"It is about time someone put the myth of Julian the Persecutor to rest. Teitler does it with style, authority, and some well-placed humor. There is an enormous amount of erudition packed into these pages, yet they unfold at a measured, almost leisurely pace. The result is a study that is both highly informative and highly accessible. It is that rare combination of a lively and readable text with thorough documentation." --H. A. Drake, University of California, Santa Barbara"In the reign of Julian religious tensions ran high. Teitler reveals how the flashpoints these created were magnified and distorted in their retelling by later Christian authors. From this book emerges a much clearer picture of late antiquity's most enigmatic emperor." --Noel Lenski, Yale University"Teitler offers a compelling, vivid, and readable portrait of the life and legacy of the emperor Julian. He traces Julian's path from Christianity to paganism, explains the careful measures the emperor took to shift the religious landscape of the Roman world, and shows how Christian contemporaries unfairly redefined Julian as a persecuting tyrant. This book provides an exciting new way to understand the mind of Rome's last pagan emperor as well as the world that shaped our modern views of Julian's unique legacy." --Edward Watts, University of California, San Diego

Flavius Claudius Julianus was the last pagan to sit on the Roman imperial throne (361-363). Born in Constantinople in 331 or 332, Julian was raised as a Christian, but apostatized, and during his short reign tried to revive paganism, which, after the conversion to Christianity of his uncle Constantine the Great early in the fourth century, began losing ground at an accelerating pace. Having become an orphan when he was still very young, Julian was taken care of by his cousin Constantius II, one of Constantine's sons, who permitted him to study rhetoric and philosophy and even made him co-emperor in 355. But the relations between Julian and Constantius were strained from the beginning, and it was only Constantius' sudden death in 361 which prevented an impending civil war. 

As sole emperor, Julian restored the worship of the traditional gods. He opened pagan temples again, reintroduced animal sacrifices, and propagated paganism through both the spoken and the written word. In his treatise Against the Galilaeans he sharply criticised the religion of the followers of Jesus whom he disparagingly called 'Galilaeans'. He put his words into action, and issued laws which were displeasing to Christians?the most notorious being his School Edict. This provoked the anger of the Christians, who reacted fiercely, and accused Julian of being a persecutor like his predecessors Nero, Decius, and Diocletian. Violent conflicts between pagans and Christians made themselves felt all over the empire. It is disputed whether or not Julian himself was behind such outbursts. Accusations against the Apostate continued to be uttered even after the emperor's early death. In this book, the feasibility of such charges is examined.