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Jeremy Swist, "Julian Augustus: Platonism, Myth and the Refounding of Rome" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello and welcome to New Books in Late Antiquity, presented by Ancient Jew Review. I'm Mike Motilla and today we're speaking with Jeremy Swiss about Julian Platonism, myth and the refounding of Rome. The Emperor Julian was the last pagan emperor. If people know one thing about Julian, that's what it is. The generation after Constantine, the was this one holdout to the Christianization of the empire. People might also know that his cousin, Constantius ii, good Christian that he was, had nearly all of Julian's family assassinated. They might know that Julian died while he kind of allegedly tried to relive Alexander the Great's conquest of Persia. And they might have thoughts on exactly who threw that spear, that tid in the young emperor at just 20 months into his reign. But the broader image that kind of tends to emerge of the is of this kind of young emperor who is, you know, going to rule for 20 months, who is basically larping as a pagan philosopher. He's like pretending to be a philosopher while he happens to be the emperor. He's this guy who kind of rebelled against the dominant Christian culture. The way I Don't know, people in Britain today might turn to Wiccan practices to get behind Christianity, or people in Iran today might turn to Zoroastrian traditions to get behind Islam and say, like, you know, there's a real Persian ness behind this, this other religion. And so then, you know, Julian, having rejected Christianity, sees himself as this semi divine restorer or savior of Rome. I think that's the image that keeps appearing. But Dr. Swiss wants us to slow down a little bit. And yes, Julian was the nephew of Constantine. The family violence was real. And he did take his philosophical and religious life quite seriously, but he had a philosophy that could actually make sense of him being emperor. Like, he wasn't pretending to do philosophy while actually being an emperor. It's more like he had a philosophical way of ruling. And Dr. Swiss shows us that understanding that philosophy is going to really help us understand his broader corpus of writing and the way people saw him too. So Dr. Swiss shows us kind of that just because he was born in Constantinople doesn't mean. And didn't go to Rome doesn't mean he didn't care about being Roman. I mean, the guy only ruled for 20 months. Give him a break. Like, if he made it back from Persia, he might have gone to Rome just to stick it to his murderous cousin. He spoke, you know, Latin with the military, his laws were written in Latin. And yes, he fantasized about being Alexander the Great, but like, everybody fantasized being like Alexander the Great. It was far more likely, though, that he saw himself in a genealogy with Augustus and Marcus Aurelius and other emperors. His love of Greek didn't make him less Roman. That's just a weird, bad product of seeing the Eastern Roman Empire as not really Rome. And that's, that's, that's just wrong. But more, I, I think we can see that Dr. Swift's intervention happens just in the title. This is not a book called Julian the Apostate. It is not a book called Julian the Last Pagan. It's called Julian Augustus the Emperor. So here to talk with us about all things Julian, including his slate ancient and even some contemporary reception and reuse of Julian, is Dr. Jeremy Swiss. Jeremy, hi. Thank you for being here. Can you introduce yourself? Who are you? How did you get interested in Julian?
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Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me on. So I am a classicist, an assistant professor of classics at the Michigan State University here in East Lansing, Michigan. And what got me into Julian? Well, I think there's a bit of a personal narrative here. So I grew up in Boston Massachusetts. And like a lot of people in Boston, you know, I was raised Catholic to the point where I just took for granted, you know, that what Catholics tended to believe was just what normal people believed. And then I went to school at the University of Maine for college, and, you know, I started being introduced to new perspectives, different points of view, but also starting to learn about Greek philosophy, studying Roman history, late antiquity. And it wasn't long before I was introduced to Julian himself. And when I learned about how Julian also had this kind of Christian upbringing where he later kind of got in with certain groups that caused him to, quote, unquote, apostatize and, you know, go a different path, that. That kind of resonated with me personally as I was going through a lot of sort of intellectual and spiritual kind of changes, you know, as I was going through college. And so it was Jay Bregman in my Roman History class, who himself is an expert on Julian, who. And Neoplatonism, who is tragically under cited in a lot of Julian scholarship. And through him, and also my mentor, Tina Passman, the classes at umaine, I was given a gift of Julian, the novel by Gore Vidal, which came out in the early 1960s. And I'm not the only Julian scholar or somebody who's written a book on Julian to kind of refer to Bidal's novel as sort of the gateway drug to Julian. If you read the books by Moises Marcos and Leonicolae, they say the same thing in their acknowledgments, but yeah. And when I say Julian's life resonated with me, it's more in the sense, less in the sense of, oh, he became my idol. I worship him, I glorify him. That is not a good or healthy way to do history. Rather, I see him sort of a mirror of myself, with all of his faults, all of his shortcomings, all of his anxieties, as well as sort of just sort of the things that motivate him. And so I kind of see studying Julian as kind of a gateway to self knowledge, right through the philosophy he pursues, as well as sort of know, other things and kind of spiritual developments. But at the end of the day, you know, if Julian were alive today, he would hate me because, you know, politically, you know, religiously, et cetera, musically even. But I think you get to the point. Get to the point there.
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Yeah, yeah. No, it's great. So, you know, like, you, you know, I think there's a lot of things to appreciate about Julian that you see him as A kind of mirror for society. But, you know, he's not just like a reflection of you. So can you tell us, like, who was this guy?
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Well, he was a lot of things at once. You know, he was a Roman emperor. He was a soldier who led armies. He was a politician, bureaucrat. But he was also a Greek authority. He was a rhetorician, even a satirist, a writer of letters. He was a devotee of philosophy, of Hellenic culture, of pagan religion. And he was also a dreamer. He really believed that he was chosen by the gods to help bring the Roman Empire back into the light of their blessing, because he believed genuinely that under his, you know, Christian successors in his, in his dynasty, you know, that the, the empire was on a path to eternal darkness. And so that's a lot of things at once. And so I like, try to make sense of how do all those things. How are all these things linked together?
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Yeah, yeah, no, that's really helpful. Just a reminder that nobody is one thing and that the things that are going to make him unique are going to come from a lot of different places. That's a little bit about who he was 4th century emperor. But can you give us a sense of the time? And a big part of his philosophy is engaged. It's popping up against the background of a broader kind of Christianizing time. His uncle is Constantine and there's all these other kind of Christian emperors, and these are like big debates going on in late antiquity right now. But what's your sense of how Christian the empire was during this time? I know all numbers are guesses. I'm not gonna pin you down a number here, but what does it mean to be a pagan emperor a generation after Constantine?
