The last gasp of Roman Paganism.
Julian the Apostate (reigned 361–363) is history's great counterfactual — the moment when the Roman Empire's lurch toward Christianity briefly reversed, then snapped forward again. Born at Constantinople in 331, Julian was a nephew of Constantine the Great, and his life was shaped by the same dynasty that had legalized and championed the new faith at Constantine & Nicaea (sv-constantine-legal). That inheritance was poisoned: in the dynastic massacre of 337, Julian's Arian Christian cousin Constantius II slaughtered most of his kinsmen. A boy raised Christian, surrounded by eunuchs and tutors, learned to associate the cross with the murder of his family — and learned to love instead the old books that promised a different world.
Preconditions: a half-converted empire
Julian's apostasy was possible only because the empire he inherited was still spiritually unsettled. Constantine had blessed Christianity but had not yet made paganism illegal; temples still stood, and the educated classes still read Homer & the Epic Tradition (sv-homer) and Plato & the Academy (sv-plato) as scripture of a kind. Secretly tutored by the crypto-pagan philosopher Nicocles and later steeped in the theurgic Neoplatonism of Iamblichus through Maximus of Ephesus, Julian fused mystery religion, Hellenic philosophy, and Homeric devotion into a personal faith. He concealed it until, proclaimed Augustus by his troops in Gaul and made sole emperor by the death of Constantius in 361, he could declare it openly.
What he tried to do
Julian moved fast. His edict of tolerance in 362 reopened temples, restored confiscated properties, and recalled exiled bishops — cynically, to set Christian factions tearing at each other. His School Edict barred Christians who rejected the gods of Homer and Plato from teaching the classics, a shrewd attempt to sever the new faith from the prestige of Greek learning. He drafted a polemic, Against the Galileans, attacking Christian dogma as superstition. Most strikingly, he funded a project to rebuild the Jewish Temple destroyed at the Fall of the Second Temple (sv-second-temple) in 70 AD — a deliberate provocation meant to falsify Jesus' prophecy of its ruin and embarrass the Church. The project collapsed amid fire and earthquake, which Christians read as divine veto.
Why it failed, and what followed
Julian's revival died with him. On 26 June 363, campaigning deep in Persia against the Sasanians — the same eastern frontier Rome had contested since the days of the Seleucid Empire (sv-seleucid) — he was struck by a spear at Maranga and died at thirty-one. He left no heir and no institution to carry the work. Christianity, now entrenched in the bureaucracy and the army, simply resumed its advance. Within a generation, Theodosius Outlaws Paganism (sv-theodosius) in the 390s, closing the temples Julian had reopened and making his life's project legally unthinkable. The historian Eusebius of Caesarea (sv-eusebius) and his successors framed Julian as a cautionary villain, the "Apostate" whose failure proved the faith's destiny.
Yet Julian endures as the great pivot that did not turn. His reign tested whether the classical order built across the long arc from Athenian Democracy (sv-athenian-democracy) and Aristotle & the Lyceum (sv-aristotle) could absorb and reverse the Christian tide. It could not — the demographic and institutional momentum was already too great. In failing, Julian inadvertently demonstrated the irreversibility of the transformation Constantine began, clearing the conceptual path to Augustine of Hippo (sv-augustine) and the Christian Middle Ages. He remains the emperor whom Renaissance humanists and Enlightenment skeptics alike would resurrect as a symbol: the philosopher-king who chose the losing gods, and lost.
Julian's sole reign (361–363) falls a generation after Constantine's conversion and the Council of Nicaea (325), in an empire where Christianity was ascendant but not yet dominant. In the East he confronted the Sasanian Persia of Shapur II, against whom he launched his fatal 363 invasion toward Ctesiphon. Theological strife consumed the church: the Arian controversy still raged, and Julian cynically recalled exiled bishops—including Athanasius of Alexandria—to deepen Christian division. Contemporaries included the orator Libanius and historian Ammianus Marcellinus in Antioch, the Cappadocian Fathers Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus (Julian's fellow Athens student), and the Neoplatonist Maximus of Ephesus. Beyond Rome's frontiers, the Gupta empire flourished in India under Samudragupta and Chandragupta II; Sasanian Zoroastrianism was consolidating; and Germanic and steppe pressures—Goths along the Danube, the looming Huns—presaged the crises of the next century. Julian thus stood at a hinge between classical antiquity and the Christianized late-antique world.
Julian's brief reign marked the last serious state-backed bid to reverse Christianization and reinstate Hellenic polytheism as imperial ideology. Raised Christian yet privately converted to Iamblichan Neoplatonism, he attempted not a mere revival but a reformed paganism modeled partly on Christian institutions—an organized pagan "church" with a hierarchy, moral teaching, and systematic charity, since he conceded the Galileans' philanthropy had won converts. His most consequential act was the school edict of 362 barring Christians from teaching classical literature, an attempt to wall the cultural inheritance of Homer and Plato off from the church. His treatise Against the Galileans furnished the most learned pagan critique of scripture before Porphyry's was suppressed. His failure, sealed by his death in Persia, demonstrated that the Christianization Constantine began was effectively irreversible; subsequent emperors (Gratian, Theodosius I) moved decisively to disestablish paganism, culminating in the 391–392 anti-pagan laws. Julian became Christianity's archetypal "apostate" and, paradoxically, a recurring symbol for later secular and Romantic critics of the church.
