JULIAN THE APOSTLE A Fourth-Century History - Phillip A. Malpas, M. A. (Phillip A.

Malpas (1875-1958) Between an early career in the British Navy, and again during W.W. II, Malpas spent 20 years of uninterrupted study in the British Museum. His speciality was early Christianity and Gnosticism and many of his studies and translations were serialized in the Theosophical Path. A large number of his books and studies remained unpublished, many of which probably perished in an Archives fire of Point Loma Publications. See Blavatsky Collected Writings, vol. 13, pp. 391-2.) (Serialized in The Theosophical Path, vol. 39, no. 2 through vol. 41, no. 3; February, 1931 through March, 1932)

"Thou shalt not revile the gods." - Quoted by Julian from Exodus, xxii, 28 The complete precept is: "And Yahweh said unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say.... Thou shalt not revile the gods nor curse the ruler of thy people." [[Hebrew text here from Exodus xx, 22, and xxii, 28.]] -------------------Contents I. New Rome II. Pergamus and Ephesus III. Gallus Ceasar IV. University-Life V. The Mysteries of the Great Mother VI. Milan and the German War VII. Events in Gaul VIII. Julian Augustus IX. The Persian War X. The Correspondence of a Philosopher XI. Aftermath ------------------

I. New Rome About the year 330 A.D., the city of Byzantium on the Bosporus was reimbodied in the New Rome. But the Emperor preferred to call it after his own name, Constantinopolis,

the 'city of Constantine.' The Roman world had grown so great that it could not stand as one Empire, and could live only by splitting into two, with a Rome for the West and a New Rome for the East. Certainly Constantine had done much to consolidate the unwieldy Empire into one whole under his command, his imperatorship, but there had to be assistant Caesars and even co-Augustuses when at the end of his reign he found himself incapable of governing alone. In 335 A.D. Constantine had divided most of the world among his three boys, of whom the eldest was just twenty-one. There was no question about the boys being named after their father: they were called Constantine, Constantius, and Constans. Constantine the Second was given Gaul, Spain, and Britain, and such outlying colonies to the West. Constantius was near the heart of the Empire with dominions not so distant from Constantinople. He included among his portion the rich lands of the near East: Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt. It was the best portion of all, for when you remember that Egypt supplied the heart of the Empire with corn, the master of Egypt was the master of the Empire. Constans received Italy and Africa and the parts about Illyria-Albania, as we may say. So there was little question as to who should have the best chance to assume the imperial power at Constantinople when the blood-stained Constantine went to his account. This pious murderer's mother, Helena, had been a mere concubine, a nobody, and later, in a genuine marriage, his father had espoused Theodora, the daughter of the Emperor Maximian. There were six children of the marriage and some of them in their turn had married and had children of their own. So there was no lack of heirs in case the three boys, sons of Constantine, had not been available, or their father's illegitimacy had been insisted upon. One of these legitimate half-brothers was Julius Constantius. This Julius Constantius, by his first wife Galla, had two children, a son whose name is not known, and another son named Gallus. Julian was the son of his second wife, Basilina. These cousins of the three Caesars were quite small boys when Constantine died; the Caesars themselves were mere youths. Julian had been born coincidently with the new city on the Bosporus when it rose from the foundations of Byzantium. Julian and Constantinople, the New Rome, were cradled together. "Two births at once," declared an old philosopher. "They are twins: the boy and the city, the city and the boy. I wonder what the future holds for them both and for their part in the world?" Constantine was dead. The body lay in state in the palace at Nicomedia, some fifty miles south of Constantinople. Strange things had happened since Eusebius of Caesarea had engineered the Council of Nicaea in 325 and thereby fixed the political power of his church. This Eusebius wrote a 'history of the church' which is still extant, but Socrates, another historian of milder political tendencies, drily commences his own history with the remark that Eusebius was "evidently more intent on a highly wrought eulogium of the Emperor, than an accurate statement of the facts." The fact was that Eusebius had the novelist's mind and his hero was Constantine. It is amusing to read in his works how his ideas about striking events grow out of nothing into 'history.' The trouble was that so many accepted his 'history' as gospel and made political capital out of some of his fanciful incidents. One must forgive him for making

Constantine out to be such a hero. Actually the Emperor was just a plain murderer by habit. At least nine murders can be placed to his credit. His own son was killed at his bidding in the castle at Pola; he himself strangled his little nephew; he made soup of his wife in a bath, and so on: the family seemed good subjects to practise on, in the pursuit of this interesting hobby. Yet it became awkward when there was some talk of Constantine's being baptized and joining the political church. They told him that if he were made a Christian he would have to put on an appearance of piety and his murders would have to be stopped. At the same time they needed him for their political prestige and protection. A compromise was adopted, if we are to believe the records. "You can get the doctor to tell you when you are dying; then you can be baptized, and you will be saved just as effectually as if you had been baptized years before. The advantage is that baptism will wipe out all your sins and you will start with a clean sheet." The idea seemed a good one and eminently satisfactory to both parties. Of course, nobody put it in quite such crude words, but that is what it amounted to. The novelist's mind found an excellent explanation of the delay in a touching story that the Emperor wanted to be baptized in the water of the Jordan, and for that reason had put off the ceremony until the last minute in the hope of visiting that muddy stream. Others said that he was never baptized at all. At any rate there was a flaw in the arrangements. When Constantine really did die the story went that he was baptized according to plan, and expired, peacefully secure in the knowledge of salvation. But the man who baptized him was the aristocratic Eusebius of Nicomedia and not at all the Athanasian supporter, Eusebius of Caesarea. This was serious, for the Bishop of Nicomedia was an Arian! What of that? Everything. The whole foundation of the political church now rested on the defeat of the Presbyter Arius of Alexandria by the Athanasians. The bitter persecution of Arius by Athanasius had all but ended in triumph for Arius, when, as it was said, the long arm of the persecutor reached from Alexandria to Constantinople and Arius died in agony in the market-place, poisoned, not long before the death of Constantine. Unfortunately there were no government-analysts in those days and the incident and the manner of this death were capitalized enormously by the Athanasians. For years they pointed to the place in the market of Constantinople, where the death of Arius had occurred, and this story kept the flock together mightily. The god of Fear held them in unbreakable bonds. The whole story is almost too miserable to repeat. Of course there was no religion about it except the name and the claim; it was politics of a very primitive, semi-savage kind. Therefore, to find the Emperor Constantine, the corner-stone of the political church, baptised by an Arian Bishop was a fearful blow. The wily Armenian mind found a way out of the dilemma. Few were educated in those days, and far more violent antitheses than these had been made to coalesce by the power of words. Always a subtil writer, Eusebius of Caesarea blended the antagonistic facts admirably in his books. So today Constantine is regarded by many people, even educated ones, as a 'good Christian,' while no condemnation is too awful for Arius. Athanasius still holds the platform and Arius is detested. And yet Constantine during his lifetime had favored the Arians and persecuted the Athanasians. Whether Constantine was baptized on his deathbed, or not, they gave him a fine funeral. In a golden coffin covered with a purple pall his body was conveyed from

Nicomedia to Constantinople and delivered to the Athanasians, who buried him in their church, forbidding any but Athanasians to enter the church where the ceremonies were held. The Athanasians claimed themselves to be the Christian church to the exclusion of all others. Such was the state of affairs when Constantius arrived to take charge of the government of Constantinople in 337, A.D. In reality it mattered little who had baptized the pious-tongued murderer. For two or three years before his death an alteration was noted in his character. He degenerated; it looked as if the Law had put its hand upon him as an earnest of the reparation that he would have to make at some time for his ill deeds. It would be going far to say that the records declare him to have been insane, but he was not the man he had been. ---------Constantius Constantius was a young man of twenty-one; but for years, like his two brothers, he had been carefully trained for Empire. Soldierly exercises, scholarly teaching, practice in the Caesarship, all had made him capable beyond his age. He returned post-haste to Constantinople on hearing of the death of his father Constantine. No definite testament had been made by the Emperor as to the succession and there was a distinct possibility of trouble for his sons. They knew perfectly well that their uncle Dalmatius, Constantine's brother, was the real legitimate heir to their grandfather, so long as any right of heirship was recognised as existing. Constantine himself was an illegitimate son. But he had taken the Empire and held it with the help of schemers in exchange for their political support. Dalmatius had been a quiet sort of man, perfectly content to let Constantine have the Empire; but that did not mean that his sons would as lightly acquiesce in the succession of Constantine's sons. When Constantius came to Constantinople to assume the purple, there were councils and consultations. The upshot was that certain orders were given and the soldiers had to carry them out. Their new master had studied certain methods of Constantine and found them good. The excuse was transparent, but the soldiers were obliged to accept it while knowing it to be a lie. It was simple enough - that the relatives of Constantine's sons were to be set up against them as candidates for the Empire. Therefore it was just and necessary that they should die, to the last babe. Theoretically, the soldiers of the guard took matters into their own hands and no one could control them. Actually, they were made to do the filthy work and could not help themselves. First they killed Dalmatius and Annibalianus, the sons of Dalmatius, the real heir of Constantine's father. That finished the house of the elder son of Constantius Chlorus. With unsheathed sword the soldiers ran through the palace killing and murdering until they finally came to the children of the younger brother of Dalmatius, Julius Constantius. They killed the eldest of the three sons and at last their glorious work was almost at an end. His two little brothers, Gallus and Julian, alone remained to be sent to join the celestial choir where political schemers could no more disturb them. They could not possibly escape, being merely a couple of small boys, and the very soldiers inured as they were to rough deeds, drew the line at these two innocents, a baby of six and a very

sick lad of twelve, who looked as if he would soon die without any attention from the soldiers or anyone else. They refused point-blank to carry out their 'duty' any further. Even that mixture of leather and india-rubber, that tough and elastic compound which Constantius called his conscience, felt a trifle nauseated by the foul massacre of all his relatives within reach. His father, Constantine, had been made of sterner stuff; he had not hesitated to strangle his little nephew with his own hands. Constantius was more delicate; he made the soldiers do the work and then said they had risen in revolt and did it of their own initiative, owing to their indignant loyalty to himself: the poor innocent Constantius had been unable to stop them. He had not missed any meals over the matter, but still he felt badly about it. It was almost as unpleasant and disagreeable a business as drowning an unwanted dog. But then it made the family so select - what was left of it. Then came the report that the little Gallus, a boy of twelve, and Julian, a baby half that age, had been spared owing to the foolish sentimentality of army-officers. Of course one could always complete the unfinished task; say that they were a danger, and there would be a dozen hands to put poison in their milk or follow any preferred mode of getting rid of such terribly dangerous people as these babes. Meanwhile it would never do to polish off the children, while the other murders were hot in the public mind. The 'revolt of the soldiers' had been quelled and the thing would be too plain altogether. Even devotees of the new politics had to preserve some show of decency, or, rather, reason. Besides, Herod of the myths had never been a popular character to imitate. So time passed and the boys still lived. Constantius began to have misgivings; they said his anger was modified. It was as good an excuse as any other. Actually, faint glimmerings of the Law of Karman, the law that every deed, good or bad, brings its own consequences with inevitable accuracy, was overshadowing his dull perceptions; he was not sure that more murders would not precipitate the reaction of the 'gods,' the ruling laws and forces of Nature. You never know which will be the last straw in the pottle. Julian's mother, Basilina - 'the little Queen' as we should say in English - died a few months after he was born. He inherited from her a refined character quite foreign to that of Gallus, whose mother, Galla, was of a different stamp. Basilina had been of good family, well-to-do and aristocratic. In those days women of good birth were given exceptionally liberal advantages in education and Basilina loved to study the resounding verse of Homer and Hesiod under her tutor, the eunuch Mardonius. Julian calls him a Scythian but that only means that he came from the barbarian fringe of the Empire. The name is Syrian and he may have been a native of any of the lands east of Constantinople. But he knew his Homer, as did all the 'grammarians'; and there in Constantinople, not so very many miles from the scene of the war for Troy, Mardonius read to his young mistress stories of Agamemnon and Achilles, of Hector and Helen and Ajax, of Ulysses and Calypso in her Atlantic isle, of the gardens of the West where the Hesperides dwell and the golden citrus glows, of gods and demi-gods and heroes. Then he would give her the scroll and she in turn would read the rolling periods of the old 'blind' poet. Perhaps Mardonius suspected, perhaps he knew, that 'blindness' - at least a little. For within the words of Homer's hexameters the seeing eye can find many a secret of the old gods and of the life divine. The poet was blind only because he chose not to see the secret things of the temples and the gods, writing them down like camp-fire tales as though they had no inner meaning. One such secret, seen through half-closed eyes, was the twintruth of reincarnation and responsibility - the birth and rebirth of man, age after age, until

he has shaken off all Karman and created no new chains to bind him to earth. He then rebecomes the god he was and needs no more to 'go out of the temple' of his divine nature. There had been a sunny day long ago when Basilina had slept and dreamed. And when she awoke her eyes were shining with a new light. She confided to her husband the dream that had come to her in her hours of sleep. "I saw the invulnerable Achilles," she said. "He told me that he himself was to be my son. I feel happy and at peace, my beloved husband!" Julius Constantius was very gentle and very sympathetic. The god gives dreams to whom he will, and those who read them do not always know the language in which they come. But surely this was a dream that none could fail to read - except Basilina. The boy would be Achilles - invulnerable by the power of the gods. And yet .... there would be the fatal heel, the one spot where the darts of powers malign could penetrate his invisible armor and destroy the champion of the armies of light. Julius Constantius smiled and was silent. But the story filtered into history, as stories do, after Julian was born. Perhaps Julian was Achilles - who knows? Surely he was one of 'fortune's favored soldiers,' never far from the center of the world's eternal battle. Now a warrior, now a king, and again a simple sage, a teacher of the people; an obscure citizen saving his people's liberties at some crisis; a poor unknown writer of books, or a poet whose words should lead nations on to victory; a merchant of no great account shining as an example of honesty in a world of fraud; a servant of some philosopher; a humble tender of the fields studying Nature at the fountain-head; again a warrior and a prince.... the wheel turns in endless rotation. Now up, now down, but ever with his 'mind's eye' fixed on his shining star, Julian was one of the 'sacred tribe of heroes' of whom the world catches a fitful glimpse from time to time, now here, now there, but whom the world often sees not when they do their greatest work for human progress. Basilina died soon after giving him to the light. His father educated him with due regard to his position in life. The eunuch Mardonius had been his mother's tutor. Mardonius should be the pedagog of the little Julian and teach him the ceaseless thundering surge of Homer's heroic hexameters as he had taught it to his gentle mother. Time came for school and Mardonius was Julian's escort when he was but seven years old. The strict and staid old teacher allowed no ill breeding. "Keep your eyes in front of you, modestly downcast in the street; do not stare at people nor swagger and strut like the soldiers," was a precept early learnt. If the little prince was invited into a house he must enter without haughtiness. If he was wanted by one of the schoolmasters he should go before being called. Other boys were noisy and full of energy. Julian had to exhaust his energies on Homer. "I should like to play at soldiers," he would say to Mardonius. "All the other boys do!" "What nonsense!" replied Mardonius. "You can read all about soldiers in the Iliad and the Odyssey. You work at your books and do it in that way!"

So the little lad had to restrain his spirits. Sadly he gave up all thought of ever being a soldier. How was he to know, or Mardonius either, that history would one day rank him among the greatest soldiers of all time? Anything grand or glorious he wanted to do, whether to travel or to see fine sights, the boy was told to seek in the pages of Homer, in the Iliad or Odyssey. Luckily he loved books and this was a real substitute for the wider life. It bred imagination. --------Macellum When Julian was twelve and Gallus eighteen, Constantius began to think once more of the safety of his throne. The boys were always a possible source of danger. Constantius had no children; without heirs there was no safeguard for the succession of the royal house. Nominally, of course, the emperors were elected. Actually they were hereditary if they could continue to hold what they held. Otherwise Constantine the bastard was the rightful emperor and his brothers of the legitimate line had no claims, nor had their sons; in which case Julian would have been no danger. Constantius was filled with more than a suspicion that his childlessness was due to his having killed all his family except his two brothers - and they had now followed, one killing the other and being killed himself in the course of war. That Constantius had not killed Gallus and Julian was due to no lack of intention: a sort of lapsus gladii, as it were. The boys must be sent away. There is a lonely castle in the mountain-fastnesses of Cappadocia, what we call the Arghi Dagh today, midway between Tarsus and the Black Sea. A farm surrounds it and the towns of Cappadocia are few and distant. One of them is Tyana, rich with the memories of the grand Apollonius who was born there in the year 1 A.D. Beauty is there of a kind; the wild beauty of the mountains and the sky. But civilization there was none. This remote farm-castle they called Macellum. To this mountain-farm with its grim fortifications, Gallus and Julian were exiled. There were slaves with them and around them, rough men who knew nothing of culture or refinement. Mardonius alone represented the finer things of life to Julian, and he was not all a man but a slave like the rest. Julian's only real companions were his beloved books and a dawning sense of the friendliness of philosophy in solitude. Gallus mixed and played with the slaves. What else could he do? They taught him rough ways and boorish manners, low tastes, and violent tendencies. There were rumors of boyish pranks and sometimes there was trouble for the boys. Once Julian was caught playing truant, not from school, but to school! He had heard of a divine philosopher in the country and, evading the watchful guards, paid him a visit. What with the aroma of memories of the glorious Apollonius and the devoted Saul of Tarsus and certain others, the wild country round about seemed by no means an unfriendly haven for the true philosophers. Plato and the philosophers were Julian's teachers; Nature was his nurse; the mountains shaped his mind and symboled for the soul greater heights to conquer. Gallus meanwhile loafed and 'killed time,' gathering bad habits from the slaves who were his sole companions. Unlike Julian, he knew nothing of books and philosophers. He just grew wild and undisciplined.

For six long years the boys led this strange, solitary life as semi-prisoners in exile. Once only in that time had Constantius seen them for a glancing moment. Julian said in after years that only his love for philosophy saved him during those lonely years of youth. Though he knew it not, they were an initiation such as all real philosophers pass through at some time when learning to stand alone, with no man to stand between them and themselves. Constantius was still childless. As the years passed there came a time when he definitely decided that his childlessness was the price the gods, the powers of readjustive Nature, made him pay for his murders. It was impossible for him to govern the unwieldy Roman Empire alone and there were few whom he could trust. Around him were only Christians - of the political and not the religious kind - and he was none too sure of them. Or rather, he was only too sure of them. They were for ever plotting, and where they were was always trouble of some sort, unless they were bought off at huge expense and a most unfair distribution of temporal power. So the Emperor sent for Gallus and made him Governor of Antioch. This city was still among the four greatest cities of the Western World, and it was madness to send as governor a young man of twenty-five who had spent the last six years as the equal and companion of slaves on an Anatolian mountain-farm. If Gallus failed, who shall blame him? The wonder was, not that Gallus failed, but that Julian succeeded. Ammianus Marcellinus, who knew them well, compared them to the reincarnation of Titus and Domitian - a very apt comparison; possibly - who knows? - a reality. Now a lad of eighteen, studious and accustomed to hardships, Julian had no more illusions about Constantius. "Our fathers were brothers," he says, "sons of the same father. And close kinsmen as we were, how this most humane Emperor treated us! Six of my cousins, and his, and my father who was his own uncle, and also another uncle of both of us on the father's side, and my eldest brother, he put to death without a trial; and as for me and my other brother, Gallus, he intended to put us to death, but in the end inflicted exile upon us. From that exile he released me, but he stripped him of the title of Caesar just before he murdered him." From the day that Julian knew that all these kinsmen had been murdered to make the throne safe for Constantius, he realized that the world held no pleasant places for him, and that he was in it for duty and duty alone. Almost his sole pleasure was in books and Nature. Constantius needed the political support of the Christians, though he was not yet a Christian himself - not officially, that is. If he had been initiated into this secret political society he would have had to show a regard for the outer rites; he would have to appear to be holy and undergo penances and prohibitions according to the ritual. There were real, genuine, religious, decent Christians, of course, but he would hardly have much chance of being that kind. So he compromised by agreeing to support and favor the Christians while remaining unbaptized. He was not ready to die and he wanted a good time meanwhile, with the occasional excitement of a murder or two untroubled by thoughts of public repentances and penances. Then when ready to die he would be baptized in good time - say thirty minutes beforehand. It was an excellent arrangement in all its details, as anyone can see. The clock of time pointed to the year 350 A.D., when Gallus was summoned to take the title of Caesar and be married to Constantia, the Emperor's sister, before proceeding

to his governorship of Antioch. Seeing that Constantia was the widow of Annibalianus, her cousin and the cousin of Gallus, who had been murdered in the pogrom of 337, when Gallus was twelve years old, it seems likely that she was old enough to be his mother, or at least no schoolgirl. At any rate the wine of her youth had long turned to vinegar. Her character was violent, cruel, and avaricious; in fact, she was not a pleasant person to meet. With the recall of Gallus from Macellum, Julian was also recalled. He was now a boy of eighteen, still in the student-stage. Tutors were chosen for him in Constantinople, and among them was appointed a sour Christian of the scheming political type. Of course there were many beautiful lives among the Christian poor and in country-places, but we shall come across none too many in the political swirl of the cities and around the throne; in high places almost none. Julian's new Christian tutor, Ecebolius, could no more abstain from scheming and plotting than any other political. The real Christians kept themselves to themselves and had nothing to do with politics. But that did not make the politicals less self-assertive and vociferous. The famous Syrian sophist Libanius was then at Constantinople, and Julian, a boy of eighteen, exhibited a great liking for his teachings. As soon as the Christians saw the trend of Julian's preferences, Libanius promptly disappeared from Constantinople, but was permitted to reside and teach at Nicomedia, fifty miles away across the straits and eastward, along the coast of the Sea of Marmora. Ecebolius had secured the tutorship of the young prince and he wanted no Libanius poaching on his preserves. But Julian had to be sent away from Constantinople, and the only convenient place where Constantius could send him was the palace-city of Nicomedia. The affairs of state seemed to override the scheming of the politicals. So they prevailed upon Constantius to extract a pledge from the boy Julian that he would not visit nor listen to Libanius. Where there's a will there's a way. In his solitude at the castle-farm of Macellum, Julian had learned to think. He had learned something of Hellenism, the Greek religion. He had learned to discriminate. Bishop Basil had told him many things, as had his guardians. But thought is free and the boy had not hesitated to play truant to visit some Hellene philosopher, difficult though it was to elude his guards. He would not listen to Libanius nor visit him. Those were the exact terms of the promise that had been forced from him. Constantius had stolen all his father's and mother's fortunes, as he had done with those of Gallus, with small exceptions. But there was still a little pocket-money. Julian had treated the slaves and farmers on his grandmother's estate with such good sense and generosity that when it was taken from him and others put in charge, they stood secretly loyal to him and saw that it was kept in good order for his return - a rare tribute to his humanity. Now he was able to draw a little profit from the place, but not much. It was a small estate of four fields along the coast where the sweet-scented grapes hang from the vines and where the farm-hands with reason were very faithful to their little master. It was wine from this that brought in enough to pay confidential shorthand-writers and student-friends to report Libanius and his lectures and bring copies of the reports to him day by day. Julian read them with the greatest delight. The old policy of fear and violent repression always defeats itself in the long run. Precisely because of the efforts made to deprive him of the good old philosophy, now in its public aspect so degraded but still at heart what it always had been, his mind was forced

to contemplate it with the greater concentration and devotion and the more closely was he bound to study and compare it. It was delicious to get away from the turmoil of the city for a few days and seek the peaceful seclusion of the Sea of Marmora and to read and dream in the sunlight. Julian describes it as: "A small estate of four fields, given to me by my grandmother. It is situated not more than two and a half miles from the sea, so that no sailor with his chatter and insolence disturbs the place. Yet it is not wholly deprived of the favors of Nereus, for it has a constant supply of fish; .... and if you walk up on to a sort of hill away from the house, you will see the sea of Marmora and the Islands, and the city that bears the name of the noble Emperor, Constantinople. You will not have to stand on seaweed or brambles to do so, nor will you be annoyed by the filth that is always thrown out on sea-beaches and sands, filth that is unpleasant and not fit to speak of; but you will stand on smilax and thyme and fragrant herbage. Very peaceful it is to lie there and glance in some book, and then while resting one's eyes, it is very agreeable to gaze upon the ships and the sea. When I was still hardly more than a boy I thought that this was the most delightful place for the summer, for it has excellent springs and a charming bath and garden and trees. "When I had grown to manhood I used to long for my old manner of life there and visited it often, and our meetings there did not lack talk about literature. Moreover, there is there, as a humble monument of my husbandry, a small vineyard that produces a fragrant sweet wine, which does not have to wait for time to improve its flavor. You will have a vision of Dionysus and the Graces. The grapes when on the vine, and when they are being crushed in the press, smell of roses, and the new-made wine in the jars is a 'rill of nectar,' if one may trust Homer. Then why is not such a vine as this abundant and growing over very many acres? Perhaps I was not a very industrious gardener." Those five years were full of ups and downs for the boy-prince. At nineteen he definitely left the Way of the Christians' which he had been made to follow while yet a child, unable to choose for himself. But he kept his decision secret. The immediate occasion of Julian's sloughing off the shell, was the fact that he had found a Teacher, one of 'Those who Know.' --------

II. Pergamus and Ephesus Pergamus is the city where the famous pergament or parchment ousted the old papyrus of the Egyptians in days gone by. This was one of the little group of cities where the seven lodges, or ecclesiae, or churches of the 'Apocalypse of John' were situated in the early days of the new movement, some two hundred years before Julian's time. Deceived by the bald translation, 'the seven churches which are in Asia,' few Westerners figure to themselves that these churches are all included in an oblong one hundred and forty miles long by seventy wide - a couple of hours' journey by train between the most distant of them if the country were fairly level. In a flat country, on good roads, you could visit every one of them in a fast motor-car between lunch and supper. They were little lodges of the new secret society of the 'Way of the Kingdom of Heaven,' perhaps

consisting of a dozen or two members, of whom one or two in each might have some smattering of education. In those days they hardly realized their destiny as the nucleus of a political revolution that was to capture and dominate the Western world, though there were among them political dreamers and agitators. Ephesus, the magnificent city of Diana Muitimammia - the Virgin-Mother Nature with the hundred breasts to nourish all humanity and creation - was the center of many secret lodges of all sorts and varieties of Gnosticism; with its glorious temple and its priests in attendance; with its unrivaled secret libraries and rituals of many cults, some of which one Saul or Paul, a Jewish preacher, had persuaded them on one of his evangelistic missions to bring to the bonfire. Some had even been burnt, but the majority were taken home again when the fascination of his fiery denunciation had cooled, leaving a few odd volumes to be consumed as an advertisement for future generations of the power of the new exoteric propaganda. Ephesus, the open gateway to the East with its plaza de toros or rather plaza de leones; with its baths and its port, with its traffic, its silversmiths and goldsmiths, its philosophers and sophists and teachers - who of them imagined that in the nineteenth century after the historical birth of Apollonius in the greater world, and of John Hydranos in the lesser world of Galilee, explorers should gloat over finding the site of what was once Ephesus, boasting of the exploit because of the difficulty of finding more than a few traces of forgotten masonry? Two centuries! Not so long a time as the world goes, but the sands run fast in the age of iron. There was that curious old mystic who tried to re-edit the ritual, mixing with it new semi-political and sectarian bias. To the little lodge in Pergamus, his mystic self had written to his workaday self: "To the President of the Pergamuslodge, write, These things saith he which hath the sharp sword with two edges.... Thou holdest fast the Lodge-word, my 'name,' and hast not denied my ritual. But I have a few things against thee because thou hast there - is it not the dwelling of Satan, the opposer, those of the cult of Seth, of Typhon, the ass-god - them that hold the doctrine of Balaam who taught Balac to cast a stumbling-block, a scandal, before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols, and to act as they do in the vaults under the arches in the foulest parts of the cities? And then you have those among you who follow Nicholas, whose teachings I hate.... " So much was in the melting-pot. It was difficult to sort out one thing from another. The visionary editor of old rituals in new covers was a Jew of Jews of the secret kabalistic tradition. The Christians who ate the meat of the sacrifices he loathed, and also those who followed the excesses of young men. Far more than this, 'marriage' was an abomination to the old ascetic, even when approved by Nicholas. In his visionary ritual-stuff he introduces a gross of thousands of people who shall be 'saved' - but he takes care that not one of them shall be married. That was what this 'John' said of the innocent Nicholas. Yet the rivals of John in a book they called the Practices of the Apostles (they had to call it something) wrote of this Nicholas that when the Hellene-Jewish religionists of the new lodges protested that the reactionary Mosaic Jewish lodge-officers were neglecting the primitive landmarks of 'care for the widows,' a most sacred duty with all Jewish lodges and communities, Nicholas was selected out of the multitude as one of seven men "of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and of Sophia" (the Greek Holy Ghost), to superintend this most important work.

