Julian’s Misopogon and the Food Shortage in Antioch: Imperial Criticism of Community Response

The food crisis in Antioch in 362/63 CE is among the best documented in the late Roman world, with four first-hand accounts. One of the most illuminating of the four is that of Emperor Julian, contained in his Misopogon, which presents and justifies his measures to redress the adverse conditions. This crisis, whose nature, causes, and severity have received thorough treatment in previous scholarship, often is cited in general discussions of subsistence crises in the Roman world, and the Misopogon—its characterization of the response of imperial officials, municipal authorities, and the urban populace—is frequently analyzed for the light it casts on governmental responses.¹ Julian’s Misopogon has drawn equal attention for its peculiarity in the satirical depiction of himself and his relationship with the population of Antioch during his residence in the city. An ever-growing body of scholarship unpacks the spectrum of meanings Julian invites in the Misopogon’s rhetorical structure to reframe the animosity between himself and the Antiochenes in a more favorable light.² While previous scholarship discusses the ways Julian’s account of the food shortage and the underlying virtue dichotomy within the text inform one another, more can be done to elucidate the extent of their interconnection and its import for a range of issues in both areas of focus.

This article shows how the virtue dichotomy in the Misopogon attempted to insulate Julian from criticism of his handling of the food shortage by blaming the Antiochenes as subjects rather than himself as ruler. Julian achieved this by situating his virtues and the Antiochenes’ vices on opposite sides of the spectrum of good and bad civic participation in crisis management practices, as can be seen outlined in Plato’s De legibus. The character traits and behaviors that Julian attributes to the citizenry in the Misopogon are those that Plato in De legibus identifies as contrary to the safety and well-being of a political community. When we are attuned to the Misopogon’s conceptual dependence on this dialogue, Julian’s narrative of the food crisis reads as an illustration of Plato’s teaching: the presence or lack of virtues in a political community determined both its vulnerability to, and its resilience from, crises. Thus, the Misopogon’s underlying engagement with De legibus develops an identifiable theory of crisis management, one that is entrenched in a polity’s broader social, political, and economic structures.

In situating Julian’s account of this crisis within a broader theory of crisis management for both imperial government and civic communities, my analysis broadens the scope beyond the question of immediate crisis response. In the ancient world, evidence of strategies to reduce risk is far more abundant than evidence about how these practices may have been conceptualized within broader frameworks for managing natural disasters and other crises. Literary sources often provide vivid accounts of the impact of crises in their immediate aftermath, but they provide fewer insights into ancient theories of risk and how to minimize it, and they reveal even less about how contemporaries regarded the interplay of wider social, political, and economic structures in the unfolding of such crises. Scholarship has consequentially foregrounded strategies of crisis response and relief measures. Consideration of crisis management is discussed most frequently in the context of subsistence crises where the role of these structures is clearer. In subsistence crises, natural and man-made causes intersect. The natural causes (droughts, floods, spoilage) that produce shortages do not always necessarily turn into subsistence crises.³ Human behaviors are most often at play in transforming a shortage into a subsistence crisis, or famine. In presenting a reading of the Misopogon that uncovers a normative account of crisis management, this article advances the understanding of the impact of crises by broadening the focus to a longer-term awareness of crises, their impact, and notions of how to avoid hazards and mitigate risk.

The following analysis is divided into five sections. The first section situates Julian’s reading of De legibus within later Platonic interpretive practices that underscore the unifying structure of the dialogue in which all aspects of political organization and association are tied to a single aim. I suggest that the concern expressed for, and the consideration given to, civic security in the proposed political program form a theory of “crisis management,” the conceptual framework of strategies to protect against misfortune. Strategies for promoting virtue are part of crisis management in De legibus insofar as virtue is understood to ensure effective participation in risk-reducing, coping, and recovery practices. Section two unpacks the virtue dichotomy in the Misopogon to show how deeply it informed Julian’s account of the food crisis. Emphasis is placed on laws and social institutions relating to the promotion of virtues that dispose citizens toward participation in intelligently designed practices for civic security. Section three shows how Julian’s account of the food crisis in Antioch is presented as the logical extension of the message sent through the conceptual dependence on De legibus as suggested in the first two sections of this article. Julian presents his actions as motivated and guided by virtue both in his response to the shortage and in his attempt to shape political, social, and economic conditions to increase civic security. The failure of his measures is attributed to the Antiochenes’ behavior, prompted by their badness of soul. Section four shifts from the Misopogon to an oration written in response by the famed Antiochene sophist Libanius that confirms the argument Julian makes in the Misopogon through the use of De legibus. This analysis not only extends the conceptualization of crisis management developed in the Misopogon, but it also provides some hint as to its wider reception, and therefore its revelatory value for the study of crisis in Late Antiquity. The fifth and final section draws out some conclusions from the analysis uncovering Julian’s notions about crisis management and the divergence between his and the Antiochenes’ view of reciprocal obligations in security practices.

In brief, because the cultural and social environment was integral to Julian’s understanding of crisis management, the following analysis more firmly situates our understanding of crises within the scholarship of urban studies. That is to say, the features of urban life and culture at the center of the Misopogon hint at the interrelationship between the particularity of civic identities and the extent—or perhaps the limits—of imperial rule. Moreover, because economic structures were likewise tied to the cultivation of virtue in ways that were understood either to perpetuate vulnerability or promote resiliency, Julian’s framing of the tension between him and the Antiochenes highlights the power dynamics behind the legitimation of the hierarchy of wealth and power within cities and the wider empire.

Julian expected at least some of the elites in Antioch and his wider educated audience to have recognized the Misopogon’s dependence on Plato’s De legibus. Beyond the countless conceptual parallels, Julian twice references De legibus directly and even remarks that he and seven others present in Antioch followed the prescriptions of De legibus.⁴ One of these seven men seems likely to have been Libanius: his written response to Julian’s Misopogon shows he certainly recognized Julian’s reliance on this text.⁵ Less certain is the precise impact that Julian imagined the Misopogon’s conceptual parallels to De legibus might have on other segments of its audience. What matters most for present purposes, however, is that a reading of the two texts in dialogue can broaden the horizon of meaning within the Misopogon and uncover an implicit theory of crisis management.

The reconstruction of Julian’s reading of De legibus presented here is based on established interpretive practices for reading Platonic dialogues.⁶ The significance of the skopos, the single underlying central theme of each dialogue that every individual aspect was subordinate to, is especially noteworthy.⁷ The skopos of De legibus was the political constitution of the adapted state (polīteia ex hypotheseos) where “certain laws and customs in the state are taken for granted.”⁸ The skopos was differentiated from its end or the good that derived from it.⁹ To my knowledge, the good deriving from De legibus’s skopos is not known.

