire, but the refined Heathenism of the Neoplatonic school seemed to them not merely the equal but the superior of Christianity. … These were the sources of the re-action against Christianity. Their spirit was embodied in Julian. In him it ascended for the last time the imperial throne, and made the final attempt to stop the triumphal progress of Christianity. But it succeeded only in giving to the world irresistible evidence that the sceptre of the spirit of Antiquity was forever broken. … What influenced Julian was chiefly enthusiasm for Greek culture. Even in a religious aspect Polytheism seemed to him superior to Monotheism, because more philosophic. Neoplatonism filled the whole soul of the young enthusiast, and seemed to him to comprehend all the culture of the ancient world in a unified system. But of course his vanity had a great share in the matter, for he naturally received the most devoted homage among the Hellenists, and his rhetorical friends did not stint their flattery. … He made his entry … [into Constantinople) as a declared heathen. Although at the beginning of his campaign he had secretly sacrificed to Bellona, yet he had attended the church in Vienne. {2723} But on the march he put an end to all ambiguity, and publicly offered sacrifices to the ancient gods. The Roman Empire once more had a heathen Emperor. At first all was joy; for as universally as Constantius was hated, Julian was welcomed as a deliverer. Even the Christians joined in this rejoicing. They too had found the arbitrary government of the last few years hard enough to bear. And if some who looked deeper began to feel anxiety, they consoled themselves by the reflection that even a heathen Emperor could not injure the Church so much as a Christian Emperor who used his power in promoting whatever seemed to him at the time to be orthodoxy in the dogmatic controversies of the age. And Julian proclaimed, not the suppression of Christianity, but only complete religious liberty. He himself intended to be a heathen, but no Christian should be disturbed in his faith. Julian was certainly thoroughly in earnest in this. To be a persecutor of the Church, was the last thing he would have thought of. Besides, he was much too fully persuaded of the untruth of Christianity and the truth of Heathenism to persecute. Julian was an enthusiast, like all the rhetoricians and philosophers who surrounded him. He regarded himself as called by a divine voice to the great work of restoring Heathenism, and this was from the beginning avowedly his object. And he was no less firmly convinced that this restoration would work itself out without any use of force; as soon as free scope was given to Heathenism it would, by its own powers, overcome Christianity. … The Emperor himself was evidently in all respects a heathen from sincere conviction. In this regard at least he was honest and no hypocrite. The flagrant voluptuousness, which had corrupted the court, was banished, and a large number of useless officials dismissed. The life of the court was to be simple, austere, and pure. Men had never before seen an Emperor who conducted himself with such simplicity, whose table was so economically supplied, and who knew no other employments than hard work, and devoted worship of the gods. A temple was built in the palace, and there Julian offered a daily sacrifice. Often he might be seen serving at the sacrifice himself, carrying the wood and plunging the knife into the victim with his own hand. He remembered every festival which should be celebrated, and knew how to observe the whole half-forgotten ritual most punctiliously. He was equally zealous in performing the duties of his office as Pontifex Maximus. Everywhere he revived the ancient worship which had fallen into neglect. Here a closed temple was re-opened, there a ruined shrine restored, images of the gods were set up again, and festivals which had ceased to be celebrated, were restored. … Soon conversions became plentiful; governors, officials, soldiers, made themselves proficient in the ancient cultus; and even a bishop, Pegasius of New Ilium, whom Julian had previously learned to know as a secret friend of the gods, when he had heen the Emperor's guide to the classic sites of Troy, changed his religion, and from a Christian bishop became a heathen high-priest. … The dream of a restoration of Heathenism nevertheless soon began to prove itself a dream. Though now surrounded by heathen only, Julian could not help feeling that he was really isolated in their midst. He himself was naturally a mystic, and lived in his ideals. His Heathenism was one purified by poetic feeling. But there was little or nothing of this to be found actually existing. His heathen friends were courtiers, who agreed with him without inward conviction. … He was far too serious and severely moral for their tastes. They preferred the theatre to the temple, they liked amusement best, and found the daily attendance at worship and the monotonous ceremonies and sacrifices very dull. A measurably tolerant Christian Emperor would doubtless have suited them better than this enthusiastically pious heathen. Blinded as Julian was by his ideal views, he soon could not escape the knowledge that things were not going well. If Heathenism was to revive, it must receive new life within. The restoration must be also a reformation. Strangely enough Julian felt compelled to borrow from Christianity the ways and means for such a reformation. The heathen priests, like the Christian, were to instruct the people, and exhort them to holy living. The heathen, like the Christians, were to care for the poor. … While new strength was thus to be infused into Heathenism, other measures were adopted to weaken Christianity. An imperial edict, June 17, A. D. 362, forbade the Christians to act as teachers of the national literature, the ancient classics. It was, the Emperor explained, a contradiction for Christians to expound Homer, Thucydides, or Demosthenes, when they regarded them as godless men and aliens. He would not compel them to change their convictions, but also he could not permit the ancient writers to be expounded by those who took them to task for impiety. … This, of course, was not a persecution, if the use of force alone makes a persecution, yet it was a persecution, and in a sense a worse one than any which went before. Julian tried to deprive the Christians of that which should be common to all men,—education. … Nevertheless he had to confess to himself that the restoration of Heathenism was making no progress worth speaking of. … He spent his whole strength, he sacrificed himself, he lived only for the Empire over which Providence had made him lord, and yet found himself alone in his endeavor. Even his heathen friends, the philosophers and rhetoricians, kept at a distance. … With such thoughts as these, Julian journeyed to Antioch, in Syria, in order to make preparations there for the great campaign he purposed to make against the Persians. There new disappointments awaited him. He found the shrines of his gods forsaken and desolate. … The temple of Apollo was restored with the greatest splendor. Julian went there to offer a sacrifice to the god. He expected to find a multitude of worshippers, but no one even brought oil for a lamp or incense to burn in honor of the deity. Only an old man approached to sacrifice a goose. … Shortly afterwards, the newly restored temple burned down in the night. Now the Emperor's wrath knew no bounds. He ascribed the guilt to the Christians; and although the temple, as is probable, caught fire through the fault of a heathen philosopher, who carried a dedicatory lamp about in it without due precautions, many Christians were arrested and tortured. The Church had its martyrs once more; and Julian, discontented with himself and the whole world besides, advanced to new measures. {2724} The cathedral of Antioch was closed and its property confiscated. Julian decreed that the Christians, whose God had forbidden them to kill, should not be intrusted with any office with which judicial functions were connected. … Julian himself became more and more restless. He hurried from temple to temple, brought sacrifice after sacrifice; he knelt for hours before his gods and covered their statues with kisses. Then at night he sat in the silence at his writing-table, and gave vent to his bitterness and disgust with every thing. Then he wrote his works full of brilliant wit, thought out and expressed with Greek refinement, but full of bitterest hatred especially against the Galileans and their Carpenter's Son. … Finally, his immense preparations for the campaign against the Persians were finished. Julian started, after finally setting over the Antiochians a wretch as governor, with the remark that the man did not deserve to be a governor, but they deserved to be governed by such a one."

