By common consent, the episode of the short pagan "revival" under Julian is the most interesting chapter in the later history of the Roman Empire proper. The one emperor after Marcus Aurelius who attracts us as a human being and as a mind, he set himself a task which, whether he failed or succeeded, must lift his name high in the annals of a decadent civilization: his failure, in fact, makes him the most living figure in the long line of autocrats from Constantine to Charlemagne. It is by such contrast, indeed, that he becomes eminent. Measured by the standards of progressive civilizations, against the great minds of the pre-imperial world and the best statesmen of later realms, he is neither a great ruler nor a great intelligence. To look for a ruling mind of the highest order in that environment of decay would be to miss the first and last lesson of the history of the empire. Supposing a potentially great faculty to be born in such a society, it could not conceivably grow to efficiency: the intellectual and the emotional atmosphere forbade. Before there can be all-round minds there must be all-round men; and the empire had made an end of the species. Intellectual originality had long disappeared from a world in which the topmost distinction stood for mere brute force, cultured men grovelling before it like scourged animals. The brooding intensity of Lucretius and the large sanity of Cæsar were become as impossible to men of the Roman name as the life of the forum of Coriolanus' day, or the Greek literature of the age of Aristophanes. The process of putting a yoke on the world had duly ended in a world of yoke-bearers, whose best leaders could but harness them.