Flavius Claudius Julianus was the son of Constantine's half-brother, Julius Constantius, by his second wife, Basilina, a lady of the great Anician family. He was born in 331, and lost his mother a few months later, while his father and other relations perished in the massacre which followed Constantine's death. Julian and his half-brother Gallus escaped the slaughter to be kept almost as prisoners of state, surrounded through their youth with spies and taught by hypocrites a repulsive Christianity. Julian, however, had a literary education from his mother's old teacher, the eunuch Mardonius; and this was his happiness till he was old enough to attend the rhetoricians at Nicomedia and elsewhere. Gallus was for a while Caesar in Syria (351-354), and after his execution, Julian's own life was only saved by the Empress Eusebia, who got permission for him to retire to the schools of Athens. In 355 he was made Caesar in Gaul, and with much labour freed the province from the Germans. Early in 360 the soldiers mutinied at Paris and proclaimed Julian Augustus. Negotiations followed, and it was not till the summer of 361 that Julian pushed down the Danube. By the time he halted at Naissus, he was master of three-quarters of the Empire. There seemed no escape from civil war now that the main army of Constantius was coming up from Syria. But one day two barbarian counts rode into Julian's camp with the news that Constantius was dead. A sudden fever had carried him off in Cilicia (Nov. 3, 361), and the Eastern army presented its allegiance to Julian Augustus. [Sidenote: Julian's heathenism.] Before we can understand Julian's influence on the Arian controversy, we shall have to take a wider view of the Emperor himself and of his policy towards the Christians generally. The life of Julian is one of the noblest wrecks in history. The years of painful self-repression and forced dissimulation which turned his bright youth to bitterness and filled his mind with angry prejudice, had only consolidated his self-reliant pride and firm determination to walk worthily before the gods. In four years his splendid energy and unaffected kindliness had won all hearts in Gaul; and Julian related nothing of his sense of duty to the Empire when he found himself master of the world at the age of thirty.