Gods and Legions

I

'Your place has long been empty.'

Julian pointed to the familiar bench, my battered shield still slung from the backrest where I had always kept it, ready to be used whenever Julian called for one of his spontaneous sparring sessions. The surroundings, however, were unfamiliar: a large, high-ceilinged, and lavish room, the walls painted with gaudy murals of frolicking satyrs and nude river nymphs, and an equally intricate mosaic on the floor depicting a vast pastoral scene. He, too, looked unfamiliar. Far from his typically casual, even shabby woolen garb, his formal court tunic was of a spotless white linen, the traditional broad purple band at the hem embroidered with gold denoting his rank. Even his beard, which mercifully he had retained or I would not have recognized him, was carefully trimmed to a self-conscious point and washed, and his normally unkempt hair was styled in the short, neat fashion of the day. The eunuchs of the court, I saw, had been exerting their influence, though I could not say, by these appearances alone, that it was for the worse. His eyes, however, were more hollow than I had remembered. More hollow, more wary, like those of an animal on its guard, or one about to attack. Only the bare wooden bench and shield in the corner remained of our old friendship.

I smiled wanly as I stood and surveyed him. 'You've changed,' I said. 'At least the eunuchs haven't convinced you to take off the beard. You still look Greek.'

He chuckled. 'Oh, they tried, believe me. The first time I allowed that doddering old fool Eutrapelus to give me a shave, he took so long that by the time he finished, my whiskers had grown back again. I have no doubt, Caesarius, that you yourself could have performed a neater field amputation than the job he did scraping my chin, but when I complained of the cuts, he tried rubbing my face with his depilatory liniment, some vile, secret psilothrum he had concocted out of ass's fat, bat's blood, and powdered viper that made my skin flower into a rash, not to mention making me want to vomit from the smell. Is it any wonder I let my beard grow?'

I laughed, but then became serious again. 'You're the Emperor. You needn't take advice from anyone — eunuch or dwarf.'

He paused for a moment. 'There are many times I could have benefited from your common sense, Caesarius,' he said softly.

'You said harsh things that night,' I answered.

Julian shrugged. 'It was the wine speaking. You know I meant no offense.'

I sighed as I tried out my old seat on the bench. 'You know I forgive you. It's my duty as a Christian. I think you may forgive yourself too easily, however.'

'Others are unforgiving, Caesarius. I know what your brother has been preaching about me in his sermons. Gregory is a good man, but a misguided one, and a trifle hysterical.'

'He has good reason. Is it true about the persecutions?'

At this question, he looked slightly taken aback, but quickly recovered.

'Caesarius,' he said calmly, 'the very fact that your brother continues to be allowed to preach against me, and not only to preach but to call me by all sorts of foul names, is proof of the… exaggeration of his accusations, is it not?'

'And Marcus?' I replied.

Julian sighed. 'Marcus. I will admit there have been problems. Crowd control is sometimes difficult from continents away. Men misunderstand my words and intent. I do not seek to persecute Christians, Caesarius. Only to eliminate favoritism within the civil service, and the unfair exploitation of our Greek heritage by those who do not believe in the old gods or, worse, who mock them.'

'So your goal truly is to restore paganism.'

'Yes… I mean no. Caesarius, that's not the ultimate goal, but it does happen to be a result. And it's not a bad thing, if you would only pull off your damnable Christian blinders. Still, there's no other way to meet the objective.'

'And what objective is that, precisely?' I demanded.

He assumed a bored expression. 'Caesarius, you know the situation as well as I do. You saw it under Constantius. Treachery and assassination at the highest levels, corruption rotting the very core of government, nepotism, religious strife. And why?'

'Why indeed, Julian?' I said, knowing full well what his response would be.

'Because,' he looked at me meaningfully, 'the people have neglected their ancestral religion, the very gods who brought Rome to glory in the past. Is it any wonder we've seen barbarian invasions from every side? Jackals always attack the crippled and weak, and that's what Rome had become, my friend, crippled and weak. Caesarius' — he leaned forward, seizing me by the forearm, his eyes ablaze — 'I know you don't support me on the religion side, but it's of no matter. We have the opportunity to redeem all of Rome's past errors! We have it! For the first time in decades, the Empire is capable of being great once again, of surpassing even its old glory! Undisputed control over the entire Empire is in my hands, the army is unified — Caesarius, there is nothing to stop us from restoring Rome, to making it the greatest empire ever to exist on earth, greater even than Alexander's! Nothing stands in our way, Caesarius, but lack of will!'

'Then why waste your time on religious squabbles?' I ventured. 'Why not leave the Christians in peace?'

He relaxed his grip on my arms and laughed, though with his mouth only. His eyes remained hollow and mirthless.

