The Emperor Julian’s momentous sojourn in Antioch is a key theme in the discourse of Christianity and paganism in the Greek East. This chapter chronicles the events and climate of 362 and 363 CE on the shores of the Orontes, not least highlighting Julian’s utopia of Antioch "city of marble."

This paper focuses on three famous hexameters allegedly uttered by Apollo in Delphi for Emperor Julian by means of the emperor’s physician Oribasius. Since the nineteenth century, this text, in which Apollo announces the destruction of his temple and the silence of the oracle, has been the subject of numerous interpretations. Some scholars regard it as a genuine oracle produced in Delphi and intended for the pagan Emperor Julian while he was in Antioch (362–3). Others argue that it is a Christian forgery and piece of anti-pagan propaganda written shortly after Julian’s death. In this chapter, I first discuss the literary context of this oracle’s quotation in the Artemii Passio, an anonymous and fictitious seventh-century hagiographical work. I argue that we cannot date the text to the fourth century, because its attribution to the lost Church History of Philostorgius appears to be spurious and is not grounded. Second, I analyse the anonymous hagiographer’s construction of this episode and compare it to similar late Byzantine pseudo-oracles about the fate of pagan temples in order to provide a new interpretation of this prophecy.

Chapter 4 concludes the analysis of Julian’s reckoning with Constantine’s propaganda. It focuses on Julian’s strategy to disavow the public persona of the first emperor who had promoted the association between Christian sovereignty and ideals of philosophical leadership. The first section considers the efforts of Constantine’s propaganda to use the events of his (Constantine’s) life to prove that Roman history was guided by Christian providence. The engagement with autobiography in Julian’s final writings appears in this light as the culmination of his response to Christianity’s claims of intellectual dominance over Greco-Roman culture. The second section reconstructs Julian’s joint attempts to project his life as the token of his superior understanding of providential history (Against Heraclius) and to mobilise past Roman history as a source of counter-exempla disproving Constantine’s claims (The Caesars). In the process, Julian repurposed a fundamental element of Constantine’s propaganda – imperial iconography – to his advantage (Caesars; Misopogon).

Chapter 6 investigates the debate surrounding Julian’s final – and fundamental, in the eyes of late Roman intellectuals – objection to Christianity: his critique of its universalising rhetoric. Third- and fourth-century bishops legitimised their increasing political prominence through competitive arguments pointing to Christianity as the only philosophy that was accessible to everyone, including the ill-educated. Julian set in opposition to this the Platonist belief that any self-confessed system of knowledge appealing to the many disqualifies its intellectual authority by revealing crowd-pleasing (hence, deceptive) ambitions. The reaction of upper-class Christians, divided between the popular consensus and allegiance to Julian’s elitist sensibilities, demonstrates the criticality of this argument. Yet – as I show in the second section – the Neoplatonic objection to the Christian rhetoric of universalism ultimately displaced non-Christian philosophers from the political scene (Eunapius’ Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists). Moreover, the rising popularity of ascetic leaders encouraged even highly authoritative ecclesiastical voices (e.g., John Chrysostom) to question the validity of Greco-Roman education. This, ironically, resulted in a power-driven challenge to the validity of the cultural system whose adaptation had been key to stabilising Christian power.

The first section addresses the debate between Julian’s supporters and detractors following his sudden death in 363. Christian preachers turned Julian’s propagandistic use of his life into proof that Roman history was regulated by Christian providence. However, they also had to confront Julian’s re-assessment of the power dynamics between the ruler and the priests in the post-Constantinian empire. I argue that Julian was wary of how the identification of religious allegiance as the criterion for determining whether an emperor was a philosopher-ruler affected the interaction between the emperor, now decentred from his religious structures of choice, and the ecclesiastical leaders. The second section shows that that the episcopal engagement with philosophical ideas both provided clerics with a weapon against Julian’s attempts to re-centre the ruler in religious matters and shaped the relationship between the bishops and emperors in addressing heresy - a key challenge faced by Christianity in its self-construction as perfect system of knowledge. Episcopal appeals to an exclusive control of knowledge also affected the public role of non-conforming philosophers, which I illustrate with a case study of Synesius of Cyrene.

Chapter 3 addresses the writings Julian composed during his sole rule (361–63) following Constantius’ sudden death. I suggest here that Julian’s mature output was grounded in the intuition that the challenge to Christian power had to be channelled into an attack on its identity as a superior interpretive system. The first section draws on a reading of key texts by Constantine and his supporters to contextualise Constantius’ intellectual self-image in the legacy of his father’s cultural policy. Constantine legitimised his subversive status as Christian emperor by projecting himself as the sublime exegete of divine providence. The second section illustrates the strategies Julian devised to deny the validity of Christianity’s hermeneutical claims, which he envisaged as prepared by Greek philosophical achievements and as being therefore derivative and unauthoritative. Julian’s critique was articulated through an attack on Christian exegesis (Against the Galileans) and on what Julian perceived as Christianity’s exploitative relationship with paideia (the School Ban). At the same time, Julian attempted to competitively rethink Greek allegoresis by renouncing the status of Homer as divine, enigmatic text and by composing hymns and writings constructing Greek religion as a ‘cult of culture’.

This chapter surveys the organization of the east Roman military from the failure of Julian’s Persian expedition to the death of Theodosius I in 395. It demonstrates that there is no evidence to support the emergence of the Notitia system during this period and, in fact, positive evidence indicating that the Roman military continued to operate in its fourth-century configuration, with a central reserve army, the comitatus, commanded by a magister equitum and magister peditum, while smaller regional commands were managed by local limitanei or, in exceptional cases, a comes rei militaris. The sole exception was the magister militum per Orientem, the chief general on the eastern frontier, whose office went from an ad hoc appointment to a formally constituted command during this period.

This chapter explores Alexander’s legacy in early Christian literature, arguing that the Christians appropriated his figure by means of subtle alterations to existing tales or comparisons of his deeds with Christian content. It focuses on the common ground between Christians and non-Christians, and looks at first, the classicising ‘pagans’ (Celsus, Porphyry, Julian); secondly, the Greek-writing Jewish authors (Philo of Alexandria, Flavius Josephus); and, thirdly, authors of the Christian comparative material. In each case, I show how Christian authors use either established or innovative strategies in deploying Alexander as a rhetorical device to enhance the effect of their argument. I offer several close readings of important if neglected passages to highlight how different the Christians’ presentations of Alexander actually are from the material they are adapting. The chapter suggests the ‘Christianisation’ of Alexander lies primarily in the Christians’ interpretation of his legacy and in their use of comparative material rather than in their development of a wholly new image for Alexander himself.