In spite of his military achievements, he was, first of all, a student. Even on his campaigns he took his books with him, and several of his extant works were composed in camp. He had been trained, according to the fashion of his times, in rhetorical studies by professional sophists such as Libanius, and he has all the mannerisms of a fourth century sophist. It was the sophistic etiquette to avoid the direct use of names, and Julian never names the usurpers Magnentius, Silvanus, and Vetranio, whose suppression by Constantius he describes in his two first _Orations_, regularly refers to Sapor as “the barbarian,” and rather than name Mardonius, his tutor, calls him “a certain Scythian who had the same name as the man who persuaded Xerxes to invade Hellas.”(4) He wrote the literary Greek of the fourth century A.D. which imitates the classical style, though barbarisms and late constructions are never entirely avoided. His pages are crowded with echoes of Homer, Demosthenes, Plato, and Isocrates, and his style is interwoven with half verses, phrases, and whole sentences taken without acknowledgment from the Greek masterpieces. It is certain that, like other sophists, he wished his readers to recognise these echoes, and therefore his source is always classical, so that where he seems to imitate Dio Chrysostom or Themistius, both go back to a common source, which Julian had in mind. Another sophistic element in his style is the use of commonplaces, literary allusions that had passed into the sophistic language and can be found in all the writers of reminiscence Greek in his day. He himself derides this practice(5) but he cannot resist dragging in the well‐worn references to Cyrus, Darius, and Alexander, to the nepenthe poured out by Helen in the _Odyssey_, to the defiance of nature by Xerxes, or the refusal of Socrates to admit the happiness of the Great King. Julian wished to make Neo‐Platonism the philosophy of his revived Hellenism, but he belonged to the younger or Syrian branch of the school, of which Iamblichus was the real founder, and he only once mentions Plotinus. Iamblichus he ranked with Plato and paid him a fanatical devotion. His philosophical writing, especially in the two prose _Hymns_, is obscure, partly because his theories are only vaguely realised, partly because he reproduces the obscurity of his model, Iamblichus. In satire and narrative he can be clear and straightforward. BIBLIOGRAPHY Manuscripts