s him write always with a
certain affectation, but no one could mistake the real feeling of loss
and loneliness that runs through the consolation. He has lost his
'comrade in the ranks', and now is 'Odysseus left alone'. So he writes,
quoting the _Iliad_; Sallustius has been carried by God outside the
spears and arrows: 'which malignant men were always aiming at you, or
rather at me, trying to wound me through you, and believing that the
only way to beat me down was by depriving me of the fellowship of my
true friend and fellow-soldier, the comrade who never flinched from
sharing my dangers.'

One note recurs four times; he has lost the one man to whom he could
talk as a brother; the man of 'guileless and clean free-speech',[180:1]
who was honest and unafraid and able to contradict the emperor freely
because of their mutual trust. If one thinks of it, Julian, for all his
gentleness, must have been an alarming emperor to converse with. His
standard of conduct was not only uncomfortably high, it was also a
little unaccountable. The most correct and blameless court officials
must often have suspected that their master looked upon them as simply
wallowing in sin. And that feeling does not promote ease or
truthfulness. Julian compares his friendship with Sallustius to that of
Scipio and Laelius. People said of Scipio that he only carried out what
Laelius told him. 'Is that true of me?' Julian asks himself. 'Have I
only done what Sallustius told me?' His answer is sincere and beautiful:
+koina ta philon+. It little matters who suggested, and who agreed to
the suggestion; his thoughts, and any credit that came from the
thoughts, are his friend's as much as his own. We happen to hear from
the Christian Theodoret (_Hist._ iii. 11) that on one occasion when
Julian was nearly goaded into persecution of the Christians, it was
Sallustius who recalled him to their fixed policy of toleration.

Sallustius then may be taken to represent in the most authoritative way
the Pagan reaction of Julian's time, in its final struggle against
Christianity.

He was, roughly speaking, a Neo-Platonist. But it is not as a professed
philosopher that he writes. It is only that Neo-Platonism had permeated
the whole atmosphere of the age.[181:1] The strife of the philosophical
sects had almost ceased. Just as Julian's mysticism made all gods and
almost all forms of worship into one, so his enthusiasm for Hellenism
revered, nay, idolized, almost all the