The Ascetic Pagan

JULIAN by Gore Vidal. 503 pages. Little, Brown. $6.95.

No odder figure ever guided the destinies of the Holy Roman Empire than the Emperor Julian Augustus (circa 331-363), known as Julian the Apostate. Here was a recluse and a scholar who became a great military leader, an ascetic who preached the life of the senses, a fatalist who believed he would remake the world. More important, here was a man who did his best to write an end to Christianity before it had fairly begun. As the subject of biography he is endlessly fascinating. As the subject of fiction he has one major defect: he was an utterly irrational man.

Novelist Gore Vidal has obviously read his Robert Graves. His ninth novel (and his first in a decade) is an attempt to apply to Julian's life the same smooth blend of erudition and dramatic flair, of scholarship leavened with wit that set the urbane tone for I, Claudius and Claudius, the God. Vidal is a resourceful writer, and he has mastered the manner to perfection. Only his subject eludes him.

Secret Journal. The novel, which draws heavily on Julian's own letters (more than 80 have been preserved), is cast in the form of a secret journal presumably written by Julian and discovered in his tent the night of his death by a garrulous old counselor, one Priscus, who serves as a sort of chorus.

As Vidal sees him, Julian was the prototype of what a political leader should be--tolerant, intellectually curious, and equipped with a large sense of the absurdity of all humanity, including himself. It is probably no accident that, in some respects, he resembles John F. Kennedy, who Vidal thought had "the perfect temperament" for command.

Last Survivors. Julian's career was as spectacular as it was brief. Nephew of Constantine the Great, he was born in Constantinople and trained, by imperial edict, for a career in the church. But in the course of a visit to Nicomedia, he came under the influence of apostate theoreticians secretly working toward a return to the old faith--or rather, to an idealized amalgam of paganism and philosophy that they took for the faith of the ancient world. Julian wanted to be a teacher, and might well have been if his half-brother Gallus (whom Vidal paints as almost a parody of the Roman voluptuary) had not been executed for misgovernment, leaving the Emperor Constantius and Julian as the last male survivors of the imperial line. With Gaul threatened by the Alamanni, Constantius reluctantly bestowed on Julian the title of Caesar and gave him both the government of Gaul and the hand of his sister Helena.

In a series of remarkable victories (the most notable being at Strasbourg in 357), Julian secured the frontier once more at the Rhine. When Constantius died in 361, he became emperor. He died in battle against the Persians in 363, at the age of 32, having been on the throne for only 18 months.

Theories & Orgies. He was, by all accounts, an inconsistent, witty, posturing romantic who somehow confused his own zest for life with a woolly, neo-Platonic pantheism, and who saw Christianity as a death-dealing force that was draining the life of the empire. In his brief reign, he made his brand of paganism (which owed much to Mithras-worship) the state religion and used his office to drive Christians from positions of state. He died, according to one theory (which Vidal accepts), from a wound inflicted not by the Persians but by an enraged Christian in the Roman ranks. His religious reforms died with him.

Vidal spent two years in Rome researching Julian, and fleshes out the story of this complex man with pages of theological philosophizing, descriptions of the campaigns and a few top-drawer orgies, including one in which 50 lascivious eunuchs rip the clothes off a herd of terrified teen-agers (male and female) "in the same way children tear wrappings from a gift, passionately eager to see what is inside."

Vidal himself is an energetic husker of wrappings. The weakness of his novels is that he seems uncertain, as is the reader, about what manner of animal he has discovered inside.

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