PREFACE

...indicating that Gaul was already in a desperate state, with no one resisting the barbarians who were laying waste to everything. For a long time, the Emperor Constantius II, the cousin of Julian who had executed much of Julian's family but now needed a legal heir to help manage the crumbling empire., residing in Italy, deliberated on how he might repel these calamities, as he himself desired (for he considered it dangerous to thrust himself into a region so far removed). At last, he found a proper course of action: he thought to bring his cousin Julian—who had not long ago been brought back from Greece at his summons—into the partnership of the empire, even though Julian was still wearing his philosopher’s cloak original: "palliatum". The pallium was the traditional cloak of a Greek philosopher, signaling that Julian was still a student of the Academy, not a soldier or a statesman.. He later carried this out, and furthermore gave him his sister Helena in marriage.

Julian, meanwhile, was not unaware of the great dangers to which he was being exposed; he believed he was being called not so much to honor as to his death. Thus, on the day when he was dressed in the imperial purple and brought into the court in the royal manner, he is said to have quoted this verse from Homer:

original Greek: Ἔλλαβε πορφύρεος θάνατος καὶ μοῖρα κραταιή; Latin: Cæpit purpurea mors, & parca violenta. This is a line from the Iliad (5.83). Julian is making a dark pun: the "purple" of the imperial robes he just put on would lead to his "purple" (bloody) death in battle.

He was even frequently heard murmuring that he would gain nothing more than to die under a heavier burden of business. Hence that silent complaint in his work, the Misopogon The "Beard-Hater," a satirical work Julian wrote later in life to mock the people of Antioch who ridiculed his philosophical austerity., that he had been banished to the Gauls, the Germans, and the Hercynian Forest A vast, ancient forest in central Europe that represented the wild, "barbarous" frontier of the Roman world. to wage war with wild beasts like a hunter. And in another place he says: "It seemed that neither of us wanted it: neither he who gave this honor (or favor, or whatever other name you wish to call it) gave it willingly, and he who received it (the gods are my witnesses) truly and from his soul refused it." Thus he speaks of himself.

And certainly, as Marcellinus Ammianus Marcellinus, the primary historian of this era and a soldier who served under Julian. says, it was tossed about everywhere as a rumor that Julian had been chosen not to relieve the troubles of Gaul, but so that he might be destroyed in the most savage wars—since he was judged to be inexperienced even then, and unlikely to endure even the sound of arms. Nevertheless, that inexperienced youth, raised in the shade of the Academy The school founded by Plato in Athens; the "shade" implies a life of quiet study away from the "sun and dust" of the battlefield. and not in the sun and dust...