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8 The Making of the Apostate Gregory’s Oration 4 against Julian “Listen to these words, all people; lend your ears, all you inhabitants of the earth,” I call you all. . . . Listen, . . . men of all kinds and ages, those who are alive today and those who will live in the future, . . . all you powers of the heavens , all angels whose work is the fall of the tyrant and who have beaten . . . the dragon, the Apostate, . . . the common adversary and enemy of all. —Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 4.1; Psalm 48:2 “Rumor, the swiftest messenger of sad events, . . . flew through provinces and nations ,” bearing the news of Julian’s death while the emperor was on the katabasis from Ctesiphon back to Roman territory.1 Libanius knew only that “a cavalryman’s spear struck him when he was without armor, . . . and the spear went through his arm and entered his side. . . . You are anxious to hear who killed him. I do not know his name.”2 By early August Jovian had been elected the new emperor by the army, still in Persian territory. To control the worst effects of the rumors, Jovian sent messengers to Illyricum and Gaul “to announce the death of Julian and [his own] elevation ,after Julian’s demise, tothe rank of Augustus.” The messengers, passing through Antioch by mid-August, also conveyed Jovian’s instructions to the mints to issue new coins with his portrait and the legend VICTORIA AUGUSTI, VICTORIA RO336 1. Amm. Marc. 25.8.13: “fama . . . index tristiorum casuum velocissima per provincias volitabit et gentes.” The exact location of Julian’s final battle is unknown. Ammianus 25.3.9 relates that on Julian’s inquiry as to where he was on that fatal day, he was told the place was called Phrygia, which accorded with an earlier oracle foretelling Julian’s death, reminiscent of the death of Cambyses, Hdt. 3.64.3–5: the name has symbolic rather than geographical significance. The scholarly consensus locates the battle south of Samarra, about 50 miles north of Baghdad and 100 miles north of Ctesiphon, which the army reached a few days later, Amm. Marc. 25.6.4; den Boeft, Drijvers, et al., eds., Philological and Historical Commentary on Ammianus Marcellinus 25, 61, 75–76, 270; Rosen, Julian, 363; Matthews, Roman Empire , 181, 506. 2. Lib. Or. 18.272, 274 (Libanius, Selected Orations, trans. Norman). MANORUM, SECURITAS REI PUBLICE.3 Such coins fooled no one. Pamphlets plastered on Antioch’s columns to welcome Jovian when he arrived there in October ridiculed the emperor with slogans such as you came back from the war: you should have come to grief there! orill-omened paris, most handsome to look upon! Julian was not the only emperor to feel the sting of the Antiochenes’ tongue. Indeed, Jovian, in terrible quandary after Julian’s death, had to conclude “a necessary but humiliating peace treaty” with Shapur II to salvage the Roman army.4 Sometime that summer of 363 the rumors of Julian’s death reached Gregory in Nazianzus. His reaction, as he recorded it, was exultation.5 As his Orations 4 and 5 indicate, however, his initial elation soon gave way to a more nuanced assessment of Julian the man and emperor, and of the consequences of his life and death for the community of the Romans.6 In these two orations, Gregory made Julian the Apostate, creating the Julian who would dominate posterity until the discovery of Ammianus Marcellinus’s Res gestae by writers such as Jean Budin, Abbé de la Bléterie , Montaigne, and Montesquieu slowly changed Julian’s image again, to that of Roman emperor rather than the Apostate par excellence.7 In Gregory’s orations, Julian became God’s divinely preordained teaching tool with which to instruct the oikoumenē and the world through his prophet Gregory on the true meaning of Greekness (to be hellēnikos and hellēnizein), by associating with Julian everything he considered the wrong way of being Greek, a Hellēn (a term that came to signify “pagan”)—from the mistaken use of Aristotle’s logic to define the Trinity to the misconduct of festivals, from the mismanagement of war to misconceived legislation. In this way Gregory could declare all the good ways of being Gregory’s Oration 4 Against Julian 337 3. Amm.Marc.25.7.5–14,8.8,8.12;denBoeft, Drijvers,etal.,Philologicaland HistoricalCommentary on Ammianus Marcellinus 25, 228–29, 269; Ehling, “Ausgang.” 4. Eutr. Brev. 10.17.1...

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