Last of the Pagans

It is remote, yet not hard to find. Park at the end of the road on the tip of the Akrotiri Peninsula, in north-west Crete, and walk for ten minutes down the shallow Aviaki gorge. Then there it is, a yawning maw of black rock. I was the only visitor. With silence all about, apart from the soughing breeze and distant pulse of the sea, I experienced for the only time in my life a sense approaching the numinous.

Arkoudiotissa (‘She-bear’) Cave is so called because of a stalagmite shaped like a bear which overlooks a raised trough of stone. Inscriptions indicate that the large interior was used to worship the goddess Artemis. Later, it was the home of Christian ascetics. Hemmed in by the damp rock enclosing that brooding figure, which has witnessed so much that was so strange, I felt spooked. What really had gone on here?

I have always had a soft spot for the ancient gods. For well over 2,000 years they were a protean force adapted by their Greek and Roman worshippers to meet the needs of supplication, sanction and propitiation. In their mischievous and fickle ways they reflected the chaos of the world and made sense of its mystery. And what fun they suggest compared to the solemnities of ‘conventional’ religion. How thrilling to unravel the cryptic utterances of the Pythoness at the Oracle of Delphi. How awe-inspiring if a storm at sea signalled the wrath of Poseidon. And was that flitting shadow in a dappled glade the elusive figure of Pan?

Sadly, history dictated that the Immortals should not be so. From the time Christianity first appeared in the first century ad, paganism was doomed. It would be centuries before the sacrificial fires flared their last. But the influence of the new monotheism was so great that by ad 380 it was declared the official religion of the Roman Empire.

However, just twenty years earlier the old gods found one last champion. Not only that, their cup-bearer was the most powerful man in the Western world, the Roman emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus (ad 331–63). Julian had rejected the Christian faith in which he was reared to embrace paganism. Raised to emperor in ad 361 – so becoming the last non-Christian ruler of the Roman Empire – he set out to restore the ancient ways and to marginalize an upstart religion that he regarded as philosophically unsound and a threat to the state.

Two years later, the figure known to history as Julian the Apostate was dead and his ambitious mission died with him. Yet his is an extraordinary story of an essentially good man defying the march of history in pursuit of an unrealizable dream. In Gore Vidal’s soundly researched and richly imagined novel Julian (1964), the voice of this strange young pagan is heard again.

Julian’s dream was not entirely misplaced. Certainly, by the time of his reign Christianity had achieved dominance over Hellenism. But its followers were still mainly an urban phenomenon whose priests were perpetually engaged in a doctrinal civil war. Ancient worship had served the needs of society for centuries and its traditions were not easily usurped.

Vidal explores this confrontation between old and new in a fictive autobiography drawing on three surviving volumes of Julian’s letters and essays, and contemporary recollections. In doing so, he paints a sympathetic portrait of an individual gullible and pragmatic, sensitive and stubborn. Julian was a skilful military commander, a talented administrator and a concerned social reformer. But he was driven by contempt for Christians who he saw bowing to an authority they regarded as greater than Rome. He mocked them as Galileans, and their churches packed with relics he called charnel houses.

We arrive in his world through correspondence between two historical pagan sympathizers: Julian’s former teacher Libanius and his former philosopher-companion Priscus. Writing nearly twenty years after Julian’s death, Libanius tells Priscus it is time to rehabilitatetheir old friend and ‘show the justice of his contest with the Christians’. He suggests they use a memoir by the emperor, stolen by Priscus, as the basis of a biography. The story unfolds in Julian’s words, interspersed with Priscus’s often waspish observations on the emperor’s recall of events and Libanius’s own reactions to Priscus’s correspondence.

Julian was born in Constantinople. After the murder of his family by his cousin the Christian emperor Constantius II, he was placed in the care of an Arian bishop and confined for six years in Cappadocia. He was a model Christian scholar. However, his love of the Greek classics drew him to Hellenic philosophy and over the next decade he secretly converted to paganism. After studying in Asia Minor and Athens, he was proclaimed Caesar in 355 and given charge of Gaul and Britain. In 361, on the death of Constantius II, he was appointed Augustus and publicly proclaimed his beliefs. Two years later, he was fatally wounded while on campaign against the Persians, allegedly dying with the words: ‘Thou hast won, O Galilean’ (an undoubted fabrication). He was 32.

