The ascetic Julian does not spare his august relative, whose title to the epithet of “Great” he would have laughed to scorn. He declares that Constantine’s victories over the barbarians were victories _pour rire_; he represents him as a crazy being in love with the moon, like that half-witted Emperor of the Claudian house, who used to stand at night in the colonnades of his palace and beg the gracious Queen of the Sky to come down to him as she had come down to Endymion. Julian puts into his mouth a grotesque speech in which he makes Constantine claim to have been a greater general than Alexander because he fought with Romans, Germans, and Scythians and not with mere Asiatics; greater than Julius Cæsar or than Augustus because he fought not with bad men but with good; and greater even than Trajan, because it is a finer thing to win back what you have lost than merely to acquire something new. The speech was received with ridicule by the gods, and then Hermes pointedly asked Constantine in the Socratic manner, “How would you define your ideal?” (τὶ καλὸν ἐνόμισας;) “To have great riches,” was Constantine’s reply, “and to be able to give away lavishly, and satisfy all one’s own desires and those of one’s friends.” The answer is significant. Julian, like Constantine’s other critics, keeps harping on the same string. It is the luxury, extravagance, and self-indulgence of the Emperor that he singles out as the most glaring defect of his character and his squandering of the Imperial resources upon effeminate and un-Roman pomps, useless buildings, and greedy and unworthy favourites. Silenus, the bibulous buffoon of Olympus, a moral rebuke from whose lips would be received with shouts of laughter, tells Constantine with mock gravity that he has led a life fit only for a cook or a lady’s-maid (ὀψοποίος καὶ κομμώτρια), and so the episode ends. We cannot doubt that there was quite sufficient of truth in these accusations to make the sharp-witted Greeks of the Empire, for whom Julian principally wrote, thoroughly enjoy his biting sarcasms.