Conversion And Politics Discuss

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Intro

Body

Aurelian

Constatine

Julian

In November 361 A.D. Constantious II died and Julian, last of the Constantinians inherited the empire. Julian would attempt a complete reversal of Constantine’s conversion in a somewhat leftfield program of reform and while his enthusiasm was laudable it would prove to be misguided. The first order of business was to completely overhaul the imperial court as stocking the halls of the palace were men who were not just venial and corrupt but men who had actively opposed Julian in the past, attempting to persuade Constantious into killing him. These men needed to be identified and purged. For all the attention his religious policies received it is worth noting that Julian wasn’t just trying to turn the clock back on the church, he was also trying to turn it back on the state. Julian looked to the emperors of the Antonine dynasty and sought to base his own administration on their example. The first thing he attacked was the sheer bloat of the imperial court. The classical emperors did not need fifty secretaries, chefs and other members of staff and anyone deemed unnecessary or redundant was let go. In a far more dramatic and a far more disruptive move Julian began to abandon the whole notion of the emperor as a living god conceit. He shed the smokescreen of officials standing between him and his subjects, he ate simple foods and wore simple clothes and grew a philosophers beard. Julian is some respects wanted to pretend that the epoch changing reform of Diocletian never happened and return to the princeps model of governance. To Julian, these were virtuous reforms that would be embraced by a public weary of overblown imperial egos, but mostly the public was just bewildered. It was akin to an emperor suddenly turning around and declaring that the republic was back in effect. It was that much of a political change. The entire political system of the late empire was set around the idea of a quasi divine emperor who inhabited the realm between man and god. Julian meant well but his vision was hopelessly anachronistic and when he died the people of the empire would once again ran back to the embrace of their once again quasi divine emperor. While he was bringing the role of emperor back down to earth, Julian also attempted to reduce the power of the imperial bureaucracy in general, adopting a more Trajan like world view and felt that the central government should be focusing on the large issues such as defence and taxation and that it was not there to micromanage the affairs of every city and town in the empire. Seeking to devolve political authority, Julian re-empowered the ruling councils within the cities and handed over jurisdiction of huge tracts of imperial land to the local magistrates, the idea being to get them more involved and to take some the weight off the emperor, but once again the citizens of the empire were more bewildered than anything else and had he lived longer his reforms may have been more successful and after his death, the rich and powerful men of the empire returned to their drift towards rural feudalism. Julian had secretly rejected Christianity around 350 A.D. not long after being released from his Cappadocian exile, but until now this rejection had been behind closed doors, a personal matter between close friends and advisors and since there were no benefits from advertising this religious preference it was information not released to the world. Now that he was emperor Julian was free to bring his paganism out into the open and from the moment he became emperor, Julian worked obsessively to tear down the socio political influence of the Christians. Julian knew that merely tearing down would not be sufficient to fulfil his vision of a re paganised empire, he would also have to build something up to replace the displaced Christians. When Julian entered Constantinople in 361 A.D. he immediately began this dual program and his political purge was driven by, in part, religious motives with Christians being removed from influential posts, denied access to the purse strings of the empire and denied access to the emperor personally. Since the previous regime of Constantious had been so overtly Christian though this essentially meant getting rid of everybody, something even Julian found he could not bring himself to do and so the Apostate emperor ended up retaining a handful of the most honest and capable Christians in his administration. The swiftness with which Julian was able to reorganise his inner circle could not be matched on a system wide basis as the bureaucracy was too large and too dispersed to overhaul over night, but the emperor was taking the long view and he issued a discriminatory order that when jobs opened up pagans were to be preferred over Christians. Julian ordered that all the old shrines and temples that had been closed over the years were to be reopened and he appropriated imperial funds to help defer the cost, but knowing that the central government could not afford to cover even a fraction of these costs, Julian issued an addendum edict that was in one part practical and one part punitive. Under the previous Christian regimes citizens had been encouraged to destroy the blasphemous sanctuaries of the pagans or to repurpose them resulting in many of these buildings becoming shops, warehouses and apartment buildings. Julian’s edict ordered that the men responsible for this bear the responsibility of the costs of undoing the damage they had done. Even Julian’s most steadfast admirers were troubled by the real world effects of this edict. The empire had been Christian for forty years by this stage so in many cases families and businesses had absorbed the pagan sanctuaries a generation or two ago and now suddenly Julian wanted them evicted and to pay the costs for doing so. It was unfair in theory and cruel in practise……..13.50

Conclusion

Julian was not to know that his reforms were doomed to failure and he felt that he was just getting started on a complete overhaul of the empire’s political constitution and he had no way of knowing that because he was about to die none of his reforms were going to stick. We have no way of knowing what would have happed had Julian lived and it is one of the great speculative questions of Roman history and maybe thirty years of Julian would have been revolutionary.