Rome's last pagan emperor was raised a Christian and could quote the Bible
Julian, nephew of Constantine the Great, grew up Christian, served as a church reader and knew scripture well. Around age 20 he turned to the old gods and Neoplatonic philosophy, and as emperor from 361 he tried to reverse Christianity's rise. He was dead by 363, and his revival died with him.
Born in Constantinople, probably in 331, Julian was orphaned young; after Constantine's death in 337 his cousin Constantius II apparently had most of his close male relatives killed, and Julian and his half-brother Gallus survived perhaps only because they were children. Kept under watch, he was schooled by a Gothic eunuch named Mardonius, whom he remembered fondly, and later borrowed classical books from a bishop in Cappadocia. Looking back in 362, he wrote that he had spent twenty years as a Christian and twelve following Helios.
Philosophy pulled him away. Studying Neoplatonism in Asia Minor from 351, he heard a teacher warn against Maximus of Ephesus, a theurgist said to make a statue of Hecate smile and her torches ignite. The warning backfired: Julian went straight to Maximus. In Athens he met Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil the Great, both future saints, and was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries.
Constantius expected him to be a figurehead when he made him Caesar in Gaul in 355. Instead the scholar learned generalship, retook Cologne, and at Argentoratum defeated a larger Alamannic force and captured its king, Chnodomarius. In 360 his troops proclaimed him emperor at Lutetia, the future Paris; civil war loomed until Constantius died, naming Julian his heir.
As sole ruler Julian slimmed the bureaucracy, promoted pagans, barred Christians from teaching classical literature and pushed them out of the army, and planned a Third Temple in Jerusalem, probably to embarrass Christians more than to please Jews. In 363 he led the largest Roman army ever sent against Persia, won outside Ctesiphon, then pushed inland, ran short of supplies and was mortally wounded at Samarra. His successor Jovian gave up Nisibis to save the army. Christians remembered him as Julian the Apostate.
Source: Julian (emperor)