So much for Pergamus and the little new lodge there. The kabalist-editor is no less denunciatory with Ephesus. Some very great early Christian (one may be permitted to guess the man specially aimed at) had been tested and the Ephesians had found him a liar. They had brought their books to him to be burnt, but they had taken them away again as soon as they had 'found him out.' Therefore these Ephesians were to be commended for listening to him no more, whoever he was. But there was yet cause for complaint, for the 'first works' had been allowed to lapse. Therefore, unless they were resumed, the candlestick of Ephesus should be removed from its place, and that quickly. Still, it was a great point in favor of the Ephesus-lodge that they hated Nicholas and his leaning towards marriage. It was an uncompromising ascetic who was writing. The rituals were becoming daily more mixed and the lodges hated one another as only brothers in ritualism can. The few writings that escaped into publicity show these antipathies and antagonisms in every line, but there was ever at work a unifying force that made them all at least seem to be one. For centuries a movement went on that took every writing that proved awkward and burnt it. Paul's example at Ephesus had that effect, at any rate. Letters, rituals, books, were changed, pruned, had passages interpolated, were copied with omissions and additions, and then burnt. In two things alone did the revolutionists make a mistake. In the first place, they passed many a secret allusion, not knowing the code in which it was written, or not even knowing it was in code: and in the second, they never knew that their astonishing efforts were countered by those of secret societies compared to which theirs were mere crude and ignorant revolutionary clubs. All that they destroyed - every word - was known and copied and stored safely away for future generations hundreds and thousands of years later, to use in studying the curious mysticmaterial madness of the age, long after its death and decent burial. Such were the signs of the interior ebullition going on in Pergamus and Ephesus in the second century A.D. They were signs of the breaking-up of the old cults; but one who knows how to read the signs of such ebullitionary periods knows that the quiet, peaceful cultivation of real religion is never far away for those who belong to it in reality. Time marches slowly, by some standards, in such matters, though rapidly in others. In two hundred years the cult of the material Kingdom of Heaven had grown enormously, overshadowing the whole of the Western world. But in the darkest spots there were bright beacons of eternal light shining for all who had eyes to see. And Julian's eyes were opening. He found reason to visit Pergamus. Whatever the reason given, the real motive was to be near the old philosopher Aedesius who lived there. Julian became quite friendly with two of the disciples of Aedesius, Chrysanthius and Eusebius. As men do, they talked and told him of the people and things they knew. "Our Aedesius is a great man," said Chrysanthius one day. "But there are others who are also great, especially in Ephesus. There is Maximus, for instance." "What of him?" asked Julian. "He is a philosopher, but a practical theurgist also. They tell strange tales of his miracles, as the vulgar call them, not knowing better. Maximus himself always insists that they are merely examples of the use of unknown laws of Nature and denies that there are such things as miracles." "What are his marvels like?" "Once he made a statue of Hecate smile and the torches in her hand burst into flame of their own accord."

No more than the psychic works that have taken place for ages past, of course; but an intuition told Julian that these, in this case and for him, were signs of the deeper knowledge that he sought, signposts as it were, but certainly not aims in life, as so many ill-advised men make them and thereby ruin their chances of advancing beyond them. Eusebius and Chrysanthius told Julian other things of the grand occultist of Ephesus, whose occultism, of course, was genuine occultism, only disguised from the public stare and interference by these psychological foolishnesses. "They say Maximus has a way with the oracles that the gods cannot resist long unless the matter is very urgent," said Eusebius. "How?" "It's like this. If he consults the oracles and they are unfavorable, he just goes on consulting them until they grow tired and give him the answer he wants!" "Then he might just as well never consult them at all," laughed Julian. "If he forces them to give the answer he wants, what's the use?" "Oh, he knows his business!" was the reply. "What really happens, I expect, is that by doing it in that way he finds out the right time to do a thing, or if it is altogether unfavorable, finds out the right time to do a thing with the least risk of ill-success." "I should think they would refuse to answer him when they felt that way," mused Julian. "Perhaps they do," said Chrysanthius. "But I suspect there is a deeper reason sometimes. By continuing his consultations it is possible that he may be able on occasion to command the gods themselves and turn unfavorable circumstances into favorable ones, by his personal effort and merit." "It's like astrology," said Julian. "The dabbler in such things, the kind of idiot who loves to call himself an occultist without having the least idea of what occultism really is, uses astrology to find out when conditions are favorable for doing a thing or not. But the real astrologer finds out by his art what forces are against him and when they are strongest. Then he deliberately sets to work to conquer those forces at their weakest, if he needs to do so; or if it is something undesirable to waste energy and effort upon, he leaves it alone altogether, if he can. The ordinary man can't do that and that is the reason why not one person in a million ought to put his fingers into such hornets' nests of psychological practices." "I think myself that Maximus is the one man in ten million," said Chrysanthius. "He forces the gods to give him the conditions he wants, if it is in their power to do so, of course - they have their limits. He commands fate; he refuses to be under the influence of the stars when he chooses to resist it; and he uses his astrology to find out the strength of the forces he has to contend with." "A man does not become like that without teachers," remarked Julian, thoughtfully. "Where did Maximus learn what he knows?" "Everybody knows that," said Chrysanthius. "He was pupil of the great Iamblichus, the leader of the Neo-Platonists of Alexandria. And you know that that grand school of divine philosophy and purity of life was founded by the saintly Theosophist, Ammonius Saccas, a hundred years ago." "I think Maximus is the man I am seeking," declared Julian.

It did not take him long to pack his belongings. They were mostly books, anyway. Ephesus was only an eighty-mile journey southward and the road was good. Saying farewell to Aedesius and Eusebius and Chrysanthius, he went by the first public coach. Maximus, the Neo-Platonist adept, was nearly seventy. Julian was a little more than twenty. The old man possessed a remarkable voice and appearance; his eyes were extraordinarily brilliant and piercing. He had a long white beard and wore his white hair long also, as was the custom with the initiates. Modern superficially-educated scholars express surprise that Maximus was such a devotee of the occult sciences and yet that his chief work was a commentary on Aristotle's Logic. Well, why not? Maximus was an occultist as well as a student of occult sciences and as an occultist all knowledge was his province. Because today there are about a million dabblers in so-called 'occult' follies to every genuine occultist, and the latter never shows himself to the public (that's what the word means in part - a man who can keep himself to himself!), that is no reason why there should not have been occultists who really could divine the future by the help of the gods, even though, then as now, there were hundreds of silly dabblers quite seriously thinking that they were occultists, or at least on the road to being such. And the world as usual confuses the two, not knowing the truth of the matter. Julian had found his teacher. In later days, on the battlefield, in the camp, at the desk, the young disciple carried the precious letters from his master. He slept with them under his pillow; he submitted his literary work to Maximus for approval. At all times he wrote an account of his doings to the Ephesian adept. For Maximus was his spiritual father, initiating him into the holy mysteries of Mithras, the Sovereign Sun. -------The Mysteries of Mithras, The Unconquered Sun There were circumstances of Julian's life and character which made him an acceptable candidate for the Mysteries of Mithras. The most important of all was that his character was clean. This enabled Maximus to reduce the customary time of probation and preparation; or rather, Julian's life, young as he was, had already been a preparation for the sacred Cycle of the Mysteries. He did not escape, but merely anticipated, the purifications of heart and mind and body necessary for the real neophyte. Since Vedic times the Mysteries of Mithras, the Sovereign Sun, the Unconquered El or Elios (Elias, Helios, Elion), had remained an inviolate secret, more so than many others of those whose legends and ritual fell into writing. Therefore all that is said of them is vague, external, exoteric, with glimpses of interior splendors through chinks in the outer garment, just as sunspots give glimpses of an inner machinery of the Sun's outer robes so brilliant as to look dark to the eye in comparison with that outer cloak. These mysteries had descended through the Zoroastrians and Persians and had spread to Babylon, where the Chaldaeans modified them slightly in order to meet their exoteric rituals. They identified Mithras with their Shemesh or Shamash (the later localized Shemesh-on or Sams-on with his glorious 'hair' - the sun's rays in their strength). It was customary to say that the rites of Mithras had passed into Rome with the Cilician pirates captured by Pompey. They brought these Mysteries fully matured to the Eternal City, during the century preceding the common era - about the time of Julius Caesar. So secret was the cult that it is said to have attained no importance in Rome for nearly two centuries -

which simply means that the public knew little or nothing of the cult for that time. Better known were the Egyptian Mysteries of Isis, who in Rome and Greece became respectively Ceres and Demeter, with suitably modified ritual. So similar were many of the observances and legends that Mithraism found a very congenial soil where the Mysteries of the VirginMother of the Gods were celebrated, the ritual of the bread and wine and the resurrection. In two centuries these Mysteries had spread rapidly in the army, and also among traveling merchants and slaves, many of whom were Asiatics. But Rome was ever a center of the mystic cult, and the Emperor Commodus had been initiated. Constantine, under the influence of a rival cult, destroyed its hopes to a great extent. Otherwise it might more than probably have become the religion of Europe until the present day. In fact, much of it, in a mutilated and misunderstood sense, did. The lodge-rooms of Mithras were not very large, being usually found in wellpopulated towns and cities where accommodation was limited. The entrance was from the street into a vestibule. Steps led down into the 'Cave' which the lodge-room represented. Julian was led with bandaged eyes into the 'Cave' and, amid due gravity of ceremonial, the veil was removed and he found himself among the assembled brethren. Soldiers, slaves, merchants, citizens, all were equal on the rectangle that formed the lodge. Women were not admitted to the rites. In another degree, Julian became the 'Soldier,' the 'Warrior.' In this degree he learnt dependence on the god within, not without, the human heart. He had to be saved from darkness and materiality to the light of spirituality by 'the god' who was his Real Self and a part of all other selves, as a drop is part of the ocean. He was enlisted to fight the eternal, and only true, war against his lower, selfish self. In this degree his forehead was 'marked,' - he was 'christened.' The 'Lion'-degree raised the candidate to the height of the vault of heaven. Leo, the lion, is the sign of high summer, when the Sun reigns in his sovereign glory both in the outer heavens and in the human heart. A communion-service of bread and wine was celebrated. One small lesson it inculcated was that the spiritual Sun is the giver and producer of food spiritual, as the material, visible sun is the giver of food material: corn and wine. And Mithras is the Sovereign Sun. In the age-old legend of the ritual, this banquet typified that 'Last Supper' of Mithras and Helios, before Mithras, the conqueror of death, rose to reign with the Father-Sun in his celestial kingdom. Far back into the night of Persian and Indian symbolism and story the ritual-legend spread its perennial roots. Another legendary ritual-story symbolized the stepping over a fossa, or ditch, filled with water, in a peculiar way reminiscent of the 'three strides of Vishnu.' Much use was made of candles and lights; there were solemn oaths and repeated formulae. The priest could only be the 'husband of one wife.' A second marriage after his wife's death was regarded as bigamy, exactly as it was among some of the earliest Christians. There were virgins and ascetics. Perpetual fire burned on the altar of the sun. The priest turned to the East to greet the sun at its rising, as he did to the south at noon, and to the west at nightfall. Bells and music were prominent in the ceremonies. Each day was consecrated to a planet, the Sun-day being the Lord's day and the most sacred of all. The 25th of December was celebrated as the birthday of the new-born Sun in the 'Cave.' As the quickener of all creation in Spring, Mithras was the Redeemer of the World. His fight against the giants of Autumn and Winter, his death and resurrection, were all

celebrated, and Julian went through the ritual-cycle, for he was himself Mithras, the Unconquered Sun, just as all candidates were, in their due degree. All these ceremonies varied in importance in degree of the candidates' intuitions. To some mere ceremonies, they were to others pregnant with vital meaning, lessons to enable the candidate to mount the ladder of self-directed evolution towards his own unveiled essential divinity. Moral rectitude was of prime importance. Without it, what chance had the intuition to act clearly? Courage, watchfulness, striving for purity, all were necessary in the incessant combat with the forces of evil and animalism within oneself. There was no time for the true warrior of Mithras to be critical of others. He had more than enough to do to be his own keeper. Resistance to sensuality was an eternal aim, and ascetism was practised by some. 'Mithras' the god within, was ever on the side of the faithful, who were certain of the final victory both in this world and the next if they kept up the struggle, true to their inner 'Mithras.' The unconquered soul ascended like the summer sun - to its former celestial home by seven gates or degrees, while the unworthy soul descended to the realms of Ahriman, Typhon, the symbolical 'Devil,' or material Nature. Julian passed through the degrees of the 'Persian,' the 'Sun-Path,' the 'Father.' Maximus was his initiator. One peculiar degree - whether Julian went through it symbolically or actually, who knows? - was that of the 'Baptism of Blood.' In a narrow chamber under a wooden grating the candidate stood naked while the Mithraic Bull was slain above. The candidate was washed in the blood of the dying bull. The scene typified the revivification of Nature, the resurrection and baptism by which all things live through the sacrifice of the life of the SunGod. The knife symbolized the penetrating ray of the sun piercing the earth, the bull. All is highly symbolical and needed no actual blood, but there was a degraded time when this degree was enacted in its full exoteric sense. All these ceremonies had a way of creeping out of the 'heart' into the 'head' of a system in its degradation and publicity. The bread of nature and wine of nature's blood, became the real flesh and blood of various nature-gods; the 'baptism of blood' became real blood in many old temples and some new ones; the external sun became a real god to the ignorant priests and their yet more ignorant followers; the symbolic resurrection of the soul and spirit from the flesh became the resurrection of the flesh in some lodges; 'Mithras' became an external god, an external universal god, if one can really imagine such a thing as a universal god outside, instead of ho theos, the god within all men. These degrading ideas all followed from the breach of the old rule of absolute silence until a candidate had shown himself so capable of exercising his intuitions as not to fall into a crude materialization of things which are not really concerned with words or objects of sense. Mithras was for ever combating Ahriman. Ormazd is the supreme 'God'; Ahriman is the opposition-power of evil. Mithras is the middle-god, as one may say, the real man on his way upwards but capable of being pulled downwards by his lower tendencies. The life of the earth springs from 'the shedding of the blood' of the sun, typified by the Bull. Mithras becomes the creator of life. Ahriman produces a drought to destroy the work of Mithras. Mithras defeats him by smiting a rock with an arrow and drawing water from its stony heart. Ahriman next sends a deluge on the world, from which 'one man' escapes, with his 'cattle,' in an ark or boat. Finally the world is destroyed by fire, and only the people

of Ormazd escape. His work accomplished, Mithras enjoyed a 'last supper' with the 'Sun' and was taken by him in his celestial chariot, the chariot of Helios or Elias, to the habitation of the Immortals, whence he continued to protect the faithful. There are three 'lights' or torchbearers in the lodge, representing the morning-sun, the day-sun, and the evening-sun, or alternatively the vernal, summer, and autumn sun. What they represent in the make-up of man himself one may guess. Confused and incomplete to the 'pro-fane,' those 'outside the fane or temple,' all this symbolism fell naturally into place with Julian, under the guidance of the grand old Ephesian adept, Maximus. Prepared by many a previous life of service and effort, Julian went straight to the kernel of those things, ignoring the outer "husks that swine do eat." These symbolisms and ceremonies were nothing to him but sign-posts, reminders, textbooks, of the great drama of the soul which he and no other for him, not even Maximus, had to go through, live through, fight through. And it is this effort, this hidden life, that made Julian a man among men and a friend of the gods. Henceforth all life to him was different. His feet were on the royal road and there could be no swerving nor looking backward. Maximus was his link with greater men, and he realized that the chain stretched endless to the realms where the gods abide - and beyond. If others above him thus helped him he must in turn reach down and lend a helping hand to those who knew less than he. Henceforth Julian's life was a life of duty and purpose lived in the secrecy of his own soul. Self had to be ignored so far as the law of action and reaction operative in all Nature permitted. ---------

III. Gallus Ceasar At twenty-five, Gallus was recalled from the castle-farm at Macellum to be made 'Caesar,' a title less than that of Imperator or Emperor, but next to it. At the same time he was given in marriage to the Emperor's sister Constantia. Perhaps 'sacrificed in marriage' would be more accurate. She was no longer a young woman and her temper was vile. Her first husband had been killed in the family-massacre of 337 when the twelve-year-old Gallus was so unexpectedly saved with his little brother Julian, then six. That was thirteen years ago. Gallus was no saint. In most families where a real saint is born there seems to be another who gathers to himself all the evil qualities which the saint has shed. He was not a bad man, perhaps, but just a type of the wrong kind of man for preferment in the Empire. Constantia, his wife, was a very unpleasant lady. Described as a monster in human form, violent, cruel, and avaricious, she was the dominant partner in this unbeautiful alliance. If Constantinople was the capital of the Roman Empire, with Rome on the semiretired list and Milan the court-residence, Antioch was the great capital of the Syrian East, as Alexandria was that of Egypt. Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria - these were the great capitals of the world of Western civilization. Of these Antioch was the outpost of the East. Persia, Mesopotamia, and the Isaurian mountains were the turbulent fringe of the Roman 'sphere of influence,' giving constant trouble and never really subjected. But

Antioch itself was now a hotbed of unrest. Centuries before, the history of secret societies catches a little glimpse of one 'Paul' being sent with relief from the lodge-members of one of the new sects of Gnosticism at Antioch to the famine-starved lodge-brethren at Jerusalem. Now, Antioch was itself in the grip of famine and the profiteer, two birds of the same flock. The rich claimed bad trade; the poor accused the rich of withholding supplies for the sake of profit. "Panta gemei, panta pollou! Plenty of everything, everything dear!" was the cry of the people, the hoi polloi, of Antioch. "We entrust the government of Antioch into your hands!" declared Constantius to Gallus. It was a doubtful trust for Gallus. The gods had to be appeased for the murders by Constantius, and therefore it was right to prefer Gallus; but the task was dangerous for an untried, untrained, undisciplined young man. If Gallus lost his life, so much the better for the peace of mind of Constantius. If he succeeded, so much the better for his Empire. In either case Constantius would profit more than Gallus. At Macellum Gallus learned no statecraft, no soldiering. His companions were slaves. He could not even attach himself, like Julian, to the crystallized thought of great men in books, and make it live. He knew nothing of tact, nothing of the arts of pleasing men, even when he meant well. "The people cry out at the price of corn, and there is enough corn for all," he said. "The question can be settled by a stroke of the pen. Let prices be fixed by decree!" It all seemed as simple as an agitator's argument from a platform. But in practice it was not so simple. "He will ruin us!" complained the profit-mongers. Every one of this powerful ring became a bitter enemy in a day. The mob were delighted and Gallus felt that they were behind him. He threatened some of the merchants and sacrificed several of the worst of them to the rage of the fickle mob. The taste of mob-favor seemed good to the young man whose world had been a mountain-farm instead of a place among men. Like Nero, he thought he was enhancing his prestige by devotion to the boxing-ring, - just the kind of slavish sport which would have endeared him to the low slaves of Macellum. Law, justice, equity - what did he know of them? If the innocent had no money and the guilty passed him surreptitious shekels, why, the guilty naturally won their case and the innocent were condemned. He reveled in that resource of the weak and ignorant espionage. Dressed like one of the mob, he would wander about the streets of Antioch and pick up bits of mischievous gossip. It was his idea of good government. His wife Constantia did not fail to make things worse. A sign of bad government is the multiplication of officials. A sign of worse government is when those officials are of a mean class. Constantius was surrounded by eunuchs and sycophants, spies, parasites, informers, office-seekers, and slaves in high places. The trade-union of half-men and bloodsuckers round Constantius was uneasy about Gallus and Julian. These two were ever a threat to their vested interests and enormous revenues. They took care that Constantius should hear about the troubles of Gallus in no flattering terms. At least one official with Gallus was an official spy on his actions. In the vague but deadly efficient way in which such things are done, the word went out that Gallus must be destroyed. To nine out of ten of the vultures round Constantius

it was a perfectly genuine tide of feeling against an incompetent and dangerous official. The engineers of such things never show their hands. But they put the machinery in motion none the less powerfully and subtilly. The first move was to break down the protection round Gallus. An order came to reduce the troops under his command. Next, Domitian, an official of the court, was sent to engineer the recall of Gallus from Antioch. Proud and haughty and full of the spirit of the court-functionary, Domitian took a high hand. Gallus was merely a provincial governor, even if he was a Caesar. "I am here to arrange for your return to Milan," he said, bluntly and brutally. Gallus was furious. "Seize that man!" he commanded. "Nay, Caesar, he is an ambassador from the Emperor!" protested a quaestor in the hope of averting serious trouble. Gallus was always crude; his education had never taught him better. "Call in the soldiers!" he ordered. The imperial party resisted the outrage on their office, and in the melee Domitian and the quaestor were killed. "There is a plot on foot!" declared Gallus. "Investigate the matter at once and punish the plotters. Torture the witnesses if need be!" This violence inflamed matters more than ever. Ursicinus, the governor of Nisibis, was a really straightforward man. He was sent by Constantius to investigate matters on the spot. With him came one Ammianus Marcellinus, who noted all that happened in his copious diaries. The trials were being disgracefully conducted and Ursicinus might have done much to restore tranquillity. In fact, he might have ended by inspiring Gallus with some notions of good government. The real plotters, always far more intelligent and cunning than their pale shadows, who suffer for them like puppets in a marionette-show, decided to head off the possibility of justice gaining sway. They pulled the strings at court and Ursicinus was recalled. Constantia may have been bad, but she was clever. She left her husband to visit her brother Constantius, the Emperor, at Milan. What game she would have played, what influence she would have had on the course of history, what her ambition was, cannot be known. She died on the way before she left Asia. Perhaps her influence was feared by the plotters round the throne and the euthanasia - out of a cup had its share in facilitating her exit - who knows? Gallus with Constantia was intelligently guided. Without her, his nature simply went back to what one might expect of a boy brought up as he had been among the pigs of Macellum. Some subtil enemy in the guise of a friend sowed the seed of Imperial ambition in his brain. He actually began to consider the possibility of supplanting Constantius as Emperor. By right of birth, if there was such a right, he was certainly justified. By right of power he was not - he had none. The sly and subtil agents of the court-emasculates persuaded him to leave Syria and visit the Emperor in Italy. It was the first step on his journey to Avernus. Who shall blame him for his follies without first blaming the brute who exiled him to Macellum in the Cappadocian wilds? Like many a young fool, Gallus had not shaken off the Nero-idea of being a 'sportsman' and so acquiring the favor of the mob. Passing through Constantinople he held a chariot-race.

