Julian, by Gore Vidal Read online

  "Do you know the beautiful story of Aedesius and his father? No? It is so characteristic. The father wanted his son to join him in the family business. But first he sent him to school at Athens. When Aedesius returned from school, he told his father that it was now impossible for him to go into business. He preferred to become a philosopher. Furious, his father drove him out of the house, shouting, 'What good does philosophy do you now?' To which Aedesius replied, 'It has taught me to revere my father, even as he drives me from his house.' From that moment on, Aedesius and his father were friends."

  We were all edified by this story. Sosipatra was indeed a fountain of wisdom, and we were fortunate to drink of her depths.

  Priscus: Did you ever meet this monster? I once spent a week with her and her husband at Pergamon. She never stopped talking. Even Aedesius, who was fond of her (I think he was once her lover), thought her ignorant, though he would never have admitted it. He, by the way, was an excellent man. After all, he was my teacher and am I not, after Libanius, the wisest man of our age?

  Libanius: Irony?

  Priscus: But though Sosipatra was hardly a philosopher, she was a remarkable magician. Even I came close to believing in her spells and predictions. She also had a sense of drama which was most exciting. Julian was completely taken in by her, and I date his fatal attraction to this sort of thing from that dinner party.

  Incidentally, a friend of mine once had an affair with Sosipatra. When the act was over, she insisted that he burn incense to her as she lay among the tangled sheets. "For I am Aphrodite, goddess come among men." He burned the incense but never went to bed with her again.

  Maximus also thought that Sosipatra was divine, or at least "inhabited from time to time by the spirit of Aphrodite". Which made her sound rather like an inn. I always found her tedious. But she was often accurate in her predictions. Lucky guesses? Who knows? If the gods exist, which I doubt, might they not be every bit as boring as Sosipatra?

  Ubanius: As always, Priscus goes too far. But I rather agree with him about Sosipatra. She did talk too much. But then, who am I to criticize her when one of my oldest friends has just told me to my face that I bore all Antioch?

  Julian Augustus

  When the dinner was over, Sosipatra presented her sons to us. They were about my age. Two of them grew up to be speculators in grain, and most unsavoury. The third, Anatolius, I heard news of only recently. Some years ago he attached himself to the temple of Serapis at Alexandria. After Bishop George destroyed the temple, Anatolius climbed on to a broken column and now stares continually at the sun. How I envy the purity of such a life! But that night at dinner, the future holy man seemed a very ordinary youth, with a slight stammer.

  When the sons had withdrawn, Sosipatra sent for a tripod and incense. "And now you will want to know what the gods advise you to do. Where to go. With whom to study." She gave me a dazzling smile.

  I blurted out, "I want to study here, with you." But she shook her head, to Ecebolius's relief. "I know my own future and a prince is no part of it. I wish it were otherwise," she added softly, and I fell in love with her on the spot, as so many students had done before me.

  Sosipatra lit the incense. She shut her eyes. She whispered a prayer. Then in a low voice she implored the Great Goddess to speak to us. Smoke filled the room. All things grew vague and indistinct. My head began to ache. Suddenly in a loud voice not her own, Sosipatra said, "Julian!"

  I looked at her closely. Her eyes were half open but only the whites showed: she slept while the spirit possessed her. "You are loved by us beyond any man alive." That was puzzling. "Us" must mean the gods. But why should they love a Galilean who doubted their existence? Of course I had also begun to question the divinity of the Nazarene, which made me neither Hellenist nor Galilean, neither believer nor atheist. I was suspended somewhere between, waiting for a sign. Could this be it?

  "You will rebuild our temples. You will cause the smoke of a thousand sacrifices to rise from a thousand altars. You shall be our servant and all men shall be your servants, as token of our love."

  Ecebolius stirred nervously. "We must not listen to this," he murmured.