Within the dialogue itself, however, the good at which the state’s arrangements aimed was explicit: making citizens as happy as humanly possible.¹⁰ Happiness in the fullest sense involves acquiring all goods, both human goods (health, beauty, strength, and rationally used wealth) and divine goods (the virtues of self-control, courage, justice, and wisdom).¹¹ Because the proposed constitution aims at the maximal happiness of its citizens, each prescription for organizing the polity aims to make the community as free, friendly, and of one mind as far as possible, for that communal condition permitted all to become as happy as their individual natures allowed.¹² In De legibus, Plato stresses that these seemingly diverse ends should be understood as advancing one single goal through mutually reinforcing aspects. This is part of a pattern in the entire dialogue, which presents fostering the philosophically ideal conditions of the polity as the most effective way to maximize the chances of obtaining and preserving all other desirable material, physical, and emotional conditions, and vice versa. The recommendations for how to organize the political community looked to improve the psychic condition of its inhabitants. At the same time, those psychic conditions also had tangible consequences for the material conditions.

Because Plato’s De legibus was intended to address “the right practices” in every sphere of life affecting happiness, protecting citizens against the misfortunes that punctuate human existence, and the material, physical, and emotional harm they cause receives extensive consideration.¹³ The dialogues’ unifying framework weaves disparate discussions concerning security from crisis into a coherent theory of crisis management within an expansive framework of measures designed to increase resiliency and reduce vulnerability. The strategies of crisis management charted in De legibus and implicit in the Misopogon resemble in outline the approach referred to as community-based disaster risk reduction (CBDRR).¹⁴ This approach prioritizes improving community participation in mitigating hazards and risk over external sources of relief measures to mitigate distress and damage after the fact. In short, the approach considers crisis management most successful when communities partake in practices that help to prevent avoidable disasters, to limit the impact of the unavoidable ones, and to recover from the physical and emotional impact of them all. Plato and Julian may not have conceived of crisis management in the same terms, but the main takeaways about how best to mitigate risk and increase the ability to cope and recover are in general alignment.¹⁵

Plato and Julian’s chief difference from CBDRR is in the behaviorism understood to motivate community participation, specifically their particular conception of virtue, the moral psychology grounding that conception, and the political conditions that best foster its cultivation. Human nature, as conceptualized in De legibus, contributed significantly to Plato’s prescriptions for political organization.¹⁶ Emphasis is placed on productively channeling impulses toward action arising from three needs and wants (food, drink, and sex) and aligning those impulses with the rational movements of the soul that move the body.¹⁷ This alignment was important both as a component of virtue, which the state sought to cultivate, and as the underlying motivational theory informing the state’s attempts to shape citizen behavior. The main factor in a community’s resilience is the ability and willingness of the entire community to participate in risk-reducing behaviors. For that reason, state security on the whole rested on the presence of virtue in the citizenry, since virtue ensured that every member of the political community was maximally willing and able to reduce risks and increase its coping and recovery.¹⁸ What we see in Julian and Plato is that virtue is a security factor, and its promotion is a strategy to reduce vulnerability and increase resiliency. In this way, Julian’s concern with promoting virtue as represented in the Misopogon was part of a wider strategy for crisis management as he understood it.

In De legibus, a secure community is free, friendly, and of one mind and comprises citizens who possess wisdom, justice, self-mastery, and courage; throughout the dialogue, Plato describes how the community becomes and stays thus through its laws (nomoi), practices (epitēdeumata), and property (ktēmata). Laws aimed at true goods properly ranked contain effective prescriptions for those ends and induce adherence through fear and right reason, both by persuading citizens of its benefits and stipulating punishment for disobedience.¹⁹ Social institutions (epitēdeumata) are organized with an eye to shaping the values and attitudes of individuals and the way they relate to one another, engendering fellowship (to koinon) and friendship (philia), that is, relationships characterized by like-mindedness (homónoia), within the community.²⁰ The property (ktēmata) of private citizens and the state are organized with an eye to the health and fellowship of the entire community, ensuring access to the necessities of life for all and placing a limit on the accumulation of wealth.²¹ When arranged in the right way, these bring about all the conditions necessary for there to be wisdom and friendship, the qualities most directly associated with willing and capable participation in effective crisis management. Wisdom ensures intelligently designed practices based on empirical knowledge of local conditions to reduce hazards and increase capacity to cope. Friendship motivates participation in preventative practices as well as response in providing aid according to one’s capacity. In brief, the city described in De legibus could live with a greater sense of security, trusting that when disaster struck, its effects would be mitigated and the afflicted would find material assistance and moral support to help them cope in their suffering and to recover to previous conditions of prosperity. Thus, whenever Julian evokes De legibus in his portrayal of himself and the Antiochenes, he draws attention to the implications of virtue for participation in crisis management and thereby tacitly apportions blame for the food crisis.

All the indicators of a happy political condition, which De legibus ties to increased resiliency and reduced risk in a community, are modeled by Julian’s self-representation and inverted in his characterization of the Antiochenes. Julian portrays the Antiochenes’ deficiencies in personal virtues and free, friendly, and rational one-minded civic relations by making explicit statements and even more by denoting their relationship to laws, social customs, and property that Plato links to the cultivation or corruption of these ideals. Julian’s characterization consciously evokes explicit explanations for how these characteristics promote behavior linked to vulnerability or resilience to crises with both natural and human causes, reinforced with specific examples. Therefore, viewed in the context of De legibus, it becomes clearer how the virtue dichotomy informs the theory of crisis management that can be seen to justify Julian’s behavior regarding the food shortage and condemn that of the Antiochenes.

