Chapter 4 concludes the analysis of Julian’s reckoning with Constantine’s propaganda. It focuses on Julian’s strategy to disavow the public persona of the first emperor who had promoted the association between Christian sovereignty and ideals of philosophical leadership. The first section considers the efforts of Constantine’s propaganda to use the events of his (Constantine’s) life to prove that Roman history was guided by Christian providence. The engagement with autobiography in Julian’s final writings appears in this light as the culmination of his response to Christianity’s claims of intellectual dominance over Greco-Roman culture. The second section reconstructs Julian’s joint attempts to project his life as the token of his superior understanding of providential history (Against Heraclius) and to mobilise past Roman history as a source of counter-exempla disproving Constantine’s claims (The Caesars). In the process, Julian repurposed a fundamental element of Constantine’s propaganda – imperial iconography – to his advantage (Caesars; Misopogon).

My research began in 2016 with a seemingly simple question: how did the Christianisation of the Roman Empire affect the self-representation of Roman power? As I chased down self-referential statements in the writings of emperors and bishops, I became increasingly aware that how fourth-century leaders spoke of themselves was indissolubly tied to how they spoke of their culture. Negotiating the value of traditional Greco-Roman paideia and its literature(s) – attacked, upheld, manipulated, and fetishised – was an obsession in all the texts I was interrogating. Students of the fourth century often contemplate the puzzling fact that the cultures and practices cultivated for centuries across the Greco-Roman Mediterranean were willingly pushed aside in the space of a few decades. This book has addressed this issue through an analysis that is both culture- and power-centred and grounded on three statements, the first two of which might seem contradictory

Chapter 6 investigates the debate surrounding Julian’s final – and fundamental, in the eyes of late Roman intellectuals – objection to Christianity: his critique of its universalising rhetoric. Third- and fourth-century bishops legitimised their increasing political prominence through competitive arguments pointing to Christianity as the only philosophy that was accessible to everyone, including the ill-educated. Julian set in opposition to this the Platonist belief that any self-confessed system of knowledge appealing to the many disqualifies its intellectual authority by revealing crowd-pleasing (hence, deceptive) ambitions. The reaction of upper-class Christians, divided between the popular consensus and allegiance to Julian’s elitist sensibilities, demonstrates the criticality of this argument. Yet – as I show in the second section – the Neoplatonic objection to the Christian rhetoric of universalism ultimately displaced non-Christian philosophers from the political scene (Eunapius’ Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists). Moreover, the rising popularity of ascetic leaders encouraged even highly authoritative ecclesiastical voices (e.g., John Chrysostom) to question the validity of Greco-Roman education. This, ironically, resulted in a power-driven challenge to the validity of the cultural system whose adaptation had been key to stabilising Christian power.

During the Principate, the negotiation of the ruler’s intellectual authority emerged as a key strategy of political self-legitimisation. In the early fourth century, the definition of early Christian thinking as the perfect system of knowledge, which had been developed through dialogue and rivalry with the post-Hellenistic philosophical schools, encouraged the emperor Constantine to mobilise his allegiance to Christianity for competitive self-assertion: he upheld his conversion as an intellectual achievement with no imperial precedent. Modern reluctance to take ancient definitions of Christianity as philosophy at face value has obscured the force of this propagandistic argument. Yet its recovery is essential to understanding Julian’s philosophical response to the positioning of early Christianity as an authoritative system of knowledge and appreciating the strategies of self-legitimisation pursued by fourth-century bishops in conversation with the (Christian) philosopher-ruler. As the question of who holds authoritative knowledge was antagonised by religious disputes, the fourth-century socio-political and ideological transition was channelled into a ‘politics of interpretation’ in which leaders (imperial and episcopal) negotiated their status as intelligent decoders of providential signs scattered throughout literature, history, and the cosmos.

The first section addresses the debate between Julian’s supporters and detractors following his sudden death in 363. Christian preachers turned Julian’s propagandistic use of his life into proof that Roman history was regulated by Christian providence. However, they also had to confront Julian’s re-assessment of the power dynamics between the ruler and the priests in the post-Constantinian empire. I argue that Julian was wary of how the identification of religious allegiance as the criterion for determining whether an emperor was a philosopher-ruler affected the interaction between the emperor, now decentred from his religious structures of choice, and the ecclesiastical leaders. The second section shows that that the episcopal engagement with philosophical ideas both provided clerics with a weapon against Julian’s attempts to re-centre the ruler in religious matters and shaped the relationship between the bishops and emperors in addressing heresy - a key challenge faced by Christianity in its self-construction as perfect system of knowledge. Episcopal appeals to an exclusive control of knowledge also affected the public role of non-conforming philosophers, which I illustrate with a case study of Synesius of Cyrene.