During the Principate, the negotiation of the ruler’s intellectual authority emerged as a key strategy of political self-legitimisation. In the early fourth century, the definition of early Christian thinking as the perfect system of knowledge, which had been developed through dialogue and rivalry with the post-Hellenistic philosophical schools, encouraged the emperor Constantine to mobilise his allegiance to Christianity for competitive self-assertion: he upheld his conversion as an intellectual achievement with no imperial precedent. Modern reluctance to take ancient definitions of Christianity as philosophy at face value has obscured the force of this propagandistic argument. Yet its recovery is essential to understanding Julian’s philosophical response to the positioning of early Christianity as an authoritative system of knowledge and appreciating the strategies of self-legitimisation pursued by fourth-century bishops in conversation with the (Christian) philosopher-ruler. As the question of who holds authoritative knowledge was antagonised by religious disputes, the fourth-century socio-political and ideological transition was channelled into a ‘politics of interpretation’ in which leaders (imperial and episcopal) negotiated their status as intelligent decoders of providential signs scattered throughout literature, history, and the cosmos.

Chapter 2 expands on the alertness of Christian intellectuals to the question of cultural prestige by reading the orations composed by Julian as Caesar (355–60) in the context of the rhetorical and cultural discourse at the imperial court. Drawing on the current re-assessment of Constantius II as pursuing a reputation as a patron of culture and philosophy, the first section argues that Julian’s early panegyrics reinforce this self-image by celebrating the intellectual synergy between the Augustus and his (famously highly cultivated) new Caesar. I further show that Constantius’ imperial propaganda relied on the assumption that allegiance to Christianity was a key factor in establishing his intellectual authority. The second section considers the writings Julian composed during his Gallic campaign (Second Panegyric to Constantius; Consolation to Himself), when his relationship with Constantius was deteriorating. As Julian increasingly exploits philosophical rhetoric to challenge rather than celebrate the Augustus, the identification of Christianity with intellectual authority becomes a polemical target in his writings, marking Julian’s first expressed disagreements with the idea of Christianity as highest philosophy.

Chapter 1 draws on Julian’s earliest surviving oration – the Letter to Themistius – to illustrate the interaction between Julian’s early rhetoric and the political discourse developed at the court of Constantius II. The first section challenges scholarly readings of the Letter as voicing a rejection of the late antique ideal of the sovereign as ensouled law. It argues that Julian’s primary intent in this text lies rather in a desire to advertise his exegetical skills at the expense of his interlocutor, the famous philosopher Themistius. The second sectio contextualises Julian’s ambition in the context of third- and fourth-century debates on the relationship between leadership and culture. It shows that this theme was invested with particular significance by Christian authors – such as Lactantius and Eusebius – who used it in claiming Christianity’s intellectual dominance over pagan thinking. This testifies to the existence of a shared perception that cultural authority legitimised political authority but also signals the ambitions of Christian intellectuals to negotiate Christianity’s cultural prestige in conversation with the Roman elites.

The question of whether a supreme authority can perform resistance – a notion presupposing confrontation with a force that is equal, if not superior – is here addressed through the case study of Emperor Julian’s opposition to Christianity. During the year and a half of his rule, Julian engaged in attempts to control the religious life of the Roman Empire, seeking to reverse the religious agenda pursued by his Christian predecessors Constantine and Constantius II. His writings, however, do not voice a top-down approach to religious confrontation, but rather deploy forms of expression that are traditionally associated with subaltern dissidents, such as humour and figured speech. Julian’s literary choices point to his self-perception – and self-narrative – as grappling with forces that were greater than his contingent position of authority. In particular, the positioning of his response to Christianity in the field of philosophy (Against the Galileans) betrays his alertness to contemporary narratives of Christianity as the system of knowledge that had displaced the philosophical schools of Greece and Rome. To this claim, Julian reacted with a defence of Greek philosophy and religion against what he perceived as Christianity’s aggressive and power-endorsed intrusion in the spheres of theology, philosophy, and interpretation of history.

The Introduction discusses paideia (culture of Greek intellectuals) and its relevance for fourth-century clergy by providing a background to the Cappadocian Fathers. The chapter defines the meaning of "classical masculinity" for this study and places its treatment of gender into the broader scholarship on late antiquity and Christianity. The chapter outlines key concepts such as aretē (manly virtue), agathos (superior person), and asceticism (self-denial), and introduces agōn (contest or struggle) as the concept around which the book is organized. It also directs the reader to consider the Second Sophistic as the antecedent to the fourth-century culture of epistolary exhibitions. The chapter explains the differences in the Cappadocians’ use of genre and the distinguishing features of epistolography and hagiographic biography. And the Introduction explores identity theory and its usefulness for investigating gender and Christianity.

This chapter looks at the ways in which Hellenisms are constructed, specifically with reference to the language of religion and divinity. It poses the question: how Christian is the determinedly nostalgic late-ancient Hellenism of the emperor known as Julian the Apostate (ruled 361-363)? If the emperor continued to be considered as a god, how did that inflect the understanding of Christ’s incarnation—and vice versa? The very language of the divine becomes fraught with ambiguity, and the distinctions imposed by interpreters between philology and theology seem increasingly tendentious. Ultimately it shows show how the dynamic interaction of theology and classical antiquity can produce an almost unthinkable collocation of ideas: that an ensouled statue of the emperor should provide some sort of model for comprehending the incarnation of Christ.