'"Squabbles," you call them? Caesarius, didn't we have this conversation back in Naissus? I cannot restore Rome alone. I need Rome itself, I need its will, the united will of the entire Empire. There is but one thing that prevents that will from materializing, Caesarius: neglect of the gods. And there is only one source of dissent in the Empire-'

'And that is the Christians,' I finished for him. He nodded almost regretfully and walked back around behind his table.

'Even the Persians are no obstacle,' he continued. 'They are cowering and pleading like stable slaves at the threat of Rome's might! But the Christians refuse to cooperate, to contribute to our efforts.'

I moved to change the subject. 'Julian, this Persian campaign you are planning — in Paris you denounced Constantius as mad for attempting the same thing.'

'Ah, but he was mad,' Julian said, smiling. 'He planned his campaign with only half the Empire behind him. I, as you recall, was the other half, and he knew I would not support him, yet he embarked on the venture anyway. His motivation was pure greed and ambition. Mine is the glory of Rome. Our unity is Persia's defeat! So you see, he was mad.'

'We have all been mad once,' I replied quietly.

It had taken me three weeks traveling overland from Nazianzus to catch up with the Emperor at his new base in Antioch, where he was preparing for a final reckoning with Sapor, the King of Kings, the Persian who had for so long been a thorn in the side of the Empire. From Antioch, Julian was gathering men and supplies for the most powerful military expedition Rome had undertaken in a generation. Provisions were pouring in through Antioch's nearby seaport of Seleucia and from across the desert by way of Aleppo. The supplies were intended not only for the army and the auxiliaries, but for the entire court, the administrators and the thousands of camp followers who were making of Antioch, already a great city, now one to rival even Alexandria, perhaps even Ctesiphon itself for opulence and wealth. Into Antioch's port poured the fruits and wines of Italy and the decorative tiles of Narbonensis; the wheat of Egypt and all of Africa, and the olive oil, silver, and copper of Spain; the venison, stout oaken beams, and soft, carded wool of Gaul; the marbles of Greece and Numidia and the cured hams of Baetica; the tin of Britain and the gold and amber of Dacia. From the vast caravans of ill-tempered camels flowed the dates of the oases and the porphyry and incense of Arabia; the ivory of Mauritania and the papyri of the Nile valley; glass from Syria and Phoenicia and silks from the Far East; and the gems, corals, and spices of India. And with the Emperor's arrival in Antioch, Antioch now eclipsed even Rome and Constantinople as the very center of the world.

Julian had arrived in the middle of July, while all the rest of the Empire was resting and escaping the heat in a somnolent torpor. He was accompanied by the recalled Sallustius, who stood always at his right hand, the side of Julian's sword arm, while Maximus kept to his left, the hand with which he wrote, the side of his intellect. They were his two principal advisers, dextral and sinister, and I was astonished and deeply concerned that Maximus seemed now to have attained influence as an adviser equal even to that of Sallustius. The Emperor was greeted at the ancient city by an enormous crowd, a fact partially accounted for by his fortuitous timing: his arrival coincided precisely with the ancient feast of Adonis, Aphrodite's lover, which was being celebrated throughout the city with the construction of small, artificial gardens and rites commemorating his death by a wild boar and his burial.

Nevertheless, despite the crowd's size, it was not necessarily one that enthusiastically supported the Emperor. Rather, the Antiochians seemed to prefer to defer judgment on their new lodger, for they had heard many things about him — that he was an ascetic, careless in his appearance, a scholar and a killjoy, a religious zealot — none of which endeared him to that city's hedonistic, worldly, cynical residents. And though the population was largely pagan, with some tepid acceptance of Christianity, or worse, of a pseudo-Christianity that blended certain of the ancient pagan rites with an adapted Christian liturgy, the citizens were not won over by Julian's enthusiastic leap into sacrificial worship of the ancient gods. In fact, they were badly put off by his excesses, for in a time of general famine (the harvests had largely failed that year), within the first weeks of his arrival at Antioch, he had engaged in an orgy of bloody sacrifices such as had never in memory been seen there.

In fact, Brother, Julian's actions were as extreme even as the exaggerated rumors we had heard back in Nazianzus, and worse — it was clear that in my absence his thinking had changed terribly, his taste for abomination grown, his capacity for refined and sophisticated thought deteriorated. I had accepted that he was no longer a Christian — indeed, he had made this clear to the entire Empire. But to have renounced even the subtleties of the philosophy he had so loved, which he had pored over for entire nights, all for the sake of these crude and humiliating pagan sacrifices was utterly beyond my comprehension. For hours every day, for days on end, the gutters of the temple precincts ran red, and Julian paraded from altar to altar with his hands and arms stained to the shoulders, at each one sloshing through a red bog of blood, surrounded by heaps of quartered beasts and reveling in the sheer quantity of animals put to the slaughter in the prodigality of his sacrifices. So insatiable was his appetite that he was said to rival even King Solomon, whom Scripture reveals to have offered such copious sacrifices that their blood and smoke must have infested Jerusalem for days.

