old teacher, the eunuch Mardonius; and this was his happiness till he was old enough to attend the rhetoricians at Nicomedia and elsewhere.  Gallus was for a while Caesar in Syria (351-354), and after his execution, Julian’s own life was only saved by the Empress Eusebia, who got permission for him to retire to the schools of Athens.  In 355 he was made Caesar in Gaul, and with much labour freed the province from the Germans.  Early in 360 the soldiers mutinied at Paris and proclaimed Julian Augustus.  Negotiations followed, and it was not till the summer of 361 that Julian pushed down the Danube.  By the time he halted at Naissus, he was master of three-quarters of the Empire.  There seemed no escape from civil war now that the main army of Constantius was coming up from Syria.  But one day two barbarian counts rode into Julian’s camp with the news that Constantius was dead.  A sudden fever had carried him off in Cilicia (Nov. 3, 361), and the Eastern army presented its allegiance to Julian Augustus.

[Sidenote:  Julian’s heathenism.]

Before we can understand Julian’s influence on the Arian controversy, we shall have to take a wider view of the Emperor himself and of his policy towards the Christians generally.  The life of Julian is one of the noblest wrecks in history.  The years of painful self-repression and forced dissimulation which turned his bright youth to bitterness and filled his mind with angry prejudice, had only consolidated his self-reliant pride and firm determination to walk worthily before the gods.  In four years his splendid energy and unaffected kindliness had won all hearts in Gaul; and Julian related nothing of his sense of duty to the Empire when he found himself master of the world at the age of thirty.

But here came in that fatal heathen prejudice, which put him in a false relation to all the living powers of his time, and led directly even to his military disaster in Assyria.  Heathen pride came to him with Basilina’s Roman blood, and the dream-world of his lonely youth was a world of heathen literature.  Christianity was nothing to him but ’the slavery of a Persian prison.’  Fine preachers of the kingdom of heaven were those fawning eunuchs and episcopal sycophants, with Constantius behind them, the murderer of all his family!  Every force about him worked for heathenism.  The teaching of Mardonius was practically heathen, and the rest were as heathen as utter worldliness could make them.  He could see through men like George the pork-contractor or the shameless renegade Hecebolius.  Full of thoughts like these, which corroded his mind the more for the danger of expressing them, Julian was easily won to heathenism by the fatherly welcome of the philosophers at Nicomedia (351).  Like a voice of love from heaven came their teaching, and Julian gave himself heart and soul to the mysterious fascination of their lying theurgy.  Henceforth King Sun was his guardian deity, and Greece his Holy Land, and the philosopher’s mantle dearer to him than the diadem of empire.  For ten more years of painful dissimulation Julian ‘walked with the gods’ in secret, before the young lion of heathenism could openly throw off the ‘donkey’s skin’ of Christianity.