123. Where else in the world, tell me, wilt thou find, "When reviled do ye bless; when blasphemed at do ye exhort" (inasmuch as it is not the accusation that does the harm but the reality), "when persecuted, submit; when cursed, pray for them that curse you; when stripped, strip yourself to boot"; in one word, to overcome malice by goodness, and make them better who injure us, by enduring the things whereby our patience is tried? And yet even though we should grant that they can repress vice by means of the lessons of their false doctrine, yet how can they ever attain to the full height of our virtue and discipline, when we even regard as vice the not progressing in what is good, and becoming young in place of old, and standing still in the same place, in the condition of whipping-tops, running round, but not going forward at all, but moving in a stationary way, so to speak, by the impulse of the lash; and it behoves us to have already practised one part of the virtues to grasp at another, and to aim at yet another, until the end, and that deification for which we were born, and to which we aspire, inasmuch as we cast a mental glance across the gulf between the two worlds, and have in expectation a reward commensurate with the magnificence of God!

1. ¹ In allowing Julian, then a child of six years old, to escape, when he commanded the massacre of his father and brothers.

2. ¹ It is impossible to preserve in English this string of miserable puns on the word λόγος, in its numerous senses of the Word, Reason, Literature, Speech, &c., on which the preacher evidently prides himself not a little.

3. ² Another play upon the double meaning of "Ελληνες," "Greeks," and "Pagans."

4. ¹ That is the restitution of the revenues of the temples which they had appropriated without form of law under Constantius.

5. ² Probably alluding to the immense body of neutrals, who had given up Paganism, but not accepted Christianity.

6. ¹ The monks of Nazianzus, who having squabbled with their bishop about some matter of discipline, hated him even more than they did Julian.

7. ¹ An unfortunate simile----a "solid rock" being even more unfavourable to the germination of seed than a "dry ground."

8. ¹ This name must be wrong; all these legends being quoted in chronological order. Methuselah was probably written, he being the only noteworthy personage between Enoch and Noah.

9. ¹ Supposed to represent the Cross.

10. ² The number Seven.

11. ¹ Constantine's half-brothers, Julius Constantius and Delmatius. There can be no reasonable doubt that Constantius II. was a party to the forgery of his father's last injunctions by the Bishop of Nicomedia, which was the pretext for the massacre of these two princes and their sons.

12. ¹ Even by Gregory's own showing, these children owed their escape from the massacre, not to the mercy of Constantius, but to the care of Marcus, who made them take sanctuary in a church.

13. ² The two children were kept close prisoners for fourteen years in a secluded castle at Cappadocia, carefully secluded from their friends, and allowed to see none but their servants. There is no doubt that if Constantius had had male issue, the last of his nephews would immediately have been sacrificed to state necessity.

14. ³ He showed his complicity in the murders not only by appropriating the provinces of the slaughtered princes (which might be excused by political necessity), but by confiscating the paternal estates of the orphans, and retaining them to the last. It was only after Julian was made Caesar that he restored to him the dowry of his mother, Basilina.

15. ¹ Theology, under Eusebius of Caesarea. The enthusiastic temper of Julian was so wrought upon by his teachers that at one time he was anxious to become a monk.

16. ² Gallus was a monster of cruelty; but this, not being incompatible with soundness of faith, Gregory regards as a mere trifle. Julian, as he remarks in an epistle to the Alexandrians, was, up to the age of twenty, a firm believer in Christianity.

17. ³ It must be borne in mind that his congregation was composed entirely of women, and mechanics or slaves----the only apology for such a narration.

18. ¹ A curious figure, of a thing pursuing what it preceded!

19. ² This admission, which Gregory often repeats, is a sufficient evidence that there was no real persecution of the Christians by Julian.

20. ¹ The temerity of Gallus in power was so far beyond all calculation as to exonerate Constantius from the charge of temerity in raising him to that power.

21. ² Alluding to the advice of Constantius' prime minister Eutropius, to put Julian to death along with his brother----a piece of useless cruelty overruled by the empress, whose influence Gregory here deprecates.

22. ¹ Vetranio, whose troops Constantius gained over by bribery, whilst spinning out fictitious negotiations with him: Sylvanus, whom he caused to be assassinated; and Magnentius in pitched battle.

23. ¹ A mild, very mild allusion, to his persecution of the Catholic sect, at the instigation of his Arian advisers.

24. ¹ Constantius had in reality been so alarmed by the rebellion of Sylvanus upon the Rhine, that he felt the necessity of a colleague in the West, and Julian was the sole survivor of his own family, to whom he could have recourse. By marrying him to his sister, Helena, he made the bond doubly sure, and but for his own stupid jealousy, the measure would have proved the best possible for his own interest----that of the empire was of but small account to him.

25. ¹ Maximus the philosopher, accused of having drawn large sums of money out of Julian; on which charge he was imprisoned and put to the torture under Jovian.

