Epilogue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
Summary
Julian and Themistius
In November ad 355 the emperor Constantius II elevated his twenty-four-year-old cousin Julian to the rank of Caesar, or number two in the hierarchy. On hearing the news one of Julian’s old teachers, the philosopher Themistius - author of surviving paraphrases of various Aristotelian treatises - wrote from Constantinople a letter to the new Caesar congratulating him and celebrating the advent of a Platonic philosopher king, comparable with a Dionysus or a Heracles. The letter does not survive, but we can infer quite a lot of what Themistius must have said in it from the successive extant panegyrics he addressed to emperors from Constantius on, and above all from Julian’s reply in his Letter to Themistius (probably ad 356), which is also extant. Themistius seems to have appealed both to history and to theory: Julian is to emulate and indeed surpass Solon, Lycurgus and Pittacus; and in switching from ‘indoors’ to ‘outdoors’ philosophy (Ep.Them. 262e-263a) he is not only following in the steps of philosophers like Thrasyllus and Musonius Rufus, who took up positions at court, but he is also living up to Aristotle’s ideal in the Politics, where in a discussion of the rival claims of the active and the leisured life statesmen are praised as ‘the architects of external actions’ (263d; cf. Pol. VII.3, 1325 b21-3).
Julian’s reply is not exactly uncivil, but it is lacking in grace, and it is highly critical. Consider the question of the comparative merits of the philosophical and the political life, or - as Themistius sometimes puts his contrast between ‘indoors’ and ‘outdoors’ philosophy elsewhere (e.g. Or.8.104a-b, 31.352b-c) - the choice between two paths of philosophy: the more divine and the human, more beneficial to the community.
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought , pp. 661 - 671Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000