The Works of the Emperor Julian, Vol. 1 (Loeb)

INTRODUCTION

Prohaeresius, but the sophist, says Eunapius,¹ refused the privilege. He could afford to wait in patience, for, like many other distinguished Christians, he consulted the omens through the pagan hierophant priest of the mysteries of Greece, and learned indirectly—but to his own reassurance—that Julian’s power would be short-lived. Even Ammianus, the pagan historian, deplored the bigotry and malice of Julian’s attempt to suppress Christian educators. “It was,” he says, “a harsh measure, and had better be buried in eternal silence.”² The Christians interpreted it as excluding their children from education; Theodoret (3. 4. 2) says as much and quotes a saying of Julian’s (frag. 7), whose context is lost, to the effect that the Christians arm their intellects to oppose Hellenism by means of the Hellenic masterpieces. Socrates (3. 12. 7) quotes another saying of the same sort (frag. 6). These two quotations perhaps belong to lost rescripts aimed at Christian teachers, which followed the extant edict and rescript. Well-educated Christians can hardly have been consoled by the enterprise of a father and son named Apollinarius, who “within a very brief space of time,” says Sozomen (5. 18), converted the Bible into epics, tragedies, comedies, odes, and dialogues for the education of Christian youths. But Christian teachers did not suffer much inconvenience, for Julian’s prohibition can hardly have been enforced in the few months that preceded his

¹ Lives, p. 513, Wright.
² 22. 10. 7: illud inclemens . . . obruendum perenni silentio (original: "that harsh measure... should be buried in eternal silence"). He repeats this criticism in 25. 4. 20. Libanius, however, was delighted, and taunted Basil and Gregory as “barbarians.”