_G. Uhlhorn, The Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism, book 3, chapter 3._

ALSO IN: _G. H. Rendall. Julian the Emperor._

_B. L. Gildersleeve, The Emperor Julian (Essays and Studies, pages 355-400)._

_Gregory Nazianzen, Invectives against Julian, and Libanius, Funeral Oration upon Julian, translated by C. W. King._

ROME: A. D. 363. The Persian expedition of Julian. His death. Jovian made Emperor by the retreating army.

See PERSIA: A. D. 226-627.

ROME: A. D. 363-379. Christianity reascendant. Secret hostility of Paganism. Reign of Valentinian and Valens. Approach of the Huns. The struggle with the Goths. Elevation of Theodosius to the throne.

When Julian's successor, Jovian, "who did not reign long enough to lead back to Constantinople the army which he had marched from the banks of the Tigris, made public profession of Christianity, he, at the same time, displaced a great number of brave officers and able functionaries, whom Julian had promoted in proportion to their zeal for paganism. From that period, up to the fall of the empire, a hostile sect, which regarded itself as unjustly stripped of its ancient honours, invoked the vengeance of the gods on the heads of the government, exulted in the public calamities, and probably hastened them by its intrigues, though inextricably involved in the common ruin. The pagan faith, which was not attached to a body of doctrine, nor supported by a corporation of priests, nor heightened by the fervour of novelty, scarcely ever displayed itself in open revolt, or dared the perils of martyrdom; but pagans still occupied the foremost rank in letters:—the orators, the philosophers (or, as they were otherwise called, sophists), the historians, belonged, almost without an exception, to the ancient religion. It still kept possession of the most illustrious schools, especially those of Athens and Alexandria; the majority of the Roman senate were still attached to it; and in the breasts of the common people, particularly the rural population, it maintained its power for several centuries, branded, however, with the name of magic. … Less than eight months after his elevation to the throne, on the 17th of February, 364, Jovian died in a small town of Galatia. After the expiration of ten days, the army which he was leading home from Persia, at a solemn assembly held at Nice, in Bithynia, chose as his successor the son of a captain from a little village of Pannonia, the count Valentinian, whom his valour and bodily prowess had raised to one of the highest posts of the army. … Spite of his savage rudeness, and the furious violence of his temper, the Roman empire found in him an able chief at the moment of its greatest need. Unhappily, the extent of the empire required, at least, two rulers. The army felt this, and demanded a second. … Valentinian … chose his brother. Valens, with whom he shared his power, had the weak, timid, and cruel character which ordinarily distinguishes cowards. Valentinian, born in the West, … reserved the government of it to himself. He ceded to his brother a part of Illyricum on the Danube, and the whole of the East. He established universal toleration by law, and took no part in the sectarian controversies which divided Christendom. Valens adopted the Arian faith, and persecuted the orthodox party. The finances of the empire demanded a reform, which neither of the emperors was in a condition to undertake. They wanted money, and they were ignorant where to seek the long exhausted sources of public wealth. … Vast provinces in the interior were deserted; enlistments daily became more scanty and difficult; the magistrates of the 'curiæ' or municipalities, who were responsible both for the contributions and the levies of their respective towns, sought by a thousand subterfuges to escape the perilous honour of the magistrature. …

See CURIA, MUNICIPAL, OF THE LATER ROMAN EMPIRE.

