As a literary genre and practice, philosophical and political epistolography seems to have been alive and well in the fourth-century Roman empire. We have fragments of twenty letters of the late third- and early fourth-centuryc.e. Platonist philosopher Iamblichus of Chalcis to former students and other contemporaries, some of whom appear to have been imperial officeholders ; theEpistle to Himeriusof Sopater the Younger to his brother Himerius on the latter's assumption of an unknown governorship in the East, probably sometime in the (...) 340s or 350s ; the Emperor Julian'sEpistle to Themistius, which was likely written and publishedc.December 361/early 362; and theEpistle to Julianof the Aristotelian philosopher Themistius on proper rule, which seems to have been a response, in part, to Julian'sEpistle to Themistiusand perhaps was written to the emperor when both men likely resided in Constantinople at the same time. These philosophical and political letters are but a few examples from this period. All four authors mentioned above, who are representative of intellectual life in the East during the fourth century, produced epistles which reflect Greek political theory in a Roman imperial context. (shrink)

By the mid fourth centuryc.e., violently divergent Christian communities had developed across the Roman empire: Nicene or Homoousian, Homoiousian, Homoian, Anomoean or Heterousian and others. The first emperor to be a strong supporter of traditional cult in more than a generation, Julian ruled over an empire of numerous religious groups that were often at variance with one another, both extra- and intra-communally, and how all of these should be treated was one of the chief problems pressing the emperor upon his (...) accession in late 361. Julian's religious thought and action during his short sole reign has long exercised scholars, its impact on Christians and Christianity in particular. To be sure, Julian tended to be hostile to Christians and Christianity, but he was by no means hostile to all, and he even favoured some Christians, some of whom he counted among his friends and officials. The emperor's Christian policy thus was complicated. One of the best examples of this complexity is Julian's epistle to the Heterousian Christian leader Aetius. In a shorter note published in this journal, Pierre-Louis Malosse focussed his attention on Julian's letter to Aetius, which dates to early 362 and which is the only such epistle to this future bishop that is extant. As transmitted, Julian's missive to Aetius is critical for the light it helps to shed on the emperor's views and treatments of Christians at the outset of his sole reign, and my conclusions on this missive differ from those of Malosse. (shrink)