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Nephew of the Latin-speaking Constantine who modeled his “Roman revolution” after Augustus (Van Dam), the emperor Julian is often considered a Hellenised anomaly within his dynasty. He was received in the East as a Greek philosopher-king, while Ammianus records his reception in the West as a foreign upstart by the Senate, by the army as a bookish Graeculus. Modern scholarship has tended to assume that Julian himself, a native hellenophone trained in Greek rhetoric, emphasized his Greekness, looking upon the Romans with little interest, if not contempt (Weiss; Classen; Hengst). A careful survey of Julian’s writings, however, reveals quite different feelings toward Rome and Romanitas in his self-fashioning as a Roman emperor committed to his role-not a divine, Hellenic sage and philosopher-king, but a merely human, philosophical amateur (O’Meara), first and foremost a soldier defending an empire providentially destined to eternally rule the oikoumenē. He consistently places “our city” Rome above even Athens and his birthplace Constantinople. The Romans, to him, are not only a thoroughly Greek people, but the superior example of a Greek civilization. Displaying a keen interest in Roman myth and history, when speaking of Greeks and Romans separately, he consistently identifies as not Greek, but Roman.