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So I'll start here with what you said in the introduction, where there's a common conception of Julian that he can be compared to, say, a youngster in the UK getting into Wicca to rebel against sort of the majority Christian hegemony that's established in society. And I think that conception has a lot to do with kind of this retrospective kind of triumphant triumph of Christianity kind of lens where, you know, he was rebelling against the inevitable progress of Chris, of, of, of triumphant Christianity that, you know, later on became the dominant religion, but also the majority religion in terms of the believers in, you know, in the empire and Western Europe and, and, and, and, and so forth. But how can you be a rebel if what you're doing is kind of representing what the majority are already thinking? So they called him the apostate, the Christians after him. Okay. And apostates in Greek, you know, literally means someone who stands away from what. Whatever thing. And it's originally meant someone who rebels, someone who is a dissident. Okay, A Tran. Even a Tran against, you know, whatever. Whatever group. Right. And so what they saw him doing is, was he was rebelling against, you know, what was, you know, the inevitable kind of proper hegemonic order. However, unlike the teenager with the Wicca in the uk, in the modern day, the majority of people, in the year 361, when Julian became sole emperor of the Roman Empire, majority of people were still pagan, especially the people who were not in the upper classes or the establishment, the people in power. And so in order to kind of reverse that, all he had to do was kind of keep his advocacy and, you know, funding subsidies and support of traditional Greco Roman pagan religions, you know, going for a while before inevitably, I think, you know, people in the army, people in, you know, in the bureaucracy, people in positions of power, even bishops, right, are going to inevitably see which way the wind's going and switch back to the previous kind of religious order. So I think a helpful article to read on this, which you can actually Google, is by Mikhail Fedashkin, and it's called Julian's Apostates, and actually looks at literary evidence, looks at other forms of evidence, and shows that there was actually a high rate of repaganization under Julian in just the 20 months that he was in sole power from late 361 to the middle of 363, again, people in the army, people in the upper classes, the educated classes, and in a lot of. And even again, even bishops, right, were becoming pagan priests. So what seems to be going on here is that theoretically you could speculate that if Julian had a longer reign, that the rate of repaganization would actually outstrip the rate of Christianization under Constantine and his sons.
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Right, yeah, yeah, that's really helpful. I mean, I think one of the misconceptions that I wanted to kind of clear up is the idea that like. Like it is not the case that in 360, the majority of people had like, all converted. Right. Like, this is still a very new movement. And it is true that at the very top, you know, Constantine and his kids are Christians. And that had, like, a big impact. But. But, you know, social change happens much, much, much more slowly. And so when. When he's coming along and kind of, you know, trying to make Roland pagan again, that's not a crazy project. That is a, like a legitimately, like yeah, like, you know, we had a 30 year blip, but like, like this is a plausible thing to do and. Yeah, so that's great. Thank you. You know, so let's get back or actually get into the book. You know, like, you start off your book kind of making sure that people know what the book is not. And what the book is not is a biography. And it's not even. You say like an attempt to get to the real Julian. And you say your questions are more like, who was Julian, according to Julian? Like, what picture do we get of him if we let him speak for himself through his own writings? And I guess I want to ask, like, what's the difference? Like, why is that a helpful way to do it? Like, I do know that, like, that is not a surprising thing for a professional historian, but when I say something like that to students, they think that what I'm doing is like, just like, I don't know, like a lesser form of history or something. Like, like, it's like, oh, you couldn't get to the real thing and so you're giving us like, I don't know, some kind of fake version or like, like the best you can do, but like a better historian would be able to do it differently. And that's like, that's not really what we mean. But can you tell us, like, why are you writing like that?
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Partly because this is my training as a classical philologist rather than as an historian. I am not presuming to write a biography of Julian or a history of the Roman Empire under Julian. I'm largely focused on his corpus of writings. That is my comfort zone, that's my wheelhouse. And so I'm staying in my lane, for one thing. The other thing is what I want to do with this book is make. Draw some clearer lines around what Julian presents and how he conceives of himself, his identity, his. His regime, and delineate that from what other contemporary authors are saying about it. Okay, so for instance, there were orders like Libanius, High Marius, and people like Themisteus, et cetera, who are interpreting what he's doing and they are using public oratory to do so. And I think people have a tendency to kind of look at his proponents, like those orators, and say, oh, these are mouthpieces of the regime, right? Or these are his propagandists. And I'm saying, well, hold on, hold on. If we actually, if we try to isolate, you know, what other people say versus what Julian says, and we understand that Julian is working from a lot of different kind of conceptions of, you know, in both. In terms of his kind of philosophical background and his cultural agenda, there's actually some major key differences. So that's one level. The other level is I really kind of resist the positivist kind of idea that we can sort of access, this was Julian, or this is. And because all we have is with our historical evidence, especially the written evidence, is we have individual points of view or we have kind of rhetorically constructed personae. And what Julian is presenting in his writings is a rhetorically constructed Persona, right? And so what I'm doing is I'm seeing is that Persona consistent across his writings, and how can we understand how to interpret that Persona? And for what I'm doing here is I'm saying, and I'm borrowing this a bit from some literary theory here, is that Julian is part of what is called a interpretive community. In other words, he's part of an intellectual community that read certain texts, such as the dialogues of Plato, for instance, in a certain way. And that intellectual community, I identify that reading community, that interpretive community, is pagan, Iamblicaean, Neoplatonists. So in other words, he's in the tradition of the philosopher Annelis of calcus, the late 3rd, early 4th century Neoplatonist philosopher, right? And his students. And then sort of we can even follow this tradition up into the fifth and sixth century, okay, Through. Through proclus and et cetera. And I see that this kind of Iamblichean tradition has certain uniform ways of. In terms of kind of metaphysical doctrine and also their approach to an understanding of pagan religion. I see Julian as part of this tradition. And so if we can sort of understand how these. Sorry, if we can understand how these. This tradition understands things like philosophical allegory or pagan sacrifice, things like that, then we can get an idea, or even just political philosophy. Then we can kind of get at what Julian might be doing as well. And so basically what I do is I say, okay, here's what Julian is saying in these texts of his, and here is how Iamblichus is presenting this doctrine that Julian seems to be alluding to, right? There's even parts of where Julian says, okay, for example, here's a myth, or here's just myths we inherited from the Greek tradition. We need to understand these myths and interpret them philosophically, specifically as Iamblichus and the Neoplatonic tradition understood them. So he's already explicitly prescribing kind of a way to read these texts and kind of what this sort of reading community he's in.
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Okay.
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And so that's what I'm doing. I'm not presuming to say this is what Julian really was, but I am looking at trying to see if there's a consistency in the Persona he is presenting and how that Persona is consistently rooted in a tradition of a specific brand of pagan, theurgic, Neoplatonism that I think is essential to see.
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B
Cool. Great. So, I mean, you've been talking about Iambiclus. Can you tell us a little bit about him and kind of the circle around him? I mean, the texts and the teachers, they really changed his life. So maybe you can start us off, give us a little bit about Iambiclus and his philosophy, and then we'll talk about the kind of the circle, the socialization aspect of this.
