Julian Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Flavius Claudius Julianus (331/332 - June 26, 363), known to Christians as Julian the Apostate, was a Roman emperor who ruled from 361 to 363, as well as the son of a half-brother of Constantine I.As a child he witnessed the murder of his family by his uncle Constantius II, the later emperor (337). This, as he stated, was the beginning of his scepticism toward Christianity. He and his half-brother Gallus were kept in the imperial domain of Macellum.
After his brother was made Caesar of the east (351) and executed by Constantius II, Julian was called to the emperor in Milan (355), made Caesar of the west and married to Constantius' sister Helena. In the years afterward he fought the Germanic tribes that tried to intrude upon the Roman Empire. He won back Cologne (356), defeated the Alamanni at Strasbourg and secured the Rhine frontier for some 50 years. In 360 Constantius ordered Julian to send Gallic troops to his eastern army. This provoked an insurrection that made Julian emperor. Civil war was avoided only by the death of Constantius II.
Julian is called "The Apostate" because he reverted from Christianity to Paganism, suppressed the persecution of pagans and destruction of temples that had followed Constantine I's official encouragement of Christianity. (During his earlier years, while studying at Athens, he became acquainted with two men who later became both bishops and saints: Gregory Nazianzus and Basil the Great.) Constantine had not yet made Christianity the official state religion, which would not happen until Theodosius I in the 380s, but he and his immediate successors had prohibited the upkeep of pagan temples, and many temples were destroyed and pagan worshippers killed during the reign of Constantine and his successors. The extent to which the emperors approved or commanded these destructions and killings is disputed, but it is certain they did not prevent them, and Julian carried out a similar policy relating to the killing of Christian priests during his reign.
Julian's religious status is a matter of considerable dispute; he did not practice normative civic paganism of the earlier empire, but a kind of magical approach to classical philosophy sometimes identified as theurgy. Whatever his personal practices, they were not Christian. According to Socrates Scholasticus, Julian believed himself to be Alexander the Great in another body via transmigration of souls, as taught by Plato and Pythagoras (Book III, Chapter XXI of his writings). The Orthodox Church retells the story concerning two of his bodyguards, who were Christians, that when Julian came to Antioch he gave orders to sprinkle all the food in the marketplace and the water wells with blood from idol-worship. This would have left the Christians in that town with nothing to eat or drink without violating their beliefs. The two bodyguards opposed the edict, and were executed at Julian's command. The Orthodox Church remembers them as Saints Juventinus and Maximos.
In his tolerance edict of 362, Julian decreed the reopening of pagan temples, the restitution of alienated temple properties, and called back the bishops that were exiled by church edicts. In his school edict Julian prohibits christian teachers from using pagan scripts e.g. the Illias. After his arrival in Antiochia in preparation for the Persian war, the temple of Apollo burned down. Since Julian believed Christians to be responsible, the main church was closed.
Sources state that he died in battle while fighting the Persians; he was so confident of victory that he was not wearing armour, and received a fatal wound from a dart. Libanius states that Julian had been killed by one of his own soldiers, a Christian who resented his beliefs; this claim is not corroborated by Ammianus Marcellinus or other contemporary historians.
Considered apocryphal is the report that his dying words were "Vicisti, Galilæe" ("Thou has conquered, Galilean"), supposedly expressing his recognition that, with his death, Christianity would become the Empire's state religion. The phrase introduces the 1866 poem "Hymn to Proserpine", which was Algernon Swinburne's elaboration of what Julian might have felt at the triumph of Christianity. Julian's life was also the inspiration for the historical novel Julian, by Gore Vidal (1964).
Julian is an alpine town in San Diego County, California, renowned for its apple pie.
Julian is also a make of car. See Julian (car).
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