β Scribed by Ford, Michael Curtis
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
A historical adventure based on fact & set in the last years of the Roman Empire. The year 354 AD: Julian, a young scholar in Athens, is the last survivor of a bloody political purge that killed his entire family. Summoned to the court of Emperor Constantius, he finds himself bearing the ring of Caesar of the Western Empire. Julian is a military genius, crushing the German tribes that have threatened Rome for generations. Soon after, he seizes the Empire for himself, becoming the most powerful man in the world while still only 30. Now the dark side of his ambition emerges. Julian discards the Christianity of his boyhood & sets his sights on the Persian Empire. In Persia, however, his gods & his sanity desert him, & the course of history is altered forever.
This second historical novel by Ford (after The Ten Thousand) follows the rise of the Emperor Julian, the fourth-century Roman Caesar who has been vilified by Christian historians for his reintroduction of Hellenistic religions to Rome. The narrator is Julian's physician, Caesarius, ostensibly a loyal adviser but also a dogmatic Christian who wants to save Julian's soul and thinks very little of the man he serves. Battle scenes predominate in the early going, as Ford traces Julian's military campaigns in Gaul and documents his growing opposition to his uncle, Constantine the Great. The fast-paced narrative competently examines Julian's development as a soldier, inspired military commander and rhetorician. Ford clearly admires Julian's breadth of intellectual curiosity and his mission to restore diversity of religious practice and neo-Platonism. But Caesarius is so unrelentingly angry and humorless that his voice-over ends up stifling Julian as a character. An unreliable narrator threatened by the hero's greatness might have been a marvelous device, but in this case Caesarius's hostility is over the top, and his snide commentary gets too much airtime at the expense of Julian. Then, too, Julian's philosophical inner life and his genius for enlightened Hellenism has been dealt with at length in Gore Vidal's Julian (1962). In showing Julian from the distorted perspective of a treacherous enemy, Ford gambles, with mixed results.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
A close relative of Constantine, the first Roman emperor to embrace Christianity openly, but himself a pagan, Julian the Apostate was a man of many contradictions. In this powerful and passionate second novel by Ford (The Ten Thousand), readers come to understand his dimensions in intimate detail. The story opens with Julian as a young, sheltered philosophy student and pacifist in Athens. Not long into his education, however, he must take up arms and save the Roman Empire from corrupt leaders and hostile neighbors. He does so ingeniously, becoming the first emperor since Julius Caesar to conquer the tribes of Gaul. Though Ford's descriptions of warfare in the fourth century C.E. are dramatically gruesome, the moments of humor and personal valor make this a truly compelling story-one not just of gods and legions but of men. Julian lived as simply as an aesthetic in the heart of one of the most decadent cities history has ever known. Although he never set foot in Rome, he dedicated his life to the expansion of the Roman Empire. Highly recommended for most fiction collections.
Jane Baird, Anchorage Municipal Libs., AK
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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