To be sure, Julian felt compelled to remain in the gods' favor because of his plans to march against the Persians, and in order to maintain the love of his oldest and most trusted troops, the Celts and the Petulantes, who had accompanied him from Gaul and had remained faithful to him even during the darkest days of the winter in Thrace. Nevertheless, the constant feasting and orgies of the rude Gallic troops at the sacrificial banquets were an ongoing scandal to the refined and delicate Antiochians, who night after night suffered drunken, carousing foreign soldiers rampaging through their streets, and were unable to hide their resentment.

Yet the favor of the gods and of his men was more important to Julian than the private complaints of citizens in his host city, who soon resorted to less than honorable expressions in their jibes against him. He was a hairy ape, they said, bearded like a goat, buried always in his philosophical and sacred texts, with uncut, inkstained nails. He ate like a grasshopper and slept like a Vestal, and spent his days quartering countless hundreds of victims for his precious gods.

None of the ritual sacrifices did I see personally, of course, for still I refused to attend them, and indeed Julian granted me full exemption from doing so. This was a minor victory because he normally required all his troops and retainers, Christian and pagan alike, to witness his ceremonies. Nevertheless, there was one event during this period before the Persian campaign to which I was at least a secondhand witness, and which bears describing here, though I will refrain from applying any interpretation to it, Brother, in deference to your more accomplished skills in that regard.

Toward the end of that year, as I mentioned earlier, he resolved to rebuild the great Jewish temple in Jerusalem, which had lain as a pile of rubble for three hundred years since its destruction by the Romans in retaliation for the Jews' rebellion. For many years, in fact, Roman emperors had prohibited Jews even from visiting its ruins, which were left as a visible sign of shame, and, indeed, it was only in recent times that Jews were allowed to set foot in Jerusalem again at all. The reconciliation measure was logical from Julian's standpoint: he carried no enmity toward the Jews as he did toward the Christians, and in fact was greatly desirous of earning their friendship. Jewish brokers held a great deal of sway among the grain merchants of Egypt and northern Africa, and exercised influence over the sources and prices of many of the luxury goods crossing the desert in the caravans from Persia. Moreover, to his way of thinking, the Jews' religion was actually not far distant from that held by the Greeks, differing only in minor details, its chief defect, of course, being monotheism.

More important, however, was the metaphysical benefit to Julian from reconstructing the temple: Christ's statement that not a stone of that great edifice would remain standing would be resoundingly refuted. The Augustus, the High Priest of Paganism, would humiliate Christians in their own house, making their god out to be a fraud. This last objective, of course, he did not discuss with me, and perhaps I exaggerate in even attributing it to him as one of his motives.

The entire reconstruction plan was couched in the form of a restoration of friendly ties between Rome and the Jews and in November of that year he invited me to travel with him to Jerusalem to witness the ceremonial unveiling of the temple's new principal gate, the area around which had been recently cleared of debris, and with the erection of new columns and porticos about to be completed. Already he had received encouraging news of the temple's progress; how at the announcement that rubble was to be cleared for the start of the construction, Jews of every age and from every region had set aside their disputes and converged on the holy mountain of their fathers to witness and assist in the great event. Men forgot their haughtiness and women their fragility; spades and axes were donated by rich benefactors, and rubble was carried by hand, even in mantles of silk. Purses opened up and the region's entire population was enthused by the pious commands of their new monarch.

Despite my mixed feelings as to his true motives, I eagerly assented to the trip, for I had never before been to Jerusalem and was delighted at the opportunity to visit the Holy City before the start of the Persian campaign in the spring. The night before we were scheduled to depart, however, a Roman naval trireme pulled silently into the port outside Antioch and disembarked its sole passenger, Alypius of Antioch, the former governor of Britain whom Julian had assigned to overseeing the rebuilding of the temple. He had left Jerusalem only three days before, paying bribes amounting to half his estate in gold to secure a fast ship that would take him to Antioch before our departure, and practically flogging the captain the entire journey to push the rowers to move faster. As Alypius rushed into the palace, accompanied by two sturdy, barefoot sailors who looked about in wonder and awe, I noticed that his face was ashen and his manner almost panicky. Julian was summoned, and in the moments before he arrived, I quickly poured out a large draught of uncut wine and offered it to the trembling architect to calm him, which he drank down gratefully in a single gulp. He then explained the reason for his hurried journey from Jerusalem.

'Your Highness,' he stammered, until Julian ordered him to stand at ease. 'All was prepared for your arrival and for the reception in a few days — indeed, lengths of sailcloth had even been draped over the new gate, ready for you to give the tug on a string we had rigged, which would send the entire veil billowing to the ground to expose the loveliest temple entrance in the East-'

'What is it, man?' Julian barked impatiently. 'Get on with it!'

