Of all the writings of Ibsen, his huge double drama on the rise and fall
of Julian is the most extensive and the most ambitious. It is not
difficult to understand what it was about the most subtle and the most
speculative of the figures which animate the decline of antiquity that
fascinated the imagination of Ibsen. Successive historians have
celebrated the flexibility of intelligence and firmness of purpose which
were combined in the brain of Julian with a passion for abstract beauty
and an enthusiasm for a restored system of pagan Hellenic worship. There
was an individuality about Julian, an absence of the common purple
convention, of the imperial rhetoric, which strongly commended him to
Ibsen, and in his perverse ascetic revolt against Christianity he
offered a fascinating originality to one who thought the modern world
all out of joint. As a revolutionary, Julian presented ideas of
character which could not but passionately attract the Norwegian poet.
His attitude to his emperor and to his God, sceptical, in each case, in
each case inspired by no vulgar motive but by a species of lofty and
melancholy fatalism, promised a theme of the most entrancing complexity.
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