26. ¹ The Platonic Powers of Nature, the actual agents of the One Supreme.

27. ² Julian certainly condoned the death of Gallus, as merited by his cruelty and treasonable designs; he only complains of his execution without form of trial. And this in his "Epistle to the Athenians," in which he puts all his charges against Constantius in the strongest light.

28. ¹ "Impiety" is regularly used for Paganism, as is "Atheism" for Christianity, by writers on the two sides.

29. ¹ Of the palace. Gregory wishes his hearers to believe a lie which he was too acute to believe himself, that Julian had suborned one of the palace eunuchs to poison Constantius at a fixed time.

30. ¹ In not having murdered Julian when a child----a pious frame of mind quite consistent with Gregory's way of thinking. But in reality the dying emperor, caring for nothing but his infant daughter and wife, publicly declared Julian his heir and successor, assured of their safety under his protection.

31. ¹ This "sympathy" is the assurance of the everlasting torments to which Julian has just been consigned by the compassionate preacher.

32. ² Supposed by La Bléterie to mean that Julian unbaptized himself by going through the baptism of blood in the Taurobolia: the context, however, shows that Gregory refers only to the revival of pagan sacrifices in the Palace.

33. ¹ A play upon δεισιδαιμονία and δυσδαιμονία, which shows the identity of the preacher's pronunciation of the two words.

34. ² The preacher wishes his congregation to believe the story, but endeavours to save his own credit with sensible people by declaring himself not altogether convinced of its accuracy or details.

35. ¹ Probably a Mithraic cave.

36. ¹ The Sign of the Cross; regularly termed by Eusebius σωτήριον σημεῖον.

37. ² How did this scene become public? The sole operators, Julian and Maximus, were not likely to have divulged it, on their reascension from the cave.

38. ¹ An admission quite sufficient to disprove the existence of any persecution for religion's sake. Julian's grand offence in the preacher's eyes was the depriving the Christians of the power of persecuting others of different views, of which they had fully availed themselves during the twenty-four years of the reign of Constantius.

39. ¹ Martyrdom, which he refused the Christians, grudging them the honour it would bring them.

40. ¹ The true "head and front of his offending" was Julian's refraining from persecution----argument, the preacher felt, was an infinitely more dangerous weapon.

41. ¹ The wretch Eusebius, the mortal enemy of Gallus and himself, and a very small number of Constantius' ministers, who, be it remembered, were condemned, not by Julian, but by a military tribunal, composed of Gallic officers, many of whom must have been Christians, in consequence of the preponderance of that religion in the West.

42. ² The state of England under Mary is an exact parallel to that of the Empire under Julian. The new religion in each case was held by a small minority, but well organized and extremely noisy; the rest of the population, except in certain districts where local causes kept up zeal for the ancient religion, were entirely indifferent to principles, but eager for the plunder of the temple lands and treasures, as of those of the abbeys and cathedrals. This state of things clearly appears from Julian's complaints in the Misopogon.

43. ¹ An admission that such persons did not lose their places on the score of their religion, for Gregory allows that they were permitted to remain in office, upon the chance of their ultimately coming over to Julian's views.

44. ² The Monogram of Christ, revealed to Constantine in a vision, and painted on the soldiers' shields on the eve of his battle with Maxentius. ---- See account in Lactantius.

45. ³Labarum, quasi laborum levamen! A curious illustration of the prevailing pronunciation by accent.

46. ¹ Or, "against the Testifier, the want of testimony," a miserable play upon the general and special senses of μαρτὺς.

47. ¹ Implying a pious wish that he had so ended his life.

48. ² Which best deserves the name of idolatry and ασεβεῖα, this disgusting relic-worship, thus distinctly attributing divine power to dead bones, or Julian's adoration of natural agencies regarded as the visible ministers of the invisible and supreme God?

49. ¹ By rendering themselves incorporeal----alluding to the ascetics in the congregation. His audience were too obtuse to perceive the difference between Julian's contempt for luxury practised for the real good of the empire and the asceticism of monks and hermits, tending solely to their own glorification and uselessness----true fakirs, whose chief merit was their dirtiness, as the quotation from Homer shows. 

50. ¹ The caves in the desert haunted by these solitaries.

51. ¹ "Strangers must give place to kings as household bread does to cheese-cakes."----A quotation from some old play.

52. ² A good hit, for once, at the rapacity of the Greek sophists (ridiculed by Libanius himself), who had beset the too liberal Julian.

53. ¹ The riddle of the fishermen (louse-catchers), "What we caught we threw away; what we caught not, we carry with us."

54. ² Who supported himself by watering gardens at night in order to go to school by day.

55. ³ By putting a stop to their mutual squabbles, and restoring the exiled Catholic bishops to their sees.

