Athanasius Banished Again; Eleusius, Titus, and the Author’s Family

The emperor was told that Athanasius was holding meetings in the church of Alexandria, teaching the people boldly and converting many pagans to Christianity. He ordered him, under the severest penalties, to leave Alexandria. The excuse given for enforcing this edict was that Athanasius, after being banished by Constantius, had taken back his bishop’s see without the approval of the emperor now reigning. For Julian declared that he had never meant to restore the bishops exiled by Constantius to their church offices, but only to their native lands. When the order for his immediate departure was announced, Athanasius said to the Christian crowds who stood weeping around him, “Take heart. It is only a cloud, and it will soon pass.” After these words he said goodbye, entrusted the care of the church to the most devoted of his friends, and left Alexandria. [a]

About the same time the people of Cyzicus sent a delegation to the emperor to lay some of their local affairs before him, and above all to beg him to restore the pagan temples. He praised their foresight and promised to grant all their requests. He drove out Eleusius, the bishop of their city, because he had destroyed some temples, treated their sacred grounds with contempt and defiled them, provided houses to support widows, put up buildings for holy virgins, and persuaded pagans to give up the religion of their ancestors. The emperor forbade some Christians from elsewhere who had come with him to enter the city of Cyzicus. It seems he was afraid that, together with the Christians inside the city, they would stir up an uprising over religion. Many people had gathered with them who shared the religious views of the Christians of the city. These were workers in the state woolen factories and the state mint. They were numerous and were divided into two large bodies. Earlier emperors had given them permission to live in Cyzicus with their wives and property, on condition that every year they delivered to the public treasury a supply of clothing for the soldiers and of newly minted coin. [b]

Although Julian was eager to advance paganism by every means, he thought it the height of folly to use force or punishment against those who refused to sacrifice. Besides, there were so many Christians in every city that it would have been no easy task for the authorities even to count them. He did not even forbid them to meet together for worship, since he knew that where the freedom of the will is concerned, compulsion is utterly useless. Instead, to put an end to these assemblies, he drove the clergy and the heads of the churches out of all the cities. He said, and rightly, that in their absence the gatherings of the people would be broken up; if there were no one to call the churches together, and no one to teach or to give out the mysteries, religion itself would in time be forgotten. The excuse he gave for these measures was that the clergy were the leaders of unrest among the people. On this pretext he drove Eleusius and his friends out of Cyzicus, although there was not the slightest sign or prospect of unrest in that city. He also publicly called on the citizens of Bostra to drive out Titus, their bishop. It seems that the emperor had threatened to accuse Titus and the other clergy of being the cause of any uprising that might break out among the people. Titus had then written to him that although the Christians were nearly equal to the pagans in number, yet, following his urging, they were inclined to stay quiet and were not likely to rise up. Julian, so as not to stir up the hostility of the people of Bostra against Titus, wrote them a letter claiming that their bishop had slandered them by saying that it was because of his urging, rather than their own inclination, that they kept from rioting. And Julian urged them to drive him out of their city as a public enemy. [c]

It appears that Christians suffered similar injustice in other places too, sometimes at the emperor’s command and sometimes through the anger and violence of the crowd. The blame for these things may fairly be laid on the ruler. For he did not bring the lawbreakers under the force of the law, but out of his hatred for the Christian religion he only scolded those who did such things, while by his actions he urged them on in the same course. So, although the emperor did not persecute them outright, the Christians were forced to flee from city to city and from village to village. My grandfather and many of my ancestors were forced to flee in this way. My grandfather was born to pagan parents. Together with his own family and that of Alaphion, he had been the first to accept Christianity in Bethelia, a populous town near Gaza. It has temples that the people of the country hold in high reverence because of their age and the excellence of their building. The most famous of these temples is the Pantheon, built on an artificial mound that overlooks the whole town. The guess is that the place took its name from the temple: that the temple’s original name was in the Syriac language, and that this name was afterward put into Greek by a word meaning that the temple is the dwelling of all the gods. It is said that these families were converted through the monk Hilarion. Alaphion, it seems, was possessed by a demon, and neither the pagans nor the Jews could free him from this affliction with any of their incantations and spells. But Hilarion, simply by calling on the name of Christ, drove the demon out, and Alaphion and his whole family at once accepted Christianity. My grandfather had great natural ability, which he put to good use in explaining the sacred Scriptures. He had some learning in general studies and knew arithmetic. He was much loved by the Christians of Ascalon, of Gaza and of the country around, and was regarded as necessary to religion because of his gift for explaining the difficult passages of Scripture. No one can speak adequately of the virtues of the other family. The first churches and monasteries built in that country were founded by members of this family, and were supported by their power and their kindness to strangers and to the needy. Some good men of this family have flourished even in our own day. In my youth I saw some of them, but they were very old by then. I will have more to say about them in the course of my history. [e]