The strengths of this monograph should be acknowledged at the outset. It is rare to encounter a work on Julian that approaches its subject with such freshness and sustained attention to literary self-fashioning. At its best, Julian Augustus offers nuanced and sophisticated close readings that illuminate the emperor’s commitment to both Roman and military paradigms of kingship, as well as his mastery (complementing, not contradicting the above) of Iamblichean Neoplatonism. Chapter 2’s treatments of the Hymn to Helios, Against Heraclius and the Hymn to the Mother of the Gods demonstrate just how profoundly Iamblichean ontology shaped Julian’s sense of a collective cosmic mission, a notion Swist expertly differentiates from messianic self-aggrandisement. Chapter 3’s emphasis on Romulus and Numa as paradigms f cyclical refoundation is both persuasive and subtle, and its redeployment in Chapter 4 to analyse the Caesars is strikingly felicitous. A connoisseur of this latter piece down to the finest of details, Swist proves our understanding of the Caesars is far from settled. Examples include his discussion of how and why the gods must be seen as recovering Julian’s rule as a node in a divinely sanctioned royal chain (192–4), and, in the same section, the unpacking of the work’s subtle (but unmistakable, once Swist draws our attention to it) construction of Augustus as a model of intellectual redemption and imperial restoration (194–214).
This very recovery of Julian’s sophistication, however, exposes the central paradox of Julian Augustus. The book’s primary claim is that Julian’s thought rests on Iamblichus (10) and that reading the former’s work in the light of the hierarchies set by his master – who differentiated sharply between true teachers, disciples, and political actors – clarifies his repeated denials of being a philosopher-ruler. Swist rejects the hypothesis of recusatio, contending rather that Julian sincerely thought of himself as an imperial leader guided by higher minds: a man ‘in love with philosophy’ who nevertheless remained distinct from those rare individuals whose souls had attained perfection.
While Swist’s readings are often persuasive, ironically, their cumulative force undermines this central demarcation. Even if Julian classified himself among those descended souls obliged to prioritise ethical and political virtue, he tirelessly engaged in mythography, theology, theurgy, and philosophical polemic at the highest level. Whether he thus satisfied the criteria to be considered a fully trained Iamblichean philosopher was never the point. Julian nowhere explicitly claims ontological superiority, but his denial of a superior nature in himself does not resolve questions of charismatic authority, nor does it explain how he pursued such authority as a servant of Helios and reformer of priestly matters. Moreover, his continual debates with Themistius, Heraclius, unnamed Cynics, and the Christians (whose claims to access to a superior epistemology he disputes in Against the Galileans) further complicate Swist’s portrait of a ruler who stood modestly beside ‘professional philosophers’ while remaining essentially a soldier and administrator.
A related difficulty lies in the book’s literalist readings of late antique rhetoric, which risk losing sight of the conventions and strategic subtleties of fourth-century court literature. I will set aside the question of whether, in approaching Himerius (230–41) and Libanius (242–65), Swist takes rhetorical amplification as metaphysical assertion. Two further examples are of greater relevance. The first concerns Julian’s competition with Themistius, treated here primarily as a dispute over the title of philosopher-ruler. According to Swist, Julian’s denial of that title must be taken at face value because the recusatio of philosopher-rulers pertains only to their relationship to power, not to philosophy (42); this argument, however, both reifies an aspirational category (that of the ‘philosopher-ruler’, a culturally determined construct that the book appears to treat as a fixed entity) and overlooks the alternative, Socratic model of self-effacement, in which the acknowledgment of one’s epistemic limitations signals wisdom and high-mindedness. A second objection concerns the chapter’s treatment of the fundamental political ideal of the nomos empsychos (‘living law’). Swist regards Julian’s supposed rejection of this ideal as proof that he never aspired to divine or philosophical kingship; yet such a claim simplifies a concept that late antique political thought treated with considerable nuance. The nomos empsychos never (not even in Themistius’ orations) denoted a ruler who was a god on earth. It functioned instead as a ‘normative demand’[1] conceptualising rulers as interpreters and issuers of legislation, with the associated expectation that they would take divine law as their guide to correct positive law on earth.
