“The available evidence is extensive but also ambiguous”, writes a contributor to Brill’s recent Companion to Julian the Apostate, the fifth installment in its Companions to the Byzantine World series. The claim—about Julian’s educational policy, in this instance (p. 172)—also explains more broadly the popular and scholarly interest perennially prompted by the last pagan emperor of Rome. An aspiring philosopher-emperor, Julian was articulately prolific for an emperor, though less so for a philosopher. Records of his legislative rule, his military campaigns, and his own writings are more extensive than for any other ruler from the antique and late antique world. His historical traces provide enough information to frame a host of questions, but to answer many fewer conclusively.

Brill’s new Companion offers thirteen studies summarizing, synthesizing, or offering new arguments about Julian’s life and the voluminous scholarship devoted to him. Sidestepping one genre of Julian studies—discerning his “personality” and psychological profile—the chapters amount to “a historians’ guide to Julian” (p. 29), and they cover an impressive range of the diverse questions routinely posed about him.