First of all he went to Nicomedia, one of the few places where the old Greek philosophy continued to be taught. There he crammed his head so full of literature and science that there was no space left for the things he had learned from Eusebius. Next he obtained leave to go to Athens, that he might study on the very spot hallowed by the recollections of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. Meanwhile, his half-brother too had been assassinated and Constantius, his cousin and the one and only remaining son of Constantine, remembering that he and his cousin, the boy philosopher, were by this time the only two surviving male members of the imperial family, sent for Julian, received him kindly, married him, still in the kindest of spirits, to his own sister, Helena, and ordered him to proceed to Gaul and defend that province against the barbarians. It seems that Julian had learned something more practical from his Greek teachers than an ability to argue. When in the year 357 the Alamanni threatened France, he destroyed their army near Strassburg, and for good measure added all the country between the Meuse and the Rhine to his own province and went to live in Paris, filled his library with a fresh supply of books by his favorite authors and was as happy as his serious nature allowed him to be. When news of these victories reached the ears of the Emperor, little Greek fire was wasted in celebration of the event. On the contrary, elaborate plans were laid to get rid of a competitor who might be just a trifle too successful. But Julian was very popular with his soldiers. When they heard that their commander-in-chief had been ordered to return home (a polite invitation to come and have one’s head cut off), they invaded his palace and then and there proclaimed him emperor. At the same time they let it be known that they would kill him if he should refuse to accept. Julian, like a sensible fellow, accepted. Even at that late date, the Roman roads must have been in a remarkably good state of preservation. Julian was able to break all records by the speed with which he marched his troops from the heart of France to the shores of the Bosphorus. But ere he reached the capital, he heard that his cousin Constantius had died. And in this way, a pagan once more became ruler of the western world. Of course the thing which Julian had undertaken to do was impossible. It is a strange thing indeed that so intelligent a man should have been under the impression that the dead past could ever be brought back to life by the use of force; that the age of Pericles could be revived by reconstructing an exact replica of the Acropolis and populating the deserted groves of the Academy with professors dressed up in togas of a bygone age and talking to each other in a tongue that had disappeared from the face of the earth more than five centuries before. And yet that is exactly what Julian tried to do.