Julian’s own writings feed claims to his uniqueness. Yet this abundance of information has also given rise to perceptions of Julian as a somewhat isolated, eccentric thinker, a loner.

When one considers the quantity of past stories, figures, events, that must be recovered from fragments, the abundance of material documenting the reign of a man who did not even reach the age of thirty-three is rendered even more striking – not least because much of what remains comes from Julian’s provocative, inspired, idiosyncratic voice.

Julian’s afterlife has been fuelled also by the richness of the ancient evidence. Wilson’s Julian Comstock, Farneti’s Imperium Solis). Even today, he continues to inhabit our fantasies, as books dedicated to him top the charts (most recently Julian Barnes’ Elizabeth Finch, whose eponymous protagonist is a Julianic scholar) and he features in pop culture from graphic novels (Broeders’ Apostata) to counter-factual fiction – ‘what-if’ historical fantasies (e.g. Secondly, nowhere in the late antique sources is this turning of the tables as visible as in the literature designed to conceal it: the surviving writings of Emperor Julian, the ‘Apostate’.įew figures from the Greco-Roman past have elicited as much fascination as Julian. First, this book contends that Christianity – the religion that culturally entrenched elites framed as incompatible with paideia – became politically successful by mastering a script that paideia had written. These sentiments set the stage for the dual paradox that Christianity, Philosophy, and Roman Power seeks to unravel. Later Roman intellectuals cleaved tightly to paideia – a system of education rooted in traditional Greco-Roman culture – as their symbolic capital, and their various expressions of discomfort at manifestations of popular culture extended also to the ‘language of fishermen’ (sermo piscatorius) which Jesus and his disciples had spoken.

The student of rhetoric in love with Latin literature struggled to accept a written style that he perceived as ‘unworthy’ of his Marcus Tully (Cicero). Or so he says, at least, in a passage from the Confessions (3.5.9) in which he reflects on his former, ‘inflated pride’. The young Augustine was repelled by the Gospels.

The passage of power