Nature and the supernatural: the hereditary allegiance of the Emperor Julian to Helios

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The Emperor Julian and Heliodorus, the author of the Aethiopica , both claimed descent from Helios, the supreme god of Neoplatonic philosophy in Late Antiquity, to whom many of Julian's ancestors, most notably Constantius Chlorus, also professed devotion. In his Hymn to King Helios , the emperor claimed to have private proofs of this that he did not wish to make public, but which appear to have had nothing to do with the taboo on divulging the mysteries of Mithras. There is a wide range of suggestive evidence in the historical record, from the hostile post-mortem testimony of Gregory of Nazianzus, to the anonymous slurs of the people of Antioch, the adulation of his own uneducated troops, and the coinage issued during his reign, that points to some genetic abnormality in his physical nature, most probably a form of albinism (an unknown condition at the time), which the emperor took as proof of the supernatural guidance of Helios in his life.