From Gore Vidal's historical novel, Julian, 1964. The novel concerns the rise and rule of the Roman Emperor Julian, the nephew of Emperor Constantine the Great. Julian became emperor in A.D. 361 before he was even 30 years old, at a time when the Roman Empire was largely Christianized. He was murdered four years later.
Like ancient trees, we die from the top.
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We are given our place in time as we are given our eyes: weak, strong, clear, squinting, the thing is not ours to choose. Well, this has been a squinting, walleyed time to be born in.
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Traitors who prevail are patriots; usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.
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Libanius to Priscus
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I have a copy of the edict before me as I write. It is composed in bad bureaucratic Greek, the official style of the bishops, whose crudity of language is equaled only by the confusion of their thought.... Priscus, I am sixty-six years old and you are, as I recall, a dozen years older than I. We have reached an age when death is a commonplace not to be feared, especially by us, for is not all philosophy but preparation for a serene dying?
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[From t]he memoir of Julian Augustus
Eusebius had the most beguiling voice and manner of anyone I have ever known. I should say something here about the voices of eunuchs. Actors and other people who try to mimic them invariably tend to pitch their voices high, and screech. Eunuchs seldom sound like that. If they did, who would ever find their company tolerable? In actual fact, the voice of a eunuch is like that of a particularly gentle child, and this appeal to the parent in both men and women. Thus subtly do they disarm us, forgetting that their minds are as mature and twisted as their bodies lacking.
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It was Emperor Diocletian who decided that we should become, in effect, if not in title, Asiatic kings, to be displayed on rare occasions like the gilded effigies of gods.
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Priscus:
But like so many others nowadays, poor Julian wanted to believe that man's life is profoundly more significant than it is. His sickness was the sickness of our age. We want so much not to be extinguished at the end that we will go to any length to make conjurer-tricks for one another simply to obscure the bitter, secret knowledge that it is our fate not to be. If Maximus hadn't stolen Julian from us, the bishops would have got him. I am sure of that. At heart he was a Christian mystic gone wrong.
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[W]e are what others need us to be. This is why our reputations change so often and so drastically, reflecting no particular change in us.
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[From t]he memoir of Julian Augustus
[T]he Nazarene existed as flesh while the gods we worship were never men; rather they are qualities and powers become poetry for our instruction. With the worship of the dead Jew, the poetry ceased. The Christians wish to replace our beautiful legends with the police record of a reforming Jewish rabbi.... They now appropriate our feast days. They transform local deities into saints. Thy borrow from our mystery rites, particularly those of Mithras. The priests of Mithras are called 'fathers.'.... [The Christians] even imitate the tonsure....
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Priscus:
Granted, no educated man can accept the idea of a Jewish rebel as god. But having rejected that myth, how can one then believe that the Persian hero-god Mithras was born of light striking rock, on December 25th, with shepherds watching his birth? (I am told that the Christians have just added those shepherds to the birth of Jesus.)
..... [W]hat Julian craved was what so many desire in this falling time: assurance of personal immortality.
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His nervous gaze flitted here and there like a bird searching for a branch to light on.
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[From t]he memoir of Julian Augustus
Those of the earth's governors who have been tyrants have always presumed that if a man is thought guilty then he must be guilty because why otherwise would he find himself in such a situation. Now any tyrant knows that a man may be perfectly blameless but have powerful enemies (very often the tyrant himself is chief among them), which is why I prefer to place the burden of proof on the accuser rather than on the accused.
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...like those old men one sees in the villages who sit hour after hour, year after year, playing draughts with one another, making the same moves and countermoves to the end of their lives.
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[From t]he memoir of Julian Augustus
Aconia Paulina wanted to know if all cults would be represented in the priesthood. I said yes. Every god and goddess known to the people...would be worshipped, for multiplicity is the nature of life. We all believe--even the Galileans, despite their confused doctrine of trinity--that there is a single Godhead from which all life, divine and mortal, descends and to which all life must return. We may not know this creator...[b]ut through intermediaries...he speaks to us...prepares us for the next stage of the journey. "To find the father and maker of all is hard," as Socrates said.... Yet, as Aeschylus wrote with equal wisdom, "men search out god and searching find him." The search is the whole point to philosophy and to the religious experience. It is a part of the Galilean impiety to proclaim that the search ended three hundred years ago when a young rabbi was executed for treason.
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Men are odd. If they cannot be first, they don't in the least mind being last.
Copyright © by Gore Vidal
Image: Bust of Julian. Capitoline Museums, Rome.
Image: Budhaditya Deb. Remains of the giant statue of Constantine. Viewable in larger format here.
Image: Ruins at Laodicea, near modern Denizli, southwestern Turkey.
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