Sophia’s Visions · Rome, 363 · The emperor who said no · B2–C1
Salutius: the Emperor Who Said No
Sophia’s Visions: three and a half centuries from now, in an army camp beside the Tigris, the soldiers of Rome will offer a tired philosopher the whole empire, and he will refuse. Speculating about the past (if he had accepted…, he might have…, had he accepted…) and saying how sure we are (in all probability, it is unlikely that, there is no evidence that), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, not a scroll but a vision. I have seen a man nobody remembers, on the night he could have become the master of the world.
If somebody offered me the world, I would say yes before they finished the sentence.
That is exactly why nobody will ever offer it to you.
Plato would agree with Philo: the best rulers are those who do not want to rule. Listen, and decide whether my man was wise or only tired.
In 312 the emperor Constantine began to favour the Christians, the followers of the Galilaean. His sons went further: their laws closed the temples of the old gods and forbade the old sacrifices, on pain of death. In the cities, Christians were growing in number; in the countryside and in the schools, the old gods were still everywhere.
One young prince of Constantine’s family, Julian, had a terrible childhood: when he was about six, soldiers murdered his father and most of his relatives in the struggle for power after Constantine’s death, and he was then brought up as a Christian under the cousin who had allowed it, the emperor Constantius. He secretly turned to the old gods and to Neoplatonism, the philosophy of Plotinus and his followers, built on Plato. When he became emperor in 361, he reopened…
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