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Okay, so, you know, rewind to the third century. Okay. You have the beginnings of what, you know, modern scholars call Neoplatonism with the philosopher Plotinus, right. Who, you know, among others, is kind of seeing how we need to go back to seeing the metaphysics of Platonism as kind of a way of. As a foundation of almost a sort of spirituality, right. That by practicing philosophy is a way of attaining almost this kind of enlightenment by identifying our true selves with the. With the higher divine worlds, the higher divine intellect. And then by reorganizing ourselves that way we can, through spiritual, philosophical, ethical discipline, and theoretical contemplation of this. Of these higher abstract realm of the forms, let's say, right? We can achieve this sort of union of our soul or communion with the divine, which is, you know, what they would define as happiness, Eudaimonia. Right? And so Plotinus and his student Porphyry are developing this and others are developing this approach to Platonism. And then along comes Iamblichus. And some say that he was a student of Porphyry. Some say he was just more of a contemporary and a rival, or at least someone who just debated with him a lot. And he said, well, wait a minute. Yes, all of this is important. Yes, metaphysically, right? The universe is sort of a result of the overabundance of the creative activity of the gods, originating in the first principle of the One. But it is not the case that we can just by our powers alone kind of reunite and access kind of the divine realms without some help and without some divine grace. Right. And the key kind of difference, at least of emphasis, between Iamblichus and earlier kind of Plotinian philosophy is this idea of the descent of the soul, right? Plotinus would say that when we are incarnated in bodies, right? And our soul is incarnated in a body, not all parts of our soul are here in the lower kind of realm of becoming versus the realm of being, right? The higher, logical, rational, divine part of our soul is always still up there in, you know, with access to the intellectual, the divine intellect, right? He compares this, actually, this is a good kind of image to the myth of the Odyssey, especially specifically book 11 of Homer's Odyssey, where Odysseus sees in his vision of the underworld, the soul of Heracles, the shade of Heracles, rather kind of walking around the fields of Asphodel and he interacts with him a bit and everything. However, the narrator Homer says, actually Heracles, his true self, his divine self, is actually up with the gods reveling in glory because he became immortal. And that's just the mortal shade of the Heracles, the mortal Heracles who died like a mortal. So that's Plotinus conception of the soul. Iamblichus says no, yes, the soul has a rational part of it, you know, kind of a spark or an element of the divine that it inherits from the demiurge, right? The creator, however, all of the soul descends, okay, so Sweenes, we are all cut off from the divine intellect, right? From the God, the realm of the gods. And we cannot by our own powers alone of, you know, ethical discipline, theoretical contemplation, doing philosophy full time. We can't. That's not enough. We need to. There's something beyond rationalism even here. And what we need is theurgy. In other words, long ago and in a continuing tradition as well, the gods have of their own free will, provided sets of prayers, rituals, sacrifices, oracles and various other symbols and all sorts of things, implanted them in the world or taught them to some earlier sages who had a special kind of almost natural connection to the gods. People like Numa Pompilius or Pythagoras or Plato or Orpheus. And through those kind of prophetic people, the gods sort of revealed these rituals, these kind of guidelines for religious practices that will allow people to enact the activity of the gods in this world and take on the divine life, exchange the way you live your life, your human life with, for the life of the gods. In other words, you become an extension of the gods activity in this lower realm of the cosmos.
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Okay?
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A
And theurgy is sort of the action. That's why it's the orgeia. It's from Theos God and Ergon doing activity versus theology, which is just talking about the gods, okay. Or theoria, just theorizing. And so there's some debate about this in scholarship, but theurgy can mean a number of things. It can mean sort of the higher so called kind of special rituals and practices of specialists who are philosophers, who are an elite. But it also can be applied to more conventional religious rituals from tradition that were revealed through Numa Pompilius for the Romans, through Lycurgus for the Spartans, through the ancient theorists of the Egyptians and everything to establish actually the conventional cult practices of their own traditional religions. So that alone just, I think explaining that if you know anything about Julian, you can see why he would take to that kind of philosophy, seeing that, oh, you can't just do philosophy, you actually have to do the religious stuff with it. There's a continuity with the philosophy of the religion, okay. And so this is why he believed that ancient traditional Greco Roman religious practices had to be maintained because otherwise how can people enact the activity of the gods in this world?
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Yeah, yeah, no, that's helpful. And it's, I mean, you know, like getting all of Plotinus and Iamblichus in, you know, like two minutes is tricky. But I think that that just gives us a sense and like sets us up for the next part of this, right? Which is like, you know, those are the kind of the big ideas. But like how did he get like socialized into a kind of that, that kind of reading community, that interpretive community around Yambiclist? Like what do we know about that, that circle around him?
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So Julian was a prince of the Constantinian dynasty. A he survived kind of this, this massacre of a lot of his kind of branch of Constantine's family, you know, in 337, when he was only 5 or 6 years old. But he grew up with a princely education which was traditional classical paideia. And he grew up in the Greek speaking part of the world of the empire. And so he was learning his Homer and he was learning the canon of authors. And then because he was necessarily upper class, he was also getting kind of the more elite education of which is a rhetorical education. So it's not just learning to memorize and read and interpret the text, but also to produce this literature as well based on these models. So he's learning rhetoric in places like Constantinople and in Nicomedia. And it's around then that he is catching wind of and of kind of people doing philosophy as well. And at this time, philosophy and rhetoric People teaching philosophy and rhetoric, they were off. They were often sometimes the same person. Okay, they, there was a lot tying them together. For instance, the Dialogues of Plato were very popular school texts for teaching rhetoric because he's got this great style and everything. And so one way or another he caught more onto the philosophical aspects of kind of Greek education. And eventually that led him to Pergamum, where a philosopher named Odysseus was operating. And he was a student of Iamblichus by this time. Iamblichus died around 325 or so. And ideas by this point was pretty old himself. And so Julian wanted to study with ideas because he had this reputation for great wisdom and this sort of Platonic philosophy he was getting into. Dias says, oh, I'm too old, but why don't you learn from, why don't you study with some of my students, people like Eusebius, Midnas and Chrysantheus and others. And Julian was studying with them. But then he learned about another student of Odysseus named Maximus of Ephesus. And Maximus of Ephesus was much more interested in theurgy than some of these other sort of third generation Iamblicians. And Julian seemed more interested in theurgy to start with because I think he was just much more into sort of the action, the pragmatics of these sort of spiritual disciplines rather than sort of the more abstract stuff. Like Iamblichus, you know, is not just a philosopher who is writing about magic and theurgy and rituals and everything. He's otherwise a very conventional Neoplatonist writing about mathematics. You know, he has this whole like 10 volume Pythagorean sort of sequence which a lot of which we have lost. But Julian doesn't seem that interested in that aspect of Amblichus thought. And so Maximus was someone who could have provided him, could indulge that interest more. And so he went down to Ephesus and basically Maximus became his mentor, right, throughout the rest of his life, really. And it was under Maximus that he, you know, at least according to some sources, officially apostatized, whatever that means, converted away from Christianity and converted not to paganism, but to philosophy. Okay, and there's an interesting distinction here. Okay? The paganism was a necessary consequence of him converting to philosophy because he wanted, he basically changed his lifestyle to follow this new philosophy. And worshiping these gods was a necessary part of that lifestyle, right? Rather than he got into paganism and then, oh, hey, here's some philosophy to kind of make sense of it, it was the other way around.
