Christians to pagans at the close of the second decade of the fourth
century, but it may be assumed that, when their organisation is taken
into account, they were able to control public opinion in the most
populous and important provinces of the Empire. All he had to do
“was to let the leading provinces have the religion they desired” ; the
rest of the Empire would follow in their wake. He was content
to adopt the principle of toleration; though for himself Christianity became more and more the one religion in which “crowning
reverence is observed towards the holiest powers of heaven.” He
probably carried the public opinion of the Empire with him. The
paganism of the fourth century was for the most part quiet and desired
only to be left in peace. Perhaps Ammianus MarceUinus, himself a
pagan, expressed the general opinion of his co-religionists when he
praised the Emperor Valentinian because he tolerated all creeds, gave
no orders that any one divinity should be worshipped, and did not
strive to bend the necks of his subjects to adore what he did.
The sons of Constantine changed all this. They proposed to destroy paganism by legislation. Their laws, doubtless, inflicted much injury on individual pagans, and, in the hands of such unprincipled Imperial sycophants as Paulus and Mercurius, were the pretexts for many executions, banishments, and confiscation of goods; but they remained inoperative in all the greater pagan centres. The worship of the gods went on as before in Rome, Alexandria, Heliopolis, and in many other cities. But they could not fail to irritate. If the laws were inoperative, they remained to threaten. Proposed destruction of temples and prohibition of heathen ceremonies meant in many cases the abandonment of the games and spectacles to which the careless multitude were strongly attached. Scholars saw in the advancing power of the Church the destruction of the old learning which gave its charm to their lives. Christianity itself, troubled by the meddling of the heads of the State, seemed to be rent in pieces by its controversies, to have lost its original purity and simplicity, and to have degenerated into “old-wife superstitions” (Ammianus). So wherever paganism abounded, and in places too where it only lingered, there was a general feeling of discontent ready to welcome the first signs of a reaction and eagerly listening to whispers that the last of the race of Constantine, if he lived to assume to the Imperial purple, would undo what his kinsmen had accomplished.
At the death of Constantine his nephew, Flavius Claudius Julianus, was six years old. The child escaped, almost by accident, the massacre of his family connived at if not ordered by Constantius. He lived for more than twenty years in constant peril, in the power of that suspicious cousin who scarcely knew whether he wished to slay or to spare him. He was kept secluded, now in one or other of the great cities of the East, for long in a palace far from the haunts of men, solacing himself with hard uninterrupted studies. Then for seven brief years he startled
