The Last Pagan: Julian the Apostate

and the Death of the Ancient World

by Adrian Murdoch.

2010 March 15,

Last week I finished reading Adrian Murdoch’s  The Last Pagan: Julian the Apostate and the Death of the Ancient World (Stroud, originally published in the UK by  Sutton Publishing, in 2003 for £20 but now available  in paperback from Bear and Company for $16.95.

I’d been looking for a copy since I read Gore Vidal’s novel “Julian.” Much as I like Vidal’s wit and audacity, one can’t take his historical novels as a substitute for history.  Though some would maintain that even the best academic histories are to some extent fiction and many popular histories are little more than “the prejudices of today projected onto the past, ”  still some historical characters are more relevant than others.

Charles S. Clifton of Colorado State University – Pueblo  in a review wrote

“Anyone thinking that the fourth-century CE was a long time ago is both right and wrong. Right in that 1,700 years is a long time in human history, but wrong in that certain religious and cultural controversies of that era have loud echoes in our own.”

The similarity is in the battle between societies that promote – or at least tolerate diversity – and those that seek conformity.  The impression I had from the standard histories was that Julian was trying to substitute a version of Hellenistic polytheism as the state religion for Christianity which at the beginning of his eighteen month reign held that position.  The truth is, if Murdoch is right that Julian, who was raised a Christian, sought to be a “philosopher king” of all the nations in the empire and simply removed the special privileged position of the Christian hierarchy.

Seems to me we face a similar situation today.  Maybe this time the poly-theists will win.

Though Murdoch has all the academic apparatus and is obviously a skilled historian of the period,  the book is written in an almost journalistic style.