But Constantinople was still the capital of the Empire, even if the Court was at Milan. The thoughtless 'sport' looked uncommonly like popularity-hunting in the Empire-capital. Constantius was not allowed to minimize its importance. He was furious when told of it by those around him who desired to destroy Gallus. Gallus meanwhile, unsuspecting, passed over into Europe. At first authorized to take an escort of so many officials, so many soldiers, so many public carriages, the numbers were gradually cut down. Stage by stage, post by post, along the Western road, the days saw his honors dwindle, his escort melt, his public conveyances diminished in number. Finally at Petavio he was met by one of his former subordinate officers, with a posse of soldiers. "The Emperor does me honor!" he said. "Not so," was the reply. "I am under orders to arrest you and take you to a fortress." It was the last straw. Gallus was taken like a common malefactor to the tower of Pola in Istria, where he had plenty of time to reflect on the sinister fact that it was here that the saintly Constantine had murdered his own son Crispus many years before. The omen was not false. Treated like a pickpocket, Gallus defended himself by laying the blame of all the trouble at Antioch on his wife, the sister of Constantius. Quite likely the defense was largely correct; but that did not save him. His head was cut off without more ado. When he died, at the age of twenty-nine, his brother Julian was twenty-three or twenty-four. There is nothing good to be said for Gallus except that he was a weak and uncontrolled young man. But it has been a great boast of the political enemies of Julian that Gallus never went back on the 'religion' in which he had been brought up, as Julian did. One is inclined to remark that it is a pity he did not! The eunuchs and money-suckers of the court had triumphed. There remained only Julian for them to eliminate. -------At Milan Appearances were terribly against Julian. It was said that he had corresponded and plotted with his brother; that he had designs on the Empire on his own account; that he had met his brother at Constantinople and there schemed out conspiracies with him. Then Constantius knew perfectly well that Julian had broken out of bounds at Macellum to go hunting after philosophers and absorb their doctrines. That was the only time that Julian had ever seen his cousin the Emperor. The dreary life among slaves in that mountaincastle and farm might have made any one but such a boy plan for relief; but Julian had always kept to his books and his thinking and philosophy; he was no plotter by nature. All his property had been taken by the Emperor except a small estate of his grandmother's. He truly had reason for a grievance, but he maintained a wonderfully discreet behavior. He neither denounced his dead brother nor did he defy the Emperor, but kept a philosophical silence. Constantius at Milan sent for Julian and kept him there for six months without seeing him. Julian was lodged in a suburban villa. His discretion was marvelous. There were spies, plotters, enemies, everywhere. One of the spies was 'Paul the Chain,' so called because he had the most wonderful way of linking together the most minute circumstances to make a chain of accusation against a victim. Another was Mercurius, a Dacian, called

the 'Count of Dreams,' because he did not hesitate to build an accusation upon nothing more substantial than the airy fabric of his nightmares. These precious informers would have made short work of Julian had he not found a friend at court. The Empress Eusebia, a Macedonian of exceptional talent, most discreetly befriended the young man and helped him. But he had to be extremely cautious. Once he wanted to write a letter and thank her for her kindness; but first he wisely took the advice of the oracles. With Julian and such men as he the oracles were still reliable. "When I came to Milan I resided in one of the suburbs," says Julian. "There Eusebia sent me on several occasions messages of good-will and urged me to write her without hesitation about anything that I desired. Accordingly I wrote her a letter, or rather a petition, containing such expressions as these: "May you have children to succeed you; may the God grant you this and that if you only send me home as quickly as possible!" He was homesick for the pleasant meadows of the estate in Bithynia where his grandmother had lived, near the blue waters of the Bosporus, and far from the stifling atmosphere of the court. "But I suspected that it was not safe to send to the palace a letter addressed to the Emperor's wife," he goes on. "I besought the gods to inform me at night whether I ought to send a letter to the Empress. And they warned me that if I sent it I should meet the most ignominious death. I call all the gods to witness that what I write here is true. For this reason therefore, I forebore to send the letter." From that night there constantly recurred to Julian's mind a very philosophical argument. He had been trying to run away from his place of duty and in doing so had nearly run into mortal danger. The gods, knowing the past and therefore the future (the doctrine of Karman) are always wiser than we. "I immediately reflected," he says: "Would you not be provoked if one of your own beasts were to deprive you of its services, or were even to run away when you called it, a horse, or sheep, or calf, as the case might be? And will you, who pretended to be a man, and not even a man of the common herd or from the dregs of the people, but one belonging to the superior and reasonable class, deprive the gods of your services and not trust yourself to them to dispose of you as they please? Beware lest you not only fall into great folly, but also neglect your proper duties towards the gods.... Seek to possess nothing, seize nothing, but accept simply what is vouchsafed to you by them. And this course I thought was not only safe but becoming to a reasonable man, since the response of the gods had suggested it. For to rush headlong into unseemly and foreseen danger while trying to avoid future plots seemed to me a topsy-turvy procedure. Accordingly I consented to yield. And immediately I was invested with the title and robe of Caesar. The slavery that ensued and the fear for my very life that hung over me every day - Hercules! how great it was and terrible! My doors locked, warders to guard them, the hands of my servants searched lest one of them should convey to me the most trifling letter from my friends; strange servants to wait on me! Only with difficulty was I able to bring with me to court four of my own domestics for my personal service, two of them mere boys and two older men, one of whom only knew of my attitude to the gods, and, as far as he was able, secretly joined me in their worship." "I had entrusted a certain physician with my books," says Julian, "since he was the only one with me of many loyal comrades and friends. He had been allowed to leave home with me because it was not known that he was my friend. And this state of things caused

me such alarm and I was so apprehensive about it that though many of my friends really wished to visit me, I very reluctantly refused them admittance; for although I was most anxious to see them, I shrank from bringing disaster upon them and myself at the same time." The months that Julian had spent at or near Milan were the autumn and winter of 354 and the spring of 355. It was high summer of 355 when, sick of it all, he managed to get permission, through Eusebia, to retire to his grandmother's little seaside-estate in Bithynia, not far from Nicomedia. He had actually started when he was suddenly recalled and sent to Athens as an undergraduate. Constantius had suddenly made up his mind that it was better to keep an eye on Julian and have him within reach than have him making friends in Asia Minor. And there could be no greater bond for him than that of books and study. To Athens he should go. The Empress Eusebia was his friend and possibly suggested the course taken. It was not until his university-days were over that he was recalled to Milan and made Caesar. His own narrative passes over what has been called the one thoroughly happy time of his life - his student-days at Athens. ---------

IV. University-Life In the old days, before Julian had been forbidden to hear or see Libanius the Sophist, there was one story that the boy never forgot and the Syrian never tired of telling. It was of the Sophist's university-days at Athens. "First I landed with the rest at the Piraeus and then my troubles began. I had made up my mind to enter the school of my own countryman, Athenodorus, and I promised myself happy times at his lectures. It was the realization of my life's desire. "Naturally we had to go to a tavern to get a meal after landing, and to tidy ourselves up a bit. You can imagine what a pleasure it was to find it full of real university-students. Athens was more than four miles away from the port, but the students seemed to make nothing of that. "We soon found the reason. They had come down to kidnap us! Yes, really! "It was this way. The professors were not too well paid - professors never are - and they had to take fees from their pupils. Some of them had no other income at all. Well, there were many students who couldn't pay - they had no money. Yet it was necessary to have as big a following as possible or the professor's reputation was gone. So this is what they did. The students who paid nothing made it their business to increase the number of paying students by persuading them to join their own school. And their ways were not always too gentle. "They would come down to the port, the Piraeus, and to every tavern on the way even the taverners were bribed to assist them with their glowing advertisements of this or that professor. Then, when the newly-landed student fell into their hands, they argued and pleaded, and bullied and teased him until as often as not they had cajoled him into forsaking the professor he had intended to join and into joining their own school.

"Sometimes there were contests between rival schools and nothing less than free fights between the students. They were real fights too. Many a man, as you can see, bears the scars of wounds he gained in his student-days. "When I landed I had thought there would he no difficulty in finding Athenodorus and joining his school . But at the tavern they caught me and tried to persuade me that there could not possibly be a better professor than their own choice, one Alexander of Athens. I said politely that I had already made my choice. They would have none of it. I must choose their own professor and no other. I protested. They grew warm. Finally - you can believe it or not as you like - they actually kidnaped me until I was forced to assent. And when I had once joined them it was as much as my life was worth to leave their school." And Libanius sighed as he thought of his missed opportunity and his forced university-training. It was his pet grievance throughout his life. Still, he must have had a good professor in spite of the rough way in which he entered his school. He had early been left an orphan, to run wild, and it was not until his fifteenth year that he fell prey to an overmastering desire to study rhetoric and literature. But having passed through the undergraduate course he became an instructor for four years in the university; then he spent a short time at Constantinople before going to Nicomedia for five years as a renowned teacher. Finally he spent forty years at Antioch as the acknowledged prince of the rhetoricians and sophists. Eager though he had been to begin, this record surely tells a story of good tutorship under the professor whose band they forced him to join. Many of the writings of Libanius are still in existence. Fortunately for Julian he came recommended to a special teacher of whom Maximus at Ephesus had told him. As a paying student and one under the aegis of the Emperor himself, he was hardly considered good game, and was left more or less alone in his choice of school. Not so one Claudius, a young fellow a couple of years older than himself. This Claudius was obviously a delicate young man and not well fitted for the roughand-tumble of undergraduate life. At the tavern where they went to breakfast after landing, and to shake off the effects of their seasickness, Claudius found himself the object of attentions from two contending parties. First they persuaded him, then they threatened, then they used their hands - it was the eternal student-argument in all its stages - "positive assertion, flat contradiction, personal abuse, personal violence." In other words, the rival schools commenced a free fight to secure the unfortunate Claudius. The latter became himself mixed up in the fray and seemed to be faring badly, when Julian intervened. Already it was known that he was the cousin and protege of the Emperor and his word was not to be despised; in fact, that is why he had been left in comparative peace. Claudius was permitted to go with him to Athens and the contending schools left to seek other prey, not without each vowing loud threats of vengeance on the other. "We will see if there is any justice to be had from the magistrates, you see if we won't!" - the usual empty threats which would be forgotten by the afternoon, of course. The lonely Julian had found a friend in the first hour. Claudius was really a decent young fellow and he seemed grateful to his champion. Himself, he was not fit for such student-fights. On arrival at Athens - a matter of four miles or so - they were met by two other young men about the same age as Julian or a little older. One gave his name as Gregory,

a native of Nazianzus in Asia, and the other was Basil, son of the Cappadocian Bishop Basil whom Julian had already met in his exile at Macellum. Claudius and they had been friends before, and they were overjoyed to meet one another in the university town. Claudius introduced his new friend Julian to Gregory and all four became friends; yet Julian never liked Gregory much; there was about him a bluster and an ignorance shielded by loud-voiced assurance that made him not very likable. However, as college-friendships go, they were good friends enough. But Basil was of a more refined student-type and Julian liked him. He was more of a gentleman than Gregory with his rough manners. Julian knew that the recommendation of such a wise teacher and philosopher as Maximus could be relied upon. He found his new tutor Anaximenes was all that he could desire. But he had not yet been initiated into the student-body. That was an ordeal that could not long be delayed. In fact, the sooner it was over the better. Claudius and he were to go to the baths the next day - the gossipping and luxurious meeting-place of the city. Certainly one bathed there, but it was more like a general club than anything else. You went there to meet your friends, to talk, to loaf, to exercise, or for a hundred reasons. Basil told Julian how Gregory, several years before, had saved him from the rough ordeal of initiation into this student-club by persuading the undergraduates to let him off the trying ceremonies on account of his delicate constitution. This was also done in the case of another sick man, Eunapius, but there were few who had such escapes from their first visit to the baths in due form. The new students did not quite know what was in the wind, but they were prepared for a certain amount of rough treatment. With a large body of undergraduates they went to the doors of the bathhouse and strangely enough found them shut. One of the party knocked and a student opening the door from the inside asked what was wanted. "We want to come to the baths!" "Well, you can't!" and the door was slammed. They knocked again and made a tremendous din on the doors. Again the doors were opened. "Go away!" "We won't go away! We are going in! Come on boys! Rush the place!" The newcomers formed up like a football-scrum and made an attack on the baths. But before they could make an entry a similar crowd of defenders suddenly appeared at the doors from the inside and in a twinkling there was as pretty a free fight as you would wish to see. Faces were cut, heads were hit, flesh was torn, and more than one limb was broken. It was no small ordeal for the young students to go through. But they showed spirit and did their part, until the defenders agreed that they had been plucky enough to win recognition. Then they were allowed to enter as men 'free of the baths.' There were police in Athens, but most of them were about as useful as the old London 'Charleys' who used to cry the hours at night and were the sport of any youngster who wanted some one to attack. There were the soldiers, but they were only used for serious riots. Somehow there was a certain amount of law and order, but none too much. Some of the professors were themselves the law. They used the cane freely. Libanius did. But that was an unprofitable business, because an offended student, far from his home and parental authority, might desert his tutor and the latter find his band of students depleted.

Yet the magistrates did function, as Julian learnt within a day. Those were crowded days at Athens for the young student. Julian and Claudius found themselves subpoenaed as witnesses at the courts in a case then on trial before the Proconsul. The matter was simple enough. One tutor and his band of students accused another tutor's band of attacking them and maltreating them. The defense was a counteraccusation of precisely the same nature. Which means in shorter words, that the defense was, "They began it!" Julian and Claudius had never dreamed that the hooligans who had made such a row in the tavern two days before over the newcomers had really intended to prosecute their antagonists. It didn't seem 'sporting.' But there it was. They had made a police-court case of it! The rival rhetoricians had long rolls of attack and defense. They were famous sophists and the public looked forward to some fine legal speeches running into hours, perhaps days, for all they knew. But the Proconsul knew better. He was no Greek sophist and yet he admired rhetoric as much as any of them. It was the subject par excellence of that day in Athens. Where in old Rome the gladiatorial shows absorbed the whole attention of the public, and in modern Spain the bull-ring excludes all other matters, or as in London the boxing-ring occupies all minds, in Athens it was the rhetorical contest that counted. Oh yes, indeed, it was going to be a fine case! The prosecutor and defendant and the witnesses, among them Julian and Claudius, duly appeared. The case was outlined and the prosecutor prepared to smash his opponent with what he had written - there were yards of it. "Just one minute!" said the Proconsul with a twinkle in his eye. "I understand that you claim that you are a serious and capable teacher of rhetoric and that the defendant's party interfered with your students; that they are a sham and know nothing of rhetoric and therefore have to recruit their numbers by physical violence? Is that so?" "Something like that," murmured the prosecutor, at a loss to see where the cat was going to jump. "Now silence again!" went on the Proconsul, turning to the defendants. "You say on the other hand that the prosecutor is a fraud and that he persuades students to come to him who ought to come to you, the only real and genuine professor of rhetoric?" "That is an admirable view of the situation!" flatteringly replied the defendant. "No wonder he and his hooligans assault my brave and innocent scholars!" "Yes, I know it is an assault-case," remarked the Proconsul. "But it will help a good deal if we can come down to motives and the rights of the parties. Now this is what we will do. Either one of you is right and the other wrong, or there is no case. The whole thing hinges on whether one school is bogus and has no right to persuade students away from the other. Well, that is easily enough tested. You shall choose one student and he shall argue the case. The one who fails will prove that his professor is what the other says he is - no good. You can have an hour's water each, if you like." The usher set the water-clocks to an hour so that the pleaders should know when to stop, and the case began. The public scented something highly novel in this contest. The prosecutor - Julian had seen it - was a bully, more ready with his fists than his tongue. He was no sportsman. He knew he had no case, and the knowledge

overwhelmed him. He stood almost tongue-tied and made the lamest speech that had ever been heard from an Athenian rhetorician. The fun-loving Greek public laughed and jeered at the floundering youth, only making him more silent and tongue-tied than ever. The Proconsul waxed sarcastic. "I see you teach the Pythagorean philosophy of silence!" he remarked to the prosecuting sophist. Then the defendant undergraduate had his turn. He was really excellent. He implored the compassion of the audience; he praised the excellencies of his teacher; he appealed to the sense of fair play of the Proconsul; he became personal in his allusions to the prosecutor; he spoke like one inspired, and ended in a flowery burst that brought the house down with applause. The Proconsul jumped up in his seat, shaking his robe in his excitement. Instead of a court-case it might have been a scene in a show where some gladiator had throttled a lion, or a daring toreador had made a hit, or some Bill Bluggins had delivered a knock-out blow in the ring. The audience cheered, the professor wept tears of pleasure at his pupil's success; his party were acquitted, and the prosecutor's hooligans (they were each just as bad as the other really, except in rhetoric!) were sentenced so many stripes on the bare back. It was a great introduction to university-life for Claudius and Julian! And you may be sure that the successful young orator, Proaeresius, never looked back from that day. Years afterwards Proaeresius made another memorable speech before the Emperor and by so doing won from him a remission of the taxes which his home-islands had to pay to Athens. That was a speech that made history; he became a formidable power in the land. Well, of course that meant enemies. And once those enemies succeeded in having him exiled. But the Proconsul was relieved and the new Governor recalled him to plead his cause. He was invited to speak for himself and see if he could justify himself before his enemies. Well, did you ever hear of such a chance as that? He invited his enemies to choose the subject on which he should speak. He asked no handicap. They chose one - a difficult one, you may be sure. Proaeresius spoke with golden eloquence for the motion proposed. Could any one after such a glorious speech ever dare to oppose the theme? It seemed impossible. But Proaeresius did it himself. While the shorthand writers sweated and their hands flew over the tablets he spoke with still greater eloquence against what he had just said, and it seemed amazing that any one could have ever spoken for it. It was wonderful. But he did not stop there. He began again while the shorthand slaves followed him word for word as fast as they could read. He re-repeated each of his speeches so exactly that there seemed to be no single word missing or out of place. Such a scene had never been witnessed in the history of Athens. Proaeresius was acclaimed with almost divine honors and was escorted home with military pomp and pageantry. If only his old teacher could have seen that day! It was the day when words were worshiped and his pupil had proved himself the king of words. But all of that came later. Just now we must return to Julian and Basil and Gregory. Claudius went to another tutor, and they saw little of him.

Those were happy student-days for the three friends. But Julian had other things to think of than only his books. Maximus had a purpose in sending him to Anaximenes as a tutor. It was: The Eleusinia Gradually in that intuitional way which a divinity-student of the hidden life of the soul always cultivates, it dawned upon Julian that Anaximenes was one of those who could put him in the way of initiation into the real Eleusinian Mysteries. He had already passed through the Mysteries of Mithras, such as they were, under the guidance of Maximus; but he had also desired with a great desire to study those of the Eleusinia. Julian was an exceptional man and he had had an exceptional life enabling him to appreciate the Mysteries better than most. Of course, ages ago, the process of denaturing the Mysteries had been begun by their guardians. One by one the deeper and more real Mysteries had been dropped, or rather concealed. The exoteric doctrines took the place of the true souldoctrines. Pure-souled hierophants died off and others took their place. By the time that the Eleusinia had been degraded into a State-tax-paying money-machine there were no Mysteries and no hierophants worth the name. It is the story of all churches of all religions. Men, women, and even babies, were 'initiated' just as ignorant people are baptized in some religions today without ever having the faintest knowledge of the Jordan Maximus, the spiritual Nile, the Ganges, the Eridanus, the Stream of Spirituality that Descends from Above. They only know the material font, the piscina of the temples and churches. Eusebius had invented the rather clever excuse for Constantine that he had been a Christian all the time, but had put off baptism until he could be baptized in the little Syrian river Jordan; all alike had forgotten what the real Jordan of John Hydranos was. All was tinsel, money, materialism. What had Julian to do with all this? How could it help his soul-life? Well, ages after the Great Pyramid had become derelict there were initiations that took place there - real initiations of the freedom of the soul and its divinity. The labyrinth existed and perhaps still exists to show the initiate the old formulae of the soul, inshrined and written in imperishable stone. Julian with his sharpened soul-intuition knew perfectly well that the real Eleusinia were not dead, but merely withdrawn into the secret recesses of sacred things. If he could only find a genuine initiator, he could face the mystery and partake of its purifying rites. Maximus had told him that there would be no clashing with the Mysteries of Mithras, since he would have been voluntarily permitted to enter the new rites. Gradually the way opened for him and he deliberately asked Anaximenes to guide him to the true initiator. It was done. The punishment for revealing the Mysteries was death. The punishment for revealing the name of the hierophant was also death. Therefore history has never known who initiated Julian into the Eleusinia, the Mysteries of the Mother of the Gods, the Mysteries of the Celestial Virgin, Ceres, Demeter, Cybele, Isis of the tenthousand names. But the exoteric Mysteries or fragments of them have escaped into publicity and we can follow some of the exoteric formulae through which Julian passed. Of the soulprocesses which he went through we know nothing, for the soul is known to the soul alone, and words have little to do with the matter. ---------

V. The Mysteries of the Great Mother, The Virgin-Goddess Julian had passed through the initiations of Mithras, the Sovereign Sun, and was therefore duly and truly prepared, worthy and well qualified, to undergo the trials and preparations for the Mysteries of the Eleusinian Goddess, the Mother of the Gods, the Greek Isis, the Virgin-Mother, as she had been known for ages. He was not called upon to spend long years in self-purification, because he had already undergone great purification of soul. Previous lives had done their part in shaping him, as the rough ashlar, so to say, for the soundless tool of the builder and the service of the great architect, if we may use the symbolism of the Temple-builders of all ages. The Mysteries of Mithras were the Mysteries of the Sun in its journey through the heavens; so were the twelve labors of Hercules; so were the Mysteries of the GoddessMother Demeter at Eleusis. They were all symbolical representations of the same thing. Many years after the commencement of the Christian era the devotees of the Christos in all religions - including the Nazarenes, today called Christians, in the West - had the same symbolism. Their Christos was the sun - the early Church Fathers say so - and of course his adventures were the same as those of Hercules and the rest: the passage of the sun through the signs of the zodiac. But it was no mere 'sun-myth': it was vastly more. Some initiates knew this, and were satisfied. They let their knowledge stop there. The universal symbolism of the sun in its course is so grand and is the key to so many of the wonders of science - the whole history of the atom, for instance - that they were well content to know so much. But other initiates were intuitional enough to see that these things were no more the real thing than the parchment describing history is history itself. They realized that they had to live through the same adventures themselves in the secret and sacred shrine of the heart where no priest save their own inner Christos can possibly come. They were themselves the Hercules, the Sun, the Christos, and all that others could give them was the plan and chart of the sacred journey to the Holy Seat whence the soul had come. The shades and degrees were endless - they are endless. In this way we get the sublime conception of the drama. Originally the stage was the church of all mankind. The drama was the symbolized adventure of the soul, whether it be Hercules, Bacchus, Ceres, Krishna, Buddha, Mithras, Osiris, Cybele, Attys, Adonis, Job, or any other probationary Christos - or Chrestos in the process of becoming the perfected Christos. All decent people could attend in silence, and the drama could be enacted without words, while the audience, if they knew enough, silenced the clamorings and vaporings of the brain-mind. The soul, according to its degree of clear vision, received the message of the soul - for soul is understood by soul alone. All the vast congregation could leave the archaic theater in silence, each having received precisely what his degree of purity of body and mind and soul was capable of permitting him to receive. That was the true drama and will be, in course of time, the only drama that matters. The fact that there is any other kind of drama merely indicates that Osiris lies dead, cut into fourteen pieces by his brother Typhon; that Prometheus is chained to his rock with the eagle forever gnawing at his vitals; that the initiant is lying 'dead' in the tomb, that the brain-mind of humanity is reigning on the usurped throne of the soul. In time, that usurper will be dethroned and made the slave, as it is and should be, of the King, the Soul, once

more. The Osiris will be resurrected, Prometheus will be unbound, Christos will arise, the Drama will come into its own again. Meanwhile, since nations cannot do this - they have not attained the harmony, the true expression of brotherhood required for that - individuals must keep the way open by their lonely pioneer efforts to reach the peak of Everest. And Julian was such a one. In countless other lives he had fought his way to the front rank of humanity's eternal battle and if Maximus had made him go through tests and trials and lonely waitings in the preparation-chamber, as Jesus had perhaps done in the Great Pyramid, it was no more than a symbolic repetition of the tests and trials and temptations and fierce fights with the brain-self that he had triumphed over, age after age, in body after body. Is this fancy? Certainly it is not. Such things, in the astonishing economy of nature on all planes, are reflected in plain black and white even in material life, for the dull brain to see. Study the nine-months' evolution of the unborn child and you shall find it written in indelible characters. The vegetable becomes the animal, the animal grows to a human child - "the stone becomes a plant, the plant an animal, the animal a man, man becomes a god," is the wise old saying. Shall the soul do less than the physical body, that little speck of dull earth? There is no fear or favor in the real Mysteries. What you get you have fought for, with your selfish self as the enemy. When the Eleusinia, like John's baptisms in aftertimes, were opened to the public for money, they received exactly what they paid for: an afternoon's pleasant entertainment. For Julian that was an abomination. He was called by an enemy, "The Great Mind." If he had known anything about the soul, that enemy should have rather called him a man on the way to becoming a Great Soul. And such men cannot be judged by the mere mind any more than the actions of a philosopher can be judged by a frog croaking in a pond. The real Mysteries were characterized by silence. The soul needs few words. Julian was conducted by the messenger of the Gods, Hermes or Mercury. Other gods were there, each fulfilling a part in the ceremonies. Bacchus or Iacchos, Cybele, Vulcan, Adonis, all were represented; the old literary myths faded away from sight and the aspirant perceived new and glorious meanings unfold and fade away as others came into view on the screen of the purified mind. Had he been a Hindu, these powers would have had other names, but they would have been the same powers. Isis, Osiris, Hathor, Pthah, Ra, Tum, would have been the names in Egypt, perhaps. In Mexico, yet other names would have been used. If one wanted to localize the universal symbolism it could always be done. Julian became himself the symbolical Sun, being instructed what to do by his initiators. How can we separate or describe the different scenes and degrees of that version of the drama of the soul? We can only catch fleeting glimpses of the film as it reels before our imperfect vision. There is the degree or figure of Aries the Ram, the pushing month that forces its way into the year. Taurus the Bull with its horns does the same with added force and vigor - the Mysteries of Mithras give the story of the bull and its symbolisms. Castor and Pollux, the twins; now surely that is an impossibility for a man, say Julian, to represent twins? Not at all; it is the grand secret of the divine and the demon ever struggling for the mastery in man; man is truly a twin; the final purpose of the mysteries is so to purify the demon-side

