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Updated: May 16, 2025
If Constantius wanted to reopen the case, he must summon a free council, and begin by expelling the Arians. To this demand he firmly adhered. The Emperor's threats he disregarded, the Emperor's gifts he flung out of the church. It was not long before Constantius was obliged to risk the scandal of seizing and carrying off the bishop of Rome. Athanasius was still at Alexandria.
There may be traces of Latin in his writings, but his allusions to Greek literature are such as leave no doubt that he had a liberal education. In his earliest works he refers to Plato; in later years he quotes Homer, and models his notes on Aristotle, his Apology to Constantius on Demosthenes. To Egyptian idolatry he seldom alludes.
The assemblies of the senate, which Constantius had avoided, were considered by Julian as the place where he could exhibit, with the most propriety, the maxims of a republican, and the talents of a rhetorician.
The hasty retreat of Constantius might be justified by weighty reasons; but he resigned, without a struggle, the possession of Gaul; and Dardanus, the Prætorian præfect, is recorded as the only magistrate who refused to yield obedience to the usurper.
But when once he had studied the Nicene doctrine and found its agreement with his own conclusions from Scripture, a clear sense of duty forbade him to shrink from manfully defending it. Such was the man whom the brutal policy of Constantius forced to take his place at the head of the Nicene opposition. As he was not present at Milan, the courtiers had to silence him some other way.
On this solemn occasion, the guards, with the other troops whose stations were in the neighborhood of Milan, appeared under arms; and Constantius ascended his lofty tribunal, holding by the hand his cousin Julian, who entered the same day into the twenty-fifth year of his age.
What I have taken the liberty to make prominent are well chosen, clearly-proved crimes, worthy of death. Your learning is great, Reverend Abbot, but I know the old writers, too. The Emperor Constantius made marriages between Jews and Christians punishable with death. I can show you the passage."
But Constantius was busy with the barbarians, and had to leave the matter till he came to Milan in the autumn of 355. There Julian was invested with the purple and sent as Cæsar to drive the Alemanni out of Gaul, or, as some hoped, to perish in the effort. The council, however, was for a long time quite unmanageable, and only yielded at last to open violence.
In these familiar conferences with the sovereign of the West, Athanasius might lament the error of Constantius, but he boldly arraigned the guilt of his eunuchs and his Arian prelates; deplored the distress and danger of the Catholic church; and excited Constans to emulate the zeal and glory of his father.
The eldest of those princes soon complained, that he was defrauded of his just proportion of the spoils of their murdered kinsmen; and though he might yield to the superior guilt and merit of Constantius, he exacted from Constans the cession of the African provinces, as an equivalent for the rich countries of Macedonia and Greece, which his brother had acquired by the death of Dalmatius.
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