Julian by Gore Vidal
Julian the Apostate, Constantine the Great’s nephew, was one of the Roman Empire’s most brilliant but fleeting figures in history. He was a brilliant general with military prowess on par with Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, a persuasive essayist, and a philosopher who worshipped the gods of Hellenism. However, he got caught up in a bitter intellectual conflict with Christianity that led to his murder at the age of 32, just four years into his brilliantly humane and compassionate rule. Julian is a brilliantly inventive and perceptive work of classical antiquity that revives the legacy of an ardent king while capturing the political and religious upheaval of a perilous time.
Julian by Gore Vidal
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Julian by Gore Vidal is, predictably, a story about Julian the Apostate, a Roman emperor. From 361 to 363 AD, Julian reigned as emperor and made an effort to convert the empire from Christianity to pagan religion. It is definitely a literary book. It has quite intricate framework that begins with letters that two genuine pagans, Libanius and Priscus, write to one another about Julian after the emperor’s passing. The narrative then switches to a manuscript that one of them magically acquired, which carries us up to Julian’s passing. The focus then returns to the two men writing to one another.
The conversion of Constantine and Alaric’s Visigoths’ capture of Rome in 410 spanned the 4th century in the West. Alaric put a stop to Rome’s sense of invincibility once and for all when he converted the Emperor, which naturally led to the recognition of Christianity as the first among the many religions in the Mediterranean realm (Edict of Milan 313). Between those years, Byzantine (which was renamed Constantinople in 330) grew to dominance as Rome’s influence declined. Christianity increasingly took on theocratic authority and began to exert control over people’s lives in a way that its predecessor, Paganism, never did.
The many different forms of Christianity and their respective dogmas gained relevance as the church’s influence rose. Three of them—Arianism, Monophysitism, and Dyophysitism—had various conceptions of the nature of God and the nature of God and Jesus. Different interpretations of God’s and Jesus’ natures were used as rallying cries throughout that epic war between rival Christian factions and horrific mob violence. Arguments about whether Christ was the son of God or the same as God, and whether he was a real physical presence on earth or part physical and part spiritual were the backdrop of deadly conflicts, all vying for the allegiance of the Mediterranean region, which was still very civilized and culturally united at the time. These conflicts are difficult for us to comprehend today. Constantine finally put an end to it with a Solomonic stroke that combined elements from all of the competing theologies of God and wrapped them in a Platonic framework.
