Introduction
The Introduction offers a survey of the primary non-Christian and Christian sources available for a reconstruction of the short reign of Jovian. The most important source obviously is Book 25 of Res Gestae of the pagan Ammianus Marcellinus. He presents a gloomy picture of the person and reign of Jovian in order to save the image of his hero and Jovian’s predecessor, Julian (the Apostate). From Edward Gibbon onward, modern scholarship has adopted this unfavorable image that presents Jovian’s reign as a meaningless period between the emperorship of Julian (361–363) and the rule of the Valentinians (364–378). However, Jovian’s rule was vital for the sustenance of imperial leadership after Julian’s disastrous Persian military campaign and religious policies, both of which caused considerable upheaval. Jovian’s reign was a return to the norms of the pre-Julianic period and brought back stability to the Roman empire. For an emperor who ruled such a short time, the Christian Jovian had an unexpected and surprising afterlife. The second part of the book discusses Jovian’s “Nachleben” in the so-called Syriac Julian Romance, a text of historical fiction that has rarely been studied and is largely unknown to historians of the late Roman period.