Julian is most explicit in his critique of freedom and its implications for security. Julian characterizes the citizens of Antioch throughout the Misopogon with the single, prevailing desire to be free.²² The Antiochenes’ notion of freedom portrayed by Julian is not the “due proportion” of freedom that Plato identifies as the basis of civic security but rather the forms of freedom Plato ascribes to Athens and Persia,²³ which he uses as examples of states exhibiting dangerous extremes leading to destruction, Athens exhibiting an excess and Persia a deficiency in freedom in the citizenry.²⁴ Julian suggests the Antiochenes’ misunderstanding of freedom led them, like the Athenians, “to reject every form of slavery” to the extent that even “the name of slavery was unbearable to hear, whether it be slavery to the gods or the laws or to [Julian], the guardian of the laws.”²⁵ Plato asserts that, above all, the safety of the city depends on obedience to the laws: “Where law is subordinated and is without authority, I see disaster at hand in a city of this sort.”²⁶ Plato uses the Athenians to illustrate why. Because they gave excessive freedom to the citizens, they did not rely on laws and thus could not cooperate effectively to save their property, family, and neighbors.²⁷ If state security resided in willing civic obedience to the laws, as Plato alleges, then disaster loomed for the Antiochenes who, according to Julian, showed “not only by [their] words but also [their] deeds that [they] despise the laws.”²⁸

Julian, in contrast, represents himself as possessing and promoting the “due proportion” of freedom that Plato regarded as necessary for security. This freedom consists of the consensual rule of superiors over inferiors, with superior defined in reference to reason. Julian’s obedience to law extended so far as to influence the composition of the Misopogon. Its satirical character allowed him to illustrate his virtues without explicitly presenting them so as to praise himself, as he says at the very outset, is “forbidden by law.” In relating his obedience not only to the laws but also to the gods, his pedagogue, doctor, and relatives, Julian shows that he was not “ashamed to follow” any who knew better than he did and thus exemplifies his commitment to reason above all.²⁹ In this, Julian defends his legitimacy on the principle that “the best servant is the best ruler,” while simultaneously foregrounding its security implications.³⁰ The safety of the city depends “above all,” Plato alleges, on the obedience of its rulers to the laws: “where [law] is the master of rulers, and rulers are slaves of the law, I see safety [sōtēria], and there coming about all such goods that gods give.”³¹

This notion of freedom is intimately connected to self-control (sōphrosynē), the willing subjection of the lower parts of human nature to the higher rational parts.³² Plato describes education as the key to cultivating sōphrosynē in citizens, and thereby freedom in the political community. Proper education, he says, should lead the child to experience pleasures and pains in accordance with right reason, which is pronounced by law and confirmed as correct by the oldest and most just members of the community.³³ Julian’s comparison of the type of education he received to that of the Antiochenes makes it clear that his produced sōphrosynē and led to freedom and that theirs did not. Only a strict education transforms boys into truly free men according to Plato, and according to Julian, because the Antiochenes’ failed to understand true freedom as the willing subjection of the inferior to the superior, they corrupted their children’s education.³⁴ The Antiochenes’ education described in the Misopogon was reminiscent of the education of the Medes, which Plato attributes as a major factor in their destruction.³⁵ Like the Misopogon’s Antiochenes, the Medes allowed women and eunuchs to oversee education, allowing the children to grow up in luxury.³⁶ Julian intimates that it left them susceptible to bodily harm and psychic disturbance when he contrasts the style and result of his own upbringing.³⁷ Because his education started from a young age, and “because he was given no choice,” he obeyed his pedagogue, thus forming his “disposition such that it could no longer be changed.”³⁸ Julian foregrounds the benefits of his disposition, namely, his “delight in living moderately” and his resilience to physical stressors that would otherwise disturb his soul.³⁹

The Antiochenes’ hedonist inclinations were likewise connected to education, which in De legibus is a lifelong process, and everything that triggers perceptions of pleasure and pain falls under its regulation, according to its definition as “the particular training …, which leads you always to hate what you ought to hate, and love what you ought to love.”⁴⁰ Rather than seek to suppress appetites and desires linked with pleasure, the laws and institutions aimed to make virtue a hedonic experience.⁴¹ The security implications come from pleasure’s relationship with harmony. Without pleasure and desire aligned with reason, there can be no harmony. Plato asserts that wisdom cannot exist without harmony in the soul and that its lack makes one “anything besides the savior of the state.”⁴² Plato thus calls lack of harmony folly or ignorance, a condition characterized either by false beliefs about the rank of goods or misalignment of correct belief and desire.⁴³ In either case, folly motivates seeking worse, lower goods over better, higher goods. For crisis management where cooperation in a wisely designed strategy for achieving a common goal is critical, desire for false goods, which deter cooperation and motivate seeking behaviors that exacerbate hazardous conditions, is especially problematic. When Julian compares his and the Antiochenes’ pleasures then, he underscores their respective folly and wisdom and the consequences for security.⁴⁴

In De legibus, festivals with their various forms of civic entertainment are critical to harmonizing pleasure with reason, both within the individual and within community.⁴⁵ Properly conducted, spectatorship aligns pleasures with the correct order of goods and incites imitation of individuals who are recognized for these goods.⁴⁶ Plato insists that, for a city “to be secure, to prosper,” it is “absolutely necessary to make a correct allocation of public recognition and disgrace as far as is possible in human affairs,” which means recognizing first “good qualities of the soul,” then “what is beautiful in the body and good for it,” and then “the so-called goods to do with property and money.”⁴⁷ Misalignment in the public recognition of goods shifts the motivational pull on the soul, inciting behavior that prioritizes the worse over the better, thereby increasing vulnerability.

In the context of Plato’s De legibus, the Antiochenes’ preferences in entertainment and their behavior at public performances and celebrations appear hazardous.⁴⁸ The problem, Julian implies, was not that the “laughter-loving” Antiochenes delighted in “all sorts of spectacles” but that they did not delight in the right sort and in the right way.⁴⁹ Julian’s portrayal again evokes Plato’s example of a dangerous excess of freedom and its causes. The descent of the Athenians into excess started with spectatorship at public performances of music and poetry.⁵⁰ The right way of listening was in silence and not in whooping and clapping. Julian depicts the citizens of Antioch as comparable to the excessively free Athenians in their clapping.⁵¹ The implied danger of the Antiochenes’ behavior derives from the notion that public approval aligns beliefs about good and bad with perceptions of pleasures and pains. The Antiochenes’ spectacles, according to Julian, presented the best as the worst, and the worst as the best.⁵² Associating virtuous traits with objects of public ridicule induces spectators to shun the good and seek the bad, as Julian implies was evident when the Antiochenes ridiculed him, his moderation, and all the physical indications of his virtue.⁵³ The sights on stage and in the streets that Julian describes led him to conclude that the Antiochenes “do not know what self-control (sōphrosynē) is” since, as Plato argues, one cannot know what one has not experienced, even indirectly. The Antiochenes, Julian says, “hear its name only, but do not see it performed.”⁵⁴

Julian implies a lack of harmony and thereby reason also manifested in the comedic, abusive language that the Antiochenes directed at him. The ridicule of Julian’s self-control, and all of its physical markers, subverted the proper function of comedic displays, which Plato believed not only acquaints citizens to bad behavior on a rational rather than practical level but also shapes a collective identity in the citizen audience by cultivating a sense of otherness from those on the stage.⁵⁵ The problem was that the Antiochenes composed abuse directed at Julian and sung the abuse publicly to the pleasure of all.⁵⁶ The shared pleasure in the performance of his abuse had the desired effect in one respect, as Julian indicates when he relates his “pleasure at their homónoia” and “oneness” in the Antiochenes’ dishonor of and hatred of him.⁵⁷ Unity in purpose is indeed critical in crisis management, at least if it is “rational” one-mindedness that correctly prioritizes goods.

