ABSTRACT
The religious history of the mid-fourth century is dominated by the emperor Julian. Despite the brevity of his reign (361-3), his attempt to reverse the changes initiated by Constantine was bound to be the focus of attention for contemporaries, and this is reflected in the available source material, which includes much written by Julian himself. By contrast, the much longer reign of his predecessor Constantius II (337-61) has been described as ‘peculiarly elusive for the historian of religion: unlike his predecessor and successor, Constantius neither chose nor rejected Christianity, so that his personal spiritual history lacks a dramatic turning-point’ (Fowden 1998: 539), and the sources are not as plentiful – hence the emphasis in this chapter on Julian.