'There was a tremor.'

'What?' I said. 'An earthquake? We've heard nothing about one. Was there any damage?'

'Not to the city, no, my lord,' the poor man answered me, afraid to look anyone in the eye.

'What then?' Julian roared in exasperation.

'My lord,' the hapless architect moaned, 'the entire portico collapsed. Twenty workmen who were rigging the veil were buried in the rubble, and the remainder were only able to save themselves from the falling stones by taking refuge in a nearby…' He stopped, as if unable to go on.

Julian stared at him, motionless.

'A nearby what?' he asked, quietly and menacingly.

'A church,' Alypius whispered.

'A church,' Julian repeated, before spinning on his heels and storming out of the anteroom, muttering threateningly under his breath and gesturing with his arms, though there was no one nearby.

'What am I to do now?' the wretched Alypius asked me after a moment, staring around at the priests and guards who surrounded him, and at the malevolent Maximus, who had watched the entire exchange in silence. I had noticed, since my return to service, that Maximus' rash, if that was what you could call it, had spread several inches further and now engulfed most of the left side of his face and disappeared into the collar of his tunic, which he was constantly tugging and adjusting in his discomfort.

'I suggest you return to the trireme and await the Emperor's orders,' I told the man gently. He looked at me as if I had just passed his death sentence, as in fact I very well may have, for he was jailed that next morning and killed later in the week by a fellow prisoner, a madman, apparently, who had become enraged at the unfortunate architect for reasons I never learned.

'It doesn't matter,' Julian told me over breakfast two days later, in a calm after his earlier rage. 'I will order the cleanup and lay the cornerstone of the reconstructed temple myself.'

But the journey to lay the sacred stone was not to be. During the next several weeks, frightful reports filtered up to us from Jerusalem's temple district, which at first he dismissed in contempt, then noted in some disbelief. Finally, after summoning the Roman governor of Jerusalem himself to the palace at Antioch to give account for the strange happenings, he listened to them in utter astonishment. It appears that although at first the project to clear the temple site of the centuries-old accumulation of debris had been pursued with great vigor, not a workman in the entire city, Jewish, pagan, or Christian, could now be persuaded to set foot within a hundred yards of the site, for fear of divine punishment. During the first week after the initial collapse of the portico, as workmen had been in the process of removing the great stones and columns that lay in a chaotic heap, a series of terrible balls of flame had burst forth from the temple's ancient foundations, charring men into blackened skeletons. The fire had then disappeared without trace of an odor or a lingering flame.

The site foreman had at first attributed the phenomenon to some seepage of the black bitumen found in such abundance in the area of the Dead Sea, the ancient name of which, in fact, is the Lake of Asphalt because of the masses of that substance that periodically detach themselves from the bottom and float to the surface. A careless laborer, he concluded, might have ignited a pool of it when heating his supper in the shelter of the rocks, and thereby started the conflagration. He therefore sent a number of workers carefully into the underground vaulted cellars of the temple, some of which were still intact after the old Roman destruction, to investigate the matter further.

The second series of flames lit the evening sky like a lightning strike in a Dacian forest, and indeed many in the city of Jerusalem at first looked up to the heavens in surprise to see if they were about to be caught in the rain. They were even further surprised when the entire city was pelted with a barrage of dust, sand, and small pebbles. If only it had rained true water, it might have sooner ended the suffering of those poor ten or twelve souls among the cellar explorers who were still left alive after the explosion. They had rushed from the underground caverns shrieking and raving, their hair and extremities burned from their bodies. Most of them died hours or days later.

As I wrote earlier in this treatise, I have heard of fire issuing forth from dead bodies, and I myself have witnessed fire bursting from the storage of ice. Never, however, have I encountered fire emanating from cold, dressed stone, and I hope I may never live to see such a phenomenon myself. The rationalists among Julian's court speculated that terrible gases had somehow been released from where they had been building deep within the earth, perhaps from faults that had developed in the ground following the tremor that had first toppled the structure, and that these gases had, in turn, been ignited by the spark of a workman's chisel or the sputtering of an oil lamp. Others spoke more darkly of the wrath of the gods, be they the ancient ones of Greece jealous of Julian's favor to the Jews, or the mysterious bovine deities of Persia, infuriated at Rome's imminent march against the King of Kings. The Christians in the street claimed it as holy retribution against the Emperor for daring to question their Savior's divinity, while Maximus and the haruspices attributed it to still insufficient attention to placating Rome's guardian spirits through additional sacrifices.

I shall leave any final interpretation to you, Brother, for Julian wisely diverted his attention and energies elsewhere.