Conserative Morality wrote:
There are no objective measures without criteria, and any choice of criteria are subjective. I didn't specify the meaning of 'best' (and, in fact, phrased it inconsistently as 'favorite' in the OP and 'best' in the poll - mea culpa) for that very reason.He was an Augustus for just over three years, and sole emperor for less than two. He was also politically incompetent.
His one great success was proving himself to be a better general than anyone anticipated, though it's worth stressing that he only reached the summit of unchallenged power because Constantius II died of natural causes on his way to depose Julian as Augustus of the West and named the latter - the sole surviving male member of his family - his successor.
While many of his attempted anti-corruption reforms were well-intentioned, his failure to acknowledge that the structure of the Empire had changed in the last 200 years led him to idolise and attempt to emulate an idealised government structure of the 2nd century. His short-sighted rigid adherence to his political ideology managed to rapidly alienate just about everyone who might have formed some sort of reliable power base. Even before his move to Antioch and his cack-handed (though again, almost certainly well-intentioned) attempt to deal with the Antiochian famine, he'd managed to systematically alienate just about everyone except his core support in the Western Army and a scattering of pagan philosophers - and that was before his failed religious reforms.
Those religious reforms, which is just about the only thing most people remember him for, were an abject failure. They not only continued to undermine core support in the Eastern Empire - by now by far the wealthiest and most powerful part of the Roman state - but vanished without a trace on his death. They weren't even embraced by the majority of pagans; his core support for his reforms seems to have been a tiny minority of Attican neoplatonists whose abstract ideas on paganism and attempts to co-opt some aspects of Christianity was rejected by most pagans, not least because 'paganism' wasn't a single religion or ideology. Attempting to make it so while imposing Christian discipline on its organisation was itself politically misguided because it likely alienated as many pagans as it did Christians.
His death was itself the direct result of spectacular political and military misjudgements. His plan for the invasion of Persia and capture of Ctesiphon was almost bizarrely hubristic. Leaving aside the total lack of provocation from the Sassanids, Julian could only rely on the Western army; his political incompetence had alienated the Eastern army, the officers of which were predominantly Christian, and which would inevitably bear the brunt of the workload for the invasion. His strategic decisions in the invasion were poor, leaving his army isolated deep within enemy territory, and unable to either besiege or storm Ctesiphon. His lack of caution and refusal to appoint the sort of bodyguard typical to post-Diocletian emperors led directly to his death during a Sassanid attack on the camp.
His reign was as brief, and as effective, as that of a transient soldier-emperor of the crisis of the third century. The only reason we remember him at all was because of the attempt to turn back the Christian tide and make his ascetic version of paganism the state religion
PROOF THAT EVEN GODS MAKE MISTAKES WHEN THEY WALK AMONGST MEN
Rather than seeing him as a transient soldier-emperor in the vein of the Illyrian clique or any number of fourth or fifth century coup successors, I see him as the last spark of a dying age.
As Hypatia of Alexandria is to the history of science and philosophy, Julian is to the history of the Roman Empire. He was great not because of what he achieved, but because of what he represented, or represents to us in the modern day. A final ember cast forth from the guttering fire, bright and brief and beautiful, regardless of the darkness that followed. Not that I think if Julian had succeeded in everything he'd set out to do that the Roman Empire would have RETURNED TO GLORIES LONG PAST, but let me have my poetic license here
Genuinely curious rather than attempting to be cute...
Why have you highlighted 'crisis of the third century' in bold and then made a comment about my making a mistake?
Is it that you think the comparison is essentially invalid, or are you claiming that there's a factual error in my use of 'crisis of the third century'? I don't want to respond until I've understood the objection.