56. ¹ Who, in reality, upon the news of Julian's accession, used every effort to obtain terms of peace from so formidable an adversary.

57. ² This looks like an allusion to the joke of the Antiochenes upon his Bull Apis, "which tossed over the whole empire."

58. ³ μετρίως "carried on within the limits prescribed by law and usage, without any arbitrary exercise of power;" all this seems implied in the word. This unwilling confession of an enemy of the existence of all the essential parts of good government in Julian's system, is worth more than all the eulogies of Libanius.

59. ¹ All these evils being in truth less virulent than those caused by the sectarian quarrels which had raged under Constantius. In the new reign whatever annoyances the Christians endured were entirely of their own seeking, as all the examples quoted by Gregory prove to demonstration.

60. ² This argument tells against the pleader; the Christians being as yet a small minority in the empire their discontent was less dangerous than that of the Pagans. Gregory has confessed that the whole army conformed without difficulty to Julian's change of the state religion.

61. ¹ A clever hit of Gregory's, the sharpest in the whole invective. 

62. ² An allusion to the absurd fable that Pan was the fruit of Penelope's amours with all her suitors.

63. ¹ Τὸ δὲ Βιάζεσθαι τυραννικῶς ἀισχυνόμενος----by this unguarded admission the preacher refutes his whole invective.

64. ¹ The celebrated "Sapphire of Constantius," which represents him spearing a wild boar before Caesarea personified, may with good reason be supposed a copy of some similar group.

65. ¹ Their fewness proves there was nothing in these representations calculated to scandalize any but those bent upon discovering pretext for disaffection.

66. ¹ One of the regular insignia of imperial rank was the thuribulum carried before the Augustas, and the putting incense thereon by all petitioners. Thus Dion notes that Marcia enjoyed all the honours of an Augusta, except that of the thuribulum (as being the highest of all, and therefore which even Commodus dared not allow a concubine). The idolatry in the scene was the invention of mischief-making bigots, who actually, later, got up a plot for Julian's assassination.

67. ¹ A sufficient proof that the honour was paid to the emperor alone, in accordance with the ancient ceremonial.

68. ¹ The burning incense to Jupiter had been the appointed test of conformity to paganism in Diocletian's persecution. The instigators to rebellion availed themselves of this fact, keeping out of sight the essential difference of the two ceremonies.

69. ¹ ’ἐζορίᾳ παραδόντα. No stronger proof is needed of Julian's tolerance than this so inadequate punishment for their mutinous and insolent behaviour.

70. ¹ These horrible displays of popular fury prove the cruelty with which the party using such retaliation had been treated during the preceding reign. La Bléterie cannot deny this, but ingeniously shifts the blame upon the Arians, whom he calls a sanguinary and persecuting sect. But Gregory's tone throughout shows that he only lacked the power, not the will, to follow their mode of dealing with the pagans.

71. ¹ On the point of renouncing Christianity through their alarm.

72. ²A sufficient evidence of the tyrannical manner in which he had exercised the authority granted to him by the "excellent Constantius." The "habitation of devils" demolished by him, was a time-honoured temple, dear to the whole population----nevertheless, he would have been allowed to compound for his former bigotry by the payment of a nominal fine----moderation hardly to be expected in the case of mob-law.

73. ¹ This, therefore, must have formed part of the "Twelve Tortures" ----a curious revelation.

74. ² The preacher is incorrect in his entomology in his zeal to heighten the picture; bees and wasps neither bite, nor would be attracted by such bait----the flesh-flies were quite sufficient for the occasion.

75. ¹ Who was perfectly innocent of this treatment of Marcus, which was the spontaneous act of his fellow-citizens.

76. ¹ Curious morality----to make a person responsible for all the future consequences of a virtuous action!

77. ² Probably Sallustius Secundus.

78. ³ The savage tyrant to whom the Suitors threaten to ship off Ulysses.

79. ¹ "Wells, cisterns, conduits"----the very last places for the concealment of murdered persons. And all these scenes passing under the eyes of Julian's body-guard, many of whom in high command, as Jovian Valentinian, and were steady Christians. But it was a common trick of the monks to hide human bones in temples, and then point them out as evidences of human sacrifice. A notorious example is that of the Mithraeum at Alexandria. Nothing is more likely than that the same stratagem was practised in Julian's palace at Antioch by some zealot. A single bone would suffice to build all Gregory's declamation on.

80. ¹ ἀνάρπαστος, "arrested and brought up before Julian," seems all implied in the word.

81. ² Not, however, on account of the execution of these pagans, but for remissness in not checking the sedition before it broke out into civil war.

82. ³ ελλεην had now got the double sense of "Grecian" and "pagan."

83. ¹ These expressions indicate that Maximin's statues were not destroyed upon his downfall (according to the regular custom of the times, "descendunt statuae restemque sequuntur"), but were left mutilated, as objects of public scorn.

