Julian’s Campaign in Persia and His Death

In the last book I told what happened in the church during the reign of Julian. This emperor, having made up his mind to go to war with Persia, crossed the Euphrates quickly at the beginning of spring. He passed by Edessa, because he hated its people, who had long been Christians, and went on to Carrhae, where there was a temple of Jupiter, and there he offered sacrifice and prayer. He then picked twenty thousand armed men from his troops and sent them toward the Tigris, to guard those regions and to be ready to join him if he should need their help. He also wrote to Arsacius, king of Armenia, one of the allies of Rome, to ask for his help in the war. In this letter Julian showed the most boundless arrogance. He boasted of the great qualities which, he said, had made him worthy of the empire and pleasing to the gods he cared for. He reviled Constantius, who had reigned before him, as an effeminate and ungodly emperor, and he threatened Arsacius in a grossly insulting way. Since he knew Arsacius was a Christian, he heaped on the insults, and poured out unlawful blasphemies against Christ freely and at length, as he was in the habit of daring to do on every occasion. He told Arsacius that unless he did as he was told, the God he trusted in would not be able to defend him from Julian’s vengeance. When he judged that all his arrangements had been properly made, he led his army through Assyria. [a]

He took a great many towns and forts, either by treachery or in battle, and pressed on carelessly, without stopping to think that he would have to come back by the same road. He plundered every place he came to, and pulled down or burned the granaries and storehouses. Going up along the Euphrates, he came to Ctesiphon, a very large city to which the Persian kings have now moved their residence from Babylon. The Tigris flows close by. A stretch of land between the city and the river kept him from reaching it with his ships, so he judged that he must either go on by water or leave his ships and go to Ctesiphon by land, and he questioned the prisoners about it. He learned from them that there was a canal that had become blocked over time, and he had it cleared out. Having in this way joined the Euphrates to the Tigris, he moved on toward the city, his ships floating alongside his army. But the Persians appeared on the banks of the Tigris in a formidable display of cavalry and many armed troops, with elephants and horses. Julian realized that his army was hemmed in between two great rivers, and that it was in danger of being destroyed whether it stayed where it was or retreated through the cities and villages he had laid waste so completely that no food could be had. So he called the soldiers out to watch horse races and offered prizes to the fastest riders. Meanwhile he ordered the officers of the ships to throw overboard the army’s provisions and baggage, so that the soldiers, seeing themselves in danger for lack of what they needed, would turn and fight their enemies boldly and more desperately. After supper he sent for the generals and tribunes and ordered the troops to embark. They sailed along the Tigris during the night, came straight to the opposite bank, and landed. Some of the Persians saw them leave and urged one another to resist them, but the Romans easily overcame those who were still asleep. [b]

At daybreak the two armies joined battle. After much bloodshed on both sides, the Romans went back by the river and camped near Ctesiphon. The emperor, no longer wanting to go any further, burned his ships, because he thought they needed too many soldiers to guard them. Then he began his retreat along the Tigris, keeping the river on his left. The prisoners who served the Romans as guides led them to a fertile country where they found plenty of food. Soon afterward an old man who had made up his mind to die for the freedom of Persia let himself be taken prisoner, and he was brought before the emperor. When he was questioned about the route, he seemed to be telling the truth, and he persuaded them to follow him, as one who could bring the army very quickly to the Roman frontier. He said that for three or four days’ journey this road would be hard going, and that they would need to carry food for that time, because the country around was barren. The emperor was taken in by what this shrewd old man said and approved the march by that route. After three days of advancing, they found themselves stranded in a wild, uncultivated region. The old prisoner was put to torture. He admitted that he had willingly offered himself to death for the sake of his country, and so he was ready to bear any suffering they could inflict on him.

The Roman troops were now worn out by the length of the march and the shortage of food, and the Persians chose this moment to attack them. In the heat of the fighting that followed, a violent wind arose. Clouds hid the sky and the sun completely, and at the same time the air was filled with dust. In the darkness this caused, a horseman riding at full gallop aimed his lance at the emperor and wounded him mortally. After throwing Julian from his horse, the unknown attacker slipped away unseen. Some guessed he was a Persian; others, that he was a Saracen. There are those who insist that the man who struck the blow was a Roman soldier, angry at the rashness and recklessness the emperor had shown in exposing his army to such danger. Libanius the sophist, a native of Syria and Julian’s closest friend, wrote the following about the man who had done the deed: “You want to know who killed the emperor. I do not know his name. But we have proof that the murderer was not one of the enemy, for no one came forward to claim the reward, although the king of Persia had a herald proclaim the honors to be given to the man who had done it. We are surely indebted to the enemy for not claiming the glory of the act for themselves, but leaving it to us to look for the killer among ourselves. [c] “Those who wanted him dead were men who lived in constant breach of the laws and who had plotted against him before, and so they did the deed as soon as they found an opportunity. They were driven by the wish to be freer from all restraint than they could be under his rule, and perhaps most of all they were spurred on by their resentment of the emperor’s devotion to the worship of the gods, which they opposed.”