FLAVIUS CLAUDIUS, emperor of Rome from December 361 to June 363, was the son of Julius Constantius, and nephew of Constantine the Great, and was born in A.D. 331. On the death of Constantine, the soldiers, to assure the empire to his sons, murdered his collateral relations. Julian and his half-brother Gallus alone escaped. Constantius the new emperor hearing that his cousin was still in life, consigned him to the care of Eusebius, bishop of Nicosia. By this prelate and the learned eunuch Mardonius, Julian was trained not only in every branch of polite literature, but in the doctrines of the Christian system. At a befitting age he was made a reader in the church, and in that capacity used to expound the Scriptures to the people. At the age of fourteen he was transferred to the castle of Macellum, where he and Gallus were educated together under the strictest surveillance. When Constantius, who was childless, found it necessary to adopt Gallus as his heir, Julian returned to the capital to carry on his studies, and there made the friendship of the sophist Libanius. Reasons of state induced his cousin to send him back once more to Nicosia, where he fell under the sway of Maximus of Ephesus, and other Platonists. After the tragic death of Gallus in 355, Julian was sent to Milan, where he remained for some months as closely watched and guarded as ever. More than once his life, endangered by the suspicions and caprice of his imperial cousin, was saved at the instance of the empress Eusebia. By her advice he was now invited to court, and named heir to the purple. The emperor next gave him his sister Helena in marriage, and assigned to him the government of Gaul, which the hordes of German invaders were then laying waste with fire and sword. In four successful campaigns Julian displayed his bravery and military skill. The Germans were driven across the Rhine, and Chnodomar, their most powerful king, taken prisoner. Fixing his headquarters at Lutetia (Paris), he set himself to repair the havoc of the barbarian invasions. Cities were rebuilt, impost and taxes abolished, and rapacious governors punished. All these reforms were brought about in such a way as to gain to their author the highest credit for gentleness and clemency, as well as wisdom and sagacity. When the war with Sapor, king of Persia, broke out, Constantius, alarmed at his cousin's growing popularity, took the occasion to draft away to the East the veteran legions of Gaul. When they were preparing to depart, Julian assembled them at Paris, and formally bade them farewell. His address was received with shouts of displeasure, and before he could understand what was meant he found himself saluted as emperor. His first step was to announce the fact to his cousin, whose timely death saved the Romans from the scourge of a civil war. Julian hastened to the capital, and was quietly invested with the imperial purple. His first act was to put an end to the reckless and wasteful extravagance which had prevailed at the court of his predecessor. He himself affected the extreme of simplicity, always walked on foot, prided himself on the length of his nails, and the inky blackness of his hands; and, in his Misopogon, "celebrates with visible complacency the shaggy and populous beard, which he fondly cherished after the example of the philosophers of Greece" (Gibbon, ch. xxii.). To carry out his reforms he established, at Chalcedon, on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus, an extraordinary chamber of justice, consisting of six judges of the highest rank in the state and army. The object of this tribunal was to bring to trial such public men as in the last reign had abused their influence with the emperor to grind down and oppress the people. Many guilty persons were condemned and punished, but unfortunately some who were quite innocent shared the same fate. In the latter class was Ursulus, the able and honest treasurer of the empire, "over whose face," in the words of the historian Ammianus, "justice herself appeared to weep." Among the wise edicts which Julian had published on ascending the throne, was one proclaiming universal toleration. His own conduct, however, was soon marked by a keen and even bitter hatred to Christianity. Though brought up in that faith, he had never owned himself its disciple; and the name of the Pagan would have suited him better than that of the Apostate, which was fixed upon him when he abolished Christianity as the religion of the empire. Revoking the edict of universal toleration, he persecuted the Christians, confiscated the revenues of their churches, and taxed them heavily to rebuild the heathen temples, which, in their day of power, they had pulled down and plundered. He excluded them from every, even the meanest, office of state; and by a special edict forbade them either to study or to teach polite literature. With his connivance, if not at his instigation, the whole paganism of the empire rose in arms against the disciples of the new faith, and imprisoned, tortured, and even offered them as victims on the altars of the heathen gods. Such of the unfortunates as claimed Julian's protection were answered with the heartless taunt that "Every Christian is called upon to suffer." Among the victims was the aged Marcus, bishop of Arethusa, who had saved Julian, when a boy, from the general butchery of his father's Julianus family. When the emperor heard that his old preserver had been ignominiously dragged through the mud and tortured to death, he allowed the perpetrators of the foul deed to pass unpunished. The feeble efforts which he made to check these and similar excesses only served to stimulate the fanaticism of the persecutors. Meanwhile, Julian had resolved to make war upon Sapor, king of Persia. On his way to the East he made Antioch his head-quarters till the expedition should be completely organized. During his sixth months' residence in that city, his unkingly dress and manners, ill-trimmed beard, and strange retinue, offered a tempting mark to the shafts of ridicule, and gave abundant occupation to the epigrammatists and small wits of the place. Julian avenged himself in his famous satire of Misopogon, or Beard-hater, the most trenchant and original of his works. He afterwards took a far more terrible vengeance, by appointing to the government of the city one of the worst men in his dominions. When the inhabitants remonstrated, he replied, "I well know that Alexander is a bad man, and does not deserve a government; but he is exactly such a governor as the greedy and insolent Antiochians deserve." When everything was at last ready, Julian set out on his expedition with a brilliant and well-appointed army of 65,000 men. The campaign brought out the better qualities of his nature. He was indefatigably active, and exposed himself to every hardship like the meanest soldier. Success at first attended his arms. He crossed the Euphrates, and afterwards the Tigris, without loss, took several strongly fortified towns, and defeated the Persians in many skirmishes. His nimble foe, however, refused to close with him in a pitched battle, but his clouds of light horsemen cut off the foraging parties, and the Romans were soon reduced to great straits for supplies. Still, they held out so gallantly, that Sapor seriously thought of suing for peace, when, in a skirmish of outposts, the Roman emperor fell mortally wounded. Brought back to his tent, and feeling that he had but a short time to live, he spent his last hours in discoursing with his friends on the immortality of the soul. He reviewed his reign, and declared himself satisfied with his own conduct, and as having neither penitence nor remorse to express for anything that he had done. He died on the 27th July 363, after a reign of one year and nearly seven months. In accordance with his own instructions, his ashes were carried to Tarsus, in Cilicia, where a stately monument was erected to his memory by his successor, Jovian.

