Julien législateur: un mélange des genres?

Historians never failed to look for a direct evidence of Julian’s government style in the series of his Letters. Nevertheless, the evidence from the legislative epistulae does not have the same significance whether one treats them as a “raw”, personal version later to be rewriten by the Chancellery under a “standardized” form for circulating through the provinces or whether one acknowledges in those epistulae the very form which Julian gave to his laws and which reached the inhabitants of the Empire. The first interpretation is the traditional one, which, in the case of the “scholastic law”, leads to completely dissociate Julian’s version from the text of the Theodosian Code version. Several analysts deny any direct link between these two versions and ignore or underestimate the degree of autonomy which was granted to the compilers by the specifications ascribed them by Theodosius: this latitude is particularly noticeable in the case of the choice — contradictory but easy to explain in a political perspective — of including Julian’s scholastic law into the Code’s chapter dedicated to education, that is the law whose main purpose was most in contrast to a Christianized Empire’s principles as endorsed and consecrated by the Theodosian compilation. The second interpretation — which is defended in the present article — takes into account the extent of the differences allowed between the original text of the imperial constitutions and the compiled version of the Theodosian Code, which was persuasively demonstrated by Volterra. From the moment one consider them to be original versions of Julian’s law-writing, the legislative epistulae disclose the political communication style of this emperor who carries out to an extreme level the confusion of enunciative and stylistic “genre”, being itself an effect of Julian’s unusual, overwhelming propension to theatrical performance of his self even in the use of imperial discourse.