TERMS FOR HOMELAND IN THE WRITINGS OF THE EMPEROR JULIAN AND IN THE AETHIOPICA OF HELIODORUS

Abstract

In his writings the emperor Julian states that he has three homelands: Constantinople, Athens and Rome, and yet he refers to his youthful relegation to Macellum as an exile and he more than once approvingly deploys the sayings of the Cynic philosopher, Diogenes, that he was without a home and that he was a citizen of the universe. At the same time, Julian believed that human salvation was possible and that the soul could escape this world and ascend to heaven. Similarly, in the Aethiopica of Heliodorus, all the major characters (apart from the Ethiopians Hydaspes and Persinna) experience exile from their earthly homelands. Yet here too the possibility of a return to a remote, otherworldly home is suggested. Heliodorus enigmatically makes use of an allusive neologism (ἡ ἐνεγκοῦσα, or ‘motherland’), in contrast with the traditional term ἡ πατρίς (‘fatherland’), to refer to a philosophical ‘place of birth’, particularly in the case of the main characters, Theagenes and Chariclea.