From the moment he first seized the purple in 361, few Roman emperors have provoked as much discussion as Julian. Despite the brevity of his reign—just twenty months of unchallenged sole rule—the ‘apostate emperor’ prompted a literary outpouring from supporters and opponents alike, followed by a battle to define his legacy which played out not only in Greek and Latin but also Syriac and Coptic. Controversial in his own time, he has remained a source of fascination down to the present day due in large part to the sheer number of faces he wore: an emperor who was also an author and fancied himself a philosopher; the last member of the first Christian imperial house who was also Rome’s final polytheist ruler; a Greek-speaker born in the Roman East who waged a civil war against it from the Latin West. The result of this enduring interest has been a steady stream of modern publications, from academic surveys of his own writing or treatment in particular authors to general audience biographies, the latter published as recently as 2023.[1]
These are the crowded waters in which Emperors and rhetoricians must wade. It is necessary to be clear here, for the title may suggest a broader remit; while there are certainly useful takeaways for scholars of imperial rhetoric more broadly, this book functions first and foremost as an innovative study of Julian’s public career from his time as Caesar in Gaul after 355 to his days in Antioch before his fateful Persian campaign of 363. Marcos ultimately overcomes the risks of tackling such a seemingly well-worn topic by grounding his investigation first and foremost in shrewd and detailed textual study. His command of his corpus and ability to trace clear throughlines of continuity and difference across authorial personas allows him to convincingly articulate a theoretical framework of Late Antique rhetoric and situate the work of Julian and his contemporaries within it. This framework produces a number of insights and fresh interpretations that even result in that rarest of commodities: something new to say about Julian.
Marcos lays out the basics of his approach in the introduction, including a justification for the utility of panegyric to reconstructing the objectives and self-presentation of Late Roman regimes. In this, the book is very much in line with recent scholarship on the subject, most notably Adrastos Omissi’s outstanding book on panegyric and usurpation, a work which is atypically but regrettably omitted from the bibliography here.[2] The introduction makes a compelling argument that encomiastic texts are especially useful for understanding Julian’s public persona, given this emperor’s tendency to represent himself via what Marcos smartly identifies as a distinctive mix of personal idiosyncrasy and adherence to traditional norms. Marcos’ stress on Julian’s own record as a successful panegyrist and the impact which this had on his later self-presentation is especially interesting, and its validity is repeatedly demonstrated throughout. The structure of the book is then outlined as essentially a chronological march through Julian’s career with each chapter covering a span of roughly two years, usually examined via 2-3 rhetorical works produced within that span.
The first chapter begins the book on one of its strongest notes. The first orations of Julian and of Themistius are not typically considered the finest work of either author (indeed the manuscript rubric on the latter suggests this low opinion may even have gone back to Themistius himself). Yet Marcos looks at these works in tandem, along with briefer notes on Themistius’ second oration and the Constantian letter adlecting him to the Senate, and lays out a series of striking parallels. In particular, this chapter argues that we can see a consistent ideologically driven image of Constantius as a lover of paideia. Drawing heavily on Brown’s classic work on paideia and political culture, this chapter shows how both Themistius and Julian present themselves as educated intellectuals who can attest to the emperor’s own learnedness, demonstrated not least in his sponsorship of the speakers themselves.[3] This shared emphasis is all the more striking given the otherwise radical contrast between Themistius’ abstract philosophical treatise with its self-consciously innovative structure and Julian’s textbook encomiastic model rooted in highly specific exempla. Given the poor state of our evidence for Constantine’s sons in general, this insight into what was surely Constantius’ own calculated self-presentation is a valuable addition to our understanding of his public image.
In Chapter Two, Marcos moves into the latter years of the 350s to examine the second two panegyrics written by Julian as Caesar, one again for Constantius and the other for the empress Eusebia, as well as Themistius’ third oration. The chosen theme of ‘diplomacy’ is a somewhat more forced unifying principle than paideia was in the first chapter, but the actual analysis remains strong. Particularly notable is the section on Julian’s consistent self-promotion and construction of a literary persona across both of his speeches, including a useful discussion of his ‘personal manifesto’ within the second oration to Constantius. For this better-studied work, Marcos is able to sharply summarize prior orthodoxy while usefully buttressing it with his close reading of the panegyric of the empress. The chapter is especially convincing in highlighting Julian’s new emphasis on Claudius Gothicus as the shared (fraudulent) ancestor of Augustus and Caesar alike as a significant moment in his evolving self-presentation, although it does not push this to the further point that the claim grants Julian a dynastic legitimacy wholly independent of the hated Constantine and his sons.
