THE HELLENES OF THE EMPEROR JULIAN: THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL SELF-IDENTITY AMONG LATE ANTIQUE INTELLECTUALS

The article investigates the ideology of the group of Late Antique intellectuals centred around the Emperor Julian in the early 360s. These intellectuals were practitioners of the traditional paideia and called themselves Hellenes. The author analyzes the crisis of self-identity among the members of this community on the example of such representatives as Libanius, Himerius and Julian himself. The problem of correlation between religious and cultural elements in the `hellenic' identity is studied in the context of the rising Christianity and on the example of Gregory Nazianzinus polemical orations against Julian. The author concludes that the ideology of 'Hellenism' was destroyed by the internal conflict between a serious attitude to religion and the spread of metaphorical interpretation. This conflict caused the separation of religious elements of 'Hellenism' from the literary and rhetorical ones. Christian intellectuals such as Gregory and Basil the Great used this tension to 'appropriate' the classical paideia, which resulted in the gradual Christianization of 'Hellenism'.