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B
Okay.
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A
You know, so that's, that's, that's sort of how he got into this crowd. And so while he, when he eventually kind of was called to power, first in 355 to be a junior emperor Caesar under his cousin Constantius II, and then eventually in 361 when he becomes sole emperor soul Augustus, all the while he has people like Maximus as well as other people like Priscus of Epirus, constantly as his sort of gurus, as it were, his kind of his unofficial advisors in all matters philosophical, spiritual, religious, etc. Right. That are kind of the, the, the, the brain trust of a lot of his ideas about ruling and how he sees himself, you know, in this kind of providential scheme that the gods had evidently been putting him on. And that is, I think, gets into kind of one of the first major kind of things I do in my book, which is talk about how Julian sees himself vis a vis philosophy as a ruler.
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B
Yeah. So maybe you can tell us about this. Like, I mean, he cares about rituals, he cares about the life of the mind, but like, the guy's the emperor. Like, he's spending a lot of time thinking about grain supplies and armies and, you know, tax rates. Right. Like, and he cares about Plato. But like, like, he did see himself as the emperor who like, liked philosophy, not like a philosopher who just happened to be emperor. But can you. And he thought that, like, he thought that his philosophy could account for that he wasn't just a bad philosopher because he had to be emperor. So can you tell us about this relationship kind of between philosophy and ruling?
- [36:51]
A
Yes. So I really like how you kind of phrase that toward the end where he wasn't just a philosopher who happened to be called to be emperor, rather he was an emperor who had an evident strong philosophical interest that he then used to make sense of how and guide how he was emperor.
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B
Right.
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A
And this is actually sort of a real reorientation he makes for himself because, you know, he did not expect to become emperor. You know, he kind of just wanted to do his own thing until basically kind of the necessity of kind of keeping the dynasty in the family. There weren't that many left male relatives of him because, partly because his cousin the emperor had murdered a lot of them, but eventually he, Constantius ii, was someone who just like really, really wanted to make sure that anyone who was sharing power or ruling in the empire had to be part of the dynasty. And so eventually Julian was called up. He was the only one left to help him rule the empire, and he's called him up as Caesar in 355. And then eventually, six years later, he becomes soul of Custis. Okay, so Julian plausibly might have aspired to be a philosopher, a professional philosopher, a full time philosopher, had he continued to live a private life. I don't doubt that. However, given the circumstances of his career and the trajectory, he was convinced that the gods had other plans for him. The gods wanted him to be emperor so that he could restore their worship. Because by being emperor, you have the material political means to establish that and not just be an armchair philosopher who says, well, hey, it should go this way instead. Right? So I think that's an important context there. And so when he becomes emperor, he says, okay, I'm emperor now. So, yes, philosophy should continue to be an important guide, essential guide to how I live my personal life as well as how I rule. And I should surround myself with professional philosophers who are not. Who themselves don't have any political power, who don't have any official offices.
- [39:19]
B
Right.
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A
And they will continue to advise my rule while they are practicing philosophy full time. Right. Because they are the ones who, through their discipline, through their spiritual discipline, through their practice of theurgy, are much more able to. The term is intelligence. In other words, to access directly the divine intellect through their contemplation, through their practice of theurgy and everything, which is something Julian is much less able to do as emperor because he's emperor. Okay? He has. He has to. He has to lead armies, Right. As you said, he has to worry about the grain supplies.
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B
Right.
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A
He has to sit on court cases. He has to do a lot. A lot of paperwork. Right. And he talks about this through, like, everywhere. He's just like, I am so busy as emperor, I have to do all of this stuff. Like, I don't have time to do a lot, to do a lot of, you know, philosophical research or things like that. I do as much as I can. Right. But clearly I have. This is my identity, this is my job. I am emperor.
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B
Right?
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A
And I'm not going to pretend that I am some philosopher king who can do both at once.
- [40:31]
B
Right, Right. Yeah. And I think this is where, like, the actual philosophy part of this is, is helpful because, like, for Plotinus, you know, like, your. Your soul. Your soul is still kind of up there, like. And you have this, I don't know, Charleston calls it a divine double, where you kind of, you know, like you. You go up and like, all of life is about a kind of homecoming and and everybody has this. And so like the goal is for everybody to be living that kind of life. And you know, most people won't. But like that just makes you a bad philosopher if you're not doing that. Whereas, I don't know, with Iambiclus, like, I don't know, there was like a, there was a sense that like different people actually had different natures. Like we're not just happening to be in exile. Like, like for like you, you really can't go home again. And so you need these sacred rituals, these kind of, I don't know, I think it was like little hotspots to the gods or something. Like, like, and, and, but like practically what that means is like if you are an emperor, you shouldn't be a philosopher. If you're a shopkeeper, you shouldn't be a full time philosopher. Like we like have our thing to do here in the world and we have our little rituals and, and symbol. What? Like kind of the symbols, rituals, all those kinds of things that can kind of boost you up into the spheres. But like you're also supposed to kind of have a life here. And there's a politics to that, but there's also a philosophy to that that he's not, I don't know, he's not making that up. It's like maybe he just got lucky that that's the socialization that he was brought into, that it could help him make sense of actually being emperor. That's just the way I was thinking about it, having read here.
