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So debate the world of Late Antiquity revisited

Peter Brown
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SO DEBATE
THE WORLD OF LATE ANTIQUITY REVISITED

It is twenty-five years since Peter Brown's seminal book The World of Late
Antiquity first appeared. Symbolae Osloenses has asked Professor Brown to revisit that world and give us a report, describing both the circumstances in
which the book was written and in what respects, through his own subsequent research and that of others, his picture of Late Antiquity has changed
since then. We have also asked ten scholars from various disciplines to comment on his report, and Professor Brown to reply to their comments. A common bibliographical list concludes the debate section. Further contributions
on the present state of research on Late Antiquity are invited.

REPORT
PETER BROWN

Before we revisit The World of Late Antiquity* after a quarter of a century, it is

important that we should revisit the quarter century that preceded it, in order to understand the origins of the perspective that characterized the book
from the very outset. That quarter of a century was still dominated, in all the
areas that came to concern me most, by the towering mass of Mikhail RostovtzefFs Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire? Edward Gibbon, by contrast, was a distant figure. His Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was usually perceived as little more than a literary masterpiece, from
whose pages classical scholars and persons of correct, "enlightened" attitude
would cull a few lapidary citations, in order to justify their own sovereign
disregard for the last centuries of the classical world, and, most especially, for
its distasteful religious ferment. It was not until the bi-centenary of the publication of the first volumes of the Decline and Fallthat I myself attempted,
along with other scholars, to take the full measure of the range, the serious1 Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity: from Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad (London:
Thames and Hudson 1971); the reprints by W.W. Norton (New York 1989) and Thames and
Hudson (London 1995) contain an up-dated bibliography whose additions a reader might find
revealing.
2
Rostovtzeff 1926; see Momigliano 1954; Bowersock 1973; Andreau 1988, i-Ixxxiv; Wes 1990;
Shaw 1992.

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5 0 DEBATE

ness and the sad clarity of vision of Gibbon, the historian of religion and empire (Brown 1976). But in the 1950s, it had been Rostovtzeffwho told us that
those who studied the age beyond Diocletian and Constantine, indeed, beyond Septimius Severus, must resign themselves to moving in an alien world,
fatally depleted and already "barbarized" from within by the catastrophic upheavals of the third century A.D.
Unlike the Olympian Gibbon, Rostovtzeffthe Rostovtzeff of those gripping last chapters of the Social and Economic History, "The Roman Empire
during the Period of Military Anarchy" and "The Oriental Despotism and
the Problem of the Decay of Ancient Civilization"was a living, disquieting
presence for all young students. We are dealing with a Europe-wide phenomenon. Only recently, my friend and colleague, Lellia Cracco Ruggini, has
written of how, in 1952, she had climbed the steep stairway to the study of
Plinio Fraccaro, arriving a little breathless with anxiety, to introduce herself
as a potential graduate student, only to have placed in her arms the Social and
Economic History of Rostovtzeff along with the four volumes of the Patrologa
edition of the works of Saint Ambrose. "Read them, think about it," was
Fraccaro's peremptory admonition. "See what you can get out of it all."
(Ruggini 1995, ix)
It was in exactly the same year, in Ireland, that I received a far less solemn,
but equally decisive call to the later Roman empire. On the shelves of the
lending library of the Royal Dublin Society at Ballsbridge I fell, entirely by
accident, on that heavy, olive-green volume, whose superb illustrations and
majestic print spoke with instant authority to a total beginner. A classical
building in clear grey granite, the Royal Dublin Society stood as a monument to the high taste and public spirit of its Anglo-Irish founders, now
faced, across the street, by the modern, more frankly vernacular faade of the
head office of the Irish Sweepstake, resplendent with gigantic, bright green
shamrocks. Maybe already on the bus back to Glenageary, certainly by teatime, I had found my way to those last chapters, and began to read them, still
with the frisson of the young when faced by an account of some truly memorable disaster. I learned about
The social revolution of the third century, which destroyed the foundations of the economic, social and intellectual life of the ancient world.3
I was already prepared for such melancholy judgements. It was my intention
to study medieval and modern history at Oxford1952 was for me a dreamy,
solitary year, spent back in Ireland, between Public School in England and

3 Rostovtzeff 1926, 477.

THE WORLD OF LATE ANTIQUITY REVISITED

New College, Oxford. The growing crisis of pre