One might be tempted to request a moratorium on studies of Julian (361–363), the apostate from Christianity who tried to restore a pagan throne and to strengthen paganism in the Roman Empire after the reigns of Constantine and his sons; but there would be something cruel in that, for Julian is an endlessly fascinating figure. H. C. Teitler's book, though, which first appeared in a shorter form in Dutch in 2009, is not an ordinary biography or standard political account. As the subtitle indicates, his interest—indeed, his central interest—is Julianic martyrs and confessors and the question of whether Julian himself directly and deliberately persecuted them. After going through many cases of martyrs and confessors, his answer is a confident no.

I cannot share Teitler's confident position. No one will doubt that there were Christian martyrs and confessors during Julian's reign; the return of the throne to a pagan incited pagan officials and mobs against Christians. Nor can anyone deny that the Christian sources are stubbornly anti-Julianic (just as the pagan sources are pro-Julianic) and are problematic in other ways, too, and may accuse Julian of things he did not do. And it is true that Julian's official policy was to use persuasion, not force, in attempting to win Christians back to paganism; making martyrs of them would only help their cause. Still, the question remains: did the intense Julian, despite his official policy of non-persecution, on occasion lose patience and personally resort to violence against Christians? (It is significant that, according to several fifth-century church historians, Julian's praetorian prefect of the East, Salutius, had to remind him of his policy of non-violence during the latter part of his reign.) My own reading of the sources leads me to believe that we cannot exclude as confidently as Teitler does the possibility that Julian on occasion violated his own policy of non-violence. Christian sources on Julian that are more sober than dedicated hagiographies and chronologically closer to him—e.g., the fifth-century church historians Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret in Greek and Rufinus in Latin—may occasionally preserve a true story of an act of persecution by the emperor himself. (As for later hagiographical passiones or accounts of the sufferings of martyrs and confessors, we can all agree that they are largely fiction; to discredit them one after another is to beat a dead horse.) Finally, despite the dangers of contrafactual historicizing, a full assessment of Julian as non-persecutor or persecutor must ask the question: what would have happened to Christians if he had had a long reign? The fact that Christian sources claim that Julian threatened to get tough with Christians upon returning from Persia, where he died, does not invalidate asking that question. Julian was an aborted phenomenon. His reign lasted “barely twenty months” (142), and he was only thirty-two when he died.

Having expressed these reservations, it remains for me to say that this is a good book. It is concise, clearly written, and accessible to a nonspecialist. It dedicates itself to an aspect of Julianic studies that can easily get pushed to the side by other concerns: Julian's personal life, the politics and military ventures of his Caesarship and rule as emperor, his nonreligious reforms, and his intellectual life and writings. Those new to Julian may want to read a general treatment of him, such as G. W. Bowersock's Julian the Apostate (Harvard University Press, 1978), before coming to Teitler. The one hundred thirteen pages of endnotes and bibliography, in a smaller font than the text, show the depth of research that supports the one hundred forty-three page text itself. The ample citation of primary and secondary sources in the endnotes will help scholars find their way through many ancient texts and a large bibliography.