Julian the Apostate [Paperback]

G. W. Bowersock (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0674488822 | ISBN-13: 978-0674488823 | Publication Date: March 25, 1997

This portrayal of one of antiquity's most enigmatic figures offers a vivid and compact assessment of the Apostate's life and reign. Proceeding directly from an evaluation of the ancient sources - the testimony of friends and enemies of Julian as well as the writings of the emperor himself - the author traces Julian's youth, his years as the commander of the Roman forces in Gaul, and his emergence as sole ruler in the course of a dramatic march to Constantinople. In Bowersock's analysis of Julian's religious revolution, the emperor's ardent espousal of a lost cause is seen to have made intolerable demands upon pagans, Jews, and Christians alike.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Bowersock has written the best narrative history of Julian's career...His success is due not only to the vivid style but to the command of the very wide variety of sources that enables him to derive new insights from unexpected facts.
--W. H. C. Frend (New York Review of Books )

The most reliable and lucid account available of Julian's haunting obsession...An extraordinarily good book about an extraordinary man.
--George Steiner (London Times )

Packed with skillfully deployed information and remarkable insights...The picture is drawn with an incisive vigor which is completely convincing, and with unusual elegance of style.
--J. N. D. Kelly (The Observer )

About the Author

G. W. Bowersock is Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

Product Details

• Paperback: 152 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (March 25, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674488822
• ISBN-13: 978-0674488823
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,341,095 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

72 of 78 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, but Biased Account of a Fascinating Figure., November 3, 1999

By 

Stefan Cover (Cambridge, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Julian the Apostate (Paperback)

There are certain historical figures that are nearly impossible to get to know in anything approaching an objective sense. Something about them compels us to a judgement. Julian the Apostate is one of those rare figures who forces us to react emotionally - no matter how objective we think we are. And our reaction often says more about who WE are, than about the object of our judgement.

Flavius Julianus was the last pagan Emperor of Rome. He briefly attempted to reverse the ongoing Christianization of the Roman Empire begun by his detested uncle, the Emperor Constantine. He failed miserably and died young, but his attempt to reverse the cultural tides of his day will always fascinate any who encounter Julian and his century.

Glen Bowersock's book is a classic example of 20th Century historical revisionism. The historical consensus concerning Julian since the time of Gibbon and Voltaire has been cautiously admiring on the whole. Bowersock seeks to reverse that consensus by reinterpeting the abundant historical evidence. In doing so his dislike of Julian is displayed on nearly every page. I can't go into detail here, but there are numerous instances in which the author achieves a "new" interpretation by placing the very worst construction on the evidence. In nearly every case he favors whatever presents Julian in the least favorable light. Nowhere is this more evident than in Bowersock's account of Julian's "usurpation" of the title of Augustus in 361. He strains every nerve to prove the mutiny of the soldiers was engineered by Julian and his friends and that they lied about it later, all against formidable evidence to the contrary.

That being said, this is an interesting book. The author does a good job introducing the historical context, and his scholarly account of the facts of Julian's life is lively. Read the darn thing, but do yourself a favor and read the best account ever written of Julian's reign, that contained in the Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus. It is available in translation as a Penguin paperback. Ammianus served in Julian's army and was a balanced witness of the Apostate's good and bad qualities. Julian was a complex man. He was a soldier, emperor, scholar, orator, philosopher, even a political prisoner for some years, and a deeply religious pagan. He was also credulous, didactic, a fanatic, an egomaniac, and even a public nuisance upon occasion. In the end however, our very best witness, Ammianus, admired Julian greatly. I must confess, so do I.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Author all but ignores Julian's anti-Christian polemics., May 30, 1999

By A Customer

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This review is from: Julian the Apostate (Paperback)

I found the book thoroughgoing in biographic details on Julian's life. But particularly disappointing is the author's neglect of Julian's anti-Christian arguments, which make fascinating reading. Oddly, Bowersock ignores, in his Bibliography, the 3-volume set of Julian's writings published some years ago by Loeb Classics. This omission is especially galling since B. maintains many of J.'s writings are unavailable, but some he so characterizes ARE available in the Loeb volumes! Of particular interest was J.'s diatribe against the "Galilean," Jesus--which is found in Loeb, but all but ignored in Bowersock's book. This is perplexing to say the least.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Scholarly, Researched, Biased, September 22, 2009

