Julian was left an orphan before he was seven years old. His mother had died a few months after his birth. His father had perished, as we have seen. For some years after the massacre, he appears to have resided at Constantinople. Of his brother Gallus we hear nothing during this period. Julian himself was placed under the charge of an old family servant--a Scythian, Mardonius by name, a strict and pedantic disciplinarian, but also a man of culture, as the sequel shows. Mardonius taught his pupil to keep his eyes fixed on the ground as he took his walks. He led him always to and fro to school by the same way, knowing no other himself, and preventing the lad from discovering any other. He strictly prohibited him from going to the theatre or the circus, and altogether filled his mind with a distaste for the popular amusements of his age. We hear nothing of companionship, nothing of outdoor exercise, nothing of the cheerfulness and the sympathy which are equally necessary with the moral discipline and the intellectual training for the proper expansion of child's faculties. Julian was not like other children. Whatever may have been his natural disposition, his education had never allowed him to be a boy. Human nature, more especially childish nature, must seek relief somewhere from hard conventional restraints. Where all the usual outlets are closed, the buoyancy and the enthusiasm of the child will devise some means of escape. The paradise of Julian's childish existence was made up of two things. First, his tutor Mardonius was an enthusiastic admirer of Homer. If he prevented him from playing in the field he took him to the leafy islands of Calypso, to the Cave of Circe and the Gardens of Alcinous. With a less intelligent child this might have bred a feeling of disgust; but Julian was quick, imaginative, absorbing, and here was field for his sensibility. And, again, though his walks might be confined to one city, and to one street in that city, yet no bounds could shut out the glories of the heavens above. We have Julian's own authority for saying that his childish imagination was profoundly impressed by their contemplation. "From my earliest days," he wrote long afterwards, "a strange yearning after the rays of the God, the Sun God, sunk into my soul; and thus from the time I was quite a little child, when I looked at the light of heaven, I was beside myself with ecstasy, so that not only would I look eagerly and fixedly on the sun, but at night also, when there was a cloudless and clear sky, I gave up everything at once, and was rivetted by the beauties of the heavens, no longer understanding anything that any one spoke to me, nor giving heed to myself what I was doing." These, then, were the two bright spots which relieved the gloom of his childish life--the literature of Greece and the contemplation of the heavens. How large an influence these early memories had on his later apostasy, it will not be difficult to imagine.