- [42:01]
A
No, and yeah, and Iamblichus in the De. Mysterious, as it's now called, you know, he talks about how there's different types of people know, it's an anthropology of souls where, you know, only a very select group of people, right. Have this sort of special nature, right. That allows them to be able to access, you know, the divine intellect. Right. And then there's also kind of people who are. The majority of people who, you know, are not destined or capable of that, but they can still kind of enjoy a sense of communion with the gods through the conventional religious rituals they present, but that will only elevate their souls as far as say the planetary and cosmic gods, right? So there's a sense of spirit, of kind of divine communion that is achieved at every level. Right. But there's also, you know, there's the gods as they sort of manifest in the world, right? And then there's the gods who are, you know, operating at the higher, at the higher levels of intellect and beyond. Right. And so this sort of hierarchy, as it's so called, you know, corresponds to the different types of kind of rituals and theurgy that people can practice, are appropriate to practice and so forth. And it's only like the really elite philosophers or even sort of the pagan holy men, right, you know, that are at the very top capable of. Of doing the thing. And also, you know, another thing to look at is that Julian is sort of in this. In sort of in. In between category. I see. Because, you know, if you look at, if you read Plato's Phaedrus, the myth of the Chariot allegory, you know, Socrates talks about how, you know, those who kind of their souls go through the cycle of incarnation and then they are attempting to follow the gods into the spheres beyond. And, you know, various souls are able to kind of at least get a peek into that world beyond, you know, the cosmos, where they are kind of gazing upon the forms, right? The ideal archetypes of reality. And he says, Socrates says that those who have had the were most capable. The souls most capable who have gazed upon the forms the longest are then reincarnated as philosophers. Those who have contemplated the second most become rulers and so forth and so on and so forth. And at the very end, the last group is tyrants, right? So what I see here is that categorically, okay, Julian sees himself as a ruler, but that doesn't mean he is not philosophically gifted or capable of doing philosophy at some level. It's just that those to him are two different things. And this is, I think, one objection I get to kind of. What I argue here is that, oh, people wouldn't have thought in terms of professionalization, you know, when it comes to, at least when it comes to like philosopher, right? However, looking at Julian, right, he seems to make a big point about how no philosophers, true philosophers as we understand them, actually are categorically different from rulers and politicians and whatnot, and they should maintain the separation. And so the letter to Themisteus, for instance, which is something that I spend a lot of time with in the early part of my book, is I think, where Julian kind of distraught this distinction the most because Themistias, who, you know, is, you know, he's a philosopher, orator, okay, he truly believes that philosophy and politics and ruling can be seamlessly combined and to. And that will be the best to bring about the best possible political system. Julian disagrees. He believes that no philosophers cannot do politics and rule at the same time because that'll be to the detriment of both their politics. And their philosophy. And I actually think that Marcus Aurelius in the Caesars is an example of someone who tries to be both at once, and at least in terms of the political part of it, comes up short, even if he does achieve success philosophically for that. Julian believes that, no, a true philosopher can only be effective working not in the open air, but in the shade. The Greek terms are hupai, thras, in the open air, and huposteges, right under the. Under a roof. And he believed that, no, the philosophers have to separate themselves from everyday kind of practical political life in order to focus on their activity, their contemplation, their ability to intelligize, to access the divine intellect. Okay. And that they can then use the wisdom, the knowledge that they acquire from that philosophical activity and use it to advise those who actually do the politics, who do the ruling. Okay. Which is so true. And that's. And I think that's how I see Julian seeing himself.
- [47:44]
B
Right.
- [47:46]
A
Not a philosopher king or a philosopher emperor, but a philosophically informed emperor.
- [47:53]
B
Yeah, no, that's really helpful. And I mean, it gets the way he. He reads so many of these characters, too, of like. Like, sure, Socrates talks about having a philosopher king, but, like, when you look at his life, the guy didn't, like, rule Athens like, he was a philosopher and like, you know, Marx. Aurelius might talk about doing both, but, like, the guy was a much better, I don't know, emperor than he was a philosopher. Like. And that's just like, how Julian sees them. And in a different part of the book, you talk about the hymn to Helios, and you notice that he calls himself an opados, like a follower, as opposed to a komes, a leader. And I mean, that's not the only thing you say there. But can you tell us about that distinction and kind of, you know, give us a sense of the broader project of the hymn and, like, why. Why that distinction matters for him?
- [48:37]
A
So what I'm doing there is. I am kind of addressing a trend in Julian scholarship that I am pushing against. And that's the idea that Constantine provides the model for what Julian's doing. That, in other words, Julian is kind of seeing himself as sort of a. A. A pagan Constantine and just kind of doing. Seeing what Constantine did. And then, you know, monkey see, monkey do, but for the cause of paganism rather than Christianity. Right. There's some stuff. There is. There are some. There's some stuff to it there. I'm not entirely rejecting it. Okay. But I am rejecting it certainly in terms Of. Of how Constantine himself, through his propaganda, through his. Through his coins and imagery and everything, conceived of himself vis a vis divinity. Now, Constantine, before he converted to Christianity, was, you know, a devotee of Sol Invictus, you know, the sun God Apollo, et cetera, right? And that was sort of the tradition of his family, you know, and his dynasty, right? That was sort of their. Their patron God. And so Constantine on his coins, okay, would refer to Sol Invictus as Comes Augusti, okay? In other words, the Augustus, the emperor's companion, right? And in fact, you would see, like, there's some coins where you have a. Like a gold solidus where. Whether it's a Jewgate profile, right, where it's Constantine's head and then it's just in front of Helios head or Sol Invictus, the sun God's head. And so they're sort of seen on more of a level of equality or sort of identification with each other, right? So Constantine does a lot of play where he's sort of associating him not just with the sun God, not just in terms of he. He's his divine patron or he's his buddy, but he actually takes on attributes of Sol Invictus, where he's got the radiant crown from his statuary and everything. And what he's doing here is he's traditionally kind of presenting himself in terms of. He is categorically a superior human being to the rest of his subjects. That's one reason he shaves again. He shaves and tries to present himself as this eternally youthful Apollo. So he's taking a lot of cues from Caesar Augustus in that regard. Julian does not refer to Helius or Sol Invictus, right. His family's traditional sort of patron God as his comas, as his. As his companion, right? He refers to him as. He refers to himself as an opados, okay? A follower, a servant. Right. An attendant. Okay? So that is a much different relationship that he's seeing here. This is not associating himself with Helios. He's not taking on the attributes of Helios, Right. Rather, he is in service of Helios here. And using the word Apidos, he's actually referring to how the various followers of the gods are referred to in Plato's Phaedrus in the chariot allegory, and how each God has certain followers depending on sort of the lottery of birth, right? And he happened to be sort of the follower of Helios or Apollo, right, in that regard. And so as does his dynasty. So this is where things get really interesting with sort of kind of the work on kind of how religions at this time kind of use the language of slavery. That's been sort of popular in various other books lately because Julian actually conceives himself as a Doulos, as a slave of Helios, and that Helios is actually the true emperor. Even the book, the work of Julian you're referring to is the hymn to Helios. It's actually the hymn to King Helios, Helios Basileus. Right. And so what you see here is he's almost presenting himself as an orator who is composing a panegyric of an emperor Basilicos Logos and that in order to do that he is essentially kind of maintaining that he's just a regular human being. He is not the object of praise. He's actually the one who's praising the true emperor of the universe, which is not Julian, but actually Helios. And so I think that sort of positionality that Julian is adopting makes sense of how he's doing something different from Constantine in terms of kind of how the Sun God is his relationship to the Kun God. But it also gives an idea of how Julian sort of presents himself much more humbly in terms of am I a superior being who is. No, I don't think so.
