@spendius,
Since you mention, spendius, a Roman Emperor piously sacrificing at an altar to a pagan God, you might enjoy Gore Vidal's book
Julian.-Ron
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As a genre, the historical novel demands colour and movement. It is not history but imaginative re-creation; a kind of dream-edifice, based solidly (or so one hopes) upon ascertainable or probable fact, but essentially an excursion into romance. That it is often self-indulgent and irresponsible we do not need to remind ourselves; every season spawns dozens of these reconstructions, each one proclaiming itself more colourful and more colossal than all the others, and generally with a sort of inverted justice. Yet the sleazy, commercialized examples should not prejudice us against the form as such, for the data of dream and the data of fact may serve fictional truth equally well.
The interpreter is everything. If he sets before us nothing but period derring-do and athletics, dÈcollete and sword-play, the forsooth-and-egad exoticisms of "researched" intrigue, he is only a salesman. He is making scenes, not significant arrangements. But if, like Gore Vidal in this evocation of Julian the Apostate, he is able to penetrate to depths of human meaning, to the chromatic play of personalities and events, his vision may create a design not wholly remote from parable or allegory.
What it was that interested Mr Vidal in Julian as a subject for fictionalized biography I do not know. It may have been his recent and not entirely satisfactory theatre experience with another Roman theme (He adapted Friederich Duerrenmatt's "Romulus" for Broadway, where it quickly failed.) Perhaps he decided to explore a social and political analogy. In any event, it was a happy inspiration. Julian himself is a vivid and attractive figure, surely the most engaging of the Roman emperors of the decline. His reign was brief, only 16 months. In A.D. 363, at the age of 32, he was killed in battle; but his short career was a notable one, and it is not too much to say that the last months of his administration altered the course of Western history. Moreover, he challenges our interest and sympathy as a complex, witty, unpredictable human being. We know him today by the name his Christian enemies called him, "Apostate," though we do not much bother to inquire into the nature of his "apostasy," if indeed it ever existed.
He has come down to us as a kind of historical poke: a combination of bogey-man and Judas Iscariot, a philosopher who made fun of his own beard, wrote stilted panegyrics upon persons whom he sincerely hated, persecuted various deserving Christian bishops, ridiculed the Holy Trinity ("the Triple Monster") and attempted to re-establish the cult of the old pagan gods. We are told also, though not by Mr. Vidal, that he died in agony of Early Christian remorse with a verse of Swinburne on his lips: "Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilaean!"
There are germs of truth in some of these details, but the picture is a distorted one. Julian's was indeed a Christian boyhood, if the fashionable Arianism of the Constantinople of his cousin Constantius Augustus deserves the name Christian; but the murderous example of his own family and the internecine theological squabbles of his preceptors soon disgusted him with Christianity, and his philosophical bent (which was genuine) and romantic tendency toward antiquarianism made it easy for him to see himself as a throwback to the pagan past.
His attempt to reimpose the old gods--or, rather, the old gods as seen through a mist of Mithras-worship and degenerating neo-Platonism--failed because he was utterly unrealistic in assessing the hearts of men and in evaluating the theological and political forces with which he had to contend. He was a schizophrene, straight from the textbooks: a philosopher and man of letters, yet one of the most spectacular military commanders since Julius Caesear; a fanatical conservative in religion, yet a cynical and disillusioned exponent of freedom of worship; a sensualist, a man of the world, yet at the same time an almost compulsive ascetic. And, above all things, he was alive, enchanted with living, intensely and drivingly engaged.
It is this quality of flashing vitality that Mr. Vidal admirably captures in his book. One may have reservations as to the literary and polemical value of much that goes on in his pages, but the breathing actuality of his Julian is not to be denied. The form itself is favorable and flexible: a kind of diary, notes and observations jotted down by the tireless Julian, with a choral antiphony of comment by two of his elderly mentors who survive him to copy and gloss his manuscript. Needless to say, no such manuscript exists; but Mr. Vidal has drawn so intelligently upon Julian's actual writings and those of historians and theologians contemporary with the Emperor that the texture and tone of his narrative are persuasively in character.
The neurotic, witty, pensive, reckless, domineering, sincerely humble young leader emerges so clearly that even in his less felicitous moments, when he sounds for all the world like the late George Apley trying out for the role of Shakespeare's Richard II, we believe in him and like him. It is evident that Mr. Vidal has learned much from the Robert Graves of the Claudius books: the freshness of the speaking voice in narrative soliloquy, the inevitable but discreetly managed modernization of diction, outlook, action.
One has reservations, of course. The pageantry and local color, inescapable in historical novels, are too often touched by intimations of Hollywood. Yes, there are elephants; and dancing girls and tumblers; and jeweled fat eunuchs--platoons of them. There is at least one considerable Orgy, during which Unutterable Vice finds utterance, and there is one of the funniest scenes of sexual intercourse that an eclipse of the comic sense has recently permitted to escape into print.
More seriously, Mr. Vidal is generally unsuccessful in his attempts to demonstrate Julian the theological controversialist in action. The metaphysical speculation is so superficial, so text-book adolescent, that one wonders why those frightful bishops, hammering each other's skulls with homoiousion and homoousion, took the young Apostate so seriously in the first place. Here, clearly, Mr. Vidal has got beyond his depth and has innocently betrayed his hero; but the fact that this blemish does not impede the flash and drive of his narrative testifies to the beguiling power of his wit, his craftsman's sleight of hand.
Plato once said that in the ideal society philosophers would be kings or kings philosophers. Julian, but off at the very beginning of his career, was of the calibre to prove Plato's point. Mr Vidal does not show us this, and his failure is what ultimately keeps the novel from rising above the level of high entertainment.