84. ¹ "Of the Christian's non-resistance to injury, contempt of the world," &c. Gregory, clearly unable to meet the unanswerable logic of Julian's quotations, takes refuge in a cloud of involved quibbles, the purport of which can hardly be discerned.

85. ¹ The penal laws of Constantius and Constans are sufficient answer to this boasting of a tolerance that sprung out of want of power, not want of will to persecute. Take for example those enacted a few years previously: "Poena capitis subjugari praecipimus eos quos operam sacrificiis dare, et colere simulacra constiterit."----Dat. XI. Kal. Mart. Med. Constantio A. VII., et Juliano Caes. Coss. (A.IX 356.) " Cesset superstitio, sacrificiorum aboleatur insania; nam quicunque contra legem Divi Principio, parentis Nostri, et hanc Nostrae Mansuetuinis jussiorum ausus fuerit sacrificia celebrare, competens in eum vindicta, et praesens sententia exseratur."----Acc. Marcellino et Probiano Coss. (A.D. 341.)

86. ² The doctrine of "Commandments" and "Counsels of Perfection," a most convenient subterfuge for evading all inconvenient rules in a religious system.

87. ¹ λόγοι in the sense of "literature," or in modern phrase "books." Now follows a string of miserable puns upon the various meanings of λόγος, as "Reason," "Speech," &c., impossible to preserve in the translation.

88. ¹ ἀλογία, implying also want of reason, want of education, &c.

89. ¹ Words said by Homer to belong to the language of the gods.

90. ² Literally, "stretched or slackened."

91. ¹ σοὺς, which makes a very weak sense, looks much like a corruption of Σκυθινοὺς, in allusion to the mode in which the Scythians put down the slaves' revolt by the application of the horsewhip, according to Herodotus. Nazianzen politely suggests that such would have been the best cure for Julian at the hands of his cousin.

92. ¹ Probably taken out of one of Julian's numerous regulations for the better ordering of public worship.

93. ¹ A curious allusion to the Egyptian symbolism of the scarabeus.

94. ¹ Julian might justly retort, that these old Greek myths were fully as susceptible of interpretation in a higher sense, as were the Jewish Canticles with their infinitely grosser images, out of which the preacher extracted so much spiritual grace and prophecy. He might have also replied with good show of reason, that lessons of morality were to be as easily extracted from him

"Qui quid sit pulcrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non, 
Planius et Milius Chrysippo et Crantore dixit"

as from the Hebrew legends and institutions.

95. ¹ The poets, who retail such scandalous stories of the gods.

96. ¹ "No penny, no pater-noster" became the form of the same axiom very speedily after the preacher's side attained the supremacy in the State.

ΡΚΔʹ. Ποῦ δὲ καὶ παρὰ τίσιν ἀνθρώπων, εἰπέ μοι, τὸ λοιδορουμένους εὐφημεῖν, βλασφημουμένους παρακαλεῖν, ὡς οὐ τῆς κακηγορίας βλαπτούσης μᾶλλον ἢ τῆς ἀληθείας, διωκομένους ὑποχωρεῖν, γυμνομένους προσαπεκδύεσθαι, καταρωμένους ὑπερεύχεσθαι τῶν ἀρωμένων: ἑνὶ λόγῳ, χρηστότητι νικᾷν θρασύτητα, καὶ βελτίους ποιεῖν τοὺς ἀδικοῦντας, οἷς καρτεροῦμεν πάσχοντες; Καίτοι κἂν εἰ κακίαν δοίημεν αὐτοὺς κολάζειν ταῖς τοῦ πλάσματος παραινέσεσι, ποῦ τὸ φθάσαι πρὸς τὰ μέτρα τῆς ἡμετέρας ἀρετῆς καὶ παιδεύσεως, οἷς καὶ τὸ μὴ προβαίνειν τῷ καλῷ, μηδὲ νέους ἀντὶ παλαιῶν ἀεὶ γίνεσθαι, ἀλλ' ἐν ταυτῷ μένειν κακία δοκεῖ; Στρόμβων τὸ πάθος περιτρεχόντων, οὐ προϊόντων, καὶ στάσιμον κινουμένων, ἵν' οὕτως εἴπω, τῇ βίᾳ τῆς μάστιγος. Καὶ δεῖ τὸ μὲν ἡμῖν ἐξηνύσθαι τῶν καλῶν, τοῦ δὲ ἔχεσθαι, τοῦ δὲ ἐφίεσθαι μέχρι τοῦ τέλους καὶ τῆς θεώσεως, ἐφ' ᾗ γεγόναμεν καὶ πρὸς ἣν ἐπειγόμεθα, οἵ γε διαβατικοὶ τὴν διάνοιαν, καί τι τῆς τοῦ Θεοῦ μεγαλονοίας ἐλπίζοντες ἄξιον.