- [54:09]
B
Yeah. And when he presents himself as a God, when he starts talking about that. I think if you're not used to reading this kind of literature, that can sound like the least humble thing a person can say. But I mean Christians at this time will talk about divinization. Like Athanasius will say the word became human so humans could become divine and also was quite capable of talking about humility. And I think once you're used to that kind of move, then you can see how Julian is presenting himself kind of humbly while also having this kind of lofty language as well. Okay, can we turn like the like on one? I don't know. This book is like puncturing two myths in my head. Like, like the, like Julian was not just larping as a philosopher and he wasn't just like larping as a, I don't know, like Greek who, when he was really Roman. So like, like the, the Roman ness of Julian is something a big chunk of the second half of the book is. Is interested in. And it's not just like a kind of. He doesn't just happen to be sadly Roman like where he like really wished that he, I don't know, lived hundred years before. I don't know, however many hundred years before. But one way this really comes through is in this great chapter that you have on the Symposium of the Caesars. Can you tell us about this text if people want to know really more about it? You translated and then got a full cast to read the text. It's on YouTube. We'll put it in the show notes. But can you give us a sense of this text and then what does it tell us about how he saw being the Roman emperor?
- [55:36]
A
Yeah, if I may plug that kind of radio play I did that was. That's. That was hosted by the. By Liv Albert's Let's Talk About Myth Baby podcast. And that was kind of a creative side project that I did after I submitted the. The manuscript for review of the book. And it was just a lot of fun and it was a great way. Just translating it actually helped me understand kind of the text better. And so some of my kind of new revelations actually went into the revisions of the book. And so, you know, it wasn't just floor, you know, so when you do these kind of things, they're not just frivolous, but, yes, this. So the climax of my book is chapter four, where basically it's a close reading of my favorite work of Julian. As you can tell which the manuscripts call the symposion, hence the Symposium, which is recalling sympathic literature tracing back to Plato's Symposium, which I think is actually an important kind of reference text for what Julian is doing. However, some of the earliest literary sources that refer to this text are church historians. I think Socrates of Scholasticus refers to this text as the Caesar, the Caesares. So it's hard to tell what did Julian originally call it. So I just call it the Symposium of the Caesars. Have it both ways. And this is basically Julian. This is the closest Julian comes to writing a Platonic dialogue. And a lot of people characterize this text as a satire, like a Manipian satire in the tradition of Lucian and everything. And there might be some of that there. But I think Julian is specifically. He's really steeped in Plato. And not just Plato philosophically, but Plato as a writer.
- [57:41]
B
Right.
- [57:42]
A
There's a reason Julian's works survive as much as they do is because that despite his religious affiliations, people throughout the Eastern Roman Empire, all the way to the fall of Constantinople, they liked to read Julian because they thought he was a great writer and an entertaining writer and a good model of style. And so this was definitely a text that demonstrates that. And I think it's a Quasi Platonic dialogue that is modeled on Plato's Symposium, where basically it's centered around competing speeches. Plato's Symposium was kind of competitive speeches over what is love, right? You know, what is Eros? And what Julian's doing here is, well, it's competitive speeches over who was the best ruler. And he sets this in the. As a banquet of the gods. That's a symposium of the gods, Right. And the specific occasion is the Saturnalia or the Kronea in Greek. Right. So it's basically in honor of Cronus or Saturn. Right. And the MC of this party is Romulus. And Romulus, you know, the founder of Rome who ascended to the gods at the end of his reign to become more or less one of them. And Romulus is on this occasion, inviting all of the Roman emperors who had died up until this point to join the banquet. Right. And what I see in this text is what he means by that is that Romulus wants people to follow his example of rule the way I did, and you will be able to ascend to the gods and in communion with them. And so this is essentially where I intersect with what I wrote my dissertation on. And in fact, previously with Ancient Jew Review, I had written the dissertation Spotlight back when I did my dissertation back in 2017, 2018, where I talked about this topic. So this is all coming full circle now, but it was basically about the discourse of. In Roman historiography and oratory and whatnot, of comparing emperors to the founding fathers of Rome, largely Romulus, but also King Numa Pompilius and also other of the figures of the regal period. And the idea here is that if an emperor is favorably compared to Romulus or Numa, then that means that they were a proper Roman emperor, because they are essentially, they're recapitulating the reign of Romulus. They're refounding Rome, Right. They're maintaining or bringing Rome back to its pristine condition. Whether. And by being a Romulus, right, you are not just refounding Rome, but you're also a great general expanding Roman territory, right? Defending Rome, making sure that the boundaries of Rome are. Are protected. Just like Romulus was very keen on maintaining the boundaries of Rome to the point where he even killed his brother over it, Right. Or be a new Pneuma, right? You are maintaining, preserving the original Roman legal and religious traditions that are attributed to Pneuma as well. Okay. And so I talk a lot about how Julian in chapter three, how Julian emulates these two figures, not to the sense where he is presenting himself as A new Romulus or a new pneuma, but rather he is showing them that these are the models he aspires to. Okay, That's a key difference, right? And so the symposium, I think is sort of an allegory showing that those who most successfully emulate Romulus are those who achieve communion with the gods. And so the banquet is not just. They're not just partying, but Romulus specifically asks the gods, hey, we've got the deified Roman emperors here, okay, and who happen to be all the ones deified by the Senate, okay? A lot of the ones that were not deified, like Tiberius or Caligula or Domitian, Commodus, etc, they try to join the banquet, but they fail. They either just get kicked out and sent to the underworld or they can't make it. However, these Caesars, these deified emperors, okay, who joined the banquet, they cannot sit at the same level as the gods. They actually have to sit below the moon. This is up in the sky, right? They actually sit below the moon because beyond the moon is the realm of the divine, the realm of perfect. It's a more perfect fifth element kind of part of the universe. And so Romulus, who evidently was capable of going above the moon and being among where the gods are in the, in the, in the divine realms, right? He wants more of his successors of basileis, of Roman kings, slash emperors, same word for more or less. They want to join him. He wants him to join him, right? He. So he asked the gods, hey, can we have some more of these Caesars join us at this level? And the gods are like, yeah, sure, we had already sort of been planning to do that anyway. And so they decide to hold a contest of sorts where a select group of the reputedly best emperors give a series of speeches to demonstrate that they were the best ruler. And then following those speeches, there's also a series of cross examinations that they also have to go through. Interestingly enough, Hercules, who is the equivalent of Romulus, but for the Greeks rather than the Romans, was like, well, if you're going to hold this contest, why not compare these Romans to actually the gold standard of ruler, which is Alexander, my descendant. And so Alexander decides. So Alexander comes in and he joins this contest of rulers, which also include Julius Caesar, Octavian, Augustus Trajan, Marcus Aurelius and Constantine. And they all give these speeches of talking about all the awesome stuff they did. And then there's cross examinations which they don't do so well in because nobody's perfect. And then at