Had Julian survived Persia and reigned for decades, would paganism have endured? Most scholars (Bowersock, Cameron) judge a durable reversal improbable: Christianity's institutional density, episcopal networks, and demographic momentum were already structurally entrenched, and Julian's "Hellenism" was an intellectual's artificial construct with shallow popular roots—Antioch's citizens mocked rather than embraced it, as his own satire Misopogon records. Yet a longer reign could plausibly have altered the tempo and texture of change: sustained legal disfavor and the teaching ban might have impoverished a Christian intellectual elite, delaying the synthesis of classical paideia with Christianity that the Cappadocians achieved. A successful Persian campaign would have lent his program immense prestige; his death, by contrast, discredited it instantly and handed the throne to the Christian Jovian within days. Counterfactually, the likeliest outcome is not a pagan empire but a slower, more contested Christianization and perhaps a more pluralistic fourth century—rather than the accelerated Theodosian establishment that actually followed. The deep trend toward a Christian Rome appears robust against Julian's intervention.
The central modern debate concerns the coherence and sincerity of Julian's religious program. Glen Bowersock (Julian the Apostate, 1978) presents a politically calculating, somewhat fanatical figure whose paganism was reactive and ultimately impractical, stressing the gap between Julian's ambitions and Antiochene reality. Polymnia Athanassiadi (Julian and Hellenism: An Intellectual Biography, 1981) emphasizes instead a genuine, philosophically grounded Neoplatonic spirituality rooted in Iamblichus, treating his theurgy and "Hellenism" as a serious religious system rather than mere policy—though she later (1992) tempered earlier claims about his Mithraism. Rowland Smith (Julian's Gods, 1995) situates his beliefs within mainstream contemporary thought, resisting caricatures of eccentricity. Scholars also dispute whether his measures were genuinely tolerant or covertly persecutory: the school edict, defended by Julian as principled, was condemned even by the sympathetic Ammianus Marcellinus as harsh and worthy of "everlasting silence." Further contention surrounds the Jerusalem Temple project's motives—anti-Christian polemic, philo-Judaism, or eschatological one-upmanship—and the cause of its collapse (earthquake, fire, or sabotage).
Myth: Julian's dying words were "Vicisti, Galilaee" — "Thou hast conquered, Galilean!" — admitting Christianity's triumph.
Reality: This famous line is almost certainly a Christian invention. It first appears in Theodoret's Ecclesiastical History (c. 429/450 CE), decades after Julian died in 363. No earlier source records it — not even the hostile Christian writers nearest his lifetime, nor the eyewitness account of the pagan officer Ammianus Marcellinus, who instead describes Julian dying while calmly discussing the soul with philosophers. Historians treat the quote as apocryphal propaganda symbolizing the Church's victory, not a record of his actual last words.
Myth: Julian was a lifelong pagan who never had any real connection to Christianity.
Reality: Julian was born and raised a Christian. He was baptized and even ordained a lector (reader) in the church, schooled in Christian literature under Arian clergy such as Eusebius of Nicomedia. His later embrace of Neoplatonic Hellenism — influenced by the theurgist Maximus of Ephesus — was a deliberate adult apostasy from the faith he was raised in. This is precisely why later Christians branded him 'the Apostate': you cannot apostatize from a religion you never held.
Myth: Julian launched a violent persecution of Christians, creating martyrs like earlier emperors such as Diocletian.
Reality: Julian deliberately avoided creating martyrs, understanding that persecution had strengthened the Church. He issued no general edict outlawing Christianity and even proclaimed religious toleration. His campaign was attritional rather than bloody: he stripped Christian clergy of privileges and subsidies, barred Christians from certain offices, and — most pointedly — issued his June 362 school edict forbidding Christian teachers from teaching the pagan classics, aiming to cut Christians off from the elite education needed for public success. Scattered local violence occurred, but systematic state martyrdom was not his policy.
Myth: Julian's attempt to rebuild the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem was halted by a miraculous divine fire sent to vindicate Christianity.
Reality: Julian did commission the rebuilding around 363, entrusting it to Alypius of Antioch, partly to discredit Jesus's prophecy of the Temple's destruction. The pagan eyewitness historian Ammianus Marcellinus reports that 'terrifying balls of flame' burst near the foundations and stopped the work. Modern scholars offer naturalistic explanations: the documented Galilee earthquake of 363, ignition of trapped gases or stored materials in the old substructures, an accidental fire, or possible sabotage. Christian writers framed it as divine intervention, but the project mainly collapsed because Julian himself died in Persia weeks later, ending imperial backing.
Myth: Julian was an enlightened, tolerant philosopher-king — a champion of religious freedom ahead of his time.
Reality: This flattering image, popular since the Enlightenment, oversimplifies him. Julian's 'tolerance' was substantially strategic: he recalled exiled heretics and permitted rival Christian sects partly to inflame their mutual hostility and fracture Church unity — Ammianus wryly noted Julian had learned no wild beasts are as dangerous to people as Christians are to one another. Julian was himself a fervent, polemical anti-Christian author whose treatise 'Against the Galileans' attacked Christianity directly, and his policies grew more openly hostile over his short reign. His goal was a Hellenic revival that marginalized Christianity, not neutral pluralism.
"Whilst Alypius was pressing forward the work with vigour, and the governor of the province was assisting him, terrifying balls of flame kept bursting forth near the foundations of the temple, and made the place inaccessible to the workmen, some of whom were burned to death; and since in this way the element persistently repelled them, the enterprise halted." — Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae 23.1.3, describing Julian's attempt to rebuild the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem (trans. J. C. Rolfe, Loeb Classical Library)