DBWI What if Julian died earlier.

What if instead of dying on August 18 407 like he did he dies way earlier like 362 or 363. Would Rome have still beat the Sassanids. Would there be any dynasty to save Rome like the Julian dynasty did, would Christianity have taken over, would the library of Alexandria have been rebuilt?
 
What if instead of dying on August 18 407 like he did he dies way earlier like 362 or 363. Would Rome have still beat the Sassanids. Would there be any dynasty to save Rome like the Julian dynasty did, would Christianity have taken over, would the library of Alexandria have been rebuilt?

407? 363? What are you talking about here? Julian died in 1160 of course. OK year 3 of the 296 Olympics if you are a Greek.
 
What if instead of dying on August 18 407 like he did he dies way earlier like 362 or 363. Would Rome have still beat the Sassanids. Would there be any dynasty to save Rome like the Julian dynasty did,

Is this serious?? Julian died in 363 and did not beat the Sassanids--at least not strategically--and he didn't found a dynasty.


would Christianity have taken over, would the library of Alexandria have been rebuilt?

Christianity may have taken over a bit sooner. But if Julian had died in 361-2, and there was no war with Persia, the old, better Roman borders would've lasted longer. One potential problem: If Persia was determined to regain its territories lost c 299, it might've been more of a problem in the late fourth and fifth centuries, as if the Romans didn't have enough trouble with the goths and others.
 
Is this serious?? Julian died in 363 and did not beat the Sassanids--at least not strategically--and he didn't found a dynasty.




Christianity may have taken over a bit sooner. But if Julian had died in 361-2, and there was no war with Persia, the old, better Roman borders would've lasted longer. One potential problem: If Persia was determined to regain its territories lost c 299, it might've been more of a problem in the late fourth and fifth centuries, as if the Romans didn't have enough trouble with the goths and others.

OOC: You do realize this is a dbwi right?
 
If Julian had died earlier, Christianity wouldn't be able to spread out of the empire. Why would the barbarians adopt a God as soft as Jesus? They only adopted Mithraism because they had merged Mithra with Odin and Thor into a single entity.
 
That brings up an interesting question, what kind of Christianity would emerge? At the time there were quite a few sects and cults that fell under the term 'Christianity', but they all had different ideas and were fighting each other even more than they did the Empire. The Trinitarians were big, but the Arians were still a force to be reckoned with, and there were an ever growing number of Christian Gnostic sects that had already spread beyond the Roman Empire.

Would an earlier death of Julian have lead to a single 'type' of Christianity in Europe? in the world? or would it have continued to splinter even while growing and morphing into what I assume would be 'Local Christianity's' for each region it took root?
 
Well, it depends of what sect of the Galilean´s supporters has the ear of the Emperor. After all, before Julian the christians were using the Roman State to solve their petty infighting around their supposed "simple, evangelical message". It is true that the Trinitarians had the most support between the Western Clergy, but the Arians were the most inflluential(in the East and in the Empire), because Constantius II wanted to be Bishop of Bishops as well as Emperor of Rome and he supported the Arians as the True faith, punishing (by banishing) Athanasius as an heretic and enemy of the Roman State during most of his rule. The Augustus, not the Council, was De Facto the final authority on Christian dogma: What he says goes. So if the heirs of Julian in the Throne of the Caesars are Arians, the Arians will prevail, if he is Trinitarian, the Trinitarians will prevail, if the Emperor continues Julian´s policy of ending the banishment of "heretics" and let the Christians discuss their theological problems without intervention from the State, the sect is going to lose a lot of cohesion and will go through a cycle of schisms until it get stabilized, or get into irrelevancy, whatever happens first.
 
It'd be interesting to see if Italy would be more stable, he never quite got to pacify it with all the other wars and it kept boiling for decades
 
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