Julian identifies his own entertainment preferences with “the most warlike Celts,” among whom he had spent the past few years, whose tastes, he suggests, were far different from those of the Antiochenes.⁵⁸ Julian related how the Gauls, when they had once received dancers visiting from Antioch, were repulsed by the spectacle of men who seemed to dance as if “afflicted with nympholepsy.”⁵⁹ In the theaters in Gaul, where there was no licentiousness, by contrast, there was no abuse, and none of its citizens could be found dancing “the cordax on the stage.”⁶⁰ The style of communal dancing and singing that took place at festivals among them reflected their harsh and warlike character.⁶¹ In the same way, the style of dancing reflected the Antiochenes’ dispositions, showing the lack of harmony and the dominance of their appetites over reason.⁶² Besides harmonizing an individual’s passion with reason, community participation in music and dance was also described as conditioning citizens to feel, think, and act together as a cohesive whole.⁶³ This in turn encouraged them to feel pleasures and pains as if a whole, and consequently, to perceive the fortune—and misfortune—of others as their own.⁶⁴ Identifying one’s own good with the good of another promoted willing cooperation in proactive risk-reducing and reactive coping and recovery behaviors.

Julian’s description of the Antiochenes’ participation in religious life likewise underscores the consequences for its security. The Antiochenes’ delight in festivals did not extend to the “sacred” ones where it was “necessary to be moderate [sóphronein],”that is, to the ones that led to security and happiness.⁶⁵ Participation in religious festivals as described in De legibus has two significant implications. First, religious festivals propitiated the most powerful civic patrons, the gods. Second, the festivals at which gods were worshipped also provided settings for civic socialization that cultivated friendship among members of the community, and even friendship with the gods.⁶⁶ Julian’s criticism of the Antiochenes foregrounds these two issues. Even on the festival day established by the city’s founder to one of the city’s tutelary gods, “not one of the citizens offered sacrifices, privately, on one’s own behalf or on behalf of the city’s welfare, nor did the city offer a public sacrifice.”⁶⁷ He also notes that many private citizens delightedly spent money on private dinners and feasts and “wasted much money on dinners during the May festival.”⁶⁸ Even the poorest citizens had sufficient means to contribute to the safety and well-being of their city, as Julian signifies in saying it would be enough for the Antiochenes to “worship the gods with self-controlled souls.”⁶⁹ The badness demonstrated by this behavior again signaled their vulnerability to misfortune. “The good,” Plato asserts, could live with a sense of security that “god will always, by what he gives, render any hardships that may befall [them] less severe than they might have been, and bring a change for the better in any current hardships.”⁷⁰

Julian’s reverence for the gods sharply contrasts with the Antiochenes’.⁷¹ He worshipped the gods not only materially, in proportion to his wealth, but also with a self-controlled soul. Moreover, similarity in disposition was, according to Plato, a key to friendship, and friendship a promise of material benefactions, as Julian illustrates in relating the affection the Celts felt for him due to their similarity and how it led them to give him honors and material rewards.⁷² Moderate individuals are dear to god because “like is dear to like,” and the gods are moderate.⁷³ The immoderate are dissimilar to the moderate individuals as well as other immoderate individuals.⁷⁴ Therefore, the dissimilarity to others left the Antiochenes friendless, not only in relation to gods but to other humans as well.

In sum, the behavior Julian depicts throughout the Misopogon intimates that the citizens of Antioch lacked personal virtues, and consequently the citizen body lacked freedom, friendliness, and rational one-mindedness, the communal conditions that maximize citizens’ willingness and capacity for effective, community-wide participation in crisis management. Security depended on wisdom in the community to shape effective practices and on friendship to motivate participation in practices that aimed at the good of the community. Wisdom cannot exist without harmony. Friendship cannot exist without moderation. According to Julian, the Antiochenes lacked harmony and moderation, and consequently wisdom and friendship. In describing the Antiochenes’ relationship to laws, social institutions, and practices as antithetical to the conditions for human excellence and happiness, the Misopogon sent a consistent message: Antioch was bound for ruin.

There are indications that Julian moreover attempts to draw the reader’s attention to the direct consequences of the food shortage. One sign is the wordplay around dryness and wetness in Julian’s characterization of himself and the Antiochenes. This “free city,” he writes, cannot endure this “drought” (auchmon) of hair; auchmon is the same word he uses to refer to the drought causing the shortage of grain.⁷⁵ And, the Antiochenes’ lifestyle is characterized as hygrotēs literally “moist,” although he uses it metaphorically to mean “wanton,” “flaccid,” or “lax.”⁷⁶ Antioch’s fame for its exceptional water supply no doubt made a food shortage due to drought all the more poignant.⁷⁷ These and other rhetorical choices seem to call the city’s drought and shortage to the reader’s mind, especially given the other noted literary influences on the Misopogon. Antioch’s water supply was most famously glorified by Libanius’s Antiochikos, a text that Julian seems to evoke to ironic effect more than once in the Misopogon.⁷⁸ Indeed, this and other noted literary influences on the Misopogon reinforce the conceptual dependence on De legibus by illustrating its arguments with examples that draw specific attention to the situation in Antioch as Julian wished to present it.