the end, it's you know, the gods put it to a vote. And the language here is very interesting. It's very imprecise and vague, and I think that's intentional. It says that Marcus Aurelius got a lot of votes, and so it's assumed that he won the context. And perhaps if the contest ended that way, he would have. And it makes sense, right? Marcus Aurelius was the most philosophical of the rulers there. He's even called a philosopher. And he presents definitely one of the best models of ruling. However, the gods say, well, actually, you're all winners in our eyes, and so why don't you go. So you're all invited to not just come up and have communion with the gods, but sit next to the God of your choice. And so, you know, Julius Caesar goes and sits with Aphrodite and Aries because Aphrodite, Venus is his ancestress. Right. Octavian goes and sits with Apollo, which is the sun God. And I say a lot more about that. Alexander and Trajan actually go up with Heracles. Marcus Aurelius goes with Zeus and Cronus and Constantine. He actually leaves the banquet and shacks up with Jesus, who is definitely not a God. He's just, you know, some dead guy over there. Right. There's a lot more I could say about this, but that's sort of the plot there. But if I may finish, bring this back to Romulus. What I'm seeing here is that what Julian is saying is in that he's not just endorsing Marcus Aurelius as a model here, because he's not a perfect model either. Okay? All the emperors, he points out their faults, but they are still worthy of their deification by the Senate. And they're still worthy to be admired because they all emulated Romulus in some way. They all refounded Rome in a certain way, and Rome needs to be continually refounded and that there's more than one way to do it. Okay? So it's a very kind of inclusive way of. Yeah, there's different styles of ruling that have their pros and cons, but there isn't just one way. And so Julian kind of. I see Julian coming in and he has kind of his way. And that Julian is not just looking at Marcus Aurelius as maybe a philosophical model, but he's also looking especially at Octavian Augustus. And if you read the Caesars, I think Octavian Augustus comes off as a very worthy model after Marcus Aurelius in terms of the actual things he did in order to make sure. That Rome would last.
- [68:54]
B
Right.
- [68:55]
A
And would be kind of in communion with the gods. Right. There's a lot that I think you can map onto Julian in terms of his political kind of activity and aspirations. And it makes sense because, you know, Augustus more than anyone in sort of the historiography and the propaganda of Roman refoundation is the one who's most often compared to Romulus in terms of the person who restored the Roman Empire as a new Romulus in many ways. And so I think Julian. That really resonates with Julian as well. Yeah.
- [69:32]
B
And I mean, to come back to that kind of refounding idea there, I mean, it's in your subtitle as well, but it's. Something gets taken up kind of in Julian's own writing, but it's also something that people kind of in his own day were talking about when they thought about kind of his legacy. And so maybe kind of to start to wrap up, we could talk about how people in late antiquity were seeing him. And so a lot of the speeches that we have kind of while he was alive will talk about this idea of kind of that he was a re. Founder of Rome. But maybe you can give us a sense of kind of like right after he dies, how are people starting to talk about him?
- [70:09]
A
Well, there's a key distinction I make is the way that his contemporaries, especially his supporters, talk about him while he's alive. And then there's how he talks about. They talk about him after he dies because clearly there's. Clearly the circumstances are quite different while he's still alive. He has his supporters like the orator Libanius I, Marius Claudius Mamertinus. I talk about all three of those. And they all have different approaches to Julian in terms of the rhetoric of refounding than Julian does. And they have different kind of professional and ideological agendas that they bring to that interpretation that I think should be more distinguished from how Julian conceives of his. His role as a refounder. So probably the closest of those three I mention is Claudius Mamertinus, because he is. Well, he's presenting Julian in very traditional terms of Ciceronian, Plinian, Latin, oratory, which he does on 1-1-362 in his sort of addressed to the Senate of Constantinople, you know, on. As a. As consul. And he is, you know, he's presenting him as kind of a new Augustus. Right. Someone who is, you know, very down to earth. He's a soldier, but he's also, you know, a. Someone who is a great reformer. But the Thing is, is that he mamritinus is part of the tradition of the, the Latin panegyrics at this time, which are saying that yes, they're not, they're, yes, they are restoring the best parts of the Republic, but they're not just restoring the republic. They, the system they have created is better than the Republic. In other words, they are endorsing the idea that the monarch, that monarchy, you know, is superior to, to republican traditions, Right. And so they actually embrace the idea that kind of late antique Roman rulership is actually the superior system and it is an innovation, okay. Over earlier Roman models. Julian is much less inclined to present himself as innovating in anything, Right. You know, he is trying to bring Rome back to its pristine condition, Right? And then there is Heimerius, who is a Greek, you know, pagan orator, you know, from Bithynia, operating teaching in Athens. And unlike Julian, who is much more inclined to emphasize Rome and as you know, the capital and not in any way on a level of equality with Constantinople, which his predecessors and his successors would do, Heimerius actually thinks that Julian will make Constantinople the superior city because Julian was born in Constantinople and that under Julian it will be refounded as kind of the city of Julian rather than the city of Constantine. And that is already it is superior to Rome and so high. Marius has a much more kind of Eastern Greek focused kind of spin on supporting Julian's kind of restoration politically, not just religiously that Julian did. And then Libanius, who is in Antioch, right, who was also seeing Julian as kind of restoring a lot of things and also specifically the city of Antioch. You know, he hinted that he wanted to make Antioch kind of a new capital even, right. And that Libanius was definitely more interested in sort of what Julian's kind of reforms would do for, you know, Greek, classical paideia. And he was much less interested in sort of, you know, kind of the Roman aspect of all of this, okay? And so that's during his life, after his death, okay. Suddenly the game changes and Libanius is a nice kind of way of controlling our variables here because then suddenly Libanius has to reckon with the fact that clearly it was fated that Julian would only reign so long and that he had to step aside while kind of the course of empire, the course of destiny carried on. And Libanius was convinced that it was really fated that kind of the world order collapse and that Julian was kind of the last glimmer of hope, but it was a false hope. And that. So after Julian's Death. Libanius writes about how if Julian's life was a refoundation of everything that was good in the world, culturally, religiously, politically, then his death was the opposite, a defoundation. Everything return is returning to darkness. The Roman Empire is on the path to collapse. However, not everybody thought like Libanius, even people who are sympathetic to Julian. So for instance, another author I talk about is Ammianus Marcellinus, the Greek turned Latin historian who was a contemporary of Julian. He served under Julian, but he wrote in Rome a few decades later. And Ammianus Marcellinus didn't believe that Julian's death was leading to the inevitable collapse of the Roman Empire, at least not in the sense of Rome will go away because he thought that Rome will always be eternal. However, he does believe that the disaster at Adrianople and things like that were certainly, you know, caused by the fact that leadership, Roman leadership never returned to the level of, of Julian. And Ammianus sees kind of proper Roman rulership as maintaining definitely, definitely being focused on the city of Rome and focusing on maintaining proper Roman traditions. But Amiodus thought that not even Julian was perfect or he properly did this during his reign and that's actually what led to his downfall.
