Word: emperor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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JULIAN, by Gore Vidal. In A.D. 361, Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate took an 18-month back step to the Hellenic gods, using all his power to destroy Christianity. In this ingenious historical novel, Gore Vidal brings his wit and urbanity to his subject, and if he does not quite capture the spirit of this elegant hero, his novel is still entertaining and convincing...
...avaricious Spaniards, gold was simply rare and therefore of monetary value; when a nation had enough, it became rich. The Indians were astonished at this attitude, and surmised that the white men had some physical disease that could only be cured by gold. The Inca Emperor Atahualpa had to ransom himself from the swinish Spanish Adventurer Pizarro with a roomful of the stuff-13,000 lbs., all told. (For his pains, Atahualpa was strangled.) Indifferently, the Spaniards melted art into bullion; their pillage increased Europe's gold supply by 20%, part of which went to finance the ill-fated...
...odder figure ever guided the destinies of the Holy Roman Empire than the Emperor Julian Augustus (circa 331-363), known as Julian the Apostate. Here was a recluse and a scholar who became a great military leader, an ascetic who preached the life of the senses, a fatalist who believed he would remake the world. More important, here was a man who did his best to write an end to Christianity before it had fairly begun. As the subject of biography he is endlessly fascinating. As the subject of fiction he has one major defect: he was an utterly irrational...
...paganism and philosophy that they took for the faith of the ancient world. Julian wanted to be a teacher, and might well have been if his half-brother Gallus (whom Vidal paints as almost a parody of the Roman voluptuary) had not been executed for misgovernment, leaving the Emperor Constantius and Julian as the last male survivors of the imperial line. With Gaul threatened by the Alamanni, Constantius reluctantly bestowed on Julian the title of Caesar and gave him both the government of Gaul and the hand of his sister Helena...
...series of remarkable victories (the most notable being at Strasbourg in 357), Julian secured the frontier once more at the Rhine. When Constantius died in 361, he became emperor. He died in battle against the Persians in 363, at the age of 32, having been on the throne for only 18 months...