2 - Julian

Summary

THE EARLY YEARS

Despite Julian's success in convincing himself that the gods had set him on an imperial mission against the Christian dynasty of Constantine, his assumption of empire on the news of Constantius' death in November 361 could scarcely have been predicted by the young boy who survived the massacre of his relatives in 337. As the sons of Constantine monopolized the empire, and control of the east fell to Constantius, Julian and his older half-brother Gallus were excluded from the public life of the court. While in later years Julian would look back affectionately on his early introduction to the Greek classics, ‘after my seventh year’, at the hands of his family tutor, the eunuch Mardonius (Misop. 351a–353a; Or. VIII. 241C–d), he chose to keep silent about another of his early mentors, his kinsman bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia. As with Mardonius (who had been the tutor of Julian's mother Basilina), Eusebius' connection with the young Julian was essentially a domestic one; yet it could not escape notice that the bishop was also a powerful political ally of the new emperor Constantius, who had an interest in encouraging his supervision of Julian and Gallus as they emerged into adulthood.

After bishop Eusebius' death Constantius had the brothers transferred to the confines of the imperial estate in Cappadocia known as Macellum, not far from the city of Caesarea, where they were to reside for six years (342–8). This extensive property, comprising a grand palace surrounded by gardens and fountains (Sozom. V. 2.9), ought to have provided a comfortable existence for the teenage princes; but Julian came to regard their spell there as nothing short of imprisonment (‘we were watched as though we were captives of the Persians’).