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.

Chapter 2 expands on the alertness of Christian intellectuals to the question of cultural prestige by reading the orations composed by Julian as Caesar (355–60) in the context of the rhetorical and cultural discourse at the imperial court. Drawing on the current re-assessment of Constantius II as pursuing a reputation as a patron of culture and philosophy, the first section argues that Julian’s early panegyrics reinforce this self-image by celebrating the intellectual synergy between the Augustus and his (famously highly cultivated) new Caesar. I further show that Constantius’ imperial propaganda relied on the assumption that allegiance to Christianity was a key factor in establishing his intellectual authority. The second section considers the writings Julian composed during his Gallic campaign (Second Panegyric to Constantius; Consolation to Himself), when his relationship with Constantius was deteriorating. As Julian increasingly exploits philosophical rhetoric to challenge rather than celebrate the Augustus, the identification of Christianity with intellectual authority becomes a polemical target in his writings, marking Julian’s first expressed disagreements with the idea of Christianity as highest philosophy.

Chapter 1 draws on Julian’s earliest surviving oration – the Letter to Themistius – to illustrate the interaction between Julian’s early rhetoric and the political discourse developed at the court of Constantius II. The first section challenges scholarly readings of the Letter as voicing a rejection of the late antique ideal of the sovereign as ensouled law. It argues that Julian’s primary intent in this text lies rather in a desire to advertise his exegetical skills at the expense of his interlocutor, the famous philosopher Themistius. The second sectio contextualises Julian’s ambition in the context of third- and fourth-century debates on the relationship between leadership and culture. It shows that this theme was invested with particular significance by Christian authors – such as Lactantius and Eusebius – who used it in claiming Christianity’s intellectual dominance over pagan thinking. This testifies to the existence of a shared perception that cultural authority legitimised political authority but also signals the ambitions of Christian intellectuals to negotiate Christianity’s cultural prestige in conversation with the Roman elites.

Chapter 3 addresses the writings Julian composed during his sole rule (361–63) following Constantius’ sudden death. I suggest here that Julian’s mature output was grounded in the intuition that the challenge to Christian power had to be channelled into an attack on its identity as a superior interpretive system. The first section draws on a reading of key texts by Constantine and his supporters to contextualise Constantius’ intellectual self-image in the legacy of his father’s cultural policy. Constantine legitimised his subversive status as Christian emperor by projecting himself as the sublime exegete of divine providence. The second section illustrates the strategies Julian devised to deny the validity of Christianity’s hermeneutical claims, which he envisaged as prepared by Greek philosophical achievements and as being therefore derivative and unauthoritative. Julian’s critique was articulated through an attack on Christian exegesis (Against the Galileans) and on what Julian perceived as Christianity’s exploitative relationship with paideia (the School Ban). At the same time, Julian attempted to competitively rethink Greek allegoresis by renouncing the status of Homer as divine, enigmatic text and by composing hymns and writings constructing Greek religion as a ‘cult of culture’.

This chapter explores the indexical potential of time in three ways: chronological perspective, the use of temporal adverbs and adjectives to situate an episode within a larger span of literary history; marked iteration, the self-reflexive replay or foreshadowing of other events; and epigonal self-consciousness, the direct or indirect appeal to poetic predecessors. All three tropes are active in archaic epic and lyric, but with differing accents. In epic, references to time and iteration mark intratextual and intertextual cross-references and doublets, while epic heroes’ epigonal relationships with their πρότεροι figure the tensions of the poet’s relationship with his predecessors. In lyric poetry, temporal references similarly index tradition; δηὖτε marks both generic and intertextual repetition; and direct appeals to πρότεροι follow and challenge both whole genres and specific texts. Indexical temporality was deeply embedded in archaic Greek poetics from the very start.