During the twelve years that Valentinian reigned over the West (A. D. 364-376), he redeemed his cruelties by several brilliant victories. …

See ALEMANNI: A. D. 365-367.

Valentinian had undertaken the defence of Gaul in person, and generally resided at Treves, then the capital of that vast prefecture; but at the time he was thus occupied, invasions not less formidable had devastated the other provinces of the West. …

See BRITAIN. A. D. 367-370.

At this period Valens reigned over the Greeks, whose language he did not understand (A. D. 364-378). His eastern frontier was menaced by the Persians, his northern by the Goths. … Armenia and Iberia became subject to Persia; but as the people of both these countries were Christian, they remained faithful to the interests of Rome, though conquered by her enemy. … The dominion of the Goths extended along the shores of the Danube and the Black Sea, and thirty years had elapsed since they had made any incursion into the Roman territory. But during that period they had gone on increasing in greatness and in power. … Spite of the formidable neighbourhood of the Goths and the Persians—spite of the cowardice and the incapacity of Valens—the East had remained at peace, protected by the mere name of Valentinian, whose military talents, promptitude, and severity were known to all the barbarian tribes. But the career of this remarkable man, so dreaded by his enemies and by his subjects, had now reached its term." He died in a fit of rage, from the bursting of a blood-vessel in his chest, November 17, A. D. 375. "His two sons,—Gratian, who was scarcely come to manhood, and Valentinian, still a child,—shared the West between them. … {2725} Never, however, was the empire in greater need of an able and vigorous head. The entire nation of the Huns, abandoning to the Sienpi its ancient pastures bordering on China, had traversed the whole north of Asia by a march of 1,300 leagues." The Goths, overwhelmed and flying before them, begged permission to cross the Danube and take refuge in Mœsia and Thrace. They were permitted to do so; but such extortions and outrages were practiced on them, at the same time, that they were exasperated to a passionate hatred. This bore fruit in a general rising in 377. Two years of war ensued, marked by two great battles, that of Ad Salices, or The Willows, which neither side could fully claim, and that of Adrianople, August 9, 378, in which Valens perished, and more than 60,000 of his soldiers fell.

See GOTHS: A. D. 376, and 378.

"The forces of the East were nearly annihilated at the terrible battle of Adrianople. … The Goths … advanced, ravaging all around them, to the foot of the walls of Constantinople; and, after some unimportant skirmishes, returned westward through Macedonia, Epirus, and Dalmatia. From the Danube to the Adriatic, their passage was marked by conflagration and blood. … No general in the East attempted to take advantage of the anarchy in favour of his own ambition; no army offered the purple to its chief; all dreaded the responsibility of command at so tremendous a crisis. All eyes were turned on the court of Treves, the only point whence help was hoped for. But Gratian, eldest son of Valentinian, and emperor of the West, was only 19. He … marched upon Illyricum with his army, when he learned the event of the battle of Adrianople, and the death of Valens, who had been so eager to secure the undivided honours of victory, that he would not wait for his arrival. Incapable of confronting such a tempest, he retreated to Sirmium. The news of an invasion of the Allemans into Gaul recalled him to the defence of his own territory. Danger started up on every hand at once. The empire stood in need of a new chief, and one of approved valour. Gratian had the singular generosity to choose from among his enemies, and from a sense of merit alone. Theodosius, the Spaniard, his father's general, who had successively vanquished the Scots and afterwards the Moors, and who had been unjustly condemned to the scaffold at the beginning of Gratian's reign, had left a son 33 years of age, who bore his name. The younger Theodosius had distinguished himself in the command he held in Mœsia, but was living in retirement and disgrace on his estates in Spain, when, with, the confidence of a noble mind, Gratian chose him out, presented him to the army on the 19th of January, 379, and declared him his colleague, and emperor of the East."

_J. C. L. de Sismondi, The Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter 5 (volume 1)._

ALSO IN: _T. Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, introduction, and book 1, chapter 1._

ROME: A. D. 378. Gratian's overthrow of the Alemanni in Gaul.

See ALEMANNI: A. D. 378.

ROME: A. D. 379-395. Theodosius and the Goths. His Trinitarian Edict. Revolt of Maximus. Death of Gratian. Overthrow of Maximus by Theodosius. Usurpation of Eugenius, and his fall. Death of Theodosius.