Chapter XXIII: Julian and his Apostasy

[nwhyte]

Read it here or here.

1) Good quotes

This is rather a long anecdote about a bloke who became the Arian Patriarch of Alexandria, was martyred by the pagans, and became an Orthodox Christian saint. It is appealing for the general loely style of the writing, for its revealing snobbery about the sons of tradesmen aspirting to high office, and not least

Comments

[strange_complex]

I very much enjoyed another chapter's worth of Gibbon's (only very slightly tempered) admiration of Julian, here. You're right, though, nwhyte, to feel that some archaeological evidence would help to round out the picture. It is implausible, for example, that any temple (re-)building at all would really have got very far during such a short reign, and having written an article on the fate of pagan temples in late antiquity a couple of years ago, I'm in a position to say that there is no persuasive surviving archaeological evidence for Julian's efforts in this regard