Similarly, when the literary tropes in the Misopogon are read in dialogue with De legibus, their import for civic security can be uncovered. Julian’s references to his boorishness evokes the tropes of “Greek” and “barbarian”; the “country dweller” and the “city dweller” are one example. In cultivating this trope, Julian likens himself to “some country fellow who from his small means has to pay a tax or render tribute to a harsh master.”⁷⁹ The analogy, which is embedded in his expressed dislike for the entertainment of the city, seems, perhaps, to point to a conscious effort to draw out the relationship between the vocal upset of the urban population at the center of the Misopogon and the comparative silence of the country dwellers (at least as is apparent within the sources).⁸⁰ Julian suggests this contrast by locating the stasis in the theaters, the place where Antiochenes vented their distress. Julian’s association with the country dweller might also recall the foodways in the moralizing rhetoric. The “inferior” diet attributed to the barbarian or the country dweller in the sources was not, as often presented in the sources, a matter of choice.⁸¹ In the context of Plato’s De legibus, these connections with bearing on the food crisis are even more strongly suggested.⁸² The Athenian refers to the Cretan and Spartan interlocutors’ political organization as fit for those residing in “a military camp” not “city dwellers,” associating soldiers with the “boorish country dwellers,” who are usually placed in opposition to city dwellers.⁸³ Plato characterizes their social institutions as deficient in correct pleasures, specifically musical pleasures, and then uses the example of appealing to “pleasure, correctness, and utility” when evaluating food and drink to illustrate his point. Transitioning from a discussion of proper pleasure in entertainment, to food according to the proper standard, to correct musical pleasure, forms a connection between Julian, who associated himself with his warlike soldiers from Gaul, and the warlike Cretan and Spartan and places them in opposition to the “urbane” Antiochenes. Moreover, the comparison evokes the moralizing rhetoric attributed to “boorish country dwellers” and its negative portrayal, and its more positive undertone is implied by both Julian and De legibus: the ability to tolerate disturbances to the ideal diet without undergoing acute distress, which otherwise could lead to civic strife.⁸⁴

In short, the addition of Plato’s De legibus highlights the way these other literary influences form part of a more coherent political theory and allows each critique to be linked, on one end, to the philosophical ideal of a good condition of the soul and, at the other end, to prosperous material conditions. In doing so, it deepens the significance of each point for crisis management. When attuned to De legibus then, Julian’s description of the Antiochenes makes it appear inevitable that when Antioch met with some misfortune, its effects would be more damaging, and the distress of the afflicted would be more acute. And this was precisely what Julian indicates happened when droughts caused crops to fail. What ensued was not only a shortage of grain but a full market crisis, instigated and exacerbated, Julian implies, by the Antiochenes, the folly of the powerful, and the lack of self-control of the entire population.

Exactly why the characteristics that Plato links to vulnerability in De legibus and that Julian attributes to the Antiochenes in the Misopogon is illustrated when Julian’s narrative turns to the “greatest thing from which [the city’s] hatred arose,” that is to say, his handling of the food shortage.⁸⁵ Julian became aware of the problem the moment he arrived in the city in July, when shouts of “everything abundant, everything expensive” greeted him in the theater.⁸⁶ The population had to wait until October to see Julian intervene directly.⁸⁷ Recognizing the resentment caused by his perceived inaction, Julian attempted to correct the record in the Misopogon, relating that he had in fact responded to their pleas immediately. Julian explained that he met with “powerful (dynatoi) Antiochenes” the very next day to persuade them that it was “better to contemn unjust gain and to treat citizens and visitors well.”⁸⁸ Because the powerful men he addressed “had promised to attend to the matter,” Julian explained that he did not immediately intervene in the city’s management of the shortage.⁸⁹ He framed the choice to defer to the council as an attempt to give the Antiochenes the freedom that they wished for.⁹⁰ Julian said that it was only after three months passed that he realized that those “powerful” Antiochenes that he afforded the freedom to manage the affair had “so negligently handled the matter that no one could have expected it.”⁹¹

It was at that point Julian claimed he realized his direct intervention was needed. He thus immediately stepped in to help alleviate the shortage, listing in the Misopogon his specific measures along with commentary signaling that, in each case, he was guided by his philosophical commitments, as outlined in De legibus. To begin with, Julian set out to ensure that the Antiochenes had the means to satisfy their moderate desires.⁹² A city that is moderate (sōphrōn), he said, “needed bread, wine, and olive oil only.”⁹³ Accordingly, because Antioch already had “wine, olive oil, and the rest in abundance,” and because the grain shortage was caused by some misfortune, specifically a “dreadful bareness” resulting from droughts, Julian imported generous amounts of grain and sold it at a price far below normal market rates in Antioch.⁹⁴ Julian was sure to mention the portion that came from his own personal property, drawing a contrast between himself, willingly giving according to his ability, and the wealthy Antiochenes, the other should-be contributors to crisis relief.⁹⁵ In this way, Julian frames his response as prompted by a concern for the well-being of the population and guided by wise precepts for how to contribute to that end.

Julian differentiates the natural cause of the food crisis, the grain shortage due to drought and crop failure, and its amelioration by the abundance of imported grain from the artificially induced shortage and the response it required. While Julian maintained that “grain and bread were abundant and cheap” thanks to his imports, he admitted that few other food provisions were available and affordable.⁹⁶ Julian “appointed a measured [metrion] price for everything, and made it clear to all,” believing the exorbitant prices were “due to the insatiate greed of the wealthy” instead of “any scarcity.”⁹⁷ He perceived this shortage as a problem of availability tied to avoidable human behavior.⁹⁸ Because Julian regarded it as his obligation to intervene and “assist the mass of the people who were being wronged, and the strangers who kept arriving in the city,” he compelled “the landowners and shopkeepers to do what was just,” stopping them from selling “necessary provisions at whatever price they wished.”⁹⁹ Julian’s response to each cause of the shortage aligned with Plato’s guidelines, fulfilling the responsibilities of both state and citizenry by his dual role as a state agent and member of the political community regarding securing the food supply and dealing with shortages.

On the whole, Julian’s measures aligned with historical precedent for response to subsistence crises. It was often the city council and other local elites that were the first line of defense in dealing with shortages. Civic strategies differed according to local needs. Some created funds and mechanisms for redistributions in times of shortages, while others relied on aid from generous individuals within their communities, or sometimes neighboring communities, whose surplus was sold at more affordable prices.¹⁰⁰ Despite Julian’s attempt to contrast his intervention with those of other emperors and portray it as a generous personal donation, his actions generally aligned with normal imperial response to subsistence crises, which included supplying food doles, fixing prices, and expelling visitors.¹⁰¹ Emperors occasionally intervened when circumstances were more dire than could be addressed locally, especially when the presence of the army made an impact on the food supply, which was the case on this occasion.¹⁰² Although not mentioned in the Misopogon, a law shows that Julian ordered all nonessential military personnel to leave Antioch.¹⁰³ Most often, imperial intervention happened at the behest of patrons petitioning for aid on behalf of their city, and usually via the governor.¹⁰⁴ Julian’s effort to regulate market prices was likewise a common response to shortages.¹⁰⁵ Fixing prices during subsistence crises to check speculation is a more visible concern in the sources. Emperors also occasionally had to intervene to protect decurions from popular pressure to sell at unjustly low prices.¹⁰⁶ Julian seems to have been conscious of both of these factors. A measured price can be taken as one that reflects supply and demand where supply has not been manipulated by venality. Julian describes setting a fair or measured (metrion) price for everything, noting the fluctuations of prices due to supply conditions, whether based on the season or location, suggesting to his audience that he took it into consideration. Moreover, although Julian emphasized that he acted as a benefactor setting prices well below market values for grain in the city when supply was at its highest and therefore priced the cheapest, and that this was the sort of behavior those with virtue and goodwill toward citizens would imitate, albeit on a scale commensurate with their respective resources, he by no means compelled the decurions to do anything beyond the limits of justice.