  The voice continued serenely. "The way is dangerous. But we shall protect you, as we have protected you from the hour of your birth. Earthly glory shall be yours. And death when it comes in far Phrygia, by enemy steel, will be a hero's death, without painful lingering. Then you shall be with us for ever, close to the One from whom all light flows, to whom all light returns. Oh, Julian, dear to us… Evil!" The voice changed entirely. It became harsh. "Foul and profane! We bring you defeat. Despair. The Phrygian death is yours. But the tormented soul is ours for ever, far from light!"

  Sosipatra screamed. She began to writhe in her chair; her hands clutched at her throat as though to loosen some invisible bond. Words tumbled disiointedly from her mouth. She was a battleground between warring spirits. But at last the good prevailed, and she became tranquil.

  "Ephesus," she said, and her voice was again soft and caressing.

  "At Ephesus you will find the door to light. Ecebolius, when you were a child you hid three coins in the garden of your uncle's house at Sirmium. One was a coin of the reign of Septimus Severus. A gardener dug up the coins and spent them. That coin of Severus is now in Pergamon, in a tavern. Oribasius, your father insists you sell the property but hopes you will not make the same mistake you made last year when you leased the lower meadow to your Syrian neighbour, and he would not pay. Julian, beware the fate of Gallus. Remember… Hilarius!" She stopped. She became herself again. "My head aches," she said in a tired voice. We were all quite shaken. I most of all for she had practically said that I would become emperor, which was treason, for no one may consult an oracle about the imperial succession, nor even speculate in private on such matters. Ecebolius had been rightly alarmed.

  Sosipatra had no memory of what was said. She listened carefully as we told her what the goddess—and the other—had said. She was intrigued. "Obviously a great future for the most noble Julian."

  "Of course," said Ecebolius nervously. "As a loyal prince of the imperial house…"

  "Of course!" Sosipatra laughed. "We must say no more." Then she frowned. "I have no idea who the dark spirit was. But it is plain that the goddess was Cybele, and she wants you to honour her since she is the mother of all, and your protectress."

  "It also seems indicated that Julian should avoid Phrygia," said Oribasius mischievously.

  But Sosipatra took this quite seriously. "Yes. Julian will die in Phrygia, gloriously, in battle." She turned to me. "I don't understand the reference to your brother. Do you?"

  I nodded, unable to speak, my head whirling with dangerous thoughts.

  "The rest of it seems plain enough. You are to restore the worship of the true gods."

  "It seems rather late in the day for that." Ecebolius had found his tongue at last. "And even if it were possible, Julian is a Christian. The imperial house is Christian. This makes him a most unlikely candidate for restoring the old ways."

  "Are you unlikely?" Sosipatra fixed me with her great dark eyes. I shook my head helplessly. "I don't know. I must wait for a sign."

  "Perhaps this was the sign. Cybele herself spoke to you."

  "So did something else," said Ecebolius.

  "There is always the Other," said Sosipatra. "But light transcends all things. As Macrobius wrote, 'The sun is the mind of the universe.' And nowhere, not even in the darkest pit of hell, is mind entirely absent."

  "What is at Ephesus?" I asked suddenly. Sosipatra gave me a long look. Then she said, "Maximus is there. He is waiting for you. He has been waiting for you since the day you were born."

  Ecebolius stirred at this. "I am perfectly sure that Maximus would like nothing better than to instruct the prince, but, unfortunately for him, I was appointed by the Grand Chamberlain to supervise Julian's studies and I am not at all eager for my pupil to become involved with a notorious magician."

  Sosipatra's vo
ice was icy. "We think of Maximus as being something more than a 'notorious magician'. It is true that he can make the gods appear to him, but…"

  "Actually appear?" I was fascinated.

  "Actors, from the theatre," muttered Oribasius, "carefully rehearsed, tricks of lighting…"

  Sosipatra smiled. "Oribasius! That is unworthy of you! What would your father say to that?"

  "I have no idea. You see more of him nowadays than I do."

  Sosipatra ignored this. She turned to me. "Maximus is no charlatan. If he were, I would have unmasked him years ago. Of course people question his powers. They should. One must not take anything on blind faith. Yet when he speaks to the gods…"

  "He speaks to them, but do they really speak to him? That's more the point," said Ecebolius.

