But Julian was very popular with his soldiers. When they heard that their commander-in-chief had been ordered to return home (a polite invitation to come and have one’s head cut off), they invaded his palace and then and there proclaimed him emperor. At the same time they let it be known that they would kill him if he should refuse to accept.
Julian, like a sensible fellow, accepted.
Even at that late date, the Roman roads must have been in a remarkably good state of preservation. Julian was able to break all records by the speed with which he marched his troops from the heart of France to the shores of the Bosphorus. But ere he reached the capital, he heard that his cousin Constantius had died.
And in this way, a pagan once more became ruler of the western world.
Of course the thing which Julian had undertaken to do was impossible. It is a strange thing indeed that so intelligent a man should have been under the impression that the dead past could ever be brought back to life by the use of force; that the age of Pericles could be revived by reconstructing an exact replica of the Acropolis and populating the deserted groves of the Academy with professors dressed up in togas of a bygone age and talking to each other in a tongue that had disappeared from the face of the earth more than five centuries before.
And yet that is exactly what Julian tried to do.
All his efforts during the two short years of his reign were directed towards the reëstablishment of that ancient science which was now held in profound contempt by the majority of his people; towards the rekindling of a spirit of research in a world ruled by illiterate monks who felt certain that everything worth knowing was contained in a single book and that independent study and investigation could only lead to unbelief and hell fire; towards the requickening of the joy-of-living among those who had the vitality and the enthusiasm of ghosts.
Many a man of greater tenacity than Julian would have been driven to madness and despair by the spirit of opposition which met him on all sides. As for Julian, he simply went to pieces under it. Temporarily at least he clung to the enlightened principles of his great ancestors. The Christian rabble of Antioch might pelt him with stones and mud, yet he refused to punish the city. Dull-witted monks might try to provoke him into another era of persecution, yet the Emperor persistently continued to instruct his officials “not to make any martyrs.”
In the year 363 a merciful Persian arrow made an end to this strange career.
It was the best thing that could have happened to this, the last and greatest of the Pagan rulers.