Julian was in winter quarters at Paris—as Lutetia was beginning to be called—when the grave summons reached him. The island on the Seine, which now bears the Cathedral, had from early times offered a secure settlement, and, as the province became more settled, the adjoining slope, where the Latin Quarter of a later age began, was occupied with a palace, an amphitheatre, and a few of the customary institutions of a Roman town. Julian loved the little settlement on the broad silvery river, surrounded by dense forests, and he was spending the winter there, attending with equal judgment and humanity to the civil welfare of his province, when the officers of Constantius arrived. He has described at length the painful perplexity into which he was thrown. Not only would the sacrifice of four of his best legions seriously impair his strength, but they were local troops and had enlisted only for local service. He decided to obey, and ordered the troops to prepare for departure. An angry murmur arose from the camps, as the men reflected on the fate that might befall their families in the ill-protected country. Julian provided that their wives and children should accompany them, and they gathered at Paris for the dismissal. In affecting language the Cæsar conveyed to them his thanks and his admonitions, entertained their officers at a banquet, and retired to his palace.

The sincerity of Julian has been made the theme of an acrid discussion between his violent critics and his resolute admirers. But we may, without serious reflection on his character, doubt whether he entirely wished the troops to go. Such an order, from such a source, would plausibly relieve a Cæsar from obedience. Only excessive virtue or uncertain prospect of the issue would counsel a man to obey it. Both feelings were at work in Julian’s mind, and there is not ground to accuse his later account of hypocrisy. But we may surmise that, at the time, his decision was accompanied by unsanctioned hopes and dreams of a more satisfactory issue. In those days of anxious deliberation his imagination, however he might curb it, must have depicted for him the revival of culture, the arrest of superstition, the purification of the court and Empire, that would follow his elevation to the throne.

He retired to his palace, where, as he incidentally observes somewhere, Helena lived with him. But shortly after midnight a great tumult arose from the direction of the camp, and from the windows one could see the troops, the light of their torches gleaming on their drawn swords, coming toward the palace. The doors were at once closed, and Julian refused to show himself, but the cry of “Imperator” easily penetrated to his ears. On the following morning they broke into the palace, and forcibly conducted Julian to the camp. He resisted, threatened, and supplicated, but the troops were consulting their own interest, now gravely threatened by their revolt, and there was no other course possible but to consent. He was raised up on a shield, and the legions broke into a frenzy of delight at their escape from exile. A diadem only was needed to complete his new dignity, and Helena, who was present, seems to have offered a pearl necklace of hers. Julian refused to wear the feminine adornment, and an officer provided a rich golden collar, studded with gems, for the coronation.

With the struggle that followed, and the dramatic chapter that opened in the annals of Rome, we have no concern. Both our Empresses die before a decisive stage is reached. The date of the death of Eusebia is not known. It was some time between the beginning of 359 and the middle of 360, as Constantius married again toward the end of 360. She is said to have died of an inflammation of the womb, brought on by taking drugs for procuring fertility. That such drugs were familiar at the time, and that the Empress would naturally try their effect, we readily admit, but we need not entirely overlook the statement of Zonaras that the conduct of her husband and the unhappiness of her circumstances brought the beautiful Greek into a decline. Had she shared the throne with Julian, and adopted his views, the story of Europe might have run differently.[28]

That Helena was won to the views of Julian is improbable. She would, no doubt, discover soon after her marriage that he secretly cherished the cult of the old gods. From his first month in Gaul he had, with one assistant, set up a private shrine to them. There are coins that bear the names of Julian and Helena and the figures of Isis and Serapis, but they yield no inference. Nor can we learn the attitude of Helena in the struggle between her husband and her brother. The complete silence of Julian suggests that she remained moodily silent or hostile. Several months were spent in negotiation with Constantius. In December Julian celebrated, at Vienne, the fifth anniversary of his promotion, and wore the splendid diadem of an Emperor as he presided at the games and exercises. In the midst of the festivities Helena died. Zonaras, who also gives a ridiculous rumour that she had been divorced by Julian, says that she died in childbirth. We are tempted to think that the painful development of her unprosperous marriage weighed heavily on her, and her pregnancy had a premature and fatal delivery. Her remains were conveyed to Rome, and laid by those of her sister Constantina. We need not notice the charge of one of Constantius’s officers that Julian had poisoned her, and paid the guilty physician with his mother’s jewels. Julian, honestly, professes no grief at her death, and he never married again.

A third Empress makes a brief appearance at the time when Helena passes away. Passing from his long campaign on the Danube to the stricken regions of the East, Constantius had, toward the close of 360, married for the third time, at Antioch. Maxima Faustina, his third Empress, had little time to make an impression on history, if she were capable of it. As Constantius at length set out from Antioch, in the autumn of 361, to crush the mutiny in the West, as he affected to regard it, he contracted a fever, and died before he reached the European frontier. Faustina was left with the unborn wife of the future Emperor Gratian, and will come to our notice again. The Roman Empire was once more united under a strong, upright, and accomplished ruler. But Julian was now wedded to his ideals, and, as no woman shared his ascetic life and arduous labours, we must pass over the reforms, the campaigns, and the religious struggles of the next two years.

CHAPTER XIX
JUSTINA

The splendour of Julian’s reign was soon overcast. In the summer of 363, as he was skilfully extricating his troops from a dangerous position in Persia, he was pierced with a javelin, and he expired, with dignity and serenity, amongst his saddened supporters. Amid the noisy intrigue for the succession that followed, the name of Jovian, a popular and handsome officer of no distinction, obtained the loudest support, and the mantle of the brilliant young Emperor was conferred on him. How he secured the retreat of his troops by humiliating concessions to the Persians, and the Roman soldiers and Roman settlers sadly evacuated the provinces on which the blood of their fathers had been freely spent, and the emblem of the cross was borne again at the head of the legions, need not be told here. Not only is the wife of Jovian, Charito, no more than a name to us, but Jovian himself died before he reached the luxury of the capital. His brief enjoyment of power had been adorned by neither courage nor temperance. Charito sank back into obscurity, with her infant son, and was years afterwards laid by the side of her husband in the Church of the Apostles at Byzantium.

The next reign will introduce us to the stronger and more prominent personality of the Empress Justina and other Empresses of some interest. The hum of intrigue had arisen again in the camp, and the struggle of Christian and pagan was resumed. The choice of the army at length fell once more on an officer whose chief distinction was that he had a large and handsome person, and had had an energetic father. Valentinian had been an officer in Julian’s guards, and had one day, as he attended the Emperor at sacrifice, cuffed the priest for dropping some of the lustral water on his coat. Julian banished him for this violent desecration of his cult, but, though the more lively writers of the time promptly dispatch him to remote and contradictory regions, even Tillemont doubts if the sentence was carried out. It is probable that Julian had merely dismissed him from the body-guard, as we find him in the army at the time of Julian’s death. With two other officers he was sent by Jovian to secure the allegiance of the troops in the West. One legion, devoted to the memory of Julian, rebelled, and Valentinian had to fly for his life. He returned to the East, and resumed his post in the army, as it trailed some miles in the rear of the retreating Emperor. And in the middle of February (364) he was amazed to learn that Jovian had died, after a too liberal supper, and he himself was called to the throne. He was compelled by the troops to share the power with his brother Valens, and, leaving the shorn Eastern provinces under the care of Valens, he went on to Milan to take possession of the Western throne.