  "They do. I was present once in Ephesus when a group of atheists questioned him, just as you have."

  "Not to believe in Maximus does not make one an atheist."

  Ecebolius was growing irritated.

  She continued through him. "Maximus asked us to meet him that night in the temple of Hecate. Now the temple has not been used in years. It is a simple building, containing a bronze statue of the goddess and nothing more, so there was no way for Maximus to… prepare a miracle." She looked sharply at Oribasius. "When we had all arrived, Maximus turned to the statue and said, 'Great Goddess, show these unbelievers a sign of your power.' There was a moment of silence. Then the bronze torches she held in her bronze hands burst into flame."

  "Naphtha," said Oribasius.

  "But that was not all. The statue smiled at us. The bronze face smiled. Then Hecate laughed. I have never heard such a sound! All heaven seemed to mock us, as we fled from that place."

  "I must go to Ephesus," I said. Sosipatra turned to Ecebolius. "He has no choice, you know. At Ephesus his life begins."

  • • •

  The next day I received word that Aedesius would see me. I found him lying on a cot, his bearded wife beside him. Aedesius was a small man who had once been fat, but now because of illness and age the skin hung from him in folds. It was hard to believe that this frail old man had once been the pupil of Iamblichos and actually present on that occasion when Iamblichos caused two divine youths to appear from twin pools in the rock at Gadara. Yet despite his fragility, Aedesius was alert and amiable.

  "Sosipatra tells me that you have a gift for philosophy."

  "If a passion can be called a gift."

  "Why not? Passion is a gift of the gods. She also tells me that you plan to go to Ephesus."

  "Only if I cannot study with you."

  "Too late for that." He sighed. "As you see, I am in poor health. She gives me four more years of this life. But I doubt that I shall last so long. Anyway, Maximus will be more to your taste. He was my student, you know. After Priscus of Athens, he was my best student. Of course Maximus prefers demonstration to argument, mysteries to books. But then there are many ways to truth. And from what Sosipatra tells me, he was born to be your guide. It is clearly destiny."

  Priscus: It was clearly a plot. They were all in on it. Years later, Maximus admitted as much. "I knew all along I was the right teacher for Julian. Naturally, I never dreamed he would be emperor." He did not dream it; he willed it. "I saw him simply as a soul that I alone could lead to salvation." Maximus then got Sosipatra and Aedesius to recommend him to Julian, which they did. What an extraordinary crew they were! Except for Aedesius, there was not a philosopher in the lot.

  From what I gather, Julian in those days was a highly intelligent youth who might have been "captured" for true philosophy. After all, he enjoyed learning. He was good at debate. Properly educated, he might have been another Porphyry or, taking into account his unfortunate birth, another Marcus Aurelius. But Maximus got to him first and exploited his one flaw: that craving for the vague and incomprehensible which is essentially Asiatic. It is certainly not Greek, even though we Greeks are in a noticeable intellectual decline. Did you know that thanks to the presence of so many foreign students in Athens, our people no longer speak pure Attic but a sort of argot, imprecise and ugly? Yet despite the barbarism which is slowly extinguishing "the light of the world", we Athenians still pride ourselves on being able to see things as they are. Show us a stone and we see a stone, not the universe. But like so many others nowadays, poor Julian wanted to believe that man's life is profoundly more significant than it is. His sickness was the sickness of our age. We want so much not to be extinguished at the end that we will go to any length to make conjurortricks for one another simply to obscure the bitter, secret knowledge that it is our fate not to be. If Maximus hadn't stolen Julian from us, the bishops would have got him. I am sure of that. At heart he was a Christian mystic gone wrong.

