Iulianus Occidentalis: Julian the Apostate in Latin Christian Historical Texts

Abstract

This dissertation charts the reception of the Roman emperor Julian (r. 361-363), often known as Julian the apostate, in the western Roman empire and the various kingdoms that replaced it. Julian was a complicated figure, especially for Christian groups: he was an educated Christian elite who chose to convert to traditional Greco-Roman polytheism, spurring many other Christians to do the same. In the Greek and Syriac Christian traditions, this incited a long tradition of polemic against Julian. The Latin tradition has often been treated in scholarship as being ancillary to these contemporary traditions, under the assumption that Latin authors merely copied their Greek contemporaries’ polemics. This dissertation argues that Latin authors were influenced by Greek sources, but they also innovated within their own cultural environments. An overlooked difference between the traditions is that Julian’s appearance in the west was positive, inasmuch as he was a victorious commander in a series of campaigns in Gaul. While only a Caesar, he was functionally the emperor in the west as his Augustus, Constantius II, was occupied with other campaigns. I conduct my analysis of Julian’s legacy by investigating Latin Christian historical texts written between the fourth and ninth centuries. A "historical text" is any text that self-consciously claims to present an authoritative representation of the past. I utilize concepts from collective memory studies, as doing so removes issues of trying to uncover the “true” Julian. I conclude that the cultural memory of Julian as a “good” emperor was actively fought against by a coterie of Christian intellectuals. Once their texts became canonical works of history for the early medieval period, their pictures of Julian’s reign overwhelmed this older cultural memory, but did not completely displace it.