Constantine’s reign is usually heralded as a golden age and is celebrated as the beginning of the Christian era. The Last Pagan adopts a different approach, mourning the death of antiquity. Is this how you feel?

Very much so. The Emperor Julian has often been portrayed as an anomaly and regarded with slight embarrassment. It’s useful I think to change historical perspective. Instead of seeing Julian as the young man who came along and upset a Christian empire, he stood at the end of a line of Roman emperors.

At the same time, one of the premises with which I started the book is that while Constantine is conventionally heralded as the great hero and saviour of the empire, as a person he’s always appeared to me as a cynical and ruthless political operative. A deeply unpleasant man. It was natural, I suppose, to make Julian’s actions and values stand in contrast to those of Christian relatives.

Julian died aged only 31. Do you think that he had the qualities as a ruler to have shaped history if he had lived longer?

Arguably the largest problem for any biographer is that you have the benefit of hindsight – you know how the story ends. The challenge is to remember this and to stop seeing your subject’s fate as preordained. It’s too easy to see portents of doom wherever you look. This is especially true of Julian as all of the contemporaries tripped over themselves to editorialise his fate: his supporters painted him as a tragic hero and his opponents saw him as doomed from the moment of his apostasy.

If I’m being honest, even had Julian survived the war he might not have survived the peace. Religion has always attracted extremists, and it’s unlikely that Julian and his Christian opponents could have found any kind of middle ground. Plots to murder the emperor were uncovered before his death and so impassioned was the opposition to Julian’s religious reforms that I suspect one assassination attempt would have succeeded before too long.

The Last Pagan remembers a time when conflict over religion was rife, coming to a head on a battlefield in present-day Iraq. Did these parallels with recent events inspire you to choose Julian the Apostate as your subject?

Although I’d originally planned to draw parallels with the First Gulf War, the chapters on Julian’s invasion of Persia were written to a background of the build-up to the current conflict in Iraq. As Western governments began their build-up to what was obviously going to be an invasion last year, the parallels with Julian’s campaign made for distinctly uncomfortable writing – a foreign policy dictated by domestic necessity; support for the invasion from what is now Israel and the Gulf Arabs; debates about an illegal arms trade with Persia – swords of mass destruction if you will; a media campaign to encourage popular support for the war; even the fact that one of the most vocal opponents to the war was the administrator of Gaul. With Julian’s fate in mind (and the fact that his opponent outlasted his rule by some sixteen years) it is hard not to be discouraged about what the future holds.

Do you think that Roman paganism has any relevance for everyday life in the 21st century?

It’s more that the big questions that dominated Julian reign – the search for belief and the question of religious tolerance – are centre stage once more in the modern world. It’s easy to see similarities between Julian’s lack of comprehension of Christianity and the West’s frequent blindness to the Islamic world. It remains a historical irony that where Christianity was once the persecuted minority, it is now all-too often perceived as the aggressor.

At the same time, Julian’s search for his own faith as a young man mirrors the disillusionment and confusion that many today have with organised religion and the search for alternative forms of worship – a case in point is the startling growth in the interest in paganism over the past few years.

Paganism and decadence have been the principal themes of your last two historical books. This is a very popular subject at the moment, with numerous books on Roman cookery, sex, gladiatorial combat and luxury. Why do you think this is?

With honourable exceptions, thirty years ago historical biography was for students and academics. Now, I think you could argue that history is moving out of the textbook and into popular culture. Most immediately we need to thank Russell Crowe. The success of Gladiator has had an immensely positive impact on, for want of a better phrase, the classical industry. And public interest is certainly going to continue over the next couple of years as films on the Trojan War and Alexander the Great hit the big screen. The knock-on effects have been fantastic. Production companies have pumped money into historical documentaries and Michael Wood’s engaging approach has become the norm. It’s hard to switch on the television at the moment without a documentary on Julius Caesar, one of the Egyptian Pharaohs or people digging up an Iron Age dwelling.