By 

Stuart McCunn (New Haven, CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Julian the Apostate (Hardcover)

I wanted to like this book. I really did. I'm not a massive fan of Julian like some of the other reviewers here are. I appreciate the man for what he was but I never idolized him as some sort of pagan crusader. Reading some of these reviews before I started the book I wasn't worried since so many of them seem to be slightly batty. Unfortunately, they're also right. I had to write an essay on Julian so I read a lot on him. There are several other biographies out there (The Last Pagan and The Emperor Julian are quite good) and they capture the man's essence better than Bowersock. Many of the books that I had to read, scholarly works included, insult this book pretty blatantly. Rowland Smith in his book 'Julian's Gods' spends several pages rebuking Bowersock's vision of Julian as a "pathological figure." He is polite enough not to mention him obviously by name, but a quick glance at the footnotes reveals that every time he criticizes this interpretation he is referencing Bowersock. The way in which Bowersock managed to compact all of Julian's life into 119 pages is by dismissing all of Julian's religious views as unimportant (You learn nothing except that he was pagan and fancied himself a philosopher), and skimming over anything that seems to his credit. Julian was, for example, unquestionably the most approachable emperor of the Fourth Century, largely because he based his style of rule on Rome's previous philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius. All that Bowersock says about this is something snide about how he seemed to see himself in everyone he admired, no matter how dissimilar.

I truly don't know what problem this guy has with Julian. Every time he has more than one source of information he goes with the most insulting or critical one. For example: on page 107 he describes how two martyrs (Bonosus and Maximilianus) were beheaded for not removing the Christian symbol from their standards whereas it is just as likely that they were actually executed for criticizing the Emperor just before battle. He took the heavily biased stories from the Christians and takes them at face value while dismissing the pagan ones. In a similar vein he takes his description for Julian's behavior from possibly his greatest enemy Gregory of Nazianzus and says that it is essentially true.

Some examples of bias from his own words include: "when Julian died, all Christians and many pagans received the news with relief." That's right off of page 1 and the point is very debatable. Certainly he doesn't have the evidence to prove that. Julian's writings are described as being "petulant and self-righteous" and filled with his "unsettling laughter." (13) "Like them [Lenin and Mao-Tse-Tung who he's comparing him to], Julian was neither gregarious nor, in the social sense of the term, even civilized." (20)

Essentially, the way that Julian is described is as a dull, humorless, cruel, ascetic, self-righteous, unprincipled, puritanical, savage, bigot. I am using only words that Bowersock himself applies to Julian throughout the course of the book. This is not the language of an unbiased historian. To anyone who doubts that these traits do not describe, or at least dominate, Julian need only read his own writings. He has written three books worth of various works from orations to letters to satires. How Bowersock can describe the author of the Caesars as a dull and humorless person is beyond me. Sure it's not sidesplittingly hilarious, but the tone is very lighthearted throughout and you can feel the tongue kept very much in cheek. Bowersock however, takes it as a serious expression of Julian's beliefs even though Julian himself describes it as a comic work. The same goes for the Beard-Hater. Although that one is rather more bitter it can hardly be described as a "hectoring, injured, [and] repetitive" work filled with "Julian's unsettling laughter."

Until I read these works for myself I had no reason to doubt that his interpretation was true. Now I can't even see hints of his belief. Please don't take my word for this. Read those books yourself. They reveal a lot about the man's character and they are sometimes very entertaining. They are available in Loeb editions (Volume I, Volume II, Volume III) which are kind of expensive, but they are probably available for free online as well. So do yourself a favor and skip this book. Read one of the other excellent biographies. 'The Last Pagan' is probably the most readable of the two. Or read the works of the contemporary historian Ammianus Marcellinus (Volume I, Volume II, Volume III) or Julian's friend Libanius (Orations, Volume I, Orations, Volume II). These books will provide you with a much more accurate glimpse of the man who has come down through history as Julian the Apostate.