Julian

"Gore Vidal’s Julian is about the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate. Julian was emperor from 361 to 363 AD and attempted to turn the empire back from Christianity to paganism. It is very much a literary novel. It has quite a complex structure whereby it starts with letters between Libanius and Priscus—two real pagan intellectuals—who write to each other about Julian after the emperor’s death. Then it shifts into a manuscript that one of them has miraculously got in Julian’s own words, which takes us up to Julian’s death. Then it shifts back to the two men writing to each other. I think its key theme is the impact of Christianity and, in many ways, it is a deeply anti-Christian novel. At the heart of that is a protest against the way Christianity altered the sexuality of the ancient world, not just with its antipathy to homosexuality, but its loathing of the body and sex. That’s the core of the novel. It’s a very rare novel because what we’ve got here is a very established literary novelist turning out a historical novel set in the ancient world. Usually, when this happens, the result is absolutely awful because the literary novelist already sees themself as an established commentator on the human condition, so doesn’t feel the need to actually bother to do any work and get anything right. They also almost always, like the worst of genre novelists, fall into the trap of assuming their characters—in this case Romans—were just like them. There are endless examples of this, which Gore Vidal managed to avoid. He was keenly intelligent and had enough empathy to realise the people he was writing about weren’t just Gore Vidal dressed up in Roman costume."

"Gore Vidal’s “Julian,” his historical novel about the last pagan emperor of Rome, and Mary Renault’s “Persian Boy,” another historical novel, this one about a eunuch slave boy who falls in love with Alexander the Great after he conquers the Persian Empire, may be my two favorite novels. I’ve read them both at least four times each."