[In Julian] Gore Vidal has resurrected that unacknowledged humanists' culture-hero, Julian the Apostate—though perhaps "resurrected" is an unfortunate word to use in connection with the Emperor who called Christians "Galileans" and their churches "charnel-houses."…

Vidal has one rather ambiguous advantage …: unlike most Emperors, Julian wrote a great deal that was not only sedulously applauded during his lifetime, but actually survived for posterity. (p. 21)

No reader can get very far into Julian's platitudinous, mock-classical prose without realizing that as a Hellenistic man of letters (which he liked to consider himself) the Apostate was a dead flop. Any intelligent novelist who sets out to impersonate him has my sincere sympathy, and Mr. Vidal is as bright as they come. He solves the problem, quite simply, by making Julian a far more witty and astringent writer than in fact he was, and by interspersing his memoirs with acidulous comments from...