I have been possessed since childhood by a prodigious desire to buy and own books.” ― Julian the Apostate

“Some people are fond of horses, others of wild animals; in my case, I have been possessed since childhood by a prodigious desire to buy and own books.”
― Julian the Apostate

Vicisti, Galilæe.

I have always had great sympathy and empathy with the Julian the Apostate. I guess its because I sense ,in reading about him a person who felt born in the wrong time. Julian was raised as a Christian and like myself there was much pressure from one parent to become a Christian priest and from the other to know about an older mythological pantheist tradition. .In my case as in Julian's the older tradition won. SO for the last 40 or so years I have been fascinated by his experiences and observations.. Like Julian I love books and collect them and yes like Julian I have tendencies to be elitist and and critical. However I can assure my critics that I have no fantasy about being or wish to be an Emperor.......but I now feel like the old Pagan in Swinburne's Poem that follows

Hymn to Proserpine (After the Proclamation in Rome of the Christian Faith)

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BY ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

I have lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an end; 

Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend. 

Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh or that weep; 

For these give joy and sorrow; but thou, Proserpina, sleep. 

Sweet is the treading of wine, and sweet the feet of the dove; 

But a goodlier gift is thine than foam of the grapes or love. 

Yea, is not even Apollo, with hair and harpstring of gold, 

A bitter God to follow, a beautiful God to behold? 

I am sick of singing; the bays burn deep and chafe: I am fain 

To rest a little from praise and grievous pleasure and pain. 

For the Gods we know not of, who give us our daily breath, 

We know they are cruel as love or life, and lovely as death. 

O Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day! 

From your wrath is the world released, redeemed from your chains, men say. 

New Gods are crowned in the city; their flowers have broken your rods; 

They are merciful, clothed with pity, the young compassionate Gods. 

But for me their new device is barren, the days are bare; 

Things long past over suffice, and men forgotten that were. 

Time and the Gods are at strife; ye dwell in the midst thereof, 

Draining a little life from the barren breasts of love. 

I say to you, cease, take rest; yea, I say to you all, be at peace, 

Till the bitter milk of her breast and the barren bosom shall cease. 

Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take, 

The laurel, the palms and the pæan, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake; 

Breasts more soft than a dove's, that tremble with tenderer breath; 

And all the wings of the Loves, and all the joy before death; 

All the feet of the hours that sound as a single lyre, 

Dropped and deep in the flowers, with strings that flicker like fire. 

More than these wilt thou give, things fairer than all these things? 

Nay, for a little we live, and life hath mutable wings. 

A little while and we die; shall life not thrive as it may? 

For no man under the sky lives twice, outliving his day. 

And grief is a grievous thing, and a man hath enough of his tears: 

Why should he labour, and bring fresh grief to blacken his years? 

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath; 

We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death. 

Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day; 

But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May. 

Sleep, shall we sleep after all? for the world is not sweet in the end; 

For the old faiths loosen and fall, the new years ruin and rend. 

Fate is a sea without shore, and the soul is a rock that abides; 

But her ears are vexed with the roar and her face with the foam of the tides. 

O lips that the live blood faints in, the leavings of racks and rods! 

O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods! 

Though all men abase them before you in spirit, and all knees bend, 

I kneel not neither adore you, but standing, look to the end. 

All delicate days and pleasant, all spirits and sorrows are cast 

Far out with the foam of the present that sweeps to the surf of the past: 

Where beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote sea-gates, 

Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits: 

Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas as with wings, 

And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things, 

White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled, 

Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world. 

The depths stand naked in sunder behind it, the storms flee away; 

In the hollow before it the thunder is taken and snared as a prey; 

In its sides is the north-wind bound; and its salt is of all men's tears; 

With light of ruin, and sound of changes, and pulse of years: 

With travail of day after day, and with trouble of hour upon hour; 

And bitter as blood is the spray; and the crests are as fangs that devour: 

And its vapour and storm of its steam as the sighing of spirits to be; 

And its noise as the noise in a dream; and its depth as the roots of the sea: 

And the height of its heads as the height of the utmost stars of the air: 

And the ends of the earth at the might thereof tremble, and time is made bare. 

Will ye bridle the deep sea with reins, will ye chasten the high sea with rods? 

Will ye take her to chain her with chains, who is older than all ye Gods? 

All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye pass and be past; 

Ye are Gods, and behold, ye shall die, and the waves be upon you at last. 

In the darkness of time, in the deeps of the years, in the changes of things, 

Ye shall sleep as a slain man sleeps, and the world shall forget you for kings. 

Though the feet of thine high priests tread where thy lords and our forefathers trod, 

Though these that were Gods are dead, and thou being dead art a God, 

Though before thee the throned Cytherean be fallen, and hidden her head, 

Yet thy kingdom shall pass, Galilean, thy dead shall go down to thee dead. 

Of the maiden thy mother men sing as a goddess with grace clad around; 

Thou art throned where another was king; where another was queen she is crowned. 

Yea, once we had sight of another: but now she is queen, say these. 

Not as thine, not as thine was our mother, a blossom of flowering seas, 

Clothed round with the world's desire as with raiment, and fair as the foam, 

And fleeter than kindled fire, and a goddess, and mother of Rome. 

For thine came pale and a maiden, and sister to sorrow; but ours, 

Her deep hair heavily laden with odour and colour of flowers, 

White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splendour, a flame, 

Bent down unto us that besought her, and earth grew sweet with her name. 

For thine came weeping, a slave among slaves, and rejected; but she 

Came flushed from the full-flushed wave, and imperial, her foot on the sea. 

