Public religion was sometimes able to purchase some benefit from the emperor,
but it could hardly purchase the soul’s salvation for individuals. Therefore a new
general religious system had to be borrowed from a great theologian and adopted
by the empire.
During the tetrarchic period, at the end of the third century, Porphyry’s theology
became the most accredited in the state religion. The emperor Julian the “Apostate”
was the latest theologian in Roman pagan history to propose to reshape public reli-
gion in order to secure both salvation in the afterlife and the benefits a man could
expect in his private and social life. His theology was admittedly indebted to
Jamblichus’ works. Before his untimely departure from this world, he produced three
major works, Against Heracleiumand the discourses On King Heliosand On the
Mother of the Gods. The two discourses, together with On Gods and the Worldby his
friend Salustius, were meant to be the catechism of the empire.
The higher domain of gods was reshaped above all according to the Neoplatonic
and Mithraic conceptions, with an unknowable god, the “One” or the “Good,” who
manifested himself as the god Helios, from which other immaterial gods were pro-
duced, the most important of which was the Mother of the Gods. The cosmic gods,
led by the heavenly Helios, were conceived of according to the Stoic theories, and
the divine emanations affected everything as a providential rain of benefits to earth
and humankind. Since everything is created by the gods, the different civilizations
and religions of the empire are related to the nature of the supreme gods of every
people, among which also the Jewish god is taken into account by Julian in his work
Against the Galileans. The evil in life is related to human impiety and atheism.
This theological system was indebted to the philosophical readings of the
emperor, to his frequenting of mithreaand Mithraic leaders such as the Theurgist
Maximus, but also to his conception of Roman history, for he wanted to recreate
the alleged piety of the times of Numa and of the glorious Roman past. Philosophy,
theology, and also astronomy taught Julian the laws of heaven and, since “the divine
mind is the supreme Law” (Cic. Leg.2.11), he wanted to reproduce the divine law
in the laws of the Roman empire. In his endeavor Plato’s Lawsgave some help. Once
he went to Cappadocia and noticed that “many people did not want to perform
sacrifices whereas a few did want to but did not know how to perform them” (Epist.
78). Consequently one of his first concerns was the celebration of many sacrifices.
His paganism was not at all innate; he knew it through philosophical and theolo-
gical literature or pagan initiations, for he was educated as a Christian. The intellec-
tual emperor was seen by the pagans themselves as a maniac for bloody sacrifices
(Amm. 21.12.6ff.). In fact he distinguished between the cult to inferior divinities,
which were pleased with incense and sacrificial smoke, and the hyper-cosmic gods,
whose cult was practiced by philosophers and initiates to mystery religions, such
as Mithraism, the cults of Cybele and Attis, or Theurgy. Only the most cultivated
believers could unveil the secret messages of religious truths that the ancient poets
had transmitted under the mask of mythology, as Julian explains in his Against
Heracleium.
In his short reign (361–3) and in the subsequent decades the creation of the
mithraeumof Hawarte (Syria), many inscriptions related to the cult of Cybele, mostly
390 Attilio Mastrocinque