These remarks reflect the broader issue of whether Julian Augustus might be seen to sever its subject from the intellectual and political quarrels of his time to preserve the coherence of its reconstruction. Julian’s engagement with Iamblichus is splendidly foregrounded, but at the cost of other vital conversations. Fourth-century cultural debates centred philosophy not merely as a technical Neoplatonic category but also, and especially, as a powerful ideological marker that was key to debates about decoding providence for the benefit of empire. Religion, in Julian’s time, was a domain in which ultimate truths grounding ethical and political order were to be revealed. To mute this dimension risks obscuring the very ambition that makes Julian’s thought distinctive. The philosophical foundations of his anti-Christian polemic, so evident in Against the Galileans, explain why his project cannot be reduced to a reflection of some esoteric hierarchy of philosophical credentials. Julian might have learned from Iamblichus, but he went on to deploy Iamblichus’ teachings in a contested intellectual and religious landscape in which ‘philosophy’ had become a highly charged political term.
I now turn to the book’s second core argument, regarding romanitas. Swist is right to challenge the assumption that Julian reflexively privileged Greek over Roman identity (Chapter 3). His reminder that, in the fourth century CE, Greek culture was not antithetical to but constitutive of Roman identity is salutary, and Julian’s insistence that both Greeks and Romans belonged to a single, divinely sanctioned civilisation is central to his polemic against Christianity. In this, Swist captures something essential, but his corrective overshoots the mark. To claim that Julian identified more as Roman than Greek risks reinstating the very binary Swist seeks to dismantle. Julian’s romanitas, indeed, was intensely ideological, and the book underplays the tension inherent in his imagination of Rome – a city in which he never set foot – as a place of metaphysical origin and the heart of his mythmaking, yet not quite his lived reality. Julian’s immersion in Greek literature and philosophy and the relative absence of Latin citations in his oeuvre are also explained away as a form of comfortable complementarity, with Latin supposedly serving him for ruling and daily life and Greek feeding his cultural conversations (140). That may have been the case, but the argument is self-serving: Latin writers and literary circles existed, yet their legacy is muted in Julian’s cultural synthesis.
Swist’s monograph is a learned and, at times, strikingly stimulating study that will be of considerable value to scholars of late antique philosophy and imperial ideology. Its detailed engagement with Julian’s Neoplatonic context, in particular, represents a significant advancement in our understanding of his theory and practice of leadership. At the same time, readers may be left wondering whether Swist’s core intuitions are well served by the book’s proclivity for rigid categorisations (Julian must be recovered as ‘more soldier than philosopher, more realist than idealist, more Roman than Greek, and more human than god’ (12)): if the aim is to acknowledge complexity, the substitution of the ‘realist Roman soldier’ for the ‘Hellenic philosopher-ruler’ risks flattening the very tensions that Swist’s close readings so carefully uncover.
In seeking to avoid both anachronistic heroisation and Christianising flattening, Julian Augustus pursues a genuinely commendable goal but ultimately diminishes the epistemic stakes of Julian’s project. The resulting study illuminates the emperor’s humanity and restraint at the cost of underestimating the scope of his intellectual ambition. The question of motive – what drove Julian’s synthesis of romanitas and Iamblichean metaphysics – remains unaddressed. This is perhaps because to address it fully would have required acknowledging what the book largely sets aside: that Julian’s deep concern with reclaiming for his teachers the label of ‘philosophers’ unfolded as a pointed response to Christian theologians’ efforts to present their own doctrine as the epistemic key to both universe and empire.
Notes
[1] Peter Van Nuffelen, Rethinking the Gods: Philosophical Readings of Religion in the Post-Hellenistic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 117–18.