This second chapter studies Themistius' Letter to Julian, I have placed in the Annex to the chapter discussion of the transmission history of Themistius' Letter from its Greek original to the Arabic in which it survives, including details of the important evidence from Nemesius for its composition in the fourth century and for the reliability of the Arabic translation, and details of the evidence provided by the Arabic tradition for Julian as the addressee. At the end of Chapter 3, after examining Julian's Letter to Themistius, I shall return to the Themistius and offer some necessarily speculative thoughts on its relationship with Julian's Letter and on the relative dating of the two. In this chapter I shall be focussing on Themistius' selection of his material and his handling of the question of the ruler's relationship to the law.

Introduction

Anyone who glances at the Letter of Themistius will notice straightaway that its style is different from that of Themistius' orations. Tis has undoubtedly been a major factor in the several doubts that have been expressed about its authenticity, from the magisterial repudiation by Bidez to the understandable comments of Errington about the impossibility of taking the Letter as a translation of Themistius' speech on Julian's fourth consulship. As Errington has observed, we need to approach the Letter as a different kind of work and perhaps see it as deriving from an educational context: ‘We might even then stick with the attribution to Themistius'; but, he added, ‘preferable, however, is perhaps the assumption that a later theoretician of small abilities and little practical experience used the dramatic situation of Julian's accession … to imaginatively reconstruct e.g. Themistius’ lost Protreptikos . . . and had the insensitivity to envisage that the educator of an imperial prince might well have used such banal ideas’.