Lars Brownworth - Lost to the West - The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization

In the spring of 362, he set off on a tour bound for Antioch, the glittering metropolis of the East, to plan his campaign. When he reached the city, its citizens welcomed him with open arms. Used to the splendor and luxury of the imperial court, they were soon bitterly disappointed by the austere emperor and his endless censorious speeches castigating them for their lack of faith. Plummeting popularity and barely muted grumbling, however, had no effect on Julian, and he continued his attempt to revive paganism. Messengers were sent to Delphi, with instructions to ask the oracle for a prophecy. Delphi was the most famous oracle in the Roman world, and its priestess’s chewing on laurel leaves and inhaling fumes had been relaying Apollo’s messages for over a thousand years, but the ancient world was gone, and the answer the oracle gave was the last one ever recorded. “Tell the king,” she said, “on earth has fallen the glorious dwelling, and the water springs that spoke are quenched and dead. Not a cell is left the god, no roof, no cover. In his hand the prophet laurel flowers no more.”† It was a fitting epitaph—had he only known it—to Julian’s attempt to repaganize the empire.

The emperor, however, stubbornly refused to give up. If paganism wouldn’t recover, then Christianity must be crushed. Christ had prophesied that the Jewish temple wouldn’t be rebuilt until the end times, and in order to disprove this and cast Jesus as a false prophet, he ordered it to be rebuilt. Work started quickly enough, but an earthquake (and, according to Christian sources, “great balls of fire”) shattered the foundations, forcing the terrified overseers to abandon the project. Tempers were rising daily, and in Antioch the mood had become dangerously seditious. Matters weren’t improved when the emperor paid a visit to inspect the city’s famous temple of Apollo. Disgusted to learn that a Christian martyr had been buried within its precincts, Julian tactlessly ordered the body exhumed immediately. Outraged riots swept the city, and order was only restored when he forcibly arrested and executed several Christian agitators. A few weeks later, a pagan worshipper left candles burning unattended in the temple, and the entire structure caught fire and burned to the ground.

Blaming the conflagration on the city’s Christian population, Julian closed their cathedral and confiscated their gold plate, using it to pay the soldiers he was gathering. By this point, the city was on the brink of revolt, and he was even losing the support of his pagan subjects. Mocked openly in the streets for his beard and his anti-Christian measures, every day seemed to bring both sides closer to the breaking point. *Finally, in March 363, Julian’s great army was ready, and to everyone’s immense relief he gave the order to march east.

The campaign against Persia had all the markings of a tragedy even before it began. The idealistic young emperor was determined to find the glory that would refurbish the tattered standard of his religion in a vain and unnecessary war, regardless of the cost. Nothing seemed to go right, but Julian stubbornly pressed on. The Persians offered little resistance, doing their best to keep out of the way of the superior Byzantine force, but the locals diverted rivers to flood the army’s path, and it was high summer before Julian reached the Persian capital of Ctesiphon. Julian’s Gaulish troops were unused to the heat, and Ctesiphon’s high walls couldn’t be taken without a long siege. With the burning sun beating down on them, constant harrying attacks, and rumors of a large Persian army approaching, Julian was reluctantly persuaded to abandon the attempt.

For ten days, the army stumbled back, suffering incessant skirmishes as their enemies became increasingly bold. Then, on the morning of June 26, the Persians suddenly attacked. Showing his customary bravery, Julian leaped out of his tent and went crashing into the thick of the fray without pausing to fully strap on his armor. There, in the chaos of the battle, he was struck in the side with a spear. His men rushed to him, lifting him up from where he had collapsed in the dust. The spear was quickly pulled out, releasing a gush of blood, and he was carried back to his tent. The wound was washed with wine, but the tip had pierced his liver, and Julian knew it was fatal. There in his tent, with the sounds of battle already receding, he closed his eyes and stopped fighting. Scooping up a handful of his blood, he threw it towards the sun and, according to legend, died with the words “Vícístí Galílaee” * on his lips.

