Julian, the successor of Constantius, was attached to the city by special ties. It was the place of his birth, and there he had received part of his early education. The school he attended was attached to the Basilica which stood on the site of the Cistern now styled Yeri Batan Serai, a little to the south-west of S. Sophia, and thither he went under the conduct of his pædagogue, Mardonius, to study grammar and rhetoric, dressed simply and associating freely with his fellow-students. His progress in his studies soon became the talk of society, and in public opinion presaged his fitness to become, in due time, the ruler of the Empire. Whereupon the jealousy which besets despotic rule was roused in Constantius, and Julian was banished to Nicomedia. But Julian always retained a warm affection for the home of his childhood and youth. Speaking of Constantinople in one of his letters he says, “I love her as my mother, for I was born and brought up there, and I can never be guilty of ingratitude towards her.” Nor had he reason to complain of his Alma Mater’s feelings towards himself. When he approached the city, in 361, to assume the crown, the whole population poured out to meet him, and hailed him with transports of joy as at once their sovereign and fellow-citizen. The young capital acquired a greater sense of dignity and importance at the thought that one who had been cradled within its precincts now occupied the throne of the Roman world. Julian spent only ten months in Constantinople as Emperor, his stay being cut short by war with Persia, whose hostility was not less intense since the chief seat of the Empire had been brought nearer to the frontier between the two States. Into those few months, however, Julian put an immense amount of work. The condition of affairs in his native city was not after his heart, either as a statesman, philosopher, or devotee of the ancient faith of Athens and Rome. There the Christianity he would fain destroy was strongly entrenched. There wrangling sects of the new creed, more difficult to appease than the wild Franks and Alemanni, who had felt the strength of his arm upon the banks of the Rhine, kept the population in constant turmoil. There was found an Augean stable of official corruption, of unpunished crimes, of relaxed military discipline, and of extravagant luxury at the court. According to Libanius, a thousand cooks, a thousand hairdressers, more than a thousand cup-bearers, a crowd of waiters, swarming like bees in a hive, and eunuchs, thick as flies in early summer, were employed in the service of the imperial palace. One day Julian sent for a barber, and in answer to the summons an official in a gorgeous uniform made his appearance. “But I called for a barber, not for a receiver-general,” exclaimed the indignant Emperor. An investigation of the case having been made, it was discovered that in addition to a large salary the barber enjoyed the right to many perquisites, and received daily rations