Julian's Laughter

Julian, the emperor who ruled Rome for only twenty-two months, was the greatest threat to Christianity the world has ever seen, and, had he lived, would have been the greatest ruler Rome ever had, the only man who could have prevented Rome’s decline and fall. He has been called for nearly two thousand years, Julian the Apostate, hated by every priest, every high official of the Church, accused and convicted of betrayal of the faith, but Julian only pretended to be a Christian after Constantius, the emperor who succeeded Constantine, murdered Julian’s father and nearly all his other relatives. It was the only way to save his own life. Julian was never a Christian; he was born to be a philosopher, in the ancient understanding of the word.Whoever reads Plato’s Republic, if they remember nothing else, remembers the warning that the ills of mankind will never vanish unless philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers. This, for a variety of reasons, would seem impossible, were it not for the fact that with Julian it came true. There, ruling Rome and its empire, was a mind that could see more clearly into the nature of things than anyone since Plato and Aristotle. There is another part of The Republic that explains his failure, why the rule of a philosopher was not sufficient: Plato’s insistence that the only way a philosopher king could rule would be to start with children too young to remember anything of what had gone before, the way of life, the beliefs, of their parents. When Julian came to power he faced a religion that with its promise of life after death made what happened here and now, what happened to the empire, unimportant. Their eyes on heaven, Christians had no use for the belief in Roman greatness or the martial discipline that had made it possible. Julian tried to bring back the worship of the ancient gods of Rome, not because he believed in them, but because he understood that without the belief in Roman greatness, without the belief in a Rome protected by the gods, Rome and all it meant, including the honor paid to Greek philosophy, would vanish from the world and darkness become perpetual. Buried deep in The Spirit of the Laws, that book that every learned man or woman once read and studied, Montesquieu, still worried in the l8th century that his words might offend the Church, remarked: “Let us momentarily lay aside the revealed truths; seek in all of nature and you will find no greater object than the Antonines, Julian even, Julian (a vote thus wrenched from me will not make me an accomplice in his apostasy); no, since him there has been no prince more worthy of governing men.”When Julian died, whether killed by a Persian spear or murdered by one of his own, Christian, soldiers, the last obstacle to Christian dominance, and the last chance for a Roman restoration, were removed. Fifty years later, the Roman Empire, no longer able, or willing, to save itself, had been destroyed.Julian’s Laughter tells a story that if it were not true would be impossible, how Julian made the emperor, Constantius, and the emperor’s wife, Eusebia, think him a harmless scholar without ambition; how Julian, without having so much as seen a battle became one of the greatest captains of war Rome had ever known; how he became emperor at the insistence of the army, an insistence he secretly encouraged; and how he tried to restore the ancient gods while , when others slept, he spent hours every night writing dialogues and other papers in which, with sometimes hidden meaning, he attempted to show himself and others what he could grasp about the real meaning of the world.The story is told by two men who knew him, two men as different from one another as two men could be: Eutherius, a eunuch who had been chief chamberlain to the empress, Eusebia and Ammianus Marcellinus, a great Roman general and the author of the Roman history that Gibbon thought the definitive work.


Genre: Historical