Although he eventually responded with measures a community might expect of an emperor in residence during a subsistence crisis, the Antiochenes remained displeased. Part of the reason was his approach to these more conventional measures. The citizens expected Julian to demonstrate his beneficence through a public show of response.¹⁰⁷ Julian, however, intimates that his failure to respond was another marker of true freedom, which meant not needing to gratify his subjects, giving into what he believed irrational demands, specifically demands that aim at pleasure at the expense of health and higher goods. The tension points to a conflict between the understanding of euergetism and the way it suppresses civic strife, in practice, and how Julian believed it should function.¹⁰⁸

Julian furthermore disaggregates the severity of the shortage from the distress that the shortage caused in suggesting that if the Antiochenes remained distressed because of market conditions, it was due to their immoderate appetites and sumptuous tastes, not to the availability of food provisions necessary for health. Despite what Julian considered generous provisions of grain, the Antiochenes were ungrateful and upset because, according to Julian, he did not see to the city’s provisions of seafood or poultry.¹⁰⁹ Julian calls this luxury (tryphē) “beyond even the suitors of Ithaca.”¹¹⁰ The fact that they had the “leisure to compose anapests” against the “author of their prosperity [euthēnia]” is used as further proof that the cause of their distress was their sumptuous appetites and lack of self-control, not any true deprivation.¹¹¹ Julian’s depiction of the decadence of Antioch throughout the Misopogon thus minimizes the distress from the deviation from normal conditions in which Antiochenes had ready access to these foodstuffs. Julian felt no obligation to help others cope with distress caused by luxurious tastes. The mandate given in De legibus is to direct impulses toward what is best, not what is regarded as most pleasant.¹¹² In fact, Plato is explicit that there is no obligation to feed, or even pity, all who were hungry, only those who possess “self-control or some other share of virtue” and who are “hungry as the result of some misfortune.”¹¹³ Given that the Antiochenes were a far cry from his and Plato’s definition of virtuous, Julian implies that they should have been grateful for the grain he provided instead of ungrateful for the provisions he did not provide.¹¹⁴ It was, Julian argues, their own dissipated lifestyle and not his actions—or lack thereof—that was to blame for their distress over the scarcity of luxury items. Antioch, as Julian characterizes it throughout the Misopogon, was a city in poor civic health. While it remained in this condition, its citizens would be susceptible to crises, thrown into distress by even the slightest deviation from their accustomed lifestyle.

While Julian maintains that he secured enough grain for the city to prevent starvation, he admits that his price-fixing measures were less effective in relieving market shortages on the whole. Although tacitly acknowledging that his actions contributed to the problem, his account nevertheless sustains the placement of blame squarely on the Antiochenes. Julian further defends himself in this instance by casting blame for the issues of foodstuff availability on the greed of Antiochene merchants, which he attributes to a preference for unjust profits.¹¹⁵ As Julian has it, the wealthy Antiochenes not only undercut his contributions to the grain shortage by buying up the cheap grain and selling it outside the city at higher prices but also the merchants circumvented his price-fix by choosing to remove other goods from the market rather than sell them at Julian’s “measured” prices. He implies that he should have realized how immoderate they were when he saw “how many shops there were in the city” and therefore should have known they could not be governed according to the Platonic prescriptions he followed.¹¹⁶ They would not care that Julian acted on a principle of justice when he did not allow “vegetables and wine to be sold for gold.”¹¹⁷ The rich preferred unjust profits, and everyone else preferred to be treated unjustly if justice meant a lack of wine, meat, and seafood. Julian implies that he attempted to treat them as free men while the Antiochenes cared more about an excessively free market.¹¹⁸

The Antiochenes’ resistance to his attempts to regulate prices within the limits of justice could be attributed either to false beliefs about the value of wealth or a lack of harmony with beliefs and desires.¹¹⁹ Thus, the connection to Plato’s De legibus invites the Misopogon’s reader to see this as a particularly hazardous form of folly.¹²⁰ Plato insists that no power be entrusted to individuals hampered by this sort of folly.¹²¹ The danger of allowing those who sell in the markets to have power in the state,¹²² as Plato warns, was illustrated by what happened in Antioch where “those who held office” in the city did so both as “landowners and as shopkeepers” and “enjoyed profits from both sources.”¹²³ In a time of crisis, the more effective councilors are in providing relief and assisting recovery, the less they stand to profit privately from the crisis by exploiting public desperation and distress as landowners and merchants. Harmony in the soul between pleasures, desires, and reason removes the conflict of interest councilors encounter when decisions of public health and safety are at odds with private gain.

The acquisitiveness of the city’s magistrates, as Julian saw it, perpetuated the city’s vulnerabilities beyond the present situation.¹²⁴ Civic health, Plato insists, depends on willing and able community members contributing to risk-reducing practices to promote security, not to mention conditions conducive to human happiness in full. Julian presents himself as generating revenue streams for the city—remitting taxes, increasing city lands, and expanding the register of city councilors—with the aim to empower the city to ensure that its population would have access to all necessities of life as well as institutions and arrangements that promote virtue, and thus to effectively reduce risk.¹²⁵ Julian’s actions increased the financial resources of the city, both its treasury and the personal finances of those responsible for carrying out liturgies, thus empowering the council to provide healthier conditions and therefore the basis for human excellence, including resilience in the face of food shortages and crises of all sorts. Moreover, improvements would ease the personal financial burdens of councilors, allowing them to fulfill obligations, freeing them to carry out other benefactions more easily in ways that engender goodwill and friendship among citizens.¹²⁶