of man that it becomes one with its father, if you like, the heavenly twin, both, with the light of the spirit, forming the glorified Christos. The Crab and the Lion, the Sun in its full force of summer-strength and glory; the Man at the Royal Arch of his career as man, symbolized also as the Rainbow of Peace. Will he rise higher, out of the Zodiac altogether, soaring beyond the heavens, or will he be constrained to return along the Sun-path as the Alaskan Indians in their age-old symbolism of the same mysteries describe it? He does not break away from the Sun-Path. Next he encounters, he becomes rather, celestial Virgo with the wheat-ear in her hand, or the sheaf of corn with the cornucopia falling like a running stream of plenty upon the summer-earth. There is Libra the Balance, the Scales. The Man, the Sun, is tried in the balance - and found wanting; he falls slowly towards the dark and dull months of autumn and winter, the tomb of the Christos, or rather the Chreest, the mummy. Scorpio wounds him in his most vital spot as he still struggles to escape from the four walls of heaven to the liberation of the divinity which he once was, and which he will by his efforts again attain. Wounded and staggering he seeks to escape from the other door of heaven and is struck by the arrow of the giant Archer, Sagittarius; he falls towards the watery signs and passes through the realm of Capricorn the 'sea-goat'; Aquarius, the man with the pitcher of water leads him on to the place where he is to celebrate the first mysteries of death in the upper room; Pisces, the Fishes, seal the mysteries of the loaves of Ceres, the Virgin with her sheaves and the "two small fishes" which form the unending supply of celestial food for the aspirant to the perfection of the soul. It is all dim and confused to the public, to the brain-mind; it is as clear as the noonday sun to the soul. The Unconquered Sun traveling through the Signs which form the Zodiacal Band, rising to his full physical strength, attaining the balance, the turning-point, retreating and struck by the powerful blows of the giants that guard the Eastern and Western doors, he sinks fainting to his death and burial in the tomb of dull December. His body lies hidden beneath the horizon and the only indication of his tomb is the crown of thorny acacia on the pallid brow of the dead Sun, the crown of thorns, the black empty spaces where the once-bright rays have ceased to exist. Then comes the grand eternal lesson. The Resurrection! Even Death has no power over the Unconquered Sun. The Sun slowly rises again from the tomb, after three days, and the building of the Temple begins anew. Not all who in later, degraded days witnessed the grand Mystery of the Solar birth, growth, fall, death, and resurrection, knew that the Sovereign Sun is the Christos-Spirit in man, the real Man himself on his upward way towards his own essential divinity; not all knew that the resurrection has more than one meaning; that it means reincarnation in the body; that it means the final and greater reincarnation of the Divine Man in the Spiritual 'body,' to the exclusion of a material body, after a lifetime of 'days' in many bodies, one for each 'day' of that 'lifetime'; not all knew that the lesson was one of self-directed evolution for the real man, the soul, and that every grain of action and thought sown must be reaped and the doctrine of responsibility worked out to the last straw. Yet these things were known in a vague way. Even today we meet the excuse for futile plays on our degraded stage, that they teach that we cannot escape from the consequences of crime - a long-distance reminiscence of the old true soul-dramas that did

really teach such responsibility. If such doctrines were brought into conversation it was done sub rosa, and not among the crowd in public places. They were among the things that we read of when an Initiate tells his disciples that "there are many things I have to tell you but ye cannot bear them now." They are there plainly enough for all with the least intuition to see, in the confidential letters to lodges which have been made public by friend and enemy; they are there for all to see in the scarcely-disguised gospels and rituals of every race. To quote one instance alone, Jesus the Nazarene talks for pages in private conversation with his candidates for initiation about reincarnation and how souls must suffer for deeds ill-done in other bodies, until they are purified for the greater reincarnation, as you may say, the inverse incarnation, for it means the final liberation from the body; as said by an initiate of the Jewish Kabalist mysteries: "To him that overcometh I will give a white stone with a new name written. He shall become a pillar in the Temple of my God and shall go no more out!" That is, he shall no more need to incarnate in fleshly bodies, for his "sins shall be forgiven" - he shall have himself paid the uttermost farthing of suffering for sins committed and shall have received the last personal reward he wants for good deeds done. Henceforth he will be free from desire of reward or fear of punishment. All this and more is what the real Mysteries of Eleusis taught under the unspeakably simple and beautiful imagery of the story of the Sovereign Sun (as did those of Mithras) and the Virgin-Mother of the Gods with the wheat-ear in her hand. Truly her son every child of the Mysteries - was born in the 'house of Bread,' which the Hebrews call in their language 'Bethlehem.' And truly the Wine of Divine Life gave him new and divine Life. The Mysteries of the Great Mother are older than Eleusis. If in Mediterranean lands she was the Magna Mater, the Bona Dea, the Great Mother and Good Goddess, in Sanskrit she was the same. She is the Virgin, Isis, the Mother of the Gods, the Mother of Humanity. Finally, we are told, and Julian must have seen it, that the whole of the Solar Wheatand-Vine, Bread-and-Wine cycle, terminated in the Hierophant solemnly holding an ear of wheat in silence before the assembled candidates. No twin-symbols in the world so well cover the whole ground of the Solar Man and his own divinity. We may never know the name of the Hierophant who initiated Julian. It was death to mention his name, and even in this degraded time no true initiate would reveal it. In the summer and autumn of 355, Julian was a young man of twenty-five years. He spent five months at the University of Athens with such friends as Basil and Gregory and others. The time seems almost negligibly short. And yet historians have been obliged to suppose that he was at Athens before, to account for the extraordinary amount of real life that he crammed into those happy days - the only really happy days of his life, if you do not count all his days happy, as are those of every spiritual warrior. Such a strong influence had those short five months on Julian that they might have been five years to any one else. He worked, he played, he made friends, he concentrated a lifetime in those months. What is the explanation? It is not difficult to give. The outer, denatured, degraded Mysteries - which you paid a fee for being initiated into - were about as thrilling as going to kirk on a Sunday morning in winter to hear the minister preach. As far as the ordinary man knew, that was all there was in it. But the real, the pure divine mysteries are not like that. For those who are duly and truly prepared and worthy and well qualified to be initiated into even some lower aspects

of the real mysteries of the Bona Dea, the Virgin-Mother of the Christ-spirit in all men, the Bacchic wine so thrills with real life every cell of the dead body that we call our working selves that time is forgotten and centuries of glowing pulsing life may be experienced in a night. This foretaste of real life has many names in many countries. But the application of the matter is that Julian found his life so intensified, so deepened, so expanded, so exalted with the influence of the genuine Mysteries, that the 'reception of the Holy Ghost' as described by other writers, appears pale in comparison. It was the same force that made Paul such a tremendous bundle of energy throughout his life and kept him active long after any one else would have died of exhaustion: it was the soul come to life, if you like to put it that way. It is nothing that comes of paying fees or of studying books, but it is comparable only to a flower-bud opening in the sunlight by its own unaided efforts; it is the enthusiasm of Aladdin when he enters the orchard of jewels; it is the garden of delights which sends men mad if they are not purified and prepared; it is the reflexion of the heaven into which Paul was caught up; it is the glow of the Shekinah all in degree, of course. Those were not five months of student-life that Julian spent at Athens, in the summer and fall of 355. They were the seventy years of the old fairy-tale that the kidnaped mortal spends among the fairies and thinks it is only a few hours. What can we say more of the blossoming of the soul that takes place at the least contact with the real Mysteries of the Soul? We can but repeat the old saying that men often went to Eleusis mere mortals like any one else; that they returned different men. They had learnt their own essential divinity. They knew that their bodies were exactly as said, the Temple of the Divine. No wonder the Mysteries were the beacon-light of civilization throughout countless millenniums. No wonder that Egypt's glorious civilization lasted for seventy-five thousand years and more - just as long as they kept the fires of the Mysteries burning in their hearts. No wonder that the world shall again be a heaven compared with what it is now when the light of the Mysteries shines once more from the old beacons upon the mountains, like footsteps of the Messengers of Peace! They said that Julian was the marvel and wonder of Athens for his learning and attainments. And that in five months! The uninitiated historian says that of course this was merely the fulsome compliment of the Sophists and orators, such as Libanius, flattering an Emperor. Indeed it was not. It was the light that shone in his face as did the light in the face of Moses when he came down from the 'mountain' so that he had to be veiled, lest the people be dazzled. The Mysteries were such an overwhelming event in the university-life of Julian that all else is overshadowed by the glory of the initiation. Julian went through a lifetime of happiness in those five months. As described in Eastern imagery: "Behold, O happy Pilgrim! The portal that faceth thee is high and wide, seems easy of access. The road that leads therethrough is straight and smooth and green. 'Tis like a sunny glade in the dark forest-depths, a spot on earth mirrored from Amitabha's paradise. There, nightingales of hope and birds of radiant plumage sing, perched in green bowers, chanting success to fearless Pilgrims. They sing of Bodhisattvas' virtues five, the fivefold source of Bodhi-power, and of the seven steps in Knowledge."

Basil was always a good friend. But Gregory was never much of a fellow. They were just college-friends and that is all. Gregory's university-life taught him little more than the value of words, words, words, and in those days in ordinary life they were valuable. A rhetorician with eloquent speech, was always regarded as the superior of a mere exactitudinarian. If in the courts you had the best case in the world and unassailable evidence, it was of little avail unless your lawyer could talk the hind legs off a donkey, as the saying goes. If he could, then you could do much as you liked; you would be acquitted. It was all very stupid, of course, of those stupid Greeks. We have outgrown that, of course. Well, have we? It is precisely what leads multitudes in our elections; talk, and not too much thought ahead. It has destroyed governments and ruled kingdoms in the twentieth century A.D. No, we are not so very different from those fourth-century people. In fact, the two ages are remarkably alike in many ways. Gregory is quoted in after life as having written to his friend Jerome, a Father of the Church and almost the author of our present translation of the Latin Bible, "Nothing deceives the public so much as verbiage!" But he was now still a very young man and Julian found it difficult to get on with him and his verbiage. For himself, Julian was ever prone to tear the heart out of a problem and settle it offhand without frills or circumlocutions. His intelligence was exceptionally brilliant. -------

VI. Milan and the German War Then came the rapid events of November and December, 355. In the middle of this dream of happiness as a devotee at the shrine of Isis-Athena, word suddenly came for Julian to return at once to Milan, to the Court of Constantius. It was a fearful wrench - such a wrench from happiness to misery as only the Mystic can bear. It is part of the mystic life: first comes intense pleasure; then bitter pain; finally the soul rises above them both and refuses to suffer from either. Julian himself has told us how the order affected him; his suffering and the consolations he received from Athena. He says (writing to the Athenians): "I must not omit to tell how I consented to dwell under the same roof with those whom I knew to have ruined my whole family and who, I suspected, would before long plot against myself also. But what floods of tears I shed and what laments I uttered when I was summoned, stretching out my hands to your Acropolis and imploring Athena to save her suppliant and not to abandon me, many of you who were eyewitnesses can attest. The goddess, above all others, is my witness that I even begged for death at her hands there in Athens rather than my journey to the Emperor. That the goddess accordingly did not betray her suppliant or abandon him is proved by the event. For everywhere she was my guide and on all sides she set a watch near me bringing guardian angels from Helios and Selene." We have already read how Julian fared at Milan. On November 6th he was publicly invested with the title and robe of Caesar - not yet 'Augustus': that title was for the

Emperor alone. Constantius had now come to the conclusion that his childlessness was a direct punishment from the gods for his murders of members of his family; reluctantly he had come to recognise that he must give Julian a share in the government of the Empire or remain in the hands of strangers. He would have liked to see Julian dead, probably enough, but there was the excellent Eusebia at his elbow to speak gently in favor of giving the young man a chance. She herself demanded faithfulness and service from Julian, in spite of the wrongs he had suffered from Constantius. The ceremony took place at a great military assembly at Milan. The Emperor made a speech commending the young Caesar to them. Julian bore himself with noble bearing and the soldiers clashed their shields against their knees in approval and applause. A few days later he was married to Helen, the sister of Constantius, but little has been said of her in history. What a change that was for a bookworm! They cut off his philosophic beard and shaved him. They threw away his university-gown and made him wear the military cloak; they made him drill and drill and drill. His student's casual walk had to be exchanged for the soldier's swagger; the modest downcast eyes of the little schoolboy, and the simple bearing of the private citizen, had to be supplanted by the soldier's stare and glittering uniform; he had to do his best to be like the murderers of his family and to look as if he enjoyed it. He swore, not by the military gods, but by strange student's oaths: when he tripped over some new goosestep he was heard to mutter "O Plato!" But his great characteristic was that of all Initiates: he was thorough, and his concentration on the work in hand was perfect. So he soon learnt. In less than a month he was off. On December 1st he had to leave Milan for Gaul for his first military command. He felt keenly the restrictions placed upon him. In the first place he was unried and therefore not to be too greatly trusted with power. Also, who knew? he might take the first opportunity to wipe out Constantius the usurper and all his family, before himself assuming the purple. Constantius would have deserved it. Julian was given no more than three hundred and sixty soldiers as his own command. To all intents and purposes he was to go to Gaul merely to represent the royal house; to show himself in the purple and to carry the picture of the Emperor - just to show the army that Constantius was there, as you may say. Nominally he was the Commander-in-chief. Actually he was not allowed to do anything except what the older officers approved. The party had not gone farther than Turin when they heard that the Germans had taken Cologne and the whole border was in a bad way. It was winter. There was nothing to be done except to go into winter-quarters and prepare for the advance in the spring. They wintered at Vienne. At that time the country that we call France was strangely divided. In the north there was savage warfare all along the Rhine; the South was as civilized as Italy, and Vienne was thoroughly Romanized. When the new Caesar entered the city an old blind woman declared that he was destined to restore the Temples of the Gods. It was an omen of the future. At Vienne it was not so bad. Julian lived a more than Spartan life. He had some books with him and long before daylight he was up and studying. His meals were scanty and sparse. He worked all the time and his play was but a change of work. With his eye for detail and his wonderful foresight and insight he left nothing undone for the coming spring.

The orders from Constantius were explicit. Julian was to be watched as carefully as the enemy, for fear he should raise a revolt. It was not until midsummer that he was allowed to bear the ensign containing the Emperor's portrait. "I am not sending you a king," wrote Constantius to the Gauls. "I am only sending one who shall carry about and exhibit the King's portrait." And yet Julian had been made a Caesar! It was humiliating. So the year passed fruitlessly for Julian in military matters, though there was all the success that could be expected; the Roman army did very well on the Rhine-frontiers. But Julian was not even allowed to assemble the troops. This power was given to another. Julian was quartered apart with only a few soldiers, and even those he was obliged to part with when the neighboring towns implored his assistance. He was alone in his royal glory. Accepting the trial as an Initiate would, Julian acted always with moderation and without complaint or repining. This was taken for incapability and when the commander-inchief was recalled under suspicion he was almost ignored and only allowed to interfere when it was necessary to save some situation. He was actually treated by certain persons with disrespect. After that he contented himself with silence and with parading the imperial robe and image. Finally, in the spring of 357, Constantius gave Julian the command of all the forces. He expected some improvement in Gallic affairs, but not anything great. In actual fact, things could hardly be much worse. The Germans had consolidated their captures and now controlled all the country that extends along the Rhine from source to mouth. They had razed the walls of forty-five towns, together with numerous forts and citadels. For a breadth of nearly forty miles from the Rhine they had captured the country and had devastated a strip three times that width, so that the Gauls could not pasture their cattle. There were cities deserted by the Gauls and not yet occupied by the Germans; but the inhabitants were afraid to go back. With tremendous concentration on the work in hand Julian smashed his way into Cologne and Strassburg. He captured Chnodomar, the King of the country, and sent him to Constantius, who was returning from a campaign in the East. Constantius triumphed, but Julian received no great recognition. This young bookworm must have been lucky to win his battles; it couldn't possibly be talent that had done it! In the next two summer-campaigns Julian drove the Germans back beyond the Rhine. The Roman chief, Florentius, was at his wit's end to obtain corn for the troops. The Germans had command of the Rhine-outlets and the great granaries of Britain were cut off, for there was no other way to obtain supplies. Florentius wrote to Constantius to say that he had proposed to pay the Germans three thousand pounds' weight of silver for permission to land the corn from Britain without being attacked. Constantius actually approved, if "Florentius did not think such a course altogether too disgraceful." Of course it was disgraceful, says Julian - else the idea would never have entered the Emperor's head that it might be so. Julian would pay no silver to the Germans, but he would have that corn from Britain. He had not been idle. He had two hundred ships ready, and built four hundred more in ten months of waiting. A fleet of six hundred ships capable of bringing corn from Britain to the Rhine was no small matter. Once ready with his transport, Julian made a furious attack on the Germans and made them submit. He took hostages and secured a safe passage for the corn-ships to and from Britain.

At the end of his service in Gaul, Julian sums up the situation and tells of his loyalty to the Emperor and how little he deserved to be treated with resentment. He says: "Three times, while I was still Caesar, I crossed the Rhine; twenty thousand persons who were held as captives on the further side of the Rhine I demanded and received back; in two battles and one siege I took captive ten thousand prisoners and those not men of unserviceable age, but men in the prime of life." The Germans had tried an old trick with their captives. But Julian was too wide awake for them. Before he could demand the captives back, he prepared lists of all those who had been taken from the Gallic towns. The few that were left willingly told him of their lost ones. Then prisoners and rescued captives were questioned and they gave the names of all they knew to be in captivity among the Germans. The lists were enormous. When the Germans had released all the prisoners, Julian demanded where the rest were. "There are no more!" declared the German chiefs. "Well, where are so-and-so and so-and-so?" asked Julian, as the clerk behind him at the table gave him name after name in a quiet voice. The Germans were astonished. They were forced to give up every man they had taken and Julian went up in their respect to a great height. He was so very thorough in all he did. Julian continues his summary of the things he did: "I sent to Constantius four levies of excellent infantry, three more of second-quality infantry, and two very smart squadrons of cavalry. I have now, with the help of the gods, recovered all the towns, and by that time I had almost recovered forty. I call Zeus and all the gods who protect cities and our race to bear witness as to my behavior towards Constantius and my loyalty to him, and that I have behaved to him as I would have chosen that my own son should behave to me. I have paid him more honor than any Caesar has ever paid any Emperor in the past." Nor was this behavior without its heroic side; for Constantius had treated the Romans in Gaul very shabbily. Magnentius had rebelled and assumed the purple while in charge along the Rhine. The Romans had been unable to suppress him, so Constantius had done a thing which may have been according to precedent but which was certainly not above-board. When Julian had conquered the German king, he demanded to know why they had devastated such a huge portion of Gaul, and had laid waste so many towns and ruined so many square miles of fine pasture. The German king produced a letter from Constantius asking him to do so! Certainly it was one way of keeping Magnentius engaged in Gaul and thereby drawing his teeth, but the cost to the Romans and the Gauls under their protection was enormous. ------------

VII. Events in Gaul Constantius began playing the same game with Julian as he had played with Julian's brother Gallus. First he demanded 'help' from Julian in the shape of all his best soldiers; then, when Julian had been entirely deprived of effective power, there is no reason to suppose that Constantius would have done otherwise than he had done with Gallus. Julian would have been recalled to Milan or Rome or Constantinople; each step would have been marked by a diminished prestige and protection by friendly escorts, until finally he would have been arrested like a common felon and beheaded in some obscure fortress. How were these people to know that Julian was not quite like other men? That he was a genuine devotee of the true gods, and a Christian of the original type, and that on due occasion the gods were able through his devotion to warn him well ahead of pending dangers which he had a right to avoid; though of course there are dangers in any man's Karman - or store of causes unexhausted by effects - which he must go through as best he can and which the gods will not only not help him to avoid but will encourage him to face and, if possible, conquer. But in proportion as Julian was warned by the gods, so his silence increased and his enemies - the eunuchs and Constantius and the whole host of criminal and political agents - never suspected his hidden strength. Certainly Constantius had a very plausible excuse when he called for Julian's best troops. To use our modern geographical terms, he had his hands full with the Russian and Bohemian wars. But then Julian needed the troops as much as Constantius. If he had restored peace and honor in Gaul, that was no reason why he should be immediately so weakened that the Germans could again attack with fair hopes of success. Besides, later on, it would be found that Constantius had been up to his old mean trick of encouraging the enemy to attack Julian! Argument was of little use; it could be used to 'prove' that Julian was plotting to gain power. All the decent men were taken away from Julian and vile courtiers were put in their place. By some sort of oversight the excellent Sallust had become one of Julian's officers. Immediately this was noticed Sallust became a source of suspicion and as soon as possible was taken away. Julian hardly needed indications from 'the god' to tell him what was in the wind; his own mere intellectual brain was enough. Speaking of Constantius, he tells how he pleaded for fair treatment. To quote from his declaration to the Emperor: "I have no acquaintance with any of these men, nor have I had in the past. But I know them by report, and since you bid me to do so, I regard them as friends and comrades and pay as much respect to them as I would to old acquaintances. Nevertheless, it is not just that my affairs should be intrusted to them or that their fortunes should be hazarded with mine. What then is my petition? Give me some sort of written rules as to what I must avoid and what you intrust me to perform. For it is clear that you will approve of him who obeys you and punish him who is disobedient, though indeed I am very sure that no one will disobey you." If he could get written instructions there need be no more blaming him for everything that went wrong and praising his officers, his enemies, for everything that went right.

Julian opposed the extravagance of the officials with public money. They became his bitter enemies. The whole system under Constantine and later was one of plunder, and oppression of the poor and the worker. Things had to come to a head some time. The order was given for the troops, the fighting Gauls who had enlisted in the Roman army under guarantee of home-service, to go east to Constantius. Such a flagrant violation of a definite pledge was unworthy of a Roman Emperor. No loyalty on Julian's part was of any avail. Constantius could never rest happy. Like the protagonist of one of the old Greek tragedies, he was for ever haunted by the ghosts of his own crimes. His life was a hell on earth. Deeply, unspeakably, as he had injured Julian, the latter was yet almost his only friend, except perhaps the excellent Eusebia, the Empress, who was the friend of both of them. Whatever Julian did to please Constantius was suspicious; whatever he did because it was right to do was still more suspicious because it could not possibly please more than one or two; economies made enemies; extravagances, if there had been any, would have produced accusations. Constantius was surrounded by courtiers and bloodsuckers and sycophants like so many demons born of his own guilty conscience. All the time they were whispering subtil malice against Julian in his ear. Sallust was a good man, but he was at once recalled. Julian was surrounded by rascals. The Empire was rotten with a riff-raff of self-seekers. One after another was sent to Gaul with powers which Julian was ordered not to oppose in his capacity of Commander-in-chief and representative of the Emperor. Spies and agents provocateurs, the filthy dregs of a rotting state, abounded. Julian would have been condemned and removed had he been unsuccessful, but by his extraordinary brilliance and directness of mind he was highly successful. Therefore, it was unjustly assumed that he had more troops than he needed and must send them off to the Russian war or somewhere out of Gaul. The situation at one time for Julian had been astonishingly like the situation met in precisely the same place just about one thousand years later by that schoolgirl Joan of Arc - only she had never been to school. He was in the hands of jealous nominal subordinates whose one idea was to temporize; if any serious situation arose they wanted to hold a council of war. Julian, like Joan, never hesitated a moment. "We are not here as a village debating society," they both protested in words of their respective periods. "We are here to turn the enemy out. Attack! Attack! Attack!" And attacking, they won all along the line. What are dates in history? Merely landmarks indicating the arrival of the same people and similar conditions to those we have met in earlier chapters. At one time a convoy of wheat - most necessary for the troops - was coming down the Rhine for Julian. His nominal subordinate, rather than let him reap the advantage of his organization, actually burnt the corn and the boats with it! It was heartbreaking. And Julian did not love power. He loved philosophy, and what is far more than philosophy: the clean, upright, quiet, divine life of the true philosopher. He said: "It was my intention, the gods themselves will bear me witness, to divest myself of all imperial splendor and state and remain in peace, taking no part whatever in affairs." But the gods had other work for him to do. He could not please himself.

