of the army, of the people, of the republic which you have saved,"
thundered at once from every part of the field, and terrified the pale
ambassador of Constantius. A part of the letter was afterwards read,
in which the emperor arraigned the ingratitude of Julian, whom he had
invested with the honors of the purple; whom he had educated with so
much care and tenderness; whom he had preserved in his infancy, when he
was left a helpless orphan.

"An orphan!" interrupted Julian, who justified his cause by indulging
his passions: "does the assassin of my family reproach me that I was
left an orphan? He urges me to revenge those injuries which I have long
studied to forget." The assembly was dismissed; and Leonas, who, with
some difficulty, had been protected from the popular fury, was sent back
to his master with an epistle, in which Julian expressed, in a strain of
the most vehement eloquence, the sentiments of contempt, of hatred,
and of resentment, which had been suppressed and imbittered by the
dissimulation of twenty years. After this message, which might be
considered as a signal of irreconcilable war, Julian, who, some weeks
before, had celebrated the Christian festival of the Epiphany, [22] made
a public declaration that he committed the care of his safety to the
Immortal Gods; and thus publicly renounced the religion as well as the
friendship of Constantius. [23]

[Footnote 21: Her remains were sent to Rome, and interred near those of
her sister Constantina, in the suburb of the Via Nomentana. Ammian. xxi.
1. Libanius has composed a very weak apology, to justify his hero from
a very absurd charge of poisoning his wife, and rewarding her physician
with his mother's jewels. (See the seventh of seventeen new orations,
published at Venice, 1754, from a MS. in St. Mark's Library, p.
117-127.) Elpidius, the Praetorian praefect of the East, to whose
evidence the accuser of Julian appeals, is arraigned by Libanius, as
effeminate and ungrateful; yet the religion of Elpidius is praised by
Jerom, (tom. i. p. 243,) and his Ammianus (xxi. 6.)]

[Footnote 22: Feriarum die quem celebrantes mense Januario, Christiani
Epiphania dictitant, progressus in eorum ecclesiam, solemniter numine
orato discessit. Ammian. xxi. 2. Zonaras observes, that it was on
Christmas day, and his assertion is not inconsistent; since the churches
of Egypt, Asia, and perhaps Gaul, celebrated on the same day (the sixth
of January) the nativity and the bapt