Julian’s description suggests that the Antiochene councilor’s unhealthy relationship with wealth led them to squander these opportunities, placing the pursuit of private wealth over public well-being, thus perpetuating the city’s vulnerability. Julian relates that, in addition to remitting substantial sums of taxes in gold and silver, he made an effort to ensure Antioch had land that generated resources and revenue, reminding the Antiochenes that under his rule in the first place they had lost none of the lands they previously possessed.¹²⁷ Neither he nor his travel companions (epitēdeiōn)¹²⁸ purchased any property in the city, not even a field or a garden.¹²⁹ This was, he implies, thanks to his moderation and self-control.¹³⁰ In addition, Julian granted the city council lands that generated revenue and resources to better support the welfare of its citizens, including at times of crisis. He accused the councilors of instead taking advantage of the situation. Julian reports that the city council asked to take possession of uncultivated lands, and he assented to the request.¹³¹ He expresses his frustration that the city council took the land and distributed it all amongst themselves, specifically, to those who “did not need it.”¹³² It was not uncommon for city councilors to lease out civic lands. Julian’s problem with this appears to be that the councilors did not use it for public benefit where, as circumstances suggested, it was clearly needed. If droughts are a problem, a well-ordered city with virtuous magistrates, as Plato describes, manages these lands to minimize the damage of droughts and the bodily harm food shortages causes, since bodily health takes priority over other expenditures. The Antiochene councilors, however, as Julian signifies, did not operate according to the ranking of goods he and Plato considered true.¹³³ They used the land neither to increase grain reserves nor municipal coffers but instead for personal financial gain.¹³⁴

Julian reminded them of the land he allowed the city to hold, untaxed, to fund civic entertainment even after this malfeasance.The refusal of councilors to provide grain for sale at a fair price in light of all such measures added to Julian’s indignation, but none perhaps more than this one.¹³⁵ By granting these lands to the city, Julian further offset the personal burdens of civic councilors, in effect, lessening the heaviest costs of civic financing, not to mention the most rewarding in terms of social capital.¹³⁶ Julian notes the councilors’ extravagant spending on games for the sake of winning popularity, insinuating that the councilors preferred to gratify the people by providing false pleasures rather than true benefits.¹³⁷ The fact that he allowed them this land to help fund chariot races, a form of entertainment Julian discouraged for its negative psychic impact, again emphasized the problem that in his eyes was the lack of proportion in prioritizing unhealthy over healthy benefactions.

Julian likewise spread out the financial burden incurred by individual councilors when he increased enrollment in the city council to 200. Julian’s intent, he explains, was “to make the city greater and more capable.”¹³⁸ In this, Julian heeded Plato’s warning that even if “a well-organized city” with “well-laid laws” should add “unsuitable offices,” harm would follow.¹³⁹ Julian stressed how far he went to ensure that Antioch’s officials were well-qualified and capable. He even granted the council permission to nominate exceptionally wealthy but previously exempt imperial financial officials whose personal wealth could be put to public use.¹⁴⁰ The council, however, acted as “a city that was in no way well-governed” by nominating “the least capable” to the city council.¹⁴¹ In one instance, the Antiochenes nominated “a poor man, from the marketplace.”¹⁴² In another, they disregarded Julian’s nomination process and “thrust a liturgy” on a man without Julian’s approval.¹⁴³ Julian considered these individuals utterly unfit for reasons Plato provides in De legibus.

Although the management of the city’s water supply is not mentioned explicitly, readers of the Misopogon attuned to De legibus would appreciate that Julian’s critiques of the city council had implications for its management.¹⁴⁴ Julian attempted to ensure that the city’s councilors, those who oversaw the city’s water supply, were, as De legibus recommends, “capable [dynatous] individuals” who had time and resources to devote to this critical civil service.¹⁴⁵ When the community’s water supply—including its rivers, streams, rainwater runoff, and irrigation—is managed effectively, Plato believed, it minimizes the hazards of droughts and maximized food production, so as to generate reserves that can more readily prevent full-out famine-level shortages whenever a city suffers drought.¹⁴⁶ Without saying so explicitly then, Julian intimates that the Antiochene city council contributed to the severity of the shortages caused by the drought and that they were likely to mismanage the water supply in the future.

In all of these ways, Julian attempts to show that he strove to behave like one who “desires to benefit many people as far as possible.”¹⁴⁷ Nevertheless, he acknowledges that he sometimes missed his mark.¹⁴⁸ In the first place, Julian admits he erred when he entrusted the powerful men with the freedom to manage the shortage in their city, noting that he lacked the experience needed to make the judgment properly.¹⁴⁹ Had he waited to witness all the characteristics he attributed to them in the Misopogon, Julian suggests he would have recognized it was a mistake to use persuasion, as Plato said was suitable for free men. Instead, he should have applied coercion, backed with threats of punishment, which was the method suitable for the type of people they actually emulated: slaves, women, and children.¹⁵⁰ In thinking the Antiochenes could be ruled like moderate individuals, he also failed to check the immoderation of those buying up the grain. Julian admits he erred also in rewarding the city with favors and not punishing the injustices of city councilors as severely as they deserved.¹⁵¹ He reframes his beneficence and mildness as a failure to observe due proportion. Julian knew well from Plato’s De legibus that this sort of treatment “increases and fostered badness” and that, as he argues throughout the Misopogon, badness perpetuates a city’s vulnerability.¹⁵² In sum, Julian apologizes only for treating the Antiochenes as better people than they showed themselves to be, and more indulgently than was appropriate according to the philosophical principles outlined by Plato in De legibus.¹⁵³ Julian thus validates his philosophical model of rulership by transferring blame to the people he attempted to rule.¹⁵⁴

Julian signals that he had learned from these mistakes and so switched tactics to check the Antiochenes’ destructive impulses.¹⁵⁵ The Antiochenes could not be persuaded, and their harmful behavior could not be corrected with arguments.¹⁵⁶ Because he could not induce them to a rational belief that it is best to follow the laws, and he could not incite in them a desire to benefit their fellow citizens, Julian turned to the use of fear. Julian imbued in them a sense of fear that would incite the community to cooperate in service of a shared goal as well as to obey the laws, magistrates, and gods. It is precisely this sort of fear, according to Plato, that has saved cities in past times of crisis.¹⁵⁷ To this same end, Julian wrote the Misopogon to bring the fear Plato called shame (aischynē).¹⁵⁸ The Misopogon concludes with Julian vowing not to return after the war with Persia, punishing the city by denying it all the advantages that came with hosting an emperor and his court. Additionally, he appointed Alexander of Hierapolis as the sort of severe governor to incite the fear of punishment that he believed the city needed.

