THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYJulian’s eccentricities also managed to alienate the pagan population, who
lampooned and jeered at the emperor. He further excited Jews and outraged
Christians with an abortive plan to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem.^36 Julian
was not easy to assess: his rise inspired pagan philosophers and intellectuals
such as Eunapius and Libanius, but the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who
had served as an officer in Gaul and on the Persian expedition in 363, and
admired Julian greatly, was also clear-sighted about some of his faults. Julian
was the only emperor after Constantine to try to promote paganism, but his
personal unpredictability, his lack of tact and his proneness to grand gestures
made it unlikely that he could have been successful in reversing the solid gains
which Christians now enjoyed, even had his reign lasted longer.
Julian’s death at Samarra, east of the Tigris, left the army dangerously
exposed and his successor, Jovian, an obscure cavalry officer, proclaimed by
soldiers on the field, immediately had to deal with a major Persian attack.
The price of extricating the Romans from this difficult situation included the
surrender of Nisibis and Singara on the frontier with Persia, and led to the
removal of Ephraem the Syrian from Nisibis to Edessa.^37 Jovian survived
for only one year and was succeeded by Valentinian I (364–75), a Christian
officer originally from Pannonia, also chosen by the army, who within weeks
co-opted his brother Valens (364–78) as co-emperor. Their accession marked
a new dynastic departure, and they were able to fight off a challenge in Asia
Minor from Procopius, another officer, who was related to the Emperor
Julian and had been promoted by him; he had even been responsible for bury-
ing Julian’s body in Tarsus.^38 In a clear dynastic move, Valentinian also made
his seven-year old son Gratian consul in 366 and Augustus in 367, as the first
of the ‘boy-emperors’. Gratian survived on the throne until he was killed by
his own soldiers at Lyons in 383, while attempting unsuccessfully to control
the threat to Britain and Gaul mounted by the Spaniard Magnus Maximus;
when Valentinian I died in 375 his generals had declared his four-year old son
Valentinian II Augustus, and the Spaniard Theodosius I was recalled from
exile in Spain and declared Augustus by Gratian in January 379, a few months
after Valens was killed on the field in the disastrous defeat of the Roman army
by the Goths at Adrianople (below and Chapter 2).
The advent of the Pannonian emperors marked a new and ominous turn.
In the first place, as Ammianus’ account made very clear, it brought pro-
found issues about succession and legitimacy to the fore.^39 Valentinian was
easily presented as uncouth, not least because he kept two she-bears as pets;
Valens is compared to a beast of the arena.^40 Their reign was also marked by a
notorious series of trials of members of the senatorial class on charges which
included conspiracy and magic, and which gave Ammianus plenty of scope
to underline the cruelty of Valentinian.^41 Julian had campaigned to secure the
frontier along the Rhine and the Danube, and Valentinian and Valens at first
sought to consolidate relations with the Alamanni and Goths by diplomacy.
By 369 Valens had adopted a more aggressive stance and forced the Gothic
leader Athanaric to sue for peace, ending the subsidies previously paid to them