In other respects Julian was no unworthy successor of the Antonines. Though brought up in a studious and pedantic solitude, he was no sooner called to the government of Gaul than he displayed all the energy, the hardihood and the practical sagacity of an old Roman. In temperance, self-control and zeal for the public good, as he understood it, he was unsurpassed. To these Roman qualities he added the culture, literary instincts and speculative curiosity of a Greek. One of the most remarkable features of his public life was the perfect ease and mastery with which he associated the cares of war and statesmanship with the assiduous cultivation of literature and philosophy. Yet even his devotion to culture was not free from pedantry and dilettantism. His contemporaries observed in him a want of naturalness. He had not the moral health or the composed and reticent manhood of a Roman, or the spontaneity of a Greek. He was never at rest; in the rapid torrent of his conversation he was apt to run himself out of breath; his manner was jerky and spasmodic. He showed quite a deferential regard for the sophists and rhetoricians of the time, and advanced them to high offices of state; there was real cause for fear that he would introduce the government of pedants in the Roman empire. Last of all, his love for the old philosophy was sadly disfigured by his devotion to the old superstitions. He was greatly given to divination; he was noted for the number of his sacrificial victims. Wits applied to him the joke that had been passed on Marcus Aurelius: "The white cattle to Marcus Caesar, greeting. If you conquer, there is an end of us."
BIBLIOGRAPHY.--The works of Julian, of which there are complete editions by E. Spanheim (Leipzig, 1696) and F. C. Hertlein (Teubner series, 1875-1876), consist of the following: (1) _Letters_, of which more than eighty have been preserved under his name, although the genuineness of several has been disputed. For his views on religious toleration and his attitude towards Christians and Jews the most important are 25-27, 51, 52, and the fragment in Hertlein, i. 371. The letter of Gallus to Julian, warning him against reverting to heathenism, is probably a Christian forgery. Six new letters were discovered in 1884 by A. Papadopulos Kerameus in a monastery on the island of Chalcis near Constantinople (see _Rheinisches Museum_, xlii., 1887). Separate edition of the letters by L. H. Heyler (1828); see also J. Bidez and F. Cumont, "Recherches sur la tradition MS. des lettres de l'empereur Julian" in _Mémoires couronnés ... publiés par l'Acad. royale de Belgique_, lvii. (1898) and F. Cumont, _Sur l'authenticité de quelques lettres de Julien_ (1889). (2) _Orations_, eight in number--two panegyrics on Constantius, one on the empress Eusebia, two theosophical declamations on King Helios and the Mother of the Gods, two essays on true and false cynicism, and a consolatory address to himself on the departure of his friend Salustius to the East. (3) _Caesares or Symposium_, a satirical composition after the manner of Seneca's _Apocolocyntosis_, in which the deified Caesars appear in succession at a banquet given in Olympus, to be censured for their vices and crimes by old Silenus. (4) _Misopogon_ (the beard-hater), written at Antioch, a satire on the licentiousness of its inhabitants; while at the same time his own person and manner of life are treated in a whimsical spirit. It also contains a charming description of Lutetia (Paris). It owes its name to the ridicule heaped upon his beard by the Antiocheans, who were in the habit of shaving. (5) Five epigrams, two of which (_Anth. Pal._, ix. 365, 368) are of some interest. (6) [Greek: Karà Christianôn] (_Adversus Christianos_) in three books, an attack on Christianity written during the Persian campaign, is lost. Theodosius II. ordered all copies of it to be destroyed, and our knowledge of its contents is derived almost entirely from the _Contra Julianum_ of Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, written sixty years later (see _Juliani librorum contra Christianos quae supersunt_, ed. C. J. Neumann 1880). _English Translations_: Select works by J. Duncombe (1784) containing all except the first seven orations (viii. and the fable from vii. are included): the theosophical addresses to King Helios and the Mother of the Gods by Thomas Taylor (1793) and C. W. King in Bohn's _Classical Library_ (1888); the public letters, by E. J. Chinnock (1901).