The final fatal blow had come from Constantius. Julian was to be stripped not only of the best but the whole of his tried troops, and they were to be sent to the Russian war. The Celts, Welsh and Bretons, and the Petulantes, the native troops, still called Gauls, of course, knew him for a real man. If he chose to read and write at four o'clock in the morning before any one else was up, and if he chose to study divine things late at night, he fought on foot in the daytime with the best of them; nor was he a general who led them from behind to avoid excessive excitement. The soldiers loved him. The native troops who was it said that Rome had no good troops except the foreign legions of Gauls and Celts and Germans? - had mostly enlisted under the solemn pledge that they were not to be called upon for foreign service - foreign service for them being anywhere out of Germany or Gaul or Britain. They lived in the camps all their lives when circumstances permitted. Their wives had homes there and their children grew up and enlisted as their fathers had done; sometimes there were even grandchildren in the camp. The camp was a unit, a city. We have them still: there are these castra, or camps, all over England today. There are Chester, and Doncaster, and Leicester, and Chichester, and Rochester, and Cirencester, and dozens of other of these castra which were but these military camps turned city. And now Constantius had given the order for them to move out to the East, to Russia and Persia and other wild places beyond the sunrise, beyond the edge of the world, beyond their own beloved borders, far from the homeland. It was an outrage, a flouting of pledges unworthy of a great Empire; it was a crime. Julian would have found some way out of the impasse - he was no breaker of pledges while they remained pledges. But he was paralysed. From Vienne in civilized Gaul, Florentius the Pretorian Prefect was to go to Paris and see the thing done. Florentius hated Julian more than a small boy hates soap. Julian had cut down expenses and actually introduced economies to lessen the tremendous weight of the taxes. Therefore Julian was anathema to the Constantinian spendthrifts. Joined with Florentius was Lupicinus, at present in Britain. These two were to supersede Julian in the matter of getting the troops out of Gaul. Julian was helpless. He could only wait for these officials to arrive and see if he could mitigate the terrible hardship of the removal. Julian waited. Whatever he did would naturally be brought against him. "If you wait until Florentius and Lupicinus arrive before sending the troops to Constantius," the hostile officials around him declared, "then it will be said that you are trying to disobey the Emperor and hold back, in the hope of making a revolt against him." Julian was in a dilemma. If he sent the troops he was helpless and undefended besides, Constantius had threatened to ruin Gaul. But if he did not send them it was to be taken as a sign of treason. He stayed in the palace at Paris, the little island in the Seine where the Cathedral of Notre Dame now stands, and trusted to his only true friends, the gods. The soldiers were not idle, either with tongue or pen. They were not fools. Some one wrote an anonymous letter to the troops quartered near Paris and the whole garrison was in a turmoil. The letter was particularly addressed to the Celts and the Petulantes, the native troops. The name of Constantius was handled without reverence and the vile betrayal of the Gauls and the pledge that they should not be sent on foreign service was put in its true light. In addition, the letter bitterly deplored the disgrace inflicted on Julian,

the soldiers' friend. The whole garrison was deeply stirred and it became evident that if all the other legions heard of it, there would be the utmost difficulty in preventing a flat refusal, a mutiny in the army. That would have suited the officials and Constantius very well because it would have been the damnation of Julian. But what if it were successful? There was the rub. No, the plan must be carried out and Julian gradually reduced to complete impotency. These officials urged Julian not to wait for Florentius and Lupicinus but to send the troops off at once. Julian stuck to his guns. "We ought to wait a bit longer for them," he replied to their extremely urgent solicitations. And of course, that would give time for the anonymous letter-writer to upset all the remaining troops. Nebridius, Pentadius, and Decentius were supposed to be friendly. But the latter at least had been sent by Constantius for the purpose of ruining Julian. Pentadius was a real enemy because Julian had opposed all the innovations he had tried to introduce, and the fact was that Julian had not a single friend near him - except the gods. These hostile counselors and others were most insistent. "If you wait, then it will add proof and evidence that the suspicions entertained about you are correct," said these two-faced 'friends.' "If you send away the troops now it will be regarded as your own action, but when Constantius hears that you waited for Florentius and Lupicinus, then he will give them the credit and you will be blamed." And, incidentally, the Gauls would despise Julian for aiding in their betrayal. He would be left without a single supporter and with a reputation for double-dealing! Julian was helpless; he had spun out the game as long as he could and now could no longer refuse to act as he was advised. He consented, under compulsion, as he says, to write to Constantius, agreeing to send the troops. Julian even discussed the route the troops must take. There was a choice of two roads, and he voted for one of them. That was in itself almost enough to make these treacherous and suspicious friends determine on the other. There might be a catch in it somewhere! They argued that if they went by the road chosen by Julian they would meet other troops and infect them with the mutinous spirit of the fatal anonymous letter. Then there would be a mutiny and all would be thrown into confusion. Julian adds drily that there seemed to be something in what they said. It is exactly what would have happened, and he knew it. The legions arrived and Julian went to meet them. In the customary way, he made a very encouraging speech and exhorted them to continue on the march and behave like the soldiers they were - the backbone of the Roman army. It was the usual review-speech. "I knew nothing whatever of what they had determined," declares Julian. "I call to witness Zeus, Helios, Ares, Athene, and all the other gods that no suspicion entered into my mind until that very evening." It was then that things began to happen; items that were not entered in the official program. ---------

VIII. Julian Augustus

Julian went out to meet the soldiers when they approached Paris. He made the usual complimentary and encouraging speeches. "You have shown yourselves the best-disciplined soldiers of the Empire and the Empire needs you in the East. There you will find success and wealth beyond your wildest dreams; you will come home proud of having seen the wonders of the Orient. Tonight the officers are invited to dine with me in a farewell feast, and if it is in my power to do anything for them, I hope they will make their requests then. You all know that I desire to serve you and make you happy." The soldiers cheered and beat their shields against their knees. Julian to them was no longer the supposed fool of a student with unsoldierlike ways, but their gallant general. If he had seemed to bemean himself at first by fighting with them in the front rank on foot just like one of themselves, they had long overcome the strangeness of the proceeding and realized that he was their real leader. They would have followed him into the jaws of death and seen to it that they brought him back in safety. There was also about him a strange magnetism which made them do things with him and for him that they would not have done for another. Julian was still in residence at the 'palace' in the little Seine Island of Paris. His wife Helen, the sister of the Emperor, was with him, and all seemed peaceful and quiet. Meanwhile, in the officers' quarters and the camp, other scenes were in being. The officers had formed a decision as to the course they intended to take. Talking and discussing matters as officers do, they clearly perceived the plot of Constantius to ruin Julian. "The Emperor only wants to take us away so as to leave Julian defenceless," they concluded. "Look at the way he has treated us. Unlike Constantius, he does everything he can to help us. When we were to have marched into the wilds of the East we were to have gone alone. But Julian took on himself to order that our wives and families should go with us. The only time he has ever disgraced us was when the two legions gave way against the Germans. Another would have decimated us, killing every tenth man, or would have sent us to rot in the forests of the north, or would have degraded all the officers. Julian merely made them all march through the town in women's clothes! The thing hurt worse than death at the time, but he was justified in the event. For those two legions fought like lions to wipe out the disgrace and have ever since been in the front of every battle. We should have liked to kill him for making them march like that, but we see now that he was right. Shall we then suffer such a man to be slowly destroyed by Constantius?" And the whole mess roared out a thundering 'No!' Certain of the tribunes called for pen and parchment and it took them no long time to write a few short notes - they would not trust the official shorthand-writers to do it - and it was a matter of minutes before the notes were sent quite anonymously to the private messes. "We are banished, like condemned criminals, to the ends of the earth. Our homes will fall into the hands of the Germans. What are we going to do about it?" The evening was well forward towards sunset. Julian's campaigns and transportservices had provided the means for producing plenty of wine both on the spot and from the south. The soldiers were ripe for any bold stroke. The word was passed and pandemonium broke loose. With their wine-cups still in their hands they rushed to the Palace and surrounded it.

Julian had bolted and barred the doors with their heavy beams. But that was not enough to stop the soldiers in their design. They shouted and hammered on the great oak doors and it seemed as if they would break the whole house down. It was a substantial winter-house, too, with two stories, built of strong, solid oak. Amid the turmoil there gradually began to prevail one cry over the rest. Clearly and more clear it rose in all its ominous significance: "Julianus Augustus!" It was high treason of the most patent type. Julian the Emperor! Certainly there had been co-emperors before and there might be again. But Constantius had murdered wholesale the family of Julian - his cousin - and the Furies would never stop at a peaceful recognition of Julian, the rightful heir by descent, but not by fact. There could only be one ending to such a combination, the death of Constantius or of Julian, and there would be civil war in any case. Julian, being an initiated philosopher, was free from personal ambition. He had loyally obeyed the Emperor in everything, even under the utmost provocation. Why, his extraordinary loyalty was in itself suspicious! And now there was this fearful new problem to face. It came as a complete surprise to him. While one or two of his own officers tried to temporize with the soldiers and keep them in good humor, Julian went upstairs to his own room, which was next to that of his wife Helen. It was all very well for her. She was the sister of Constantius and even now possessed a little crown as a member of the royal family. But Julian needed to think for himself. Meanwhile the shouts outside became more and more insistent as the cool night-air of late spring tempered the fumes of the wine-cups. The men were now in dead earnest. It was Julian's moment of choice. Sometime after midnight the friend of the Gods stood in his upper room and looked out of the square window in the beams towards the starry sky, seeking a sign. "O Jupiter! direct me in the right way. Not for myself, but for the good of all!' And as he gazed on the myriad lamps of nature in the glittering sky of night the Gods gave him a sign. He saw the Star and followed it. He was himself to be the Ruler of the World, Emperor of Rome. He must not thwart the will of the Gods nor oppose the clamors of the army. Such things are not spoken of too lightly or too exactly. But to a few friends it was given out that Julian saw a vision of a great figure representing the Roman Empire. "If you refuse the duty laid upon you by the gods we will desert you," was the severe warning he received. The story is cautiously told. Julian dared not fail the gods. A lesser man, one Napoleon, in later days, let his personal desires gain the day and - the gods deserted him. This bookworm, this student, this philosopher and lover of the gods - those gods, alas! now so weak from lack of nourishment, the devotion of men, - this retiring young man who had planned to ask permission to give up his Caesarship and the purple robe that he might go and live by the sea on his grandmother's little farm, whence he could dream and gaze upon the turrets and pinnacles of Constantinople in the distance and meditate on the gods; this unambitious soul out of the ages must undergo the trials and terrors and strenuous times of an Emperor upon whose uneasy head lay many crowns. The god had spoken. But Julian prayed that the cup might pass from him. He opposed the clamor of the soldiers to the last, resisting as long as a chance remained that

the gods would release him from this obligation. But the sands of time were running out and before the Unconquered Sun could dawn upon another day Julian must fulfil his destiny. At three o'clock in the morning the soldiers rushed the doors and the stout oaken beams gave way. With riotous joy the Bretons and Welsh troops, the Gauls and Romans, caught Julian as he descended the stairs and thrusting him upon a shield, bore him lightly out to the cheering army in the courtyard, where now the Cathedral of Notre Dame stands in its grandeur of a later day. "Julian Augustus! Julian Augustus!" He must be crowned. The sacred emblem alone could seal the event in due form. But there was no crown. The thing must not become an omen. And it must not become a crown such as some of these secret-society people spoke of in their strangely misunderstood ritual. Julian was the protege of the Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Mithras, the Sovereign Sun. And the crown with blackened rays - replacing the golden ones, shorn off by the powers of evil, the clipped locks of Shemesh-On, of Samson, the Hebrew SunGod - must never be allowed to make the crown of thorns, the crown of him who had been shorn of all power and lies dead in the grave of winter. It must be a genuine shining golden crown. Ah! There was Helen. She could lend hers. In a trice it was brought to Julian. "Not so! Shall we seem to be entering upon a reign fit only for women?" Thus Julian as he refused to wear it. There was hesitation and doubt. Where was the crown to come from? A crown they must have before the material symbol of the Unconquered Sun rose in the heavens in all his sovereign splendor. Then a soldier snatched off a golden collar that he wore as a symbol of his rank and probably as a relic of some looted treasury of Rome's enemies. With this Julian was crowned, and at last he was in his rightful place as Emperor of the World! He would rather have been studying Plato in the long lush grass where it grew by the sea on his grandmother's farm in Bithynia under the Eastern sun of the Bosporus. But duty was duty and the gods must not be disappointed. Even the happy university-days of Athens must remain but a memory in the mind - the only happy days he ever had in his life, except when with his Teacher and Master, Maximus. The die was cast. ---------Julian and Constantius Julius had said he was not ambitious, but after due show of modesty he took the crown when they gave it to him. On the other hand, Julian really was not ambitious except only in the interest of the gods, and he wanted to strip himself of everything except the symbol after he had had it forced on him by the soldiers. He wrote to Constantius and told him so. But Constantius, the tool of eunuchs and sycophants and the victim of an evil conscience, still thought that he could suppress Julian. He promised him his life if he would surrender at discretion and give up all his honors and prestige. Considering the wholesale murder of Julian's family by Constantius, he must have thought this quite a generous offer. Julian did not. Had he surrendered, what was there to prevent some of the vile slaves of the court from accusing him of some new crime and having him

beheaded at once, as Gallus had been beheaded? That is, of course, supposing Constantius and his vile advisers thought it necessary to have an excuse for breaking his word and committing another murder. It need hardly be repeated that there was nothing religious or Christian about the politicians and courtiers except the name; the real Christians were few and kept their Christianity clean and sacred in the home, with occasional public observances, and that was all. Besides, the gods told Julian what to do and warned him every time when they could; though of course the gods are under the very strictest rules and must not evade natural law by a hair's breadth, seeing that they are themselves natural law. They could help him only when and as long as they were not met by devices of the powers of evil that even the gods cannot surmount. Ordinarily in that summer of 360 the one Emperor would have marched East from Gaul and the other West from Syria or Mesopotamia and there would have been some decisive battle somewhere, accompanied by fearful slaughter. The point had not come in Julian's life, as it had come long before in Chandragupta's, where he would shed no more blood, even in self-defense. But until it did come, the gods were not willing that he should be the instrument for more slaughter than could be helped. It is only the very inferior 'gods' hardly worthy of the name - those not so great as even a man should be - who love bloodshed where it is unnecessary. So Julian found it convenient to continue in the consolidation of the Gallic frontier while Constantius made his annual demonstrations against the great Sapor, the Persian king. In Mesopotamia and Armenia these grand Persian warriors made a yearly inroad into the Roman territory and Constantius found himself obliged to attack them in a feeble sort of way after the damage was done. It is quite possible that Constantius really did think he needed most of Julian's trained fighting men, especially the Gauls and Bretons and Germans; they were towers of strength compared to the Romans; but without good leadership what is the use of any army, however superior? They would have been wellnigh wasted. In this way the Emperors were kept busy, Julian in the West and Constantius in the East, during that summer of 360. It seemed that the clash must come sometime with its terrible civil war and slaughter. Constantius spoke very rudely of 'that goat,' as he called Julian, from his wearing the beard of the philosopher. Julian wrote quite reasonable letters trying to smooth matters over, but Constantius would have none of it. So Julian, quite reasonably, wrote manifestos to those people whom he considered had a right to know what his claims were. He wrote to the Roman Senate; that was natural, for they still nominally held the power of the Empire. But he went further. He wrote to the people of Athens, as being the head and center of the philosophic and thinking world. This was a novelty, because most people regarded Athens as a spent force, a sort of back number, quite unworthy of serious consideration in Imperial affairs. He wrote to the Spartans and to Corinth, and these letters of self-justification are regarded as evidences of the hopelessly antiquated and old-fashioned dreamy state of mind of the philosopher-Emperor. But that is always the way with historians of a material age when dealing with initiates who tempered their dull sordid everyday life with the spiritual touch. If Julian was such a hopeless fool of a bookworm, how is it that when he followed the path the gods showed him in any branch of life, he never failed? He was the soldier, the statesman, the student, the philosopher, the reformer, and he was gloriously successful

in all these roles until the gods, under the pressure of inevitable law, drew away from him. It was no fault of theirs; we should say that they did not fail him, but that the communications between him and them were cut by a hostile hand; that was the exact state of the case. Constantius made peace impossible. He went back to his old trick of supporting the enemies of Rome in secret so as to keep Julian busy. He encouraged a German enemy to attack Julian; but the gods saw to it that Julian knew it all in good time. Constantius and his political schemers could never understand that the gods were a reality and, when undisturbed, were a very real help to their devotee. If by chance they were confronted with some irrefutable evidence of their protection and aid, these dull fellows would declare that it was the work of devils! Meanwhile, Julian relied on the gods and was not deceived. Not that he did not often have to use his intuition as to their meaning; that was always the rule. But there was not much intuition needed with one of their messages. This is it, translated into the customary doggerel of a past century: When Jupiter th' extremity commands Of moist Aquarius, and Saturn stands In Virgo twenty-five, th' Imperial state Of high Constantius shall be closed by fate. Not what one would call brilliant poetry in English at any rate, but plain enough for Julian to make no mistake about its meaning. The time indicated was somewhere in the fall or winter of 360. That gave all summer to get the affairs of Gaul into order and to appoint civilian governors and officers over the province. Julian did this and then prepared to meet Constantius. The army of Welsh and Germans and Gauls that had been so bitterly upset when Constantius proposed to make them go East; the natives who had been under solemn contract that they should not be called upon to leave Gaul and their families; the men who had made Julian Emperor on purpose to avoid foreign service; were now the very men who enthusiastically followed him to the near East, to the Balkans, all along the Danubecountry to Constantinople itself. This fact shows what a magnetic power Julian had given him by the gods. His Gauls and Celts would follow him anywhere, over the edge of the world, if need be. When the time came, Julian crossed into Switzerland and marched to the sources of the Danube as far as the point where the river becomes navigable. With his usual wonderful resource and energy he sent on the rest of the army, while with three thousand picked men he embarked in boats and in the wonderfully short time of eleven days reached Sirmium, Mitrovitz, near Belgrade, as we may say. The gods were watching him and they gave him every advantage of wind and current. It was a wonderful passage. When the people in Sirmium were told that the Emperor had arrived, they were astonished. They could not understand how Constantius had come so far without being announced. When they found that the Emperor was not Constantius, but Julian, they were yet more astonished. From Gaul to Belgrade in eleven days was a marvel. The stay at Sirmium gave Julian an opportunity to consolidate matters. He received embassies and to his Welsh or Breton army he added soldiers he found at Sirmiurn,

together with legions from Hungary and Transylvania. With these he marched to Naisus or Nish, the birthplace of Constantine. That was some four hundred miles from Constantinople. Meanwhile, Constantius was making the usual autumn-retreat from Mesopotamia and was in the neighborhood of Antioch, on the way to meet Julian. The natural move to make would have been to take Constantinople before Constantius could arrive and then face him with the power thus gained from an admirable base. But Julian would not move without the assent of the gods. They told him to wait. Besides, there was the oracle to consider. It would all come right in the end, not a doubt of it. The time named came while Julian was at Naisus. True to the minute, a party of cavalry came riding from Constantinople to report that Constantius was dead and that the armies had decided to support Julian as Emperor. At once, as the gods directed, Julian marched for Constantinople. They had brought him near the capital so that when the moment came he could quickly enter the city and forestall any attempt of others to supplant him. He was received with joyful acclamations as a beloved fellow-citizen. Constantinople had been his birthplace. At once he made arrangements for the welfare of the city and the army; he gave them the privilege of electing a senate like that of Rome; he made a harbor to shelter ships from the south wind and an entrance to the port. He built a library to the Imperial portico and presented it with all his books. Then, having settled these affairs of the Empire, he prepared to carry on the Persian war. But not as Constantius had done, in a kind of tip-and-run manner. Quite the contrary. Julian was out to finish the war and to do it thoroughly, adding Persia to the Empire and opening the way to India. It was the old plan which Alexander had carried out badly. Someday it had to be done and the link formed between the living philosophy of the Himalayas and the peoples of the West. Julian thought that he was to do it. There was a Persian Prince in Constantinople, brother of the reigning King, Sapor. This was Ormazd or Hormisdas. When his father was king he had once entered a festivalhall where the great ones of the Persian Empire were celebrating a feast. They had received him good-humoredly but had not risen from their couches or seats. He was so incensed by what he considered a lack of respect that he threatened them with iron punishments when he should come to reign. So they arrested him and kept him captive, in chains, in a safe mountain-retreat. His wife sewed a file inside a fish and sent it to him for dinner after presenting the guards with a generous supply of wine. He was told to open the fish carefully and use what he found inside it. With the file he sawed through his chains and fled to Constantinople. Here he not only became the ally of Julian but was made general of one of the armies; the other was commanded by Victor. Antioch was of course the base from which the expeditions were always made into Mesopotamia and Persia. Here the armies marched and Julian with them. The people of Antioch loved pleasures and were cheerfully corrupt under the Constantines, as so many cities were. They expected Julian would encourage their idle and corrupt ways. But he had been initiated into the counsels of the gods. Could such a man willingly waste time and money in frivolity? The people invited him to the theater. He refused to stay all day - they had Methuselah-like plays in those days. Again, while at the

Hippodrome when the races and glove-fights were on and all was excitement and turmoil, he remained like a meditating statue of the Buddha considering the affairs of state and his duties. He seemed oblivious of the boxing and betting and racing. They were smart folk, clean-shaven dandies. Julian's beard offended them. They remembered how Constantius had called him 'that goat'! They insulted him. Did he let loose the soldiery and kill a few thousand Antiochenes, as any selfrespecting Emperor would do? Not a bit of it. He wrote a book. Sat up all night doing it, too. Against the Antiochenes? No, against himself! He called it 'Beard-hating.' Outdoing them in their foolish sarcasms at the expense of his beard, he turned the whole thing into a joke and killed it. Who could joke any more about his beard when he had done it himself, after the manner of a university-graduate of rhetoric who had the reputation of one who taught his own tutors before he had been at Athens three months. And then there was the sophist Libanius, who was the idol of Antioch. He was Julian's friend and admirer. Say what you like about the undignified proceeding, Julian's plan did the work. His plans always did; those who criticized him could hardly say the same about their plans. And there was no bloodshed and no hate to put to his debit. The children of the gods work in strange ways, but they get the work done. The grandest philosopher of modern times in Europe did precisely the same thing. Made fun of her own features and so disarmed the virulent shafts of her enemies without incurring the responsibility of harming them. But Julian was not at Antioch to write books. He was there to prepare for the conquest of the Road to India. He was a tremendous worker, up long before dawn and often at it late at night. Occasionally he would exhaust a few shorthand secretaries by writing a book in a night - and one full of information, too. He possessed the secret of directness and concentration. Others could not have written his books in weeks - they had not the knowledge at command. Besides the 'beard-hating' book, he had written magnificent orations to the Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, and to Ceres, the Mother of the Gods. You may call them mere pamphlets and criticize their statements, but the fact remains that they are the fruit of wonderful knowledge cautiously given out. To Julian, Mithras, the Unconquered Sun - the Christ-Sun, as the old Church-Fathers sometimes called it - was a very real Presence. Demeter, Ceres, Isis myrionymus, the Mother of the gods, the Divinity of the Eleusinia, was another. And she is a kind mother to her own children. She is the Virgin with the Wheat-ear, the Virgin-Mother of all antiquity, and much besides. Julian loved them both, the Mithras-Christ and the Virgin-Mother. For he knew them not as they were in 360 A.D. but as they had been in the period of their glory, centuries before the present era. But his business now was war; and he was ready. Did the Gods approve? ---------

IX. The Persian War Socrates the historian says that Julian was so imposed upon by the absurd notions of Pythagoras and Plato on Metensomatosis that he imagined himself to be possessed of Alexander's soul, or rather that he was Alexander himself in another body.

This Metensomatosis is Reincarnation pure and simple, just as it was taught in the early lodges of Paul and in the secret or semi-secret teachings. It was not absolutely secret, since so much that was made public was based upon it and its twin doctrine of the Balance, the Law that "As ye sow, so shall ye reap." For reincarnation and that alone makes it possible for a man to readjust the balance of good and bad which he created. He must suffer in a body for the bad and receive the benefit of the good in a body. But there were other ramifications and extensions of the simple doctrine which made it undesirable to discuss them much in public. It was possible to quote an old lawyer's question, "Did this man or his parents sin that he was born blind?" with a general and tacit acceptance or knowledge of the truth of Reincarnation. It was possible to have Solomon say, "I was a wise child and moreover good, and therefore I came into a body undefiled." It was possible to declare that John Hydranos, John the Baptist, was Elijah reincarnated. It was possible to assert that Jeshu should come again before his disciples were all in their graves. Paul wrote treatise after treatise and made speech after speech on the chief plank in all his public doctrine - Reincarnation. It was found convenient to disguise it slightly by calling it the Resurrection. But that was because of the precise difficulty that made it necessary to keep from saying much about it except in the lodges when close-tiled. It would be highly inconvenient to have the slaves and carpenters and bricklayers and cooks and barbers and less respectable people all knowing some of the finer ramifications of the doctrine, thereby possessing just enough knowledge to do immense harm, and not enough balance, or self-control, to avoid the dangers incident to a publication of the Mysteries. For instance, Paul knew perfectly well that when he talked of Reincarnation he was using mystery-language that has more than one meaning. Certainly the man reincarnates again and again until by his own efforts he is purified and can, after many, many lives on earth, 'reincarnate' or more accurately 'reimbody,' rebecoming the pure divinity from which he started out on his long journey for experience. Then there are the secrets of Reincarnation included in the medical assurance that a man's body after seven years has changed in every particle, and is the new outer case of the soul. There are other secrets included in this universal doctrine which we do not know, but can easily sense as to their existence. The country-bumpkin with his wife and family were all initiated - at a price - into the denatured Eleusinian mysteries of later date, before they perished entirely (a few years after Julian's time), just as the same good fellow is today baptized, with all his family; he saw the drama of reincarnation without in the least comprehending it. He could pay the fee and see how the master-hand of the divinity within raised the dead into a new and purified body without having the slightest idea of the lesson taught. The man next to him might see or go through the same drama and realize the wonderful story of the sun's annual death and reincarnation - or for that matter even the day-sun's journey through the twelve 'double-hours' of the day, his death and resurrection. He might grasp a little of the beautiful symbolism of the great Virgin-Mother who holds the mystery of bread - the staff of life - in her hand while her colleague Bacchus, Iacchos, manifests the mystery of the wine of divine life. But neither of them could ever penetrate the full depth of their divine significance. Nor could any priest, as such.