The character of Julian is one of the most interesting and difficult of historical problems. He seemed to have embodied, if not reconciled in himself, qualities in their own nature most opposite. With brilliant endowments, he often acted as for the most part fools only act. Naturally, and to the last humane, he allowed his kingdom to be drenched with the blood of his Christian, in other words, his best subjects. Many of his acts and edicts were lofty in aim and wise in effect; others were illogical and arbitrary. His personal morals were austerely pure, and many of his meanest subjects were both better clad and better fed than he; yet he lavished his wealth and hospitalities on the sophists whom he chose as his friends. With all his modesty and self-denial, he had no small share of vanity, which showed itself in his eager thirsting for posthumous fame. To be remembered, when other monarchs of his line should be forgotten, was to him a prize worth any amount of hardship and self-sacrifice. When in early life his chances of the throne were very small, he sought to immortalize himself as an author; and, to make his character as marked and unique as possible, he affected those eccentricities from which in later life he failed, if indeed he ever tried, to disengage himself. When he came to assume the purple, his imagination glowed with the hope of doing some great deed that should transmit his name to prosperity. His visions of military glory were soon dispelled, when he found, at first, no foe against whom to concentrate the whole power of his empire. In the internal administration of his kingdom he found "ample room and verge enough" for reform, which he was not long of effecting. Such services as these, however, posterity was likely to regard as mere acts of duty, for which no special credit was due to him. A much better chance lay in his restoring the ancient greatness of the republic and the empire, and with it the religious system under which its triumphs had been achieved. Paganism, though on the wane, was still able to oppose a strong front to the new faith. Personally, Julian had little reason to prefer the new to the old. From his own relations—all adherents of the former—he had suffered nothing but cruel maltreatment, and more than once had narrowly escaped with his life, while the Christian church itself presented a sad spectacle of schism, disunion, angry controversy, and intolerance. On the other hand the friends of his youth, as of his riper years, had all been pagans, and by them he had uniformly been caressed, flattered, and admired; while the unity and splendid ceremonies of the pagan worship were probably not without their influence. It is ridiculous to suppose that he did not see through the absurdities of the old mythology; but it was part of his tactics to profess reverence for the deities of Rome, and he himself used to sacrifice to the mother of the gods and compose orations in honour of Apollo, whose son he ordered himself to be called. The sophists, his chosen friends, were not slow to confirm what his vanity had already whispered; and it is not difficult to see why they should have done so. Encouraged by their advice and the hopes of immortal fame, of which he might count himself secure, if successful, Julian came forward as the champion of paganism. It would almost seem as if, in doing so, he had done violence to the dictates of his conscience and the early religious impressions, from which his chequered career could hardly have set him free. If, in coming to this conclusion, we disregard the fierce attacks of the Christian fathers, Gregory of Nazianzus, Cyril, and Jerome, who accused him of downright hypocrisy, it is much less easy to reject the testimony of his own friend Libanius, and the historian Ammianus, who unconsciously make a similar admission.

Even had he not reigned, Julian's name would, in all probability, have been saved from oblivion by his writings. Of these the best are his Letters, especially that to Theodius, in which, in a lofty style, and with great closeness and force of reasoning, he details the duties of a sovereign. His Caesars, or The Banquet, is a satire in which the Roman emperors are described as one by one seating themselves round a table in heaven, and defending themselves from the attacks made on the vices, crimes, and follies of their earthly career by Silenus. Gibbon pronounces this work one of the most agreeable and instructive productions of ancient wit. His Orations are less interesting. His narrative of his Gallic Campaigns, as also his Refutation of the Christian Religion, has unfortunately perished. The best editions of Julian's complete works are those of Petavius, Paris, 1680; and of Ezekiel Spanheim, Leipzig, 1696. (Life of Julian, in Gibbon's Decline and Fall; Vie de Julien, by the Abbé de la Bletterie; Vie de Julien, by M. Thourlet; Histoire de Julien, by M. Jondot; Neander's Ueber den Kaiser Julian, &c., &c.)