Serious Fun in a Potted History at the Saturnalia? Some Imperial Portraits in Julian the Apostate's Caesars, a Medallion-Image of Julian and the 'Gallienae Augustae' aurei

Abstract

Within a fantastical narrative setting, Julian’s Caesars offers a ‘potted history’ of Rome’s rulers from Julius Caesar to Constantine; in its story, five ‘Caesars’ and Alexander the Great enter a contest to determine which of them had been the greatest. Julian’s prologue to the story represents it ambiguously as both a satirical contribution to the fun at a Saturnalia, and a ‘myth’ offering profitable instruction on serious matters. The assessment of Julian’s underlying mood and purposes in composing Caesars is accordingly problematic: questions arise about the balance of humour and earnestness in his narrative voice, the extent to which his fiction’s ‘instructiveness’ was implicitly a lesson in historical ‘facts’, the extent and idiosyncrasies of his own knowledge of Roman history, and the level of literary and historical awareness he anticipated in his target-audience. This paper addresses these questions with reference to Julian’s depictions of some particular emperors and of Alexander in Caesars, and to potentially relevant visual images on a medallion dated to Julian’s reign and in an earlier coin-series. Its argument falls into five sections: (I) introductory discussion of the ‘Saturnalian’ cultural context of Caesars and the circumstances of its composition, and of modern ‘psychologising’ readings of its author’s purposes and state of mind; (II) assessment of the hypothesis that Marcus Aurelius and Alexander serve in Caesars as exemplary ‘models’ for emulation in its author’s eyes; (III) assessment of a visual image of Julian that some adduce as evidence of ‘Alexander-imitation’ by him at the time of Caesars’ composition; (IV) critique of a hypothesis that postulates suppressed anger and prurience at the heart of Caesars’ ostensibly humorous ‘potted history’; (V) a speculative closing discussion relating Caesars’ depiction of a particular emperor (Gallienus) to his portrait-head in a much-discussed coin-image, and to an episode in his reign as reported in a lost account by a third century historian (Dexippus). The discussion reverts in closing to two central matters: Caesars’ problematic standing as a guide to the extent of Julian’s historical knowledge, and the balance of humour, fact and fiction in the piece.