But there it was in its simple sense, obvious to the most simple mind. There was the reincarnation of the body symbolized first in the sun itself and then in the sun's protege, the wheat, year after year. And the harvest was intimately bound up in the whole thing. It was the inseparable symbol of Justice, of the Law of Recompense. You can see it all pictured beautifully in the Egyptian paintings. To the priest, the orthodox scientist, the antiquarian, these are beautiful scenes of farm-life in ancient Egypt. To the simple soul of more intuition and less learning they are the very essence of religious symbolism. This is why a common scribbler, a historian of a phase of history several centuries A.D., can jeer at the 'idiotic' doctrines of Pythagoras and Plato, and yet be regarded as an 'authority.' Yet what does it matter? Julian knew a thousand times more than any of such penmen. If the gods had revealed to him that he was Alexander in another body, there is nothing very strange about it. Certainly his life shows curious parallels with that of his prototype. Julian is a far greater Alexander. The latter, drunk and irresponsible, marched across Persia and almost opened the Road to India. He used the training of past lives to make himself an irresistible conqueror - until he met a much greater man, Chandragupta, who barred him from India. Alexander died at the age of thirty-three and is reported to have wept because he could find no more worlds to conquer. In the ordinary sense this is pure rubbish, because he had India and all China and much more beyond to attack. What he could not conquer was that kingdom whose conquest is greater than the taking of any earthly city - himself. He had not been initiated into the Mysteries and had not learnt to conquer himself in that great and only real war where he who conquers becomes divine, that war where the glorious victor learns to make himself 'as nothing in the eyes of men.' Julian had entered that glorious path of self-conquest and Julian was greater than Alexander, though less 'in the eyes of men.' Would he also die at the early age of thirtythree blazing the Road to India? Or would he burst through the obstacle created by the Law of Balance, Karman as they called it in Hindusthan? We shall see. It is unfortunate that when the gods are mentioned in these days there are few who have the least idea as to who and what they are. They are not great big people living in the air in a kind of irresponsible condition, where they can be propitiated by the smell of roast mutton from a Temple in Jerusalem or anywhere else. Not that roast mutton or pigeon-pie does not have its place in certain ceremonies connected with some of them, for all we know to the contrary. Nor are they a kind of half-silly, good-natured giants who do funny things for you if you only worry them enough with pleadings and placations. Whatever they are we may be sure that they obey natural laws as much as we do, and far more faithfully. That is enough for us, so far as concerns our story. If a man passes an open drain he usually gives it a wide berth. If he does not, then he must be so blunted in his finer nature that he comes very low down in the scale of intelligence. The law is just the same with the gods, both good and bad. When a man like Julian or Maximus purifies himself and his whole neighborhood with a lifetime of purity, then the finer gods will sometimes willingly communicate with him and help him. But fill their shrines with the refuse of the slaughterhouses and you will get no high god to penetrate the foul horrible atmosphere; you may get something like a psychic pariah to delight in a charnel-house, but that is about all. And if you fill the shrine and its neighborhood with the rotting remains

of quite ordinary sinning mortals (even though the newspapers call them 'saints'), you really cannot expect clean gods to visit the place. They have no desire to catch psychic typhoid! So it was that when Julian went to the shrine of the glorious Daphne Apollo near Antioch, there was no response from the bright and sunny god. His fane was shut and plundered. On the day of the great festival Julian went out to pay the honors as High Pontiff of the Roman Empire; and he found no vast crowd of joyous worshipers, no piping and dancing, no sacrifices, no processions, no priests, no honor. His own story is pathetic enough. This is what he writes: "In the tenth month, according to your reckoning - Loos, I think you call it - there is a festival founded by your forefathers in honor of this god, and it was your duty to be zealous in visiting Daphne. Accordingly I hastened thither from the Temple of Zeus Kasios, thinking that at Daphne, if anywhere, I should enjoy the sight of your wealth and public spirit. And I imagined in my own mind the sort of procession it would be, like a man seeing visions in a dream: beasts for sacrifice, libations, choruses in honor of the god, incense, and the youths of your city there surrounding the shrine, their souls adorned with all holiness and themselves attired in white and splendid raiment. But when I entered the shrine I found there no incense, not so much as a cake, not a single beast for sacrifice. For the moment I was amazed and thought that I was still outside the shrine and that you were waiting the signal from me, doing me that honor because I am supreme Pontiff. But when I began to inquire what sacrifice the city intended to offer to celebrate the annual festival in honor of the god, the priest answered, "I have brought with me from my own house a goose as an offering to the god; but the city, this time, has made no preparations." Then Julian spoke severely, in the Senate, to the people of Antioch, chiding them for their neglect of religion and their foolish support of the 'Atheists' - the common name for Christians or Galileans. "Every one of you," he said, "allows his wife to carry everything out of his house to the Galileans, and when your wives feed the poor at your expense they inspire great admiration for godlessness in those who are in need of such bounty - and of such sort, I think, are the majority of mankind." He tells them how they waste money and luxuries in dinners, but will not give an ounce of olive oil for religious purposes. Julian restored the Temple of Apollo at Daphne, but he solemnly calls the mighty Helios to witness that when he entered that temple the god gave him a definite sign that he had left the shrine. And why had Apollo forsaken his holiest shrine? Because there was a 'tomb of the godless' built right in front of it; otherwise a 'Christian' Church. The glorious Apollo Daphneus was forced to leave his shrine, the bones of Babylas, a Bishop of Antioch, having been buried there to desecrate it. The Christians boasted of this. But Julian was a servant of the gods, and therefore merely directed that the body be removed, reverently, to Antioch. This was done on October 22, 362 A.D., and that very night the Christians burned the restored Temple of Apollo! This is what Zosimus writes: "When the winter was past, having collected his forces and sent them before him in the usual manner of marching, he (Julian) departed from Antioch, though without

encouragement from the oracle. The reason of this failure it is in my power to explain, yet I pass it over in silence." How could he have said more? Probably for the first time in his life as an Initiate Julian undertook a great step without the gods. Even his Master, Maximus the Ephesian, was unable to tell him whether to go forward or hold his hand. It is the way the Law works; it is Karman; it is intelligent 'Fate.' -------On the March If you draw a great triangle with Antioch pointing north at the northeast corner of the Mediterranean, the base some distance to the west of Alexandria on the African coast, and its other end at the mouths of the Euphrates and Tigris at the head of the Persian Gulf, you may say in a rough sort of way that the Euphrates occupies the whole of the right hand side of the triangle. And much more than that, for the great river has its beginning in the Armenian Mountains far to the north and towards the Black Sea. But we are not concerned with this magnificent watercourse until it passes within a hundred miles or so of Antioch to the east of that great city - the third or fourth city in the Western world. The tremendous deserts to the south are avoided by cutting straight across to the east until you come to the river, passing through Beroea (Aleppo) and Hierapolis. When you have come to Hierapolis you may say that you have reached the river, because it is already in the fertile belt which stretches all the way down from the Mesopotamian border to the Persian Gulf. Mesopotamia is simply the Greek word for 'between the rivers' (Euphrates and Tigris), and as soon as you are over the Euphrates you are in Mesopotamia, since the Tigris runs north in a rough parallel to the more western river. The Romans had long ago obtained power over the countries between Mesopotamia and Antioch and also had Armenia in their interests. They were also joined by some of the great warriors of the North and West, the terrible Goths. Julian's army of 83,000 took five days to reach Hierapolis, about twenty miles west of the Euphrates. The country far to the east was still Roman, but the whole trouble was that it was constantly being attacked by the Persians under the great Sapor, and the Romans were able to send only punitive forces, which did little more than reassert the Roman suzerainty. There were Roman cities which held off the Persians when they could, though sometimes they were taken and destroyed and the Roman garrison led away into captivity. Julian's plan was to stop all this by aiming at the heart of Persia, far to the south, where were Ctesiphon and Seleucia and Babylon. If he could punish these cities then he need never fear that the Persians would again raid the Roman sphere of influence; they would be afraid. Whether Julian knew it was in the plan, or thought it was, to push on to India, history will never know; only the secret records of the oracles and the gods can decide the point. Julian was a true soldier, just as he was an expert at everything he undertook, both because he had the gods behind him and willingly followed their indications, and because he had the Initiate's power of concentration on the work in hand. Where another would have gone straight east somewhere towards Nineveh and in a direct line for India - just as Alexander did - he only pretended to go. As soon as it seemed plain to the Persians that

he had left the Euphrates behind and was making straight for the Tigris, he suddenly turned at a sharp angle to the southward and picked up his flotilla of provisions and supplies at the point where he again came to the Euphrates. He had left Antioch on March 5th, 363. By March 27th he had rejoined his flotilla on the Euphrates. But the eastward movement was not entirely abandoned. A strong detachment under Sebastian, formerly Duke or Governor of Egypt, and of Procopius, a relative of Julian and his probable heir, were sent on to Nisibis and ordered to hold the irregulars in check. Then, having more or less reduced that part of the country to order and put it under the care of his ally, Arsaces the King of Armenia, they were to march south and join him for the important part of the campaign. At Callinicum where he rejoined his flotilla, Julian celebrated the feast of DemeterCeres the Mother of the Gods, the patroness of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Going down the Euphrates the Romans reached Circensium, say half way to Babylon, after about 350 miles of marching from Antioch. This was almost the last garrison in Roman territory and the real campaign was about to begin. Constantius had played at this war for several years, never attaining any real success; and Julian found out one of the reasons. While still in Roman territory he saw long trains of camels tied head to tail as is the custom to tie them to this day. "What are they carrying?" he asked. "Wine!" he was told. "The best wine of every country and all the means for making its use as pleasant as possible. There's nothing like doing the thing in style!" "Isn't there?" asked the Emperor. "They seem to have forgotten that this is war, not a picnic. The only wine a soldier should drink is that which he loots from the enemy and wins by his sword. Send it all back! I myself am a soldier and I will have just the same diet as the rest!" There was no answer to such an argument, and the wine was restored to its cellars. All luxury was cut off. But the baggage-animals were not stinted. It was early spring and the grass grew lush by the riverside; the animals reveled in its freshness. The first engagement was a good omen for the Romans. They came to an island where the Chaboras joins the Euphrates and here there was a fort to be taken. When the garrison saw the surrounding hills covered with armed men they opened the gates and gave themselves up, going to live in Roman territory. This first capture provided so much in the way of good things that the Roman army lived as well as in a town for several days. The next fort was an island so built around with a wall that there was not even foothold outside the wall. Julian did not stop to waste time over it, but pushed on, remarking that he would come back and take it when he was ready. Arrived in the land of the Assyrians, the Romans had all the provisions they required. It was a rich country, full of palms and abundant crops and vines. The small towns found everywhere were unable to put up any resistance. Julian could not prevent the army from drinking the wine they looted, but they did not drink to excess. They remembered that one man who became drunk was promptly executed. The Assyrians watched them from the surrounding hills helpless to withstand them.

The Euphrates was much like the Nile. The spring showers in the Armenian hills melted the snows of winter and the river swelled enormously. Dykes and canals were led everywhere over the surrounding land and the crops rivaled those of the Egyptian river. Seeing that the Romans must keep to the river, the Assyrians opened all the dykes and flooded the country. The water was a serious obstacle even on the flat, but the innumerable dykes and canals made sudden dips which meant marching breast high or as high as the chin, and at times the water covered the heads of the advancing soldiers. Those who could swim were in their element. Like a lot of schoolboys they raced each other to see who could go farthest in the shortest time. But those who could not swim had to make the best of it, bridging the canals and trying to keep to the raised paths under water, often falling off and having to be hauled out; officers were rescued by their servants, servants by their officers. They made fun of the whole thing; they could do nothing else, for even the Emperor himself shared their difficulties and, as was his way, laughed at every trouble. Another - say Constantius - would not have hesitated to make the men stand in the water and hold boards on their heads so that he could cross dryshod. But Julian was not like that. There was a job to be done and he did it in the shortest and most direct way. His gorgeous purple robe - the insignia of his Imperial office, he could not lay down. So with it on he just plunged through mud and slime and water, showing the purple robe all stained. How could any of the army make difficulties of the passage with such an example to follow? Very few men were lost in the floods which the Assyrians made. But Julian no longer troubled about small castles and forts. They were not so many miles now from the heart of the country, where the rivers approach one another very closely before finally joining, a little below Babylon. On the Euphrates was the city of Pyrisapor, named after the reigning King, Sapor. East of this city, a few miles away on the Tigris, were the cities of Ctesiphon and Seleucia; once these were taken. Persia would be almost at the mercy of the Romans. Pyrisapor had been built with one wall within another, one town inside another. On the assault the defenders retreated to the inner town, as being more strongly fortified. Many of the Romans were killed by arrows from the walls, but persevering, the rest raised mounds level with the top of the inner wall and took the place. Terms were agreed upon: that the townsfolk should not be given back to the Persians even when peace was made. They had fought as well as they could, but even so, the Persians would have treated them as they treated all who surrendered - they would have flayed them alive. And they didn't want to be flayed alive. They preferred to join the Romans. Julian was rough-and-ready and democratic, but he was a disciplinarian for all that. The cavalry appointed to protect the advance had been very troublesome. Three times they had threatened mutiny (they didn't call it 'striking' in those days,) if they did not get a bonus in preference to the rest of the army. And on top of that they 'lost' their captain instead of following him into the thick of the fray. It was cowardice. Julian was unarmed and he had only three of his guards with him. But he went into the midst of these turbulent cavalry and picked out ten men whom he ordered to dismount instantly. Then he delivered them over to the executioners as a punishment for their desertion of their officer.

The country was rich and there was plenty of food. They discovered many women and children hidden in cellars and caves and underground-passages. The captives in fact, numbered more than the Roman army; yet there was abundance of food for all. More floods remained to be encountered. Some advised moving out into the desert and marching on dry land. Julian would have none of it. It might be difficult to go through the floods, but the whole army might face death from thirst if they went out into the desert. They would go on as they had done before. Julian was a bookworm, but a practical one. He dug out of his baggage a copy of Plutarch and showed the advisers how Crassus had led his men to certain ruin doing exactly the same thing. They had no more to say. And as if he had been under the guidance of the gods, the palm-trees soon became plentiful and there was abundance of wood for making bridges. The soldier-boys treated the whole thing as a game. While some were going over the planks, others dived into the flood and raced them swimming. The floods had proved a failure as defense. There was a fortress that seemed impregnable. It was on a precipitous island, and the walls were built as part of the cliffs, of burnt brick cemented with asphalt, very strong. There was a small space by the riverside where grew tall and thick reeds, covering the entrance to a passage which led up into the rock. From this the Persians sallied out and one day nearly caught the Emperor; he only escaped after a hand-to-hand fight. So sure were the Persians that they were safe that they jeered at the Romans from the walls and insulted them in every way. The Romans made a little bridge from the bank to the island. Then under cover of their coracles, made of hide, they attacked the cliff by mining. The arrows and stones showered on them from the walls and could not penetrate the upturned boats under which they were working. Even fire would not touch them. The Persians knew that their castle was being mined but they did not believe it possible for the Romans to succeed. They dined and drank and made merry in their lofty nest. But the Romans had no wine; they burrowed and worked unceasingly. The mine was as wide and as tall as a man. The first Roman that emerged from the hole came out at midnight in the middle of a tower; he was unobserved by the garrison. One followed after another, and silencing a woman they found sleeping with a little child, they soon occupied the doors of the towers. Then they signalled their companions below to shout. The Roman victory was complete. The garrison were killed as they jumped out of bed and ran about the place wondering what had happened. Many of them threw themselves over the wall and were killed that way; others were thrown over by the Romans; the rising sun looked upon a scene of horror. It was all against the Emperor's orders, but the soldiers remembered those of their companions who had been killed with arrows and in other ways and it was impossible to restrain them. The Unconquered Sun, the Emperor's patron, had not been intended to look upon such a sight at his rising. Finally the castle was destroyed to the last brick. It was a lesson to the Persians. They now believed that the Romans were invincible, while the Romans knew they were. The Emperor Julian, always doing great things and thinking them trifles, this time really thought that he had done something worth while. "There! That will give Syrian Libanius, the famous Sophist of Antioch, something to make a speech about," was what he said. He was right. His own annals have perished, and it is Libanius who has told us the story.

After this even the baggage-porters went out and captured Persian towns; the inhabitants were so afraid of the Romans. The plan was to punish the Persians so severely that they should no longer dare to attack the Roman-occupied territory every year as they had been doing under the inefficient Constantius. Therefore every town was plundered, and all that could not be used or carried away was thrown into the river or burnt. A magnificent palace belonging to the Persian King was burnt and all in it destroyed; buildings, gardens, trees, shrubs, flowers, tapestries, all were demolished. Attached was a magnificent park full of game; wild boars were kept there for the chase. The Romans had exciting days catching and roasting them. Forty-five miles from Babylon the Roman army came to the neighborhood of Seleucia and Ctesiphon on the Tigris, the twin cities. These were the goal of their ambition. There was a great difficulty. The junction of the rivers was some way to the south. The Romans were on the Euphrates. If they crossed to the cities by land they would have to abandon their flotilla. If they went down the river they could not easily get back up the Tigris-branch against the stream. Julian was always ready for every situation. Again his books served him well. A couple of prisoners were caught, an old man and a youth. They were questioned about a canal that had once united the Euphrates and Tigris between the place where they were and the cities of Seleucia and Ctesiphon. The young man told all he knew, not knowing the object of this archaeological inquiry. The old man suspected, but answered fully because he saw no way of avoiding it. He realized at once that Julian knew perfectly well what he was talking about, but he did not know that Julian had found it in his beloved books. "Yes, there was a canal there in ancient times," the old man said. "But now it is filled up, and the part near the river here is sown with corn where the dam was made across it." "At the nod of the Commander-in-chief," says the chronicler, "the obstruction was removed." The Euphrates ran into the canal and its own bed was drained dry. The flotilla went down the canal with the army marching alongside. The waters of the Euphrates so swelled the volume of the Tigris that the inhabitants of the cities were alarmed, thinking their walls would be overwhelmed. The Persian army was forced to face the Romans. The Romans could not have retreated had they wanted to; all was desolation behind them, and they were in the corner where the canal joins the Tigris. The best of the Persians were facing them; they had "shining shields, and neighing horses, with bent bows, and the huge bodies of elephants to which it is the same thing to walk through stalks of corn as it is to go through the midst of legions in battle-array." Another Persian army was in the background behind another river and the situation looked serious for the Romans. What did Julian do? He just made a race-course and turned the place into a sort of Newmarket. Prizes were given for the winners and the betting was fast and furious. The Persians did not know what to make of it. Here were the Romans celebrating the victory they had not yet won, just as if they were sure to beat the enemy, though the latter was far stronger and better placed. It gave the Persians a creepy feeling to see the calm confidence of this Roman. Nothing seemed to daunt or stop him.

Meanwhile the guards in the boats were disembarked under the pretext of examining the rowlocks and oars. In reality the plan was to have the boats ready for the soldiers to embark instantly and cross the Tigris into the undevastated land beyond. But Julian was cautious. If he told his plans only at the last minute, it was obvious that spies could do him little harm in giving the enemy notice of his movements. After the feast to the officers, Julian took them aside and told them the plan. The general who had most of the army under him objected to it. The height of the opposite river-bank, and the multitude of the enemy, made the thing seem altogether too hazardous. Julian dismissed him and told another to carry on with the scheme. "You will be successful," he said. "But not without a wound; you will be wounded in the back of the hand and it will need little doctoring." Who and what was this wonderful leader of theirs to prophesy in that way? Just 1050 years or so later Joan of Arc was to do exactly the same thing. Were they both merely guessing? Were their predictions mere coincidences, or were the 'gods' behind both of them? The fighting men were already in the boats; Julian stood looking steadfastly up into heaven for The Sign; as soon as he perceived it he gave the signal to the tribunes and they passed the word with all possible secrecy to the rest. They sailed, they landed, and were received with a shower of arrows and stones. The river bank was enough to make the greatest general next to Julian afraid in the daytime; now it was night. In time of peace, with no opposition, men encumbered with arms would not have attempted the ascent of the bank. Now there were the enemy in face of them; they were loaded with armor; and yet they mounted the bank. How they did it, the gods alone knew; they themselves could not explain it. The Romans cut their way through the enemy and attacked their camp, where the sleeping Persians were slain. They were helpless before the onrush of the Romans. Six thousand Persians were killed. But the children of the gods must ever suffer for the shortcomings of men and their desires. Ctesiphon - Persia - was in the hands of the Romans that night. If the latter had only gone to the gates and burst their way into the city.... But the men stayed to rob the dead of their gold and silver and horses. By dawn the opportunity had passed. Who knows what the future of the whole world would have been if those men had despised their personal desires and had done what their leader told them? But the soldiers knew better. Hence the trouble. It is always so. Still, looked at from the temporary point of view, the Roman success was so great that it hardly occurred to them to think that they could have done better. The King, Sapor, sent to Julian to beg for a truce that would end the war then and there, on condition that Sapor should become the friend and ally of Julian and Rome. One of the nobles in the Persian mission sought out Hormisdas, the King's brother, who was with the Romans, and, clasping his knees in supplication, begged him to take part in the petition to the Emperor. Hormisdas gladly did so, thinking he was the bearer of excellent tidings. With a happy smile he told Julian what he had been asked. To his surprise Julian ordered him to keep silence and to send his Persian visitor away without saying a word to anyone except that the interview was simply on account of the relationship between Sapor and Hormisdas.

Julian was not prepared to end the war and he was fearful lest the word 'peace' should leak out among the soldiers and so blunt their energy and courage. Then Julian went to the walls of Ctesiphon and taunted the Persians with behaving like women within the walls instead of coming out to fight. The Persians replied that Julian must seek out the king, who was elsewhere on campaign, and show himself to the latter. Julian was willing enough; he wanted to see and pass through Arbela, where Alexander had broken the power of Darius. "Julian wanted to be celebrated in song as much as Alexander had been!" So the report ran. Any tale is good enough for gossips; and Julian was not telling anyone what his full plans were. In a general way it was known that he wanted to go right through Persia and a little beyond, just as Alexander had done. And then.... Ah, well.... India is very big. But the faithless Armenian King Arsaces failed him, and his own twenty-thousand men detached for work with Arsaces in the north failed to arrive in time. This army had had some of its men shot at by the Persians while bathing in the Tigris, so they stopped to fight these guerrillas instead of pursuing the big plan and obeying orders. Besides, their generals were always quarreling and delaying, exactly as Constantius had taught them, and this inaction bred cowardice in the rank and file. A loss of twenty thousand men of his own eighty thousand, besides the defection of the Armenian army, was a serious matter. Julian was in a grave dilemma. But his courage was unabated. He would go on to India. He burnt his boats. In the first place, it would have taken half the army to tow them up against the powerful currents of the Tigris. Then many men would have reported 'sick' and would have had to go in the boats. But with all the boats burnt, the men dared not go sick, whether as malingerers or not. Fifteen boats had at first been saved for bridge-making, but even these were destroyed after it was seen how difficult it would be to take them; half the time the strong currents would take the boat and the soldiers in it into the hands of the Persians. Actually this burning of boats was to the gain of the Romans and the loss of the Persians. The army marched along the Tigris, keeping the river on the left; the country was even more fertile and rich than the other bank, the western side, so that they took more captives and had no shortage of provisions for all. Julian's plan for marching eastward from Ctesiphon had to be given up. The officers under him, like those of Alexander nearly seven centuries before, were very reluctant to go; they wished to retreat. The army could not retrace its steps because of the desolation behind them. Even if they could have done so the boats were burnt; if they had not been burnt they would have made the upstream voyage a tremendous drag on the Romans. Going north along the bank of the Tigris, or at least in the cultivated area, there was a chance of retrieving the fatal failure of Procopius and the Armenians to join the main army in the south. Even if they could find Procopius in the neighborhood of the Roman territory to the north, there was still a chance to go East from Nisibis and Arbela, as Alexander had done. There were difficulties by the way. The main host of the Persian army under Sapor suddenly gave sign of its presence one day in a distant cloud of dust on the horizon. From that moment there were engagements and skirmishes all the time. The Persians were like Cossacks, famous for their horsemanship. It was said in half jest that they could not walk, having lived and slept all their lives on horseback. Their most effective method of attack

was like that of the Parthians - that of dashing up to the enemy and then retreating, but shooting arrows behind them as they went. They were experts at this mode of warfare. Sapor offered a huge reward for any man who should kill Julian, and the Persians were all the time on the alert. Julian was everywhere where most needed, encouraging, helping, planning. One day there was a cry that the rearguard was attacked by the Persians. Snatching a shield, but otherwise unarmed, he galloped to help the defense. Then there was a counter-cry that the van was being attacked also. Hurrying back, Julian showed himself everywhere, rallying his men, leading them, preventing panic. The Persians gave way and Julian was the first to pursue them and to endeavor to unite the broken Roman line. In the heat of the action the combatants raised a cloud of dust and a sharp spear was thrown; it cut Julian's arm and pierced his side. Julian fell and was put on a shield. There was no camp: the enemy had been too troublesome, and the Romans were on the march. But a tent was quickly pitched and here the beloved of the old gods lingered on until midnight, when he died. His was the death of an Initiate, of one who has glimpsed the life of the gods. Calm and self-possessed, he made all preparations. Only once did his fortitude break down. Asking after the welfare of the Master of the Offices, his friend Anatolius, the excellent Sallust replied that he was among the blest - that he was dead. Julian wept, - not for himself but for his friend. Julian was dead, but the old Maximus survived him after, as they say, seeing him die. The Roman debacle was complete. Jovian, a plain but popular soldier, was made Emperor. Julian would not name a successor because he foresaw that it would spell trouble from the wretched politicals. Julian had gone to help his men with but one attendant. In the cloud of dust the opportunity had arisen and it was a treacherous 'Christian' hand that killed him. The proof was plain, if for no other reason than that no Persian claimed the huge reward for killing the wearer of the purple. There were those who suspected and, indeed, knew who had done the deed; but they preferred to remain silent, as did Julian himself, if he knew. The Road to India was closed with Julian; not to be opened for fourteen or fifteen centuries, when perhaps Julian himself, who (they said) had been Alexander, would perhaps prepare and open the way or do his part, in yet another body, in opening it. Who knows? These servants of the gods do their work from life to life, now resplendent in history, now obscure. They know little of the fruits of their work, perhaps, but they are ever servants of the Great Law and its executors. There was nothing for it but for the Romans to go back to Antioch as soon as they could with a whole skin - they took little else. Jovian gave up cities and provinces to the Persians and the wonder was that Sapor stopped where he did in his demands. He must have been astonished at his own moderation. The treaty once made, both sides observed it rigidly. The Romans reached Antioch with the body of Julian, where the first messenger bearing the terrible news was nearly killed. It was as though he had announced the destruction of a god. Other messengers in other places were killed! The Roman army arrived in rags. A few saved a boot or so, carrying it over their shoulders. The man who had half a broken spear was in luck; the man who saved a bit of a sword was a hero.