- [77:45]
B
Yeah. So I mean, I think that gets us to like the kind of late ancient reception can you give us? I mean, I think we should probably wrap up soon. But like, like, how did he become the last pagan emperor? Like, that's not the way Libanius is talking about him. That's not the way Ammianus is talking about him. Like kind of the, you know, the image that we have of him, like, where did that come from?
- [78:08]
A
Well, again, as we, as I discussed at the very beginning of this episode, a lot of his reception is through the lens of, you know, the Christian writers that, you know, framed his death as sort of the failure of paganism and proof divinely, you know, providential proof that Christianity was destined to triumph and was therefore good in all of that. And that's why Julian was just rebelling against this inevitability and failed rather than, you know, the way we are reframing it otherwise. And so Julian sort of, kind of the fact that Julian was sort of this last pagan, this last pagan holdout, you know, kind of resisting kind of the inevitable kind of march of Christian progress is largely, you know, something invented by Christians. Right. Because it makes them look good. And later on that image is sort of inherited by people in kind of the Renaissance and Enlightenment and, you know, romantic period, etc. Who kind of then see him as sort of a tragic figure that they become more and more kind of sympathetic to. And again, the major focus on his religious reforms. But that wasn't the only reception of Julian even in late antiquity. Again, there's a very interesting kind of book by Stefano Travato about Julian's reception in the Eastern Roman Empire, in Byzantium, throughout all the way to the end of Byzantium. And it's that Julian was not just the last pagan or the apostate or the. Or the paravatis, the transgressor, Right. He wasn't just this kind of demonic devil figure. He certainly was for religious discourse in Byzantium, Right. Any emperor who was seen as unorthodox or kind of resisting orthodoxy or the Church or what they saw as proper Christianity was compared to Julian, even if they were Christian, Right. They're a new Julian, et cetera, et cetera.
- [80:37]
B
Right.
- [80:38]
A
However, Julian was already being seen as a multifarious figure even in Byzantium because he was also seen despite his religious aberrations in their mind. He was seen as a patriot, he was seen as an emperor who was legitimately trying to do his best for the good of his country. Right. And that he was not a bad ruler, you know, if you look at his kind of military and, you know, and his administrative activities, right. They thought, well, yeah, he was, he was, he wasn't bad at all. Right. Finally, they admired him most. And I said this before in this episode as a writer, right. They were willing to overlook kind of some of the more polemical, anti Christian, pagan, blasphemous parts of his, of his writings, which of course they did for so many other pagan writings, of course, and be able to appreciate that he was a very entertaining, insightful and clever writer, and even a model of style, which is why a lot of his work survived, except for against the Galileans, which was his directly anti Christian treatise that we only have in quoted fragments. So that goes to show you that even in the place you would least expect, which was orthodox Byzantium, Julian already had quite a multifaceted and rich reception, which could only preview kind of what came later on.
- [82:20]
B
Yeah, that's great, thank you. And if people are here because they're used to you being the metal guy, there is some metal stuff in the book and there are other places where they can hear you do that. I don't know, I didn't want to pigeonhole you on that. But if people are looking for that, I promise there are other places where you can find that. Let me end with this. What do you hope people take away from the book?
- [82:41]
A
I want this book to show that when you're looking at the evidence for a figure like Julian, that you really need to be careful not to let other voices speak for him. That's sort of letting Julian speak for himself and taking him seriously. Okay. Trying to understand, okay, where is Julian coming from when he presents himself in a certain way, right. Rather than okay, well, Libanius says this, Gregory says this. The inscriptions even say this. Because even inscriptions are not dictated by the emperor. They're usually more of a bottom up thing. Right. We should not take that as and say this is Julian's idea or this is what Julian thought, or even this is what Julian said. Because you know, even things, even official media like panegyrics, even coins and inscriptions, certainly even laws, right. Are filtered through various kind of bureaucratic machinery. They are coming from different perspectives with different agendas. And that I think what Julian is doing with his corpus of writings is saying, here's how I see all of this. Here's how I see myself here, here's how I see what I'm doing.
- [84:15]
B
Right.
- [84:15]
A
And here are, here are also sort of the kind of intellectual and literary and cultural kind of premises that you can use to understand what I'm saying. Right. And if we can approach more kind of historical figures like that, then I think that'll help us be more critical kind of examiners of history ultimately.
- [84:46]
B
Yeah, that's really helpful. And especially the way like you to understand Julian and to let him speak for himself does require reading the people he was reading. Like you got to know something about Julian, about Iambol cliffs to know something about Julian. Like, like that's, that's another way you can really make a mistake. But, but kind of then just like really thinking hard about what our sources are saying and kind of, you know, what the right combinations of them. It's an important lesson for historians. Okay, Anything else you want to kind of plug things you're working on next?
- [85:20]
A
Well, my next kind of major project that I've been working on is, you know, I didn't talk about any of the metal stuff here, but I am co editing a volume on heavy metal music and pre modern worlds. And basically this is various kind of presentations and papers from the Heavy Metal and Global Premodernity online conference that I've co run a couple times with Charlotte Naylor Davis and Shama Boyarin. And we have invited various authors to contribute and turn their papers into book chapters. And this is set to be a double volume that will hopefully come out.
- [86:05]
B
Maybe.
- [86:07]
A
Late next year, early 2027 perhaps. But that's been kind of the major project at the moment. I am open to doing more with Julian perhaps writing that actual biography that I said I wasn't writing in this book. Because honestly, there is no kind of. I mean, I feel that a full, thorough biography of him needs to be written because the ones that have been written are either kind of short, kind of introductory things or they're from a while ago. And so I'm looking for opportunities for that. So this will probably not be the last you hear about Julian or Julian in Heavy Metal, because there's some stuff in the pipeline with that as well.
- [87:02]
B
Cool. Yeah, more Julian. You know, whenever you want it, we're here for you. Cool. Well, thank you, Jeremy. It's great to talk with you.
- [87:10]
A
Yeah, thanks for having me on again.
- [87:11]
B
All right, bye.
- [87:12]
A
Bye. Sa.