The conceptual dependence on Plato’s De legibus reveals an unambiguous conception of crisis management underlying the Misopogon. Who and how many, beyond later Platonists with the same education, would have recognized and appreciated the conceptual dependence and its implications is a more difficult question to answer. That at least one individual was keenly aware is clear from Libanius’s first oration in response to the Misopogon. Libanius frames his “Embassy to Julian” as an appeal to the emperor on behalf of the city in an attempt to dissuade him from following through with his vow not to return to Antioch after his Persian campaign. Libanius confirms Julian’s presentation of himself in the Misopogon as embodying a host of virtues and thus behaving “how people should behave” and being “the sort of person one should be” in a community that is safe and secure as Plato describes.¹⁵⁹ However, Julian implies that the vices of the Antiochenes, on the contrary, left Antioch at increased risk to crises of all sorts.

Yet Libanius argues that not returning to the city would be an unjust punishment according to the principles expounded in De legibus, that is, the same principles that Julian uses to defend himself in the Misopogon.¹⁶⁰ Libanius refers to another key aspect of crisis management developed in De legibus that underscores how perilous Antioch’s condition was. Whenever some misfortune befell them, its effects would be more severe and the need of the citizens for aid more dire. They would be at the mercy of outside benefactors to render assistance. Libanius explains that, with the Misopogon, Julian made their base condition known to the entire empire, and this resulted in the loss of security for the whole city.¹⁶¹ The reason, Libanius explains, is that the advertisement of the city’s badness, magnified by the influence of the emperor’s personal condemnation, in effect removed from the entire city the only cure (pharmakon) for “famine, plagues, and earthquakes”: the willing assistance of neighbors.¹⁶² Libanius laments that “even if [Antioch] remains still standing, it is bound to decline, and if it meets with disaster, it will find none to aid it” as a result of the Misopogon.¹⁶³ Rather than dispute Julian’s characterization of the city, Libanius doubles down on the significance Julian places on virtue for communal security to reveal the inconsistency between the Misopogon’s argument and the repercussions of its publication. Libanius implies that in publishing the Misopogon, Julian crossed the line between just punishment and unjust vengeance as drawn in De legibus.¹⁶⁴ Libanius reasons that, although Julian refrained from “confiscations, exile, and executions,” the punishment he inflicted was worse because, according to the argument he advances in the Misopogon, it leads to a shameful life and inevitable, painful death.¹⁶⁵ The severity of his punishment then exceeded the limits of justice, at least for those who, like the Antiochenes, show an ability to improve.¹⁶⁶ Libanius reminds that Julian himself would have, or should have, acted differently if he had considered them irredeemable.¹⁶⁷ Libanius’s oration further develops the theory of crisis management in Plato’s De legibus, which Julian drew from in the Misopogon. Virtue, especially self-control, is necessary for friendship. Friendship not only plays an important role within the community in inciting behaviors that increase resilience but outside the community as well in the form of willing assistance from neighboring communities. The Antiochenes, as Julian shows, could not rely on assistance from others within the community when misfortune strikes. Nor could they, because of the Misopogon, rely on any assistance from their neighbors.

Just as Libanius’s oration furthers the understanding of crisis management developed in the Misopogon, it also hints at the wider reception of the ideas. Libanius published this oration after Julian’s death, which suggests that Libanius believed others would see the brilliance of his approach in building his arguments on the ground that Julian had prepared in the Misopogon.¹⁶⁸ This would mean that Libanius expected his audience to recognize the Misopogon’s conceptual dependence on De legibus as Libanius himself did. Recent scholarship has begun to recognize the influence of this dialogue on the political thought of not only later Platonists but also educated elites more generally.¹⁶⁹ Even without having studied De legibus, the traditional literary education would have familiarized the elite with the values found in that dialogue.¹⁷⁰ Indeed, as the abundance of previous scholarship on the Misopogon suggests, the values underlying Julian’s Misopogon could be found throughout classical Greek as well as imperial Roman literature.¹⁷¹ These values also featured prominently in the rhetorical exercises in which students learned to assess ends and deliberate about means according to many of the same principles outlined in De legibus.¹⁷² Moreover, the social values of De legibus represent the morality of Plato’s lifetime that remained popular up to the Roman imperial period of Julian’s time, especially in the cities of the Greek east.¹⁷³ Many of the topics in De legibus also featured prominently in fourth-century intellectual debates.¹⁷⁴ Even the uneducated urban inhabitants encountered the same articulation of values in public venues and visual media: inscriptions that articulated praise for civic virtues, the visual culture that projected a shared mythic past that cultivated a civic identity, speeches of sophists, theatric renditions of the classics like Homer, and comedies that took as subjects Plato and other philosophers.¹⁷⁵

Julian’s Misopogon provides his personal account of a specific crisis. This article set out not to adjudicate his portrayal of that crisis but to reveal the rationalization of his behavior in reference to how emperors, municipal council members, and regular citizens alike ought to behave in situations where shortages of food threaten the physical and emotional well-being of the population. I have argued that Julian regarded it as an obligation of government to provide necessities for the physical well-being of citizens and, as far as possible, peace of mind with the assurance of aid should misfortune strike. As emperor, Julian was outside of the civic community of Antioch and part of it as the head of the political community of all Roman citizens. We see him projecting his role in crisis management in this way and shaping his behavior in the food crisis accordingly. As a member of the community, Julian contributed aid in proportion to his ability in the aftermath of the crisis. Julian recognized that the measures normally undertaken in times of food shortage—expelling visitors, supplying food doles, setting maximum prices, and the rest—could mitigate the impact of food shortages. However, Julian also believed that assurance of aid from powerful, generous benefactors was not enough. Even when effective, these measures alone were merely palliative and left communities vulnerable to future shortages, and hazards of all sorts. The imperial administrative system was the last line of defense that could mobilize resources across the empire and reallocate them where aid was most needed. Focusing on relief without taking any action to remedy the structures that perpetuate vulnerability was neither an effective way to address the negative effects of crises on the happy condition Julian aimed to provide. Nor was it sustainable. Allocating resources to remedy the symptoms of avoidable or mitigatable human-induced crises inhibited the ability to effectively distribute aid to those suffering from more severe and unavoidable crises.

In sum, the community-based approach set out in De legibus and adapted in the Misopogon shifts the emphasis from external assistance aimed solely at reversing adverse conditions and mitigating distress after the fact to empowering communities in security practices. The most effective means to decrease vulnerability and increase resiliency was through broad participation on a community-wide level in practices that reduced risk and increased the ability to cope and recover. Therefore, Julian attempted to show that he also considered it his obligation to empower the communities to make structural changes to increase security. Julian presented himself as empowering communities to provide for the community’s basic needs and to improve social institutions that would make citizens better, civic ties stronger, and thus the community more willing and able to participate in security practices.