It is a story of glorious possibilities and shining opportunities. But the cloud of spiritual and material darkness was settling slowly down over the West, and the gods were forced to abandon their ancient shrines. Much, very much, of the symbolism and machinery of the glorious King Helios, Mithras the Unconquered Sun, and of the Magna et Bona Dea, the Mother of the gods, was imbodied in the eclectic religions of Europe and in other cults. Initiates of the Mysteries had sacrificed themselves in order to carry with them some shreds of the old religions as seed for the future renaissance, the reimbodiment of the worship of the gods, disguising them as parts of a new cult; the emasculated Mysteries finally died out in Europe and darkness settled over the West. The Unconquered Sun was near his setting. But Julian's efforts were not wasted. He would reincarnate as a champion of toleration and pure worship again and again, in other cults, in other lands, and also in the same lands, without a doubt. There was to be one more and final effort to keep the Light burning in the Temples of the Old Gods, and only one, before the curtain fell, not to rise again for fourteen centuries. It was the effort and sacrifice of the glorious martyr of Alexandria, Hypatia, fifty years later. --------

X. The Correspondence of a Philosopher Julian was an indefatigable correspondent. He wrote late at night and he was up in the morning hours before others, writing, studying, thinking, working. With the shorthand-writers he got through an enormous amount of correspondence and literary labor. Without them he was still a giant of the desk. Several times he sat up all night to begin and end a 'book' which reads like no mere ephemeral journalism but is just as interesting today as it was when written in the sixties of the fourth century A.D. Much of his correspondence has been preserved and it is interesting to read, as showing the mind of the man in that age. Always he had before him the welfare of his people, the pursuit of true philosophy, the honor of the philosophers, and, above all, the duties of an initiate of the mysteries of the Sovereign Sun and the Virgin-Mother of the Gods. Writing to Priscus, who was with him in Gaul and Constantinople and in Persia, he says: "I swear by him who is the giver and preserver of all my good fortune that I desire to live only that I may in some degree be of use to you. When I say 'you' I mean the true philosophers, and convinced as I am that you are one of these, how much I have loved and love you, you well know, and how I desire to see you. May divine Providence preserve you in health for many a year, my dearest and best beloved brother! .... " To the same Priscus he writes in another letter: "I entreat you not to let Theodorus and his followers deafen you, too, by their assertions that Iamblichus, that truly godlike man who ranks next to Pythagoras and Plato,

was worldly and self-seeking. But if it be rash to declare my own opinion to you, I may reasonably expect you to excuse me, as one excuses those who are carried away by a divine frenzy. You are yourself an ardent admirer of Iamblichus for his philosophy, and of his namesake for his Theosophy. And I too think, like Apollodorus, that the rest are not worth mentioning compared with those two." In a letter to Oribasius, Julian mentions the "excellent Sallust." The word used is Chreston Saloustion (Crhston Saloustion), an example of the use of the word Chrest and the possibility of the double meaning so beloved of the Greek philosophers. Here it just means for the ordinary reader that Sallust was a good man. But for a philosopher who wished to show discreetly that the man of whom he speaks was a struggling devotee of the Mysteries on his way to becoming a Christos rather than a Chrestos, the same word could have been used without any profane being the wiser. The point may not seem to be important, but the confusion arising in the last fifteen hundred years through the failure to understand the distinction between the two words - it was meant to be confusing to outsiders - has caused untold misery to the European world. "It is better to do one's duty for a brief time honestly than for a long time dishonestly," is one of Julian's maxims, which had its eventual application in his own life. In another letter to Priscus, as in several, there is the phrase kai idia cheiri (kai idia ceiri) "Added with his own hand." This reminds one of the same phrase with Paul, three hundred years before Julian, who calls attention to his big lettering, as if the malady from which he suffered was an affection of the sight. Many have thought it was so. The custom of writing an autograph postscript seems to have conveyed some special compliment to the addressee. In a letter to the wise and great Maximus of Ephesus Julian lets himself go. "Everything crowds into my mind at once and chokes my utterance, as one thought refuses to let another precede it, whether you please to class such symptoms among psychic troubles, or to give them some other name.... Directly after I had been made Emperor - against my will, as the gods know, and this I made evident then and there in every way possible - I led the army against the barbarians...." He speaks of coming to Besancon. "It is a little town that has lately been restored, but in ancient times it was a large city adorned with costly temples, and was fortified by a strong wall and further by the nature of the place; for it is encircled by the river Doubis. It rises up like a rocky cliff in the sea, inaccessible, I might almost say, to the very birds, except in those places where the river as it flows round it throws out what one may call beaches, that lie in front of it. Near this city there came to meet me a certain man who looked like a Cynic with his long cloak and staff. When I caught sight of him in the distance I imagined that he was none other than yourself...." Evidently Maximus wore the regulation cloak and staff and long hair of the philosophers.

It is difficult for one who has never known a true philosopher to imagine the eagerness and anxiety Julian felt on behalf of his friend Maximus. He is so anxious that he continually "inquires of the gods" as to Maximus; at the same time he cannot do it personally because of that very anxiety being likely to upset the ceremonies, and he is obliged to do it through others. He speaks plainly to the old philosopher: "I worship the gods openly," he says, "and the whole mass of the troops who are returning with me worship the gods. I sacrifice oxen in public. I have offered to the gods many hecatombs as thank-offerings. The gods command me to restore their worship in its utmost purity, and I obey them, yes, and with a good will. For they promise me great rewards for my labors if I am not remiss...." Julian is under the constant guidance and protection of the gods so long as he does what they tell him. A man in such circumstances rarely mentions the fact; some never do, and it is better so. But with Julian there are often reasons why he should do so. The mission in which he was their apostle; the fact that he is often writing to friends who understand his own position with regard to them; the necessity for witnesses to their power; his own modesty - all are reasons why he should occasionally mention the help he receives from those powers which he and others call 'the gods.' When at Nish Julian heard of the death of Constantius and his own consequent clear path to the Imperatorship. He writes to his uncle Julian: "I am alive by the grace of the gods and have been freed from the necessity of either suffering or inflicting irreparable ill. But the Sun, whom of all the gods I besought most earnestly to assist me, and sovereign Zeus also, bear me witness that never for a moment did I wish to slay Constantius, but rather I wished the contrary. Why then did I come? Because the gods expressly ordered me, and promised me safety if I obeyed them, but if I stayed, what I pray no god may do to me! Furthermore, I came because, having been declared a public enemy. I meant to frighten him merely, and that our quarrel should result in intercourse on more friendly terms; but if we should have to decide the issue by battle, I meant to entrust the whole to fortune and to the gods, and so await whatever their clemency might decide." Julian's love for the old Maximus is well expressed in a letter written from Constantinople in 361 or early in 362. "There is a tradition that Alexander of Macedon used to sleep with Homer's poems under his pillow, in order that by night as well as by day he might busy himself with his martial writings. But I sleep with your letters as though they were healing drugs of some sort, and I do not cease to read them constantly as though they were newly written and had only just come into my hands. Therefore if you are willing to furnish me with intercourse by means of letters, as a semblance of your own society, write, and do not cease to do so continually. Or rather come, with the help of the gods, and consider that while you are away I cannot be said to be alive, except in so far as I am able to read what you have written."

When the decision was no longer in the balance and Constantius was dead, Julian has no severe words against his murderous and deadly enemy. "Suffer me to say," he writes to Hermogenes, ex-prefect of Egypt, in the language of the poetical rhetoricians, "oh how little hope I had of safety! Oh how little hope had I of hearing that you had escaped the three-headed hydra! Zeus be my witness that I do not mean my brother Constantius - nay, he was what he was - but the wild beasts who surrounded him and cast their baleful eyes on all men; for they made him even harsher than he was by nature, though on his own account he was by no means of a mild disposition, although he seemed so to many. But since he is one of the blessed dead, may the earth lie lightly on him, as the saying is! ...." In a letter to Aetius he shows how Constantius had treated the Athanasian Christians. Aetius became a bishop later, though an extreme Arian and even repudiated by the milder Arians. He says: "I have remitted their sentence of exile for all in common who were banished in whatever fashion by Constantius of blessed memory, on account of the folly of the Galilaeans. But in your case, I not only remit your exile, but also, since I am mindful of our old acquaintance and intercourse, I invite you to come to me. You will use a public conveyance as far as my headquarters, and one extra horse." George ('Saint George for Merrie England'!) had been responsible for the exile of Zeno, a famous physician, from Alexandria, and Julian says that if his exile were owing to George, then the sentence of exile was unjust. George of Alexandria was a Cappadocian bishop whose lawless activities caused him to be torn to pieces by the mob of Alexandria on December 24, 361. Julian declares: "As for curses from the gods, men in days of old used to utter them and write them, but I do not think that this was well done; for there is no evidence at all that the gods themselves devised those curses. And besides, we ought to be the ministers of prayers, not curses. Therefore I believe and join my prayers to yours that after earnest supplication to the gods you may obtain pardon for your errors.... " He makes the penalty very mild. Simply the official is to be cut off from all that may have to do with priests for three months, and then if he has shown good behavior in the interval he may be again received. It is well known that the best men of the new church were pagans who had been forced to become bishops. In the case of Synesius, the friend and disciple of Hypatia some forty years after this date, he had consented only on condition that he should retain his beliefs distinct from those of the church! In fact, there was really nothing to prevent a priest of the old gods who knew anything from becoming a bishop of the new cult, any more than there is in binding an old book in a new binding. But what was objectionable

was the claim of the exotericists of the new cult to possess the inner truths, their intolerance and, above all, their political activities. Julian, writing to a priest of Pegasius, says: "I should never have favored Pegasius unhesitatingly if I had not had clear proofs that even in former days, when he had the title of Bishop of the Galilaeans, he was wise enough to revere and honor the gods. This I do not report to you on hearsay from men whose words are always adapted to their personal dislikes and friendships, for much current gossip of this sort about him has reached me, and the gods know that I once thought I ought to detest him above all other depraved persons. "But when I was summoned to his headquarters by Constantius of blessed memory, I was traveling by this route, and after rising at early dawn I came from Troas to Ilios about the middle of the morning. Pegasius came to meet me, as I wished to explore the city - this was my excuse for visiting the temples - and he was my guide and showed me all the sights. So now let me tell you what he did and said, and from it one may guess that he was not lacking in right sentiments towards the gods. "Hector has a hero's shrine there and his bronze statue stands in a tiny little temple. Opposite this they have set up a figure of the great Achilles in the unroofed court. If you have seen the spot you will certainly recognise my description of it. You can learn from the guides the story that accounts for the fact that the great Achilles was set up opposite to him and takes up the whole of the unroofed court. Now I found that the altars were still alight, I might almost say still blazing, and that the statue of Hector had been anointed till it shone. So I looked at Pegasius and said: 'What does this mean? Do the people of Ilios offer sacrifices?' This was to test him cautiously to find out his own views. He replied: 'Is it not natural that they should worship a brave man who was their own citizen, just as we worship the martyrs?' Now the analogy was far from sound; but his point of view and intentions were those of a man of culture, if you consider the times in which we then lived. Observe what followed. 'Let us go,' said he, 'to the shrine of Athene of Ilios.' Thereupon with the greatest eagerness he led me there and opened the temple, and as though he were producing evidence he showed me all the statues in perfect preservation, nor did he behave at all as those impious men do usually, I mean when they make the sign on their impious foreheads, nor did he hiss to himself as they do. For these two things are the quintessence of their theology, to hiss at demons and make the sign of the cross on their foreheads. "These are the two things I promised to tell you. But a third occurs to me which I think I must not fail to mention. This same Pegasius went with me to the temple of Achilles as well and showed me the tomb in good repair; yet I had been informed that this also had been pulled to pieces by him. But he approached it with great reverence; I saw this with my own eyes. And I have heard from those who are now his enemies that he also used to offer prayers to Helios and worship him in secret. Would you not have accepted me as a witness even if I had been merely a private citizen? Of each man's attitude towards the gods who could be more trustworthy witnesses than the gods themselves? Should I have appointed Pegasius a priest if I had had any evidence of impiety towards the gods on his part? And if in those past days, whether because he was ambitious for power, or, as he has often asserted to me, he clad himself in rags in order to save the temples of the gods, and only pretended to be irreligious so far as the name of the thing went indeed, it is clear

that he never injured any temple anywhere except for what amounted to a few stones, and that was as a blind, that he might be able to save the rest - well, then, we are taking this into account and are we not ashamed to behave to him as Aphobius did, and as the Galilaeans all pray to see him treated? If you care at all for my wishes you will honor not him only but any others who are converted, in order that they may the more readily heed me when I summon them to good works, and those others may have less cause to rejoice. But if we drive away those who come to us of their own free will, no one will be ready to heed us when we summon." In a letter to the High-Priest Theodorus, Julian says: "It means much that we have the same guide, and I am sure you remember him." Possibly this shows that Theodorus was also a pupil of Maximus. In this letter he says: "For I certainly am not one of those who believe that the soul perishes before the body or along with it, nor do I believe any human being, but only the gods; since it is likely that they alone have the most perfect knowledge of these matters, if indeed we ought to use the word 'likely' of what is inevitably true; since it is fitting for men to conjecture about such matters, but the gods must have complete knowledge.... "When I saw that there is among us great indifference about the gods, and that all reverence for the heavenly powers has been driven out by impure and vulgar luxury, I always secretly lamented this state of things. For I saw that those whose minds were turned to the doctrines of the Jewish religion are so ardent in their belief that they would choose to die for it, and to endure utter want and starvation rather than taste pork or [the flesh of] any other animal that has been strangled or had the life squeezed out of it; whereas we are in such a state of apathy about religious matters that we have forgotten the customs of our forefathers, and therefore we actually do not know whether any such rule has ever been prescribed. But these Jews are in part god-fearing, seeing that they revere a god who is truly most powerful and most good and governs this world of sense, and, as I well know, is worshiped by us also under other names. They act as is right and seemly, in my opinion, if they do not transgress the laws; but in this one thing they err: while reserving their deepest devotion for their own god, they do not conciliate the other gods also; but the other gods they think have been allotted to us Gentiles only. To such a pitch of folly have they been brought by their barbaric conceit. But those who belong to the impious sect of the Galilaeans, as if some disease.... " (The end of the sentence is lost, having probably been cut out by some Christian hand.) The brutal murder of George, "that impious man," in Alexandria by the populace in a religious frenzy against him, provokes a severe rebuke in another letter. Certainly they had been much provoked by 'Saint George,' who exasperated against them the Emperor Constantius, and brought an army into the holy city, when the general in command, who was more afraid of him than of Constantius, plundered and despoiled the sacred edifices and treasures. Upon the people protesting, the general sent soldiers against them in

support of George, "the enemy of the gods." The citizens of Alexandria tore George in pieces as dogs tear a wolf. Julian admits that they could justly argue that he deserved it, and adds that he deserved more than that, but the citizens had no right to take the law into mob-hands. Speaking of the power of Christian propaganda he observes that: "It is their benevolence to strangers, their care for the graves of the dead, and the pretended holiness of their lives that have done most to increase atheism [i.e., the kind of Christianity that was in vogue in those days]. I believe that we ought really and truly to practise every one of these virtues." He says the priests in all Galatia must do so, in his letter to Arsacius the High-Priest, when giving instructions as to the conduct of the priests. Julian made ample provision for hospitality to strangers in Galatia. He says: "It is disgraceful that when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galileans support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us.... Teach those of the Hellenic faith to contribute to public service of this sort, and the Hellenic villages to offer their first fruits to the gods; and accustom those who love the Hellenic religion to these good works by teaching them that this was our practice of old...." There is an interesting letter to Ecdicius, the Prefect of Egypt, bidding him secure the library of the assassinated George, who, if a political turbulent rascal, was yet a scholar. Julian writes: "Some men have a passion for horses, others for birds, others, again, for wild beasts; but I, from childhood, have been penetrated by a passionate longing to acquire books. It would therefore be absurd if I should suffer these to be appropriated by men whose inordinate desire for wealth, gold alone cannot satiate, and who unscrupulously design to steal these also. Do you therefore grant me this personal favor, that all the books which belonged to George be sought out. For there were in his house many on philosophy, and many on rhetoric; many also on the teachings of the impious Galileans. These latter I should wish to be utterly annihilated, but for fear that along with them more useful works may be destroyed by mistake; let all these also be sought for with the greatest care. Let George's secretary take charge of this search for you, and if he hunts for them faithfully let him know that he will obtain his freedom as a reward, but that if he prove in any way whatever dishonest in the business he will be put to the test of torture. And I know what books George had, many of them, at any rate, if not all; for he lent me some of them to copy, when I was in Cappadocia, and these he received back." Athanasius was always a trouble. He was permitted to return to Alexandria and promptly assumed that he was thereby allowed to take power in the church there. Writing an edict to the Alexandrians, Julian says: "We have not even now granted to the Galileans, who were exiled by Constantius of blessed memory, to return to their churches, but only to their own countries. Yet I learn

that the most audacious Athanasius, elated by his accustomed insolence, has again seized what is called among them the episcopal throne, and that this is not a little displeasing to the God-fearing citizens of Alexandria. Wherefore we publicly warn him to depart from the city forthwith, on the very day that he shall receive this letter of our clemency. But if he remain within the city, we publicly warn him that he will receive a much greater and more severe punishment." A letter to Evagrius beautifully describes the peaceful estate given to Julian by his grandmother. We have quoted it elsewhere. In a letter to Basil he says: "We, though we refute and criticize one another with appropriate frankness, whenever it is necessary, love one another as much as the most devoted friends." Basil is to use the state-post and stay as long as he likes, being furnished with an escort when he chooses to leave. This Basil afterwards became a Father of the Church, famous in church history. He had been at Athens-university with Julian. Writing to his Uncle Julian, the Emperor says: "Renounce all feeling of anger, trust all to justice, submitting your ears to his words with complete confidence in the right. Yet I do not deny that what he wrote to you was annoying and full of every kind of insolence and arrogance; but you must put up with it. For it becomes a good and great-souled man to make no counter-charge when he is maligned." This advice is given "concerning the affair of Lauricius," of which there is no further history. Much has been made of Julian's Rescript on Christian Teachers. He forbids them to teach what they do not believe, like hypocrites and dishonest men. If they despise the gods why do they expound their works as given through Homer, Hesiod, Demosthenes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Isocrates, and Lysias? Did not these men think they were consecrated, some to Hermes, others to the Muses? Either let them not teach what they do not think admirable, or tell their pupils that none of these writers whom they expound is really guilty of the impiety, folly, and error in regard to the gods of which they are always accusing them. They make money from these works. They thereby confess that they are most shamefully greedy of gain, and that for the sake of a few drachmae they would put up with anything. He says: "It is true that, until now, there were many excuses for not attending the temples, and the terror that threatened on all sides absolved men for concealing the truest beliefs about the gods.... If they think that those writers were in error, let them betake themselves to the churches of the Galileans and expound Matthew and Luke.... "For religious and secular teachers let there be a general ordinance to this effect: Any youth who wishes to attend the schools is not excluded; nor indeed would it be reasonable to shut out from the best way boys who are still too ignorant to know which way to turn, and to overawe them into being led against their will to the beliefs of their ancestors. Though indeed it might be proper to cure these, even against their will, as one cures the insane, except that we concede indulgence to all for this sort of disease. For we ought, I think, to teach, but not punish, the demented."

There is another reference to George's library in a letter to Porphyrius: "The library of George was very large and complete and contained philosophers of every school and many historians, especially among these being numerous books of all kinds by the Galileans. Do you therefore make a thorough search for the whole library without exception and take care to send it to Antioch. You may be sure that you will yourself incur the severest penalty if you do not trace it with all diligence, and do not by every kind of inquiry, by every kind of sworn testimony, and further, by torture of the slaves, compel, if you cannot persuade, those who are in any way suspected of having stolen any of the books to bring them all forth. Farewell." To the citizens of Byzacium Julian writes: "I have restored to you all your senators and councilors whether they have abandoned themselves to the superstition of the Galileans or have devised some other method of escaping from the senate, and have excepted only those who have filled public offices in the capital." The Christians used to become clerics in order to avoid public duties. Constantine made them immune. Valentinian restored their privileges in 364. The Arians in Edessa were to forfeit church-funds so as to help them to go to heaven and teach them to behave. "Since by their most admirable law they are bidden to sell all that they have and give to the poor, so that they may attain more easily to the kingdom of the skies, in order to aid those persons in that effort, I have ordered that all their funds, namely, those that belong to the church of the people of Edessa, are to be taken over that they may be given to the soldiers, and that its property be confiscated to my private purse. This is in order that poverty may teach them to behave properly and that they may not be deprived of that heavenly kingdom for which they still hope." Speaking to Ecdicius, Prefect of Egypt, of "that enemy of the gods," Athanasius, he says: "Infamous man! He has had the audacity to baptize Greek women of rank during my reign! Let him be driven forth!" There is a letter to the citizens of Bostra which gives a very true picture of the turbulent politicals who had attached themselves to the Christians as a political party of revolutionaries and brought such a bad name on the genuine religious Christians. "I thought that the leaders of the Galileans would be more grateful to me than to my predecessor in the administration of the Empire. For in his reign it happened to the majority of them to be sent into exile, prosecuted, and cast into prison, and, moreover, many whole communities of those who are called 'heretics' were actually butchered, as at Samosata and Cyzicus, in Paphlagonia, Bithynia, and Galatia; and among many other tribes also villages were sacked and completely devastated, hereas, during my reign the contrary has happened. For those who have been exiled have had their exile remitted, and those whose property was confiscated have, by a law of mine, received permission to

recover all their possessions. Yet they have reached such a pitch of raving madness and folly that they are exasperated because they are not allowed to behave like tyrants or to persist in the conduct in which they at one time indulged against one another, and afterwards carried on towards us who revered the gods. They therefore leave no stone unturned, and have the audacity to incite the populace to disorder and revolt, whereby they both act with impiety towards the gods and disobey my edicts, humane though these are. At least I do not allow a single one of them to be dragged against his will to worship at the altars; nay, I proclaim in so many words that, if any man of his own free will choose to take part in our lustral rites and libations, he ought first of all to offer sacrifices of purification and supplicate the gods that avert evil. So far am I from ever having wished or intended that anyone of those sacrilegious men should take part in the sacrifices that we most revere, until he has purified his soul by supplications to the gods, and his body by the purifications that are customary. "It is, at any rate, evident that the populace who have been led into error by those who are called 'clerics,' are in revolt because this license has been taken from them. For those who have till now behaved like tyrants are not content that they are not punished for their former crimes, but, longing for the power they had before, because they are no longer allowed to sit as judges and draw up wills, and appropriate the inheritances of other men and assign everything to themselves, they pull every string of disorder, and, as the proverb says, lead fire through a pipe to fire, and dare to add even greater crimes to their former wickedness by leading on the populace to disunion. Therefore I have decided to proclaim to all communities of citizens, by means of this edict, and to make known to all, that they must not join in the feuds of the clerics or be induced by them to take stones in their hands or disobey those in authority; but they may hold meetings for as long as they please and may offer on their own behalf the prayers to which they are accustomed; that, on the other hand, if the clerics try to induce them to take sides on their behalf in quarrels, they must no longer consent to do so, if they would escape punishment. "I have been led to make this proclamation to the city of Bostra in particular because their bishop Titus and the clerics, in the reports that they have issued, have made accusations against their own adherents, giving the impression that, when the populace were on the point of breaking the peace, they themselves admonished them not to cause sedition. Indeed, I have subjoined to this my decree the very words which he dared to write in his report: "Although the Christians are a match for the Hellenes in numbers, they are restrained by our admonition that no one disturb the peace in any place." For these are the very words of the bishop about you. You see how he says that your good behavior was not of your own choice, since, as he at any rate alleged, you were restrained against your will by adimonitions! Therefore, of your own free will, seize your accuser and expel him from the city, but do you, the populace, live in agreement with one another and let no man be quarrelsome or act unjustly. Neither let those of you who have strayed from the truth outrage those who worship the gods duly and justly, according to the beliefs that have been handed down to us from time immemorial; nor let those of you who worship the gods outrage or plunder the houses of those who have strayed rather from ignorance than of set purpose. It is by reason that we ought to persuade and instruct men, not by blows, or insults, or bodily violence. Wherefore again and often I admonish those who are zealous for the true religion not to injure the communities of the Galileans or attack or insult them. Nay, we ought rather to pity than hate men who in matters of the greatest importance are

in such evil case. (For in very truth the greatest of all blessings is reverence for the gods, as, on the other hand, irreverence is the greatest of all evils. It follows that those who have turned aside from the gods to corpses and relics pay this as their penalty.) Since we suffer in sympathy with those who are afflicted by disease, but rejoice with those who are being released and set free by the aid of the gods. Given at Antioch on the First of August (362)." In a letter to the Alexandrians, Julian mentions that he walked the 'way' of the Christians until his twentieth year. He speaks of the Noetic Sun, and the visible Sun and the 'living image' of Helios, showing that the genuine sun-worshipers did not revere the physical sun, but the same Christ-Sun as the genuine nonpolitical Christians of early times. Athanasius has been reported to him as a clever rascal. Previously he had been banished from Alexandria for his political activities; now having shown himself more active therein than ever he is banished from all Egypt. Julian shows his desire to promote the cause of music by arranging to maintain a number of choir-boys with special educational facilities for those who show exceptional aptitude. There is an interesting letter to the Jews in which Julian speaks of restoring the Temple at Jerusalem. He was never antagonistic to the Jews. He says: "Those who are in all respects free from care should rejoice with their whole hearts and offer their suppliant prayers on behalf of my imperial office to Mighty God, even to him who is able to direct my reign to the noblest ends according to my purpose. This you ought to do in order that, when I have successfully concluded the war with Persia, I may rebuild by my own efforts the sacred city of Jerusalem, which for so many years you have longed to see inhabited, and may bring settlers there, and together with you, glorify the Most High God therein." In a letter to Photinus, Julian speaks of God entering the womb in a material sense as an impossible consideration. In directing that funerals should take place only at night, Julian adduces among other considerations that death is rest; therefore, since the night is appropriate to rest, funerals should then take place. Among the other reasons are that a man going to the temple meeting a funeral must purify himself and not enter the temple. Also, if heard or seen, a funeral disturbs the temple-services. Those who know what is right in such matters do not approve of funerals taking place until after the tenth hour of the day (4 p.m.). He said little about the impurity of funerals connexion with temple-rites of real religion, but it was well known that the oracles were ruined by the burial of Christian corpses and bones in the churches or temples or near them. No pure oracle could approach such a charnelhouse. Shortly before the commencement of the Persian campaign, Julian wrote to Arsaces the king of Armenia a very severe letter, anticipating his failure to support him (Julian). Julian speaks plainly of the possibility of his dying or being killed on the campaign, but points out that Arsaces will gain nothing by deserting him, because he will in due time be crushed by the Persians if he fails. Actually Arsaces, as Julian anticipated, did

treacherously desert him and thereby ensured the failure of the campaign so far as such desertion could do it. In another letter, Julian speaks in open language of the Invisible Sun, showing that, as we have already said, the physical Sun is worshiped only by exotericists as a symbol of the real Sun. Perhaps it is the protest of an initiate against a too-open revelation of mysteries that prompts Julian to say of Paul that "he surpassed all the magicians of every place and time," and also that he changed about with every condition like a polypus changing to match the rocks. Julian speaks of the "godlike Iamblichus." He speaks of Christianity - the blatant political fanaticism of the day, not the real Christianity, - as a disease. Undoubtedly he was right, for such political frenzy on a nominal religious basis is truly a mental disease. Even on campaign he writes: "As for the number of letters I have signed, and papers, - for these, too, follow me everywhere like my shadow...." He tells of the curious superstition or test of the German mothers who float their new-born babies on the Rhine. If they sink, it is a proof of their illegitimacy. If they float, it is a sign of their true birth. Also possibly it was a test of hardiness. A baby that could survive such an ordeal would surely be physically strong! Lydus says that Julian wrote to the Jews: "For I am rebuilding with all zeal the temple of the Most High God." This may contain the usual double entendre used by initiates and mystics the world over. For Julian was so rebuilding the temple in his own heart most actively. But the reference to the Most High God points to El Elion of the Jews, who is of course the same as the Helios of the Greeks, in his true character. The Christian Bishops invented classics to take the place of the Greek classical literature. Julian says of these: "Egnwn, anegnwn, kategnwn, "I recognised, I read, I condemned." He speaks of the barley-beer or wine of the Celts as not being nearly so good as the Italian wine. Apparently whisky and beer date back at least fifteen hundred years among the Celts. To the Christians claiming adherence to the Jewish Old Testament, Julian very aptly quotes Exodus, xxii, 28, "Thou shalt not revile the gods." The politicals cared so little for anything but their selfish schemes that they paid no attention to such precepts of the law. Real Christians did not 'revile the gods,' but then they kept themselves very much to themselves, as they always had done, in order to avoid the self-seekers. Julian quotes 1 Corinthians, vi, 6, 8, 9-11, for the class of men who became Galileans: "But brother goeth to law with brother, and that before the unbelievers, .... ye do wrong, and defraud, and that your brethren.... "Be not deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolators, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you...." ---------

XI. Aftermath The new Emperor, Jovian, reigned only seven months. After burying the body of Julian at Tarsus, he went on towards Constantinople, and soon died. The excellent Sallust was chosen Emperor to succeed him. But he, wise man, declared that he was too old for such a responsibility. His son, then? No, he was too young. Finally the army decided on Valentinian, a great soldier but illiterate. He accepted. Within a month Valentinian made his brother Valens co-Emperor. Valens was given the Eastern Empire while Valentinian ruled Europe. In reality, Valens was hardly fitted for the position. He had not been brought up as a soldier or an organizer and was a far weaker character than his brother. But the strangest part of the combination was that Valentinian was an orthodox Athanasian Christian, while Valens was an Arian, parties always ready to cut each other's throats figuratively when not actually. The Athanasian chroniclers are naturally severe in their condemnation of the cruelty of Valens towards the Athanasians - it is not easy to hew history to its due proportions when written by factionists - but probably there was something in their complaint. Both Athanasians and Arians were men of their time, cruel to each other when opportunity arose. But both were 'Christians' and thus both persecuted the adherents of the old gods when they thought it desirable. There is a curious tale told. From the genuine oracles of the greater gods there were innumerable degrees of divination down to the merest catch-penny predictions with no gods back of them at all. The average chronicler had no means of knowing just what oracles were reliable and which were mere hocus-pocus. All he knew was that sometimes they were remarkable. As told by one who was neither a partisan nor too credulous, the tale runs that at Antioch there was an imperial notary named Theodorus, a man of reputation, birth, and education, but young. A band of designing men persuaded him that they were men of great learning and experts in divination and prediction. To ascertain who should succeed Valens in the Empire, they erected a tripod of divination which was to reveal in a secret manner what should happen in the future. The letters T h e o d soon appeared in the tripod and this was of course read to mean that Theodorus was to become Emperor after Valens. Theodorus became so involved in these follies that he continually ran after jugglers and sorcerers, consulting them as to the future. Finally he was denounced to the Emperor and duly punished. Oddly enough, in 379, Theodosius became Emperor of the East after Valens, and as far as it went the oracle was amply justified. But the incident, small in itself, led the way to a great oppression. Fortunatianus, the Emperor's Treasurer, ordered a soldier to be punished with the lash for practising sorcery. To save himself, the soldier accused others as his accomplices, whether they were so or not. Some of these were not subject to the Treasurer's jurisdiction and the case was taken before Moderatus, the Prefect of the Court. The Emperor was extremely incensed, suspecting all the most celebrated philosophers and men of learning, also some of the most distinguished men at court, of conspiracy against himself. Probably since Valentinian was illiterate, his brother Valens was also, and this anger may well have been partly due to jealousy of more learned men than himself. Also, without doubt, there was sectarian fanaticism in it.

