The odious comparisons it offered were so exactly what was wanted for
depreciating the Most Christian king and his courtly Church, that all
further inquiry into the apostate's merits seemed useless. Voltaire
finds that Julian had all the qualities of Trajan without his defects;
all the virtues of Cato without his ill-humour; all that one admires
in Julius Caesar without his vices; he had the continency of Scipio,
and was in all ways equal to Marcus Aurelius, the first of men. Nay,
more. If he had only lived longer, he would have retarded the fall of
the Roman Empire, if he could not arrest it entirely. We here see the
length to which "polemical fury" could hurry a man of rare insight.
Julian had been a subject of contention for years between the hostile
factions. While one party made it a point of honour to prove that he
was a monster, warring consciously against the Most High, the other
was equally determined to prove that he was a paragon of all virtue,
by reason of his enmity to the Christian religion. The deep interest
attaching to the pagan reaction in the fourth century, and the social
and moral problems it suggests, were perceived by neither side, and it
is not difficult to see why they were not.
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