Chapter 6 investigates the debate surrounding Julian’s final – and fundamental, in the eyes of late Roman intellectuals – objection to Christianity: his critique of its universalising rhetoric. Third- and fourth-century bishops legitimised their increasing political prominence through competitive arguments pointing to Christianity as the only philosophy that was accessible to everyone, including the ill-educated. Julian set in opposition to this the Platonist belief that any self-confessed system of knowledge appealing to the many disqualifies its intellectual authority by revealing crowd-pleasing (hence, deceptive) ambitions. The reaction of upper-class Christians, divided between the popular consensus and allegiance to Julian’s elitist sensibilities, demonstrates the criticality of this argument. Yet – as I show in the second section – the Neoplatonic objection to the Christian rhetoric of universalism ultimately displaced non-Christian philosophers from the political scene (Eunapius’ Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists). Moreover, the rising popularity of ascetic leaders encouraged even highly authoritative ecclesiastical voices (e.g., John Chrysostom) to question the validity of Greco-Roman education. This, ironically, resulted in a power-driven challenge to the validity of the cultural system whose adaptation had been key to stabilising Christian power.

The first section addresses the debate between Julian’s supporters and detractors following his sudden death in 363. Christian preachers turned Julian’s propagandistic use of his life into proof that Roman history was regulated by Christian providence. However, they also had to confront Julian’s re-assessment of the power dynamics between the ruler and the priests in the post-Constantinian empire. I argue that Julian was wary of how the identification of religious allegiance as the criterion for determining whether an emperor was a philosopher-ruler affected the interaction between the emperor, now decentred from his religious structures of choice, and the ecclesiastical leaders. The second section shows that that the episcopal engagement with philosophical ideas both provided clerics with a weapon against Julian’s attempts to re-centre the ruler in religious matters and shaped the relationship between the bishops and emperors in addressing heresy - a key challenge faced by Christianity in its self-construction as perfect system of knowledge. Episcopal appeals to an exclusive control of knowledge also affected the public role of non-conforming philosophers, which I illustrate with a case study of Synesius of Cyrene.

In this way, the fourth-century philosopher Bishop Synesius of Cyrene argued that every Roman household, even the most modest, had Gothic slaves. In this chapter, I examine how late antique writers, Synesius among them, dealt with the enslavement of foreigners. Foreigners here refer to non-Roman and non-Greek people outside the frontiers of the Roman Empire, conventionally called ‘barbarians’. War on the frontiers stimulated commerce in humans – namely, slave trade – and vice versa: the activities of slave merchants at least partly motivated warfare in the frontier regions. Non-Roman groups took captives, Romans among them, and made a profit selling them as slaves or returning them for ransom. For their part, Romans took captives and sold them into slavery. We also have several attestations of kidnappers who abducted people during peacetime and even within the Roman Empire. Late antique bishops complained about the slave trade of Roman citizens. Augustine, for example, condemned the business of so-called ‘Galatian’ slave traders.