Being himself immune, the soldier accused people right and left, as did other informers. All the accused were imprisoned until the jailers declared that the cells would hold no more. The country roads were thronged with marching convoys of the accused until they resembled the congested streets of great cities. Their money, their property, their lives, were taken. The Christian Emperor's treasury grew fat on the proceeds. The wives, children, and dependents of the philosophers were left destitute. "The first philosopher of note who suffered was Maximus, the next was Hilarius of Phrygia, who had interpreted clearly some obscure oracles; after these, Simonides, Patricius the Lydian, and Andronicus of Caria, who were all men of extensive learning, and condemned more through envy than with any shadow of justice." The bitterest accusation against Maximus was that he had been given monetary support by Julian. "A universal confusion was occasioned by these proceedings, which prevailed to such a degree that the informers, together with the rabble, would enter without control into the house of any person, pillage it of all they could find, and deliver the wretched proprietor to those who were appointed as executioners without suffering him to plead in his own justification. The leader of these wretches was a man named Festus, whom the Emperor, knowing his expertness in every species of cruelty, sent into Asia as Proconsul, that no person of learning might remain alive, and that his design might be accomplished. Festus therefore, leaving no place unsearched, killed all whom he found, without form of trial, and compelled the remainder to fly from their country." Meanwhile the Age of the Fathers was fashioning and crystallizing and petrifying Western theology into the form which was to carry it down for the next fifteen centuries. Jerome, Augustine, Basil - the college friend of Julian - Gregory Nazianzen, Ambrose, John Chrysostom, to say nothing of Athanasius and even Cyril, all are names that write themselves large on the screen of ecclesiastical history of the half-century. Of these only one interests us at the moment; Gregory of Nazianzus. We have met him as a young man at Athens University in the company of Basil and Julian. If the first characteristic of Basil was that he was a man of gentlemanly manners, Gregory's was that of a rather sour blusterer who often carried his point in argument by his own prescription of 'words.' He even went so far as to make this a compliment to the second person of the Trinity who, as an abstraction, was called the 'Word.' But Gregory's words, though often convincing to his ignorant audiences on the spur of the moment, had no backbone, no heart, no base. He was very much the type of a park tub-thumper who convinces more by the torrent of his verbiage than by his reasoning. "There is nothing so well calculated to deceive the people as verbiage," Gregory is said to have written to a friend. In another place he says, "It is well-fitting for us to return thanks to God in behalf of words." After Julian's death, this Gregory thought it incumbent on him to attack the dead lion in a long wordy invective, which for centuries was regarded by partisans of one or the other as either seriously damaging, or a monument of reasoning, according to the point of view. In fact, it is neither; it is an excellent specimen, a hundred and twenty pages long, of the

jugglery of words, full of sound and fury, meaning nothing. You can read diligently through the whole wilderness of words and find hardly half-a-dozen lines worthy of serious attention in the light of their avowed purpose, vilification of Julian. However, Gregory's harangue does give a few sidelights on the manner of man he himself was and, by inference, on the deep ignorance of his audience. He appeals to the soul of the Great Constantius - a soul washed in the blood of most of his own family and a sprinkling of others' for good weight - though Gregory discreetly omits that. Gregory actually declares that Constantius ought to have murdered the baby Julian with the rest, and lest his audience should think he is only speaking rhetorically he repeats the pious sentiment more than once. As a specimen of a preacher's argument of the day we can see how he speaks of the way in which Julian actually made some of the Christians restore what they had stolen from the destroyed temples. He talks of this as "submitting with joy to the robbery of their possessions" - this, fittingly enough, on the same page where he declares himself to be a master of words. The fact is, try as they might, neither Gregory nor Julian's bitterest enemies could find any accusation of evil or oppression against the latter. Gregory says so. It is an interminable harangue, this Invective against Julian. But in the torrent of words Gregory manages to wrap up some very foul calumnies in such a way as to convince his hearers and yet leave a loophole for his own escape, if challenged, by dragging in rumor and gossip. He goes so far as to say that Julian's oracles of the coming death of Constantius were not foreknowledge but knowledge, that Julian had arranged to poison Constantius on that date, through a trusty hand! Unfortunately for the argument the idea was not original. It was dangerous to Gregory's cause to suggest such a thing so soon after the death of Arius and the triumph of Athanasius; or was it the old trick of loudly accusing your enemy of doing what you yourself have done or are about to do? The Athanasians had not thought of producing an oracle previous to the death of Arius, in agony in the market-place of Constantinople - they had no oracles. But it would have been a good alibi if they had. Therefore when Julian does so, it is a proof of his cheating. Gregory is positively dishonest in his political bias. He is obliged to mention the awful persecution of his own sect, the Athanasians, by Constantius, who favored the Arians. So he used the term "He vexed us a little"! A man who can so denature history is not to be trusted in anything said against a man he unreasonably hates. He even goes so far as to say that the Christian God was behind all the acts and deeds of Constantius! Gregory's oratory carries him away into saying that Constantius had Julian caught in a net between his forces and then, "Alas for our wickedness! In the very middle of his march (Constantius) closes his mortal career, after offering many excuses to God and man for his misplaced humanity and having set an example to all Christians by his zeal of affection for the Faith!" This touching picture of Constantius praying for forgiveness for not having murdered the baby Julian with the rest did not seem to strike the congregation as peculiar in any way. C. W. King, the eminent translator of this sermon, says that in reality the dying Emperor, caring for nothing but his infant daughter and wife, publicly declared Julian his heir and successor, assured of their safety under his protection.

The Mithraic initiation is quoted against Julian as a terrible dealing with demons under the guidance of Maximus, who, by the way was quite as much of a saint as Gregory, and in the opinion of many, much more so. Julian is represented as quailing before the demons he challenged in the Mithraic cave and successfully making the sign of the cross to drive them away before facing them a second time. There is a curious suggestion in this garbled account of what was an inviolable secret. (How did Gregory know about it? His excuse of popular rumor will not hold water for the moment.) This is the Mithraic form of what was in another derived Mystery called the Temptation in the Wilderness, such as all chrests or neophytes had to pass through. And the talisman of the cross was used in the Mysteries thousands of years ago. Did Gregory know if this symbol was used in this particular connexion? The Labarum with its "In hoc signo vinces" - was it part of this ceremony, or only of others? Certainly the Labarum differs from the later adopted Roman cross, but so does the early Christian swastika-cross derived from India. There is extant a picture from a Roman catacomb showing a grave-digger who wears on his cloak the swastika as the Christian cross. This is one of the very earliest Christian representations of the cross. Gregory either knows too much or too little. He describes Julian as being reborn in the Mysteries as a magician and therefore wicked, forgetting that his own ritual describes the physical birth of an Initiate as being honored by the holy magicians - or in the Latin form of the word, magi. The pious trust of Gregory in the power of words - verbiage - leads him very far towards treating his audiences as possessing no intelligence whatever. He brings up Julian's greatest crime against the political Christians. He will not make martyrs of them, thus depriving them of the greatest source of publicity! Let them suffer by being forbidden to speak, (Gregory himself would have burst if he had been muzzled for long!) but let them not have the honor of doing so. This was the wicked Julian's cruel device. Well, if Gregory could drag in no worse accusation than that, it seems regrettable that he should waste breath and ink in a hundred and twenty pages of pious vituperation! Incidentally there was a very real grievance for some in Julian's refusing to make martyrs of certain of the worst of the anarchists. There were among them ignorant fanatics who really believed that if they could insult all law and authority and order, and behave in an impossible way against public interest, they had only to call themselves 'Christians' before being put out of the way to earn eternal glory and a martyr's crown and the honors they could never attain on earth. Their courage was more admirable than their ignorance. To these insane seditionists it was a real hardship to find that they could in no way get themselves 'martyred'! We do not refer of course to the few real martyrs who did suffer for their genuine religious opinions at other times, but merely to these fanatics of the middle fourth century who could not have given the remotest definition of what Christianity was, to save their lives. King remarks pertinently that this in itself is an admission that is quite "sufficient to disprove the existence of any persecution for religion's sake. Julian's grand offense in the preacher's eyes was the depriving the Christians of the power of persecuting others of different views, of which they had fully availed themselves during the twenty-four years of the reign of Constantius."

A curious accusation is that Julian in his tyranny "attacks our religion in a very rascally and ungenerous way, and introduces into his persecution the traps and snares concealed in arguments!" The plea is illuminating as showing that the ignorant did not so much mind martyrdom - it was a cheap way, as they themselves said, of earning eternal life and honor, and Julian, the brute, would not confer it on them! but the rascally and ungenerous use of arguments was like a foul blow in a prize-fight, because, they held, the Christians could not stand up against reason! When Julian became Emperor some of the vilest politicals were tried by a military court, and punished by the court as they deserved. Gregory is injudicious enough to complain that these brutes were executed because they were Christians. Why, some of them were the very ones who during the reign of Constantius had bitterly persecuted the Christians of Gregory's own party! And Julian had nothing to do with their condemnation. But so eager is Gregory against Julian that he forgets himself like this many times. The 'christians' were fortunate to be relieved of such court-pests - unless they were politicals of precisely the same kidney, which in truth some of them were. While trying to blame Julian for dismissing Christians from office in the state, Gregory carelessly shows that Julian did nothing of the sort, not for religious reasons, in any case. To make an argument, Gregory declares that there were many Christians in office and high station whom Julian kept there in the hope of some day subtilly converting them to the gods! The preacher sneers at Julian's marching on foot with his armies, his eating whatever food was available, his doing everything for himself, and in the same breath rhetorically calls upon him to admire the unwashed feet and general filthiness of the holy Christian ascetics. This was not meant to be a funny argument, but quite serious, and one wonders what the congregation who heard this wild discourse were like? Their general unwashedness is described as superiority to things below, a being above things human, the plea of many who disbelieve in soap. Gregory says nothing of it here, but actually there was a real 'philosophical' argument behind this aversion. The idea was that when Christians had undergone the ancient Jewish rite of baptism they were washed clean of all sin and everything else, and it was thereafter an insult to the Deity to wash their bodies or faces! So far was this carried that the greatest authority of the day, or a few years later, accounts for the shearing of nuns' tresses as being a convenience to enable them to scratch more easily, since they must not wash! Gregory is quite indifferent to consistency when he can raise an argument. Glorifying words, he does not hesitate to claim it as a great virtue when he describes some of his party inventing sufferings for themselves and then keeping silent about them. King notes a curious giving-away of his case when Gregory says: "That thing, however, was very bad and ill-natured in him when, not being able to persuade us openly, and being ashamed to force us like a tyrant he.... forced us with gentleness!" According to the curious rhetorical custom of the time, Gregory never once actually names Julian. A great case was made of the setting-up of statues and pictures of the gods and those of the Emperor. By this means the common soldier's salute was said to be a

cunning device to make them honor the gods. But the noisy agitators were quite unable to show that more than a very few even noticed this. The congregation listening to all this stuff without protest must have been appallingly ignorant to swallow it; unless they had mostly gone home to dinner after a few hours of it, weary of the non-stop sermon, and leaving the remainder asleep and unattentive. The customary salute of the soldiers at the Emperor's distribution of bounty seemed to offer even better ground for noisy agitation. Some one in a brilliant moment remembered the test for Christians in the days of the Diocletian persecution. They had to throw a few grains of incense on the burning tripod; the mild Roman officials were satisfied with even a motion pretending to do it in the case of ordinary fairly decent befooled citizens; soldiers had even been known to shove the trembling ignorant Christian's arm, so as to save his life, by pretending that he had thrown the pinch of incense on the altar of his own accord. But now the same ceremony was merely the ordinary Imperial salute and meant nothing more. The Emperor sat on his throne, with the tripod before him and the master of ceremonies close by. The soldier took the bounty and at the same time threw a pinch of incense on the fire; the soldier thought no more of it than he did of saluting the Emperor in any other way, except that he was the more pleased to do it seeing that he was receiving a valuable cash-present at the same time from the Emperor's hands. The Emperor had been generous and the soldiers did as soldiers do, went home and 'treated' their comrades to a good dinner. This is what Gregory says of the way the subtil agitators improved the occasion to spread disaffection. "After the meal, when the drinking had advanced as far as the customary cold draught, they, as though no harm had happened, invoked the name of Christ over the bowl containing the liquor, casting their eyes upwards with the sign of the Cross." This is an extraordinary picture of the degradation of the Mysteries into publicity. Julian knew well what the Christ was and is, and realizing such things how could he do otherwise than as he did - keep reverent silence over the mystery, even if for so doing he was accused of being anti-Christian by those who knew nothing whatever of the mystery and almost nothing of the name, except its sound. Gregory continues: "Some of their messmates, wondering at it, said: 'What means this? Do ye mention Christ, after renouncing him?' 'How have we renounced him?' reply they, half-dead with fright [Gregory loves to make his audience shiver!] and, 'What is this strange news we hear?' On his reply, 'You have thrown incense on the fire,' and informing them that was the renunciation, immediately, leaping up from the banquet, like men out of their senses and frantic, boiling with zeal and fury [and wine?] they rushed through the grand square, shouting out and calling, 'We are Christians! Christians in our souls! Let every man hear it, and God above all, unto whom we live and will die! We have not been false to thee, O Savior Christ; we have not denied the blessed Confession; if the hand has erred at all, the conscience has not gone with it. We have been cunningly entrapped by the Emperor; we have not turned traitors for gold. We cast off the impiety; we cleanse ourselves with our blood!' Then, running up to the Emperor, they cried out very boldly, 'We have not received gifts, O Emperor, but have been condemned to death; we have not been

summoned for honor, but have been sentenced to disgrace. Grant a favor to thy own soldiers: sacrifice us to Christ, of whom alone we are the subjects; give us fire instead of the fire; make ashes of us instead of those ashes; cut off the hands which we so wickedly extended; the feet with which we so wickedly ran. Honor with thy gold others that will not repent of having taken it; Christ suffices us, whom we have in the place of all things.' Saying these things all with one voice, they also exhorted the rest to understand the fraud, to recover from their intoxication, to make excuse to Christ with their blood. The Emperor was exasperated at this, but avoided putting them to death openly, that he might not make martyrs of them - they who, as far as depended on themselves at least, were true martyrs; he sentenced them to banishment and so took his revenge on them, thereby conferring on them the greatest benefit, that they should be stationed at a distance from his stratagems." Thus Gregory. Assuming for the purpose of argument that what he says is truer than the rest, this gives a very strange picture of the times. Imagine such a scene in any army today among soldiers who had well dined! Comment is unnecessary. But one has suspicions that their comrades would have done peculiar things to the agitators in the privacy of the barracks. They wouldn't let an Emperor treat the agitators so good-naturedly and gently. The savage bent of Gregory's mind is shown by his detailed and most rhetorical account of the torture of the aged Marcus by the mob of the Arethusians. This Marcus had destroyed their temple when he was protected by Constantius, and they were unable to stop him. The mob in Julian's time, overwhelmed with hatred of this plundering fellow, sought him out and demanded replacement of the Temple and its treasures at a high figure. Marcus, true to the principles of those who wanted 'martyrdom' and a cheap purchase of eternal happiness, refused to pay a penny. The mob came down and down in their demands almost to nothing, but the old man would not give a single coin. Bystanders even offered to pay the small final demands of the outraged and robbed people, but Marcus would not allow it. So they gave him what any other mob less exasperated would have given him. They let their fury loose upon him, and the things they did are not nice to repeat. But Gregory is delighted with the opportunity this gives him for saying that Julian, the persecutor who would not persecute, was responsible for the old man's torments. Then as a crowning argument - they certainly did learn funny logic at the University of Athens - Gregory declares that Marcus thoroughly deserved what he got for having saved Julian when a baby from the massacre set on foot by Constantius! It was in fact a serious crime against 'Christ' not to have murdered Julian when he had arrived at the mature age of six! Again we are tempted to see in the listening congregation a crowd of devotees compared with whom the most unwashed Hyde-Park crowd are pillars of deportment and monuments of learning. Perhaps this comparison really is no exaggeration. As the interminable sermon proceeds, the preacher waxes less logical than ever. He declares vehemently that Julian meditated persecutions against the Christians which not even Diocletian, nor Maximian, nor Maximin, ever dreamed of; terrible, unspeakable things, if there could be anything more terrible than those persecutions really were. Well, what are these super-terrible things? Just this; Julian intended to deprive the Christians of all freedom of speech (sermons of a hundred and twenty pages long on nothing at all

were to be prohibited, presumably!) Gregory had this terrible thing reported by spies in the palace. The Christians were to be excluded from all meetings, markets, and public assemblies, nay, even from the law-courts! The very idea leaves this particular wordmonger foaming at the mouth. And he quotes Julian's justification for these harsh measures, compared to which mere death was nothing: a pleasure, in fact. Julian says: "That it is part of our religion neither to resist injury nor to go to law, nor to possess anything at all, nor to consider anything one's own; but to live in the other world, and to despise things present as though they were not; neither is it lawful for any one to return evil for evil, but when they are smitten on the one cheek to turn the other also to the smiter, and to be stripped of the coat after the cloak." And perhaps he will add, "to pray for those that injured them, and wish well to their persecutors." Says Gregory, "'Tis very true he could not help knowing all this - he that once was a Reader of the divine oracles, was a candidate for the honor of the great pulpit, and used to glorify the Martyrs by the gift of churches and of consecrated lands!" Then wisely he runs off into a lot of red-herring talk calculated to relieve him of the necessity of arguing away Julian's logic; there is a wistful suggestion that it seems a pity that Julian knew about these once-Christian precepts and virtues. Julian is so absurd as to expect the Christians not to be politicals and agitators and office-seekers, but merely religious people! Julian's preliminary plans are quoted by the preacher Gregory as though they were stolen from his own party. "He also, having the same design, was intending to establish schools in every town, with pulpits and higher and lower rows of benches, for lectures and expositions of the heathen doctrines, both of such as give rules of morality and those that treat of abstruse subjects; also a form of prayer alternately pronounced, and penance for those that sinned proportionate to the offense; initiation also, and completion, and other things that evidently belong to our constitution. He was purposing also to build inns and hospices for pilgrims, monasteries for men, convents for virgins, places for meditation, and to establish a system of charity for the relief of prisoners, and also that which is conducted by means of letters of recommendation by which we forward such as require it from one nation to another things which he had especially admired in our institutions." Gregory makes an admission which is interesting to students of ancient churchpractices. He says: "There are, I will not deny it, among ourselves, also certain doctrines under concealment, but what is the nature of their envelope, and what the effect on the mind? Neither the outward form is indecent, whilst the hidden sense is admirable and exceeding

glorious, to such as are introduced into its depth, and like some beauteous and unapproachable body, it is veiled by a robe by no means to be condemned." This shows that there were even in Gregory's time a few remaining fragments of the mystic symbolism of the ancients left in the church. Gregory describes Julian's death as "truly seasonable and salutary for the whole world." In a note, King the translator says that Sozomen is even bolder and boasts that the blow was the vengeance of a Christian. In contrasting 'our' dead, namely, Constantius, with Julian, Gregory becomes almost comic in his eagerness to whitewash him. He dares not say that the angels sang to the funeral cortege as it passed over Mount Taurus, but he does what he often does in similar cases, says that the people heard music and singing and that "he supposes" these were the angels! This "in honor of his piety and a funereal recompense of his virtue. For although he had seemed to shake the foundations of the true faith, this, nevertheless, must be laid to the charge of his subordinates' stupidity and unsoundness, who, getting hold of a soul that was unsuspicious and not firmly grounded in religion, nor able to see the pitfalls in its path, led it astray what way they pleased, and under the pretense of correctness of doctrine converted his zeal into sin." It is a bold statement that "Constantine laid the foundations of the Imperial power and of the Christian religion." Says Gregory: "Our Emperor was received in the tomb in the Church of the Apostles [at Constantinople], who received the holy race, and now guard their remains, which receive almost equal honors with their own!" You would hardly guess from this that Constantius most severely persecuted Gregory's party. Nor would you realize that Julian treated Gregory well enough, making his brother his own physician. There is a much-quoted passage of Gregory, usually given as though perfectly serious and reliable instead of coming out of such a curious storehouse of illogical arguments, wordy insults, and hopelessly twisted bits of fact. Gregory refers to Julian as he knew him at the University of Athens: "This character of his was made known by experience to others, and by his coming to the throne, which gave him free scope to display it. But it had been previously detected by some, ever since I lived with this person at Athens; for he too had gone thither, immediately after the catastrophe of his brother, having himself solicited this permission from the Emperor. There was a double reason for this journey: the one more specious the object of acquainting himself with Greece and the schools of the country; the other more secret, and communicated to but few - that he might consult the sacrifices and cheats there upon matters concerning himself; so far back did his paganism extend. At that time, therefore, I remember that I became no bad judge of his character, though far from being of much sagacity in that line; but what made me a true guesser was the inconsistency of

his behavior and his extreme excitability (that is, if he be the best diviner who knows how to guess shrewdly). A sign of no good seemed to me to be his unsteady neck, his shoulders always in motion and shrugging up and down like a pair of scales, his eye rolling and glancing from side to side with a certain insane expression, his feet unsteady and stumbling, his nostrils breathing insolence and disdain, the gestures of his face ridiculous and expressing the same feelings, his bursts of laughter unrestrained and gusty, his nods of assent and dissent without any reason, his speech stopping short and interrupted by his taking breath, his questions without any order and unintelligent, his answers not a whit better than his questions, following one on top of the other, and not definite, nor returned in the regular order of instruction.... I exclaimed as soon as I had observed these signs, 'What an evil the Roman world is breeding!....'" And so he goes on. As an argument, the whole rigmarole is rubbish. As an insult to the dead Emperor the audience may have drunk in every word like mother's milk without understanding in the least. The only value there is in it for us is the sidelight it throws on Gregory, the people, and the character of the time. By the time he had come to the end of the sermon - he had to make two sessions of it, with an interval for dinner, maybe - Gregory has persuaded even himself that Julian really was a terrible persecutor. "How bitterly thou didst persecute the Christians, and eat up so holy a people," he says, addressing the dead Julian. And the only persecution he can really lay his hands on is that Julian had the intention of making him keep his mouth shut! What a pity Julian did not carry this dreadful persecution into actuality! Without the power of pouring forth a stream of words, words, words, and yet more words, Gregory could not have survived a single day! ------The old adept of Ephesus was doubtless glad to go. His work was done. The twilight of the gods was deepening to the thick pall of the night that men call the Dark Ages. One star alone was yet to shine as a sign of hope for future days when the Egyptian blackness should clear away. Hypatia, the glory of Alexandria, was yet to rise and set. The magnificent city of Alexandria was built in the form of an enormous Roman Cross. True to the symbolism of the eternal Mysteries which claimed Julian as their Apostle to the end, Hypatia was 'crucified' upon it. After her.... the dark.

The End --------------------