Chapter Three is perhaps the weakest of the book conceptually, though it still has points to recommend it. The ostensible focus is on the legitimation of Julian’s Paris coup of 361 and subsequent civil war against Constantius, taking as its main case study the self-justifying letter which he wrote to the Athenians to advance his case. This is in itself entirely logical, and the discussion of the letter’s deployment of ‘auto-panegyrical’ devices is a valuable addition to scholarship on this fascinating text. This section in particular would have benefitted from engagement with Omissi’s extensive commentary on the letter, which is largely complimentary to Marcos’ analysis.[4] Somewhat less successful is the effort to place this epistle alongside a discussion of the orations attributed to Julian at this time by Ammianus Marcellinus. As the author acknowledges, these are obviously inventions of the historian writing some three decades later, and thus a sharp break from the book’s otherwise firm focuses on both contemporary evidence and authentic rhetoric. The argument that Ammianus is (by his own admission) drawing upon panegyric for both material and literary tropes is unsatisfying; the same justification could be made for considering Ammianus’ accounts of the rest of Julian’s career, something the author does not do. The discussion of Ammianus remains interesting, but feels out of place in both the chapter and the book as a whole.
Chapter Four is dedicated to Julian’s tenure in Constantinople in 361, now back on much firmer ground. The main stress is on Claudius Mamertinus’ speech from the Panegyrici Latini, another encomium from which Marcos manages to extract much fresh insight. His argument that Julian adopted a highly subdued approach to religious policy in his early messaging will strike many readers as counter-intuitive, but its presentation with a great deal of supporting material makes a compelling case, as does the comparison with the early policy of Constantine. Where this chapter really stands out however is in its integration of Himerius’ panegyric on Constantinople into this historical moment, a speech which as the author notes is usually treated independently of its Julianic context. Reading Himerius’ work alongside Mamertinus and the propaganda of Julian’s regime as a whole tells a useful story of developing messaging which sheds light on emperor and rhetoricians alike.
Lastly, Chapter Five treats a wider array of texts from Julian’s time in Antioch at the end of his reign in 362-3. A brief survey of a handful of imperial letters and edicts feels an odd fit. As Jill Harries in particular has shown, Julian’s personal voice leaves strong traces in his legislative output, and a fuller consideration of this would have been entirely within the scope of this volume.[5] Alternatively, it might with justification have been excluded entirely as a distinctive genre. The abbreviated treatment of a handful of examples seems to fall unsatisfyingly between these two poles. Happily, the other works which are treated are once again the beneficiaries of insightful analysis. These consist of two contemporary orations of Libanius, which Marcos convincingly argues show a slow evolution in Julian’s public approach to religion, and the infamous Misopogon, perhaps the most bizarre text to bear an emperor’s name. Fittingly for a final chapter, the discussion of Julian’s missive against the people of Antioch serves as a culmination of many of the book’s major themes, with Marcos arguing that it must be read by foregrounding the author’s record as a skillful rhetorician and panegyrist in particular. As he concedes at its conclusion, the Misopogon is undoubtedly a strange text which it is difficult to read as a total success. However, his claim that it was nonetheless a carefully crafted work drawing upon topoi of panegyric and anti-panegyric to achieve political ends and not simply an emotional rant deserves to be taken seriously, especially when read against the contemporary messaging of the regime and its supporters.
A conclusion sums up the book’s core themes including its articulation of the functions which panegyrics served for imperial regimes, their authors, and their audiences. Marcos also uses his final remarks to make explicit an argument that recurs throughout the book largely as subtext: that Julian was a more skillful and ‘sensible’ emperor than he is often portrayed, and that he and his regime’s deployment of panegyric as both author and subject offer powerful evidence for this. The book thus concludes by inverting the traditional dynamic which once saw imperial encomium dismissed as empty rhetoric detached from the material reality of ruling the Roman Empire; rather, Marcos argues, Julian’s very success at rhetoric should be seen as evidence of his diligent approach to ruling.
The text is supported by a number of appendices. Three of these usefully summarize and offer a view on relevant controversies including the dating of the first orations of Themistius and Julian, as well as Julian’s pre-Caesar background; a fourth covers the evidence for emperors other than Julian at Antioch to better contextualize the discussions of Chapter Five. There are also four maps at the beginning; one (somewhat irrelevantly) shows the location of major battles of the fourth century while the others cover fourth-century Paris, Constantinople, and Antioch.
In sum, Emperors and rhetoricians serves as an intriguing examination of the communicative strategies of Roman regimes and elites in the middle of the fourth century, and a useful reconsideration of the public presentation and career of Julian in particular. By convincingly emphasizing the flexibility of panegyric and the ways in which it could be manipulated to fulfill multiple functions for different audiences, Marcos offers an analysis of the last polytheist emperor which feels genuinely additive rather than simply reiterating traditional narratives.
Notes
[1] See for example Baker-Brian, N. & Tougher, S. (eds) 2012: Emperor and Author: The Writings of Julian “the Apostate”, Cardiff; Ross, A. 2016: Ammianus’ Julian: Narrative and Genre in the Res Gestae, Oxford; Freeman, P. 2023: Julian: Rome’s Last Pagan Emperor, New Haven.
[2] Omissi, A. 2016: Emperors and Usurpers in the Later Roman Empire: Civil War, Panegyric, and the Construction of Legitimacy, Oxford.
[3] Brown, P. 1992: Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire, Madison.
[4] Omissi 2016, pp. 193–208.
[5] Harries, J. ‘Julian the Lawgiver’ in Baker-Brian & Tougher 2012.