Julian never saw Eusebia again, and cannot have had the least correspondence with her. Even in Milan he had, on reflection, torn up a letter in which he modestly wished his patroness the reward of a succession of children. On his side there was nothing but a pure feeling of gratitude and reverence. She was, says Zosimus, “a woman of erudition and prudence above her sex”; a shining example of spiritual and bodily beauty, according to Ammianus. She had most probably saved his life, and most certainly made his fortune. But it is believed by many writers that Eusebia’s feeling for Julian was of a less ethereal nature. Gaetano Negri, whose life of Julian is one of the most distinguished biographies of a Roman Emperor, justly repudiates the suggestion of improper feeling on her part, and it is a superfluous inference. But one may, without casting the least reflection on her virtue, hesitate to think that the only link between them was a sympathy of culture. Such sympathy we may well assume between a cultivated Greek lady and an ardent Hellenist, but so cold and spiritual a relation may very naturally and pardonably have been strengthened by a warmer feeling. Julian had no sensuous attractiveness for a beautiful woman. But his manly person and character, his vast superiority to the crowd of ignoble parasites she daily encountered, and to her weak and mediocre husband, must have excited an admiration less purely intellectual than an appreciation of his learning. The person of Flavia Julia Helena remains faint and elusive in the ample chronicle of the time. She was much older than Julian, who was in his twenty-fifth year, while Helena cannot have been less than thirty.[27] She had not been previously married, Ammianus says, and the long maidenhood would not tend to make her attractive. The marriage was arranged by Eusebia in the political interest of Julian, and it probably retained the chill that a _mariage de convenance_, with such disparity of age, would naturally bear. In Julian’s abundant, and largely autobiographical, writings she is barely mentioned. It was the marriage of an old maid--for the Roman world--with an austere, if conscientious, philosopher. The gradual discovery of Julian’s secret loyalty to the old gods would not make their relations more cordial.