Julian Abandons the Faith; the Death of Constantius

Such were the events in the Eastern church. Meanwhile Julian the Caesar attacked and defeated the barbarians who lived along the banks of the Rhine. Many of them he killed, and others he took prisoner. The victory added greatly to his fame, and his moderation and gentleness had already won the affection of the troops, so they proclaimed him Augustus. Far from offering Constantius any excuse for this, he replaced the officers whom Constantius had appointed, and he took pains to circulate letters in which Constantius had urged the barbarians to enter Roman territory and help him against Magnentius. Then he suddenly changed his religion. Although he had earlier confessed Christianity, he declared himself high priest, went regularly to the pagan temples, offered sacrifices, and invited his subjects to take up that form of worship. [a]

A Persian invasion of Roman territory was expected, and Constantius had gone to Syria on that account. Julian thought that he might make himself master of Illyricum without a battle, so he set out for that province, on the pretext that he meant to offer Constantius an apology for having accepted the emblems of imperial power without his approval. It is said that when he reached the borders of Illyria, the vines appeared full of green grapes, although the grape harvest was over and the Pleiades had set. It is also said that a spray of dew fell from the air on his followers, and every drop was stamped with the sign of the cross. He and many of those with him took the grapes appearing out of season as a favorable omen, and thought that the dew had made that figure by chance on the clothing it happened to fall on. [b] Others thought that of the two signs, the green grapes meant that the emperor would die before his time and that his reign would be very short, while the second, the crosses formed by the drops of dew, showed that the Christian religion is from heaven and that everyone ought to receive the sign of the cross. For my own part, I am convinced that those who took these two signs as bad omens for Julian were not mistaken, and time proved them right.

When Constantius heard that Julian was marching against him at the head of an army, he gave up his planned campaign against the Persians and set out for Constantinople. But he died on the way, when he had come as far as Mopsucrene, which lies near the Taurus mountains, between Cilicia and Cappadocia. [c] He died in the forty-fifth year of his age, after reigning thirteen years jointly with his father Constantine and twenty-five years after that emperor’s death.

A little while after the death of Constantius, Julian, who had already made himself master of Thrace, entered Constantinople and was proclaimed emperor. The pagans claim that diviners and demons had foretold the death of Constantius and the change in affairs before Julian set out for Galatia, and had advised him to undertake the expedition. This might have been taken for a true prediction, if Julian’s own life had not ended so soon afterward, when he had only tasted imperial power, as if in a dream. But it seems absurd to me to believe that, after he had heard the death of Constantius foretold, and had been warned that it would be his own fate to fall in battle at the hands of the Persians, he should have leaped into certain death. That death brought him no other fame in the world than a name for poor judgment and poor generalship, and had he lived, he would probably have let most of the Roman territories fall under the Persian yoke. I have put this remark in only so that no one blames me for leaving it out. I leave everyone to form his own opinion. [d]