The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets

TLDR: A translation of Lieu's book on Julian's own writings is available in English translation as discussed by the authors, but they are not available in translation for the general reader. But they are available for a limited number of translations of contemporary sources.

Abstract: Chrysostom XVI): for 'funerary urn' read 'sarcophagus'; Saint Babylas was interred, not cremated, and the Greek word is \\apva£. P. 109 (Ephrem, Hymn 1, line 1): there is a superfluous 'which'. The three texts presented are not major sources on Julian. But they are not available in English translation. The editor and his collaborators have done students of late antiquity a service by making them accessible. It might have been useful to append a note on where translations of the principal contemporary sources are to be found Julian's own writings, Ammianus Marcellinus, Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 4 and 5, Libanius, Or. 1, 12-18. Julian fascinates the late twentieth-century world. There have been many scholarly studies on him in recent years. Gore Vidal wrote a best-seller on him. Lieu's book will help us to understand this extraordinary man, who faces us, inter alia, with a major problem on the place of the contingent in history. Had his anonymous assassin missed with his javelin, and had Julian gone on to live to a ripe old age, what would have happened? Christianity would hardly have disappeared. But perhaps a very different relationship would have been established between religious authority and political power. The history of Europe might have taken a very different course.