  Libanius: Christian mystic! Had Priscus any religious sense he might by now have experienced that knowledge of oneness, neither "bitter" nor "secret", which Plotinus and Porphyry, Julian and I, each in his own way—mystically-arrived at. Or failing that, had he been admitted to the mysteries of Eleusis just fourteen miles from his own house in Athens, he might have understood that since the soul is, there can be no question of its not-being. But I agree with Priscus about Maximus. I was aware at the time of the magicians' plot to capture Julian, but since I was forbidden to speak to him I could hardly warn him. Yet they did Julian no lasting harm. He sometimes put too much faith in oracles and magic, but he always had a firm grip of logic and he excelled in philosophic argument. He was hardly a Christian mystic. Yet he was a mystic—something Priscus could never understand.

  Julian Augustus

  Ecebolius was eager to go to Ephesus, rather to my surprise; I had thought he would have wanted to keep me from Maximus. But he was compliant. "After all, I am your teacher, approved by the Emperor. You cannot officially study with Maximus, or anyone else. Not that I would object. Far from it. I am told Maximus is most inspiring, though hopelessly reactionary. But we hardly need worry about your being influenced at this late date. After all, you were taught Christian theology by two great bishops, Eusebius and George. What firmer foundation can any man have? By all means let us visit Ephesus. You will enjoy the intellectual life. And so shall I."

  What Ecebolius had come to enjoy was playing Aristotle to my green Alexander. Everywhere we went, academics were curious to know me. That meant they got to know Ecebolius. In no time at all, he was proposing delicately that he "exchange" students with them. "Exchange" meant that they would send him students at Constantinople for which they would receive nothing except the possible favour of the prince. During our travels, Ecebolius made his fortune.

  In a snowstorm we were met at the gates of Ephesus by the city prefect and the town council. They were all very nervous.

  "It is a great honour for Ephesus to receive the most noble Julian," said the prefect. "We are here to serve him, as we have served the most noble Gallus, who has also honoured us by his presence here." At the mention of Gallus, as though rehearsed, the councillors began to mutter, "Kind, good, wise, noble."

  "Where is my brother?"

  There was a tense pause. The prefect looked anxiously at the councillors. They looked at one another. There was a good deal of energetic brushing of snow from cloaks.

  "Your brother," said the prefect, finally, "is at court. At Milan. He was summoned by the Emperor last month. There has been no word about him. None at all. Naturally, we hope for the best."

  "And what is the best?"

  "Why, that he be made Caesar." It was not necessary to inquire about the worst. After due ceremony, we were led to the prefect's house, where I was to stay. Ecebolius was thrilled at the thought that I might soon be half-brother to a Caesar. But I was alarmed. My alarm became panic when later that night Oribasius told me that Gallus had been taken from Ephesus under arrest."Was he charged with anything?"

  "The Emperor's pleasure. There was no charge. Most people expect him to be executed."

  "Has he given any cause?"

  Oribasius shrugged. "
If he is executed, people will give a hundred reasons why the Emperor did the right thing. If he is made Caesar, they will say they knew all along such wisdom and loyalty would be rewarded."

  "If Gallus dies…" I shuddered.

  "But you're not political."

  "I was born 'political' and there is nothing I can do about it. First Gallus, then me."

  "I should think you were safest of all, the scholar-prince."

  "No one is safe." I felt the cold that night as I have never felt the cold before or since. I don't know what I should have done without Oribasius. He was the first friend I ever had. He is still the best friend I have, and I miss him here in Persia. Oribasius has always been particularly useful in finding out things I would have no way of knowing. People never speak candidly to princes, but Oribasius could get anyone to tell him anything, a trick learned practising medicine. He inspires confidences.

  Within a day of our arrival at Ephesus, Oribasius had obtained a full report on Gallus's life in the city. "He is feared. But he is admired."

  "For his beauty?" I could not resist that. After all, I had spent my childhood hopelessly beguiled by that golden creature.

  "He shares his beauty rather liberally with the wives of the local magnates."

  "Naturally."

  "He is thought to be intelligent."

  "He is shrewd."

  "Politically knowledgeable, very ambitious…"

  "Yet unpopular and feared. Why?"

  "A bad temper, occasionally violent."

  "Yes." I thought of the cedar grove at Macellum.

  "People fear him. They don't know why."