XIV
Julian passed the winter in preparations for his Persian campaign. At the beginning of spring, on the fifth of March, he quitted Antioch with an army of sixty-five thousand men. The snow was melting from the mountains. In fruit-gardens the leafless young apricot trees were trimmed with pink blossoms. The soldiery marched gaily to the war as to a festival.
The dockyards of Samos had built a fleet of twelve hundred ships, wrought of enormous cedars, pine, and oak from Taurus gorges, and the fleet had ascended the Euphrates as far as the city of Leontopolis.
By forced marches Julian passed by Hieropolis to Carrhæ, and thence along the Euphrates as far as the southern Persian frontier. In the north, another army of thirty thousand men had been sent out under the generals Procopius and Sebastian. Joined to the forces of the Armenian Arsaces, these were to lay waste Adiabene, Apolloniatis, and traversing Corduene rejoin the principal army on the banks of the Tigris at Ctesiphon.
All had been provided for, combined and planned with ardour by the Emperor himself. Those who understood the plan of campaign were amazed, and not without reason, at its wisdom, simplicity, and greatness of conception.
At the beginning of April, the army reached Circesium, a post remarkably fortified by Diocletian on the frontier of Mesopotamia, at the junction of the Araxes and the Euphrates. There a bridge of boats was constructed, Julian having given the order to cross the frontier on the following morning. Late that evening, when all was ready, he returned to his tent, fatigued but satisfied. He lit his lamp in order to resume his favourite work, for which part of his night was reserved. It was a study in pure philosophy: Against the Christians. He used to write it in snatches, within sound of the trumpets and camp-songs and challenging sentries. He rejoiced in the idea that he was fighting the Galilean with every weapon lying to his hand; by battlefield and book, by Roman sword and Hellenic learning. Never did the Emperor part with the works of the Fathers, ecclesiastical canons and creeds of the councils. On the margin of the New Testament, which he studied with no less care than Plato and Homer, he would make caustic annotations with his own hand.
Julian took off his dusty armour, sat down before his table, and dipping his reed-pen in ink, began to write. His leisure was immediately invaded. Two couriers had just arrived in camp, one from Italy, the other from Jerusalem. Their news was by no means agreeable. An earthquake had destroyed the city of Nicomedia in Asia Minor, and subterranean rumblings had raised to the highest pitch the terror of the inhabitants of Constantinople. The books of the sibyls, moreover, forebade the crossing of the frontiers before the year had elapsed. The courier from Jerusalem brought a letter from the dignitary Alipius of Antioch. By a strange contradiction Julian, the worshipper of the manifold Olympus, had decided to rebuild the temple, destroyed by the Romans, of the one God of Israel, in order to refute, in the face of time and the world, the prophecy of the Gospel, "There shall not be left here one stone upon another that shall not be thrown down" (Matt. xxiv. 2). The Jews responded with enthusiasm to the Emperor's appeal. Gifts flowed in from all sides. The plan of rebuilding was a superb one. The work was promptly taken in hand, and Julian confided the general supervision to his friend, the learned and noble Alipius of Antioch, formerly proconsul of Britain.
"What has happened?" asked Julian, before unsealing the missive, perturbed at the sombre face of the courier.
"A great misfortune, well-beloved Cæsar!"
"Speak, fear nothing."