This has had a galvanising effect on publishing too. It was great to see, for example, that Michael Grant’s Gladiators: the Bloody Truth was reprinted on the back of Gladiator’s success. A quick flick through any publisher’s catalogue shows that there is clearly a significant and growing market for books on the ancient world. It’s inevitable that people are going to be interested in the more salacious elements of Roman history – sex sells – but I think it is great. Anything that opens up the classical world to a wider audience is fantastic.

The Last Pagan has been written with a general readership in mind. Is it important for you that history should be more accessible?

It’s absolutely essential to make history, specifically ancient history, more accessible, especially while there’s demonstrable interest there. The classical world had an aura of sanctity about it for too long.

But there’s perhaps a more serious point here. The neglect that the classics have suffered in the curriculum over the past 20 to 30 years means that far too many are leaving school now without even a rudimentary knowledge of the classical world. For writers who want to reach anything other than the most specialised market, it does mean that you can’t take any knowledge for granted. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing and it certainly doesn’t mean in any way trivialising or dumbing down, but it does mean that you need to think more carefully about the way that you explain issues and concepts that previously you could have taken for granted.

As well as being a Roman historian you are also a journalist. How well do the two go together?

A background in journalism is a huge help, first and foremost as it reminds you that the people you are writing about as a historian were flesh and blood. And certainly if you cover contemporary politicians to any extent, it gives you a significant insight to why their Roman counterparts behaved the way that they did. For better or worse, the behaviour of politicians has changed very little!

What are you working on at the moment?

With my journalist hat I’ll be in Pakistan next week to profile President Musharraf. Longer term I’m working on a history of Roman Scotland, focusing on the personalities and the decision-makers that shaped the country. The amount of archaeological work that’s been done in even the last five years makes this a thrilling and very rich field to be looking at.

If you could only have 4 or 5 archaeological/historical books, what would they be and why?

	Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity. Until The World of Late Antiquity appeared in 1971 the later Roman empire was a virtually neglected academic field. The ancient world seemed to stop with Constantine and anything thereafter was dismissed as medieval. This work redressed the balance and has continued to inspire anyone interested in the period since. Aside from Brown’s prose, which is flawless, the illustrations are proof positive that late antiquity could rival the early empire for the glory of its art and architecture.
	Leonard Cottrell, Hannibal: Enemy of Rome. In the 1950s and 1960s Cottrell was one of the first writers to take ancient history out of the ivory towers and to make it accessible to the general reader. Although it’s a close call between this, his life of Hannibal, and The Great Invasion, his reconstruction of the Roman invasions of Britain, Enemy of Rome is simply one of the most passionate and exciting books on ancient history ever written.
	Barry Cunliffe, The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek: The man who discovered Britain. The first Greek to travel beyond the comfortable boundaries of the Mediterranean, Pytheas set sail from Marseilles in 350BC for the wilds of British waters. This is a near perfect example of historical detective work which also works as an account of Britain, three hundred years before Julius Caesar’s invasion.
	Anthony Pagden, Peoples and Empires. An incredible work of scholarship, this is a balanced and erudite study of imperialism and human migration – the more so as it come in at just over 200 pages. Pagden starts with Alexander the Great and segues smoothly through history to the aftermath of the western colonial empires in the 20th centuries.
	Noel Perrin, Giving Up the Gun: Japans Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879 There has been only one time in human history where a society turned its back on a technological advance it had mastered – when Japan’s ruling Tokugawa clan banned the use of guns in favour of swords. A passionate advocate of nuclear non-proliferation, Perrin explains how a society managed to unlearn something it regarded as a threat and damaging. An important book both for the historian and the politician.

What novel are you reading at the moment?

I’ve only just discovered Simon Scarrow’s Eagle novels about Quintus Licinius Cato and the Second Augustan Legion. Over the last couple of weeks I have devoured Under the Eagle, The Eagle’s Conquest and am about to finish When the Eagle Hunts. I have been dropping heavy hints about his most recent book, The Eagle and the Wolves for Christmas. They are racy and hugely entertaining adventure stories set to the backdrop of the Roman invasion of Britain.

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