And the wonderful waters knew her, the winds and the viewless ways, 

And the roses grew rosier, and bluer the sea-blue stream of the bays. 

Ye are fallen, our lords, by what token? we wise that ye should not fall. 

Ye were all so fair that are broken; and one more fair than ye all. 

But I turn to her still, having seen she shall surely abide in the end; 

Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend. 

O daughter of earth, of my mother, her crown and blossom of birth, 

I am also, I also, thy brother; I go as I came unto earth. 

In the night where thine eyes are as moons are in heaven, the night where thou art, 

Where the silence is more than all tunes, where sleep overflows from the heart, 

Where the poppies are sweet as the rose in our world, and the red rose is white, 

And the wind falls faint as it blows with the fume of the flowers of the night, 

And the murmur of spirits that sleep in the shadow of Gods from afar 

Grows dim in thine ears and deep as the deep dim soul of a star, 

In the sweet low light of thy face, under heavens untrod by the sun, 

Let my soul with their souls find place, and forget what is done and undone. 

Thou art more than the Gods who number the days of our temporal breath; 

Let these give labour and slumber; but thou, Proserpina, death. 

Therefore now at thy feet I abide for a season in silence. I know 

I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep; even so. 

For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for a span; 

A little soul for a little bears up this corpse which is man. 

So long I endure, no longer; and laugh not again, neither weep. 

For there is no God found stronger than death; and death is a sleep. 

Life of Julian the Apostate

When the Roman Emperor Julian (Flavius Claudius Julianus) came to power, Christianity was less popular than polytheism, but when Julian, a pagan (in contemporary usage) known as "the Apostate," was killed in battle, it was the end of Roman official acceptance of polytheism.

Although paganism was popular, Julian's practice was more ascetic than normal pagan practices, which may be why paganism failed when the Apostate reinstated it.

"Julian has always been something of an  underground hero in Europe. His attempt to stop  Christianity and revive Hellenism exerts still a  romantic appeal."
 ~ Gore Vidal's Julian

When the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate, died in Persia, his supporters failed to maintain support for paganism as the official state religion. It wasn't called paganism at the time, but was known as Hellenism and is sometimes referred to Hellenistic paganism.

Instead of the ancient religion returning to the Roman Empire, the popular Emperor Constantine's Christianity re-emerged as the dominant one. This seems odd since Christianity wasn't as popular among the people as Hellenism, so scholars have searched Julian's life and administration for clues to why the apostasy (which means the "standing away from" [Christianity]) failed.

Julian (born A.D. 332), the nephew of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, was trained as a Christian, yet he is known as apostate because when he became emperor (A.D.

360) he opposed Christianity. In The Demise of Paganism, James J. O'Donnell suggests that the emperor's particularly vehement stance against Christianity (and support for the other monotheistic religion, Judaism) stems from his Christian upbringing.

Julian's Intolerance

Although any such generalization is hazardous, pagans of the time generally held religion to be a private matter, while Christians behaved strangely in trying to convert others to their faith.

They claimed that Salvation made possible through Jesus was the only true belief. In the wake of the Nicene Council, Christian leaders condemned all who failed to believe in the prescribed manner. To be a pagan in the old tradition, Julian should have let everyone worship as he or she wished. Instead of letting each person worship in his own way, Julian stripped the Christians of their privileges, powers, and rights. And he did so from their own perspective: the intolerant attitude that one's private religion is of public concern.

"In summary, it is necessary to look upon the religious sociology of the fourth century with two separate (if often, and confusingly, overlapping) distinctions in mind: that between worshippers of Christ and worshippers of other gods; and that between men who could accept a plurality of worships and those who insisted on the validity of a single form of religious experience to the exclusion of all others."The Demise of Paganism

Julian's Elitism

Other writers say the failure of Julian to reintegrate Hellenistic paganism into the framework of Roman society came from his inability to make it popular and his insistence that true understanding is impossible to the average mortal, but is reserved for philosophers. Another important factor was that the Christian creeds were far more unified than paganism. Paganism wasn't a single religion and adherents to different gods did not necessarily support each other.

"The panoply of religious experience in the Roman world before Constantine was simply bewildering: from back-yard fertility rites through public, state-supported cults to the mystical ascents of which Platonic philosophers wrote with such devotion -- and everything between, over, under, and all around such phenomena. There were public cults indigenous to the various parts of the empire, certain generally (if often lukewarmly) accepted devotions such as that to the divinity of the emperors, and a vast array of private enthusiasms. That such a spectrum of religious experiences should produce a single-minded population capable of forming itself into a single pagan movement with which Christianity could struggle is simply not probable."The Demise of Paganism

Lack of a Powerful Pagan Successor to Julian

In 363, when Julian died, he was succeeded by Jovian, a Christian, at least nominally, instead of the obvious choice, Julian's praetorian prefect, the moderate polytheist, Saturninius Secundus Salutius. Secundus Salutius didn't want the job even though it meant continuing Julian's mission. Paganism was diverse and tolerant of this diversity. Secundus Salutius didn't share the late emperor's parochial attitudes or specific beliefs.

No other pagan emperor came to power before the Roman state outlawed pagan practices. Even so, and even though seventeen hundred years later, we continue to be predominantly a Christian society in terms of our beliefs, it may have been the pagan attitude of religious tolerance that prevailed.

“What could be more irrational, even if ten or fifteen persons, or even, let us suppose, a hundred, for they certainly will not say that there were a thousand,–-however, let us assume that even as many persons as that ventured to transgress some one of the laws laid down by God; was it right that on account of this one thousand, six hundred thousand should be utterly destroyed?” 
― Julian the Apostate, Against the Galileans