Julian Romance also known as “Romance of Emperor Julian”, “Romance of Julian the Apostate”

Abstract

The anonymous Christian Syriac work chronicling the life of Emperor Julian (d. 363 CE), known as Julian the Apostate for his attempt to revive traditional Roman religious practices in the final years of the Constantinian Dynasty. The Julian Romance is the apogee of a Late Antique tradition of Christian works antagonistic to Emperor Julian such as the Hymns against Julian of Ephrem Syrus and Orations 4 and 5 of Gregory of Nazianzus. While its extant recensions date back to at least the sixth century CE, the work potentially incorporates sources near contemporary to Julian’s reign. The text is likely an original Syriac composition and survives most extensively in ms. London, British Library Add. 14641 and ms. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale Syr. 378. An early Arabic translation also survives in ms. Arabic 516 at St. Catherine’s Monastery in Mt. Sinai, Egypt. The genre of the work remains a matter of debate among scholars. Nineteenth-century German orientalist Theodor Nöldeke was the first western academic to publish a study of its extant manuscripts and to render its title as roman. Scholars in the later twentieth century such as M. van Esbroeck and J. H. Drijvers, however, have defined it as a work of hagiography and religious propaganda respectively. Itself a composite text and consisting of three main sections, the work covers: the ascension and apostasy of Julian; his persecution of the Christians, especially of Eusebius, the bishop of Rome; his eastern campaigns against Shapur II; his the divinely incurred and miraculous death; and the ascension of Jovian and his restoration of the Christian Empire. Although apocryphal, the Julian Romance was the most popular and influential account of the life of Emperor Julian in semitic literatures throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Scholars such as G. J. Reinink have demonstrated the influence of the work on Syriac apocalyptic texts, especially the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius. Accounts of the life of Julian drawn from the Julian Romance also appear in a number of Arabic universal chronicles including al- Ṭabarī, Agapius of Hieropolis, al-Masʿūdī, and Ibn al-Athīr.