The words were wiser than the dying emperor meant them to be. The old religion was disorganized and decentralized, a fashionable relic for the cultural elite. It couldn’t compete with the personal revelation of Christianity for the hearts and minds of the masses, and its complex jumble of gods and rituals ensured that it was too divided for its partisans to cohesively unite behind it. Even had he lived, Julian wouldn’t have been able to change that—the old world that he had fallen in love with in his youth was irretrievably gone. Hopelessly romantic and frustratingly stubborn, the emperor had squandered his energy and imagination foolishly trying to revive a moribund religion at the expense of the one that would define the empire for the next thousand years. Rome and its polytheistic days belonged firmly in the past, and even Julian’s pagan subjects seemed bewildered by his numerous sacrifices. As one of them dryly put it, “Perhaps it was better that he died, had he come back from the east there would soon have been a scarcity of cattle.” *

His body was brought, ironically enough, to Tarsus, the birthplace of Saint Paul, and the last pagan emperor was laid to rest with all his immense promise unfulfilled. At his death, the Constantinian line came to an end, and the gods of Mount Olympus were consigned to decorative mosaics and whimsical scenes on palace floors to amuse bored emperors.

The vast pagan literature of the classical world, however, didn’t pass away. It was too deeply ingrained in Roman culture, too entwined with intellectual thought, to be so lightly cast off. The future was with Christianity, but no one who considered him-or herself Roman could completely reject the classical world. Unlike their western counterparts, early Byzantine church fathers recognized the benefits of pagan philosophy, arguing that it contained valuable insights and that careful reading would separate the wheat of moral lessons from the chaff of pagan religion.† Byzantine universities, from Constantinople to the famous Academy of Athens, would preserve and cultivate classical writing throughout the empire’s history, and even the Patriarchal Academy in Constantinople taught a curriculum that included study of the literature, philosophy, and scientific texts of antiquity. This sharply contrasted with the West, where waves of barbarian invasions would shatter civilization and break the bonds with the classical past. In thought and in power, the future was with the East; from now on the world would be ruled from Byzantium.

*True Roman that he was, Julian was also disgusted by the Germanic beer that was consumed in such large quantities by the locals. Referring to the offending brew, he wrote: “I recognize thee not; I know only the son of Zeus [referring to Dionysus, the god of wine]. He smells of nectar, but you smell of goat.” *The irony here, of course, is that the soldiers who rebelled at the prospect of being summoned east ended up following Julian to Constantinople and then Persia, a clear example of the respect the emperor commanded in his men.†Marcellinus Ammianus. W. Hamilton, ed. and trans. The Later Roman Empire (AD354–378) (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986). *In his attempt to roll back the clock, Julian took to sitting among the senators while they deliberated—as Augustus had done—claiming that even he was not above the law. He had no intention, however, of returning to the more collegial rule of the late republic. In his fanatical quest to destroy Christianity, he was among the most heavy-handed of emperors. *Marcellinus Ammianus. W Hamilton, ed. and trans. The Later Roman Empire (AD 354–378) (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986). *The Persians looted their way across the frontier, but were unable to sack the major Roman city of Nisibis. Thanks to the prayers of a local bishop, an army of gnats and mosquitoes came to the rescue, biting the trunks of the Persian elephants and driving them mad.†Wilmer C. Wright, Julian: Volume III (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). *Constantine and his sons had set recent imperial style by remaining cleanshaven, but Julian, perhaps in homage to the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, proudly wore one. He passed his time in Antioch writing two books: Misopogon and Against the Galileans. The first, translated as “Beard Hater,” was a withering attack on the people of Antioch, while the second was a scathing critique of Christianity. *“Thou hast conquered, Galilean”—a reference to the triumph of Christianity. *Ammianus Marcellinus. The Later Roman Empire (AD 354–378) , W. Hamilton, ed. and trans. (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986), p. 298.†The most famous example of this was the fourth-century father Saint Basil of Caesarea, who wrote a treatise entitled To Young Men, on How They Might Derive Profit from Pagan Literature.