d the virtues of firmness and discretion. He defended his honor,
as well as his life, against the insnaring subtleties of the eunuchs,
who endeavored to extort some declaration of his sentiments; and whilst
he cautiously suppressed his grief and resentment, he nobly disdained to
flatter the tyrant, by any seeming approbation of his brother's
murder. Julian most devoutly ascribes his miraculous deliverance to the
protection of the gods, who had exempted his innocence from the sentence
of destruction pronounced by their justice against the impious house of
Constantine. [27] As the most effectual instrument of their providence,
he gratefully acknowledges the steady and generous friendship of the
empress Eusebia, [28] a woman of beauty and merit, who, by the ascendant
which she had gained over the mind of her husband, counterbalanced,
in some measure, the powerful conspiracy of the eunuchs. By the
intercession of his patroness, Julian was admitted into the Imperial
presence: he pleaded his cause with a decent freedom, he was heard with
favor; and, notwithstanding the efforts of his enemies, who urged
the danger of sparing an avenger of the blood of Gallus, the milder
sentiment of Eusebia prevailed in the council. But the effects of a
second interview were dreaded by the eunuchs; and Julian was advised to
withdraw for a while into the neighborhood of Milan, till the emperor
thought proper to assign the city of Athens for the place of his
honorable exile. As he had discovered, from his earliest youth, a
propensity, or rather passion, for the language, the manners, the
learning, and the religion of the Greeks, he obeyed with pleasure an
order so agreeable to his wishes. Far from the tumult of arms, and
the treachery of courts, he spent six months under the groves of the
academy, in a free intercourse with the philosophers of the age, who
studied to cultivate the genius, to encourage the vanity, and to inflame
the devotion of their royal pupil. Their labors were not unsuccessful;
and Julian inviolably preserved for Athens that tender regard which
seldom fails to arise in a liberal mind, from the recollection of the
place where it has discovered and exercised its growing powers. The
gentleness and affability of manners, which his temper suggested and his
situation imposed, insensibly engaged the affections of the strangers,
as well as citizens, with whom he conversed. Some of his fellow-students
might perhaps examine his behavior