Vidal’s interpretation of his unlikely rise from philosophy student to successful military commander and finally pagan Augustus is a credible story of survival in the dangerous complexities of Roman politics. Cousin Constantius suspects him; his sadistic brother Gallus hates him; the army loves him; his wife Helena is at first indifferent, but finally supports him; the Christians loathe him. Like Robert Graves’s Claudius, Julian is the unpromising outsider thrust by circumstance into assuming the purple.

Ancient Rome is always good copy and Vidal, an erudite literary gadfly, makes the most of it. He has tremendous fun with a cast of brutal relations, bedizened and inevitably oily eunuchs, doe-eyed catamites, fawning acolytes, corrupt officials and charlatan theurgists. But the depth of the novel lies in his subject’s spiritual quest. Julian displays a touching innocence in his belief that he has been chosen by the sun god Helios – the ‘common parent of all men’ – to lead a return to ancient worship. He is bull-headed and sometimes comical in his attempts to impose his faith on a generally unreceptive population. His philosophy, firmly rooted in the mystical, is woolly. But for all his shortcomings and credulity, he is not a tyrant.

Julian’s epiphany comes at a meeting in Ephesus with the philosopher Maximus who plays on his pagan sympathies and initiates him into the cult of Mithras. Although Maximus is a transparent fraud well versed in smoke and mirrors, Julian is wholly seduced. Conveniently, Christianity had adopted the Mithraic belief in salvation and the afterlife, thus smoothing his transition from shaky faith in the one god to belief in the many.

In a revealing aside, Priscus – who, though a pagan, condemned Mithras – explains Julian’s convictions:

I suspect the origin of Julian’s disaffection is in his family. Constantius was a passionate Christian. With good reason, Julian hated Constantius. Therefore, he hated Christianity. He was Christian in everything except his tolerance of others. He honestly believed he loved Plato and reasonable discourse. Actually, what he craved was assurance of personal immortality. He chose to reject the Christian way while settling on an equal absurdity.

Achieving power, Julian orders temples of ancestral cults to be restored and ancient priesthoods revived. Christian churches lose financial aid and pagans are given precedence in appointments. Most controversially, Christians are banned from teaching the classics.

Vidal’s scandalized bishops rage that Julian will ‘burn in hell’. Julian strikes back: Is one to believe that a thousand generations of men are lost because they did not worship a Jew who was supposed to be God? A man not born when the world began? It takes extraordinary self-delusion to believe such things. But I am not here to criticize you, only to ask you to keep the peace and never to forget that the greatness of our world was a gift of other gods and a different, more subtle, philosophy, reflecting the variety in nature. What you worship is evil ... I mean to stop the illness, to strengthen the state.

Poor Julian: his gullibility is childlike. His belief in Maximus’s self-serving claims that he has been chosen by the Earth Mother Cybele to take the mantle of Alexander the Great makes us shake our heads. He is in ecstasy after being admitted to the Mysteries of Eleusis by the Hierophant of Greece: ‘I saw that which is enacted, that which is shown and that which is spoken. I saw the passion of Demeter, the descent of Persephone to the underworld. I saw the world as it is and the world that is to come . . . it was true.’

His ambitions lead to bathos. Having ordered a return to pagan worship, with a nod to religious tolerance, he attends the temple of Apollo at Daphne outside Antioch, expecting to take part in ceremonial sacrifice and libations. But all the local priest can provide for the gods’ delight is a scrawny goose. Soon after, the temple mysteriously burns to the ground. Divine vengeance, say the Christians. Vengeful Christians, says Julian. He never forgives the Antiochenes. Yet, excoriated in a climate of increasing religious orthodoxy and latterly beset by plots, he remains committed to his credo and antagonistic to violent persecution of his opponents.

Julian is now an acknowledged gem of historical fiction. It was a bestseller when it was first published although Orville Prescott, the reactionary literary critic of the New York Times, condemned it as ‘disgusting enough to sicken many of his readers’. Vidal must have been delighted. We, too, can take delight in his sensitive evocation of an intelligent man who genuinely believed he could revive the ancient world for the common spiritual good of the modern. And is Cybele that far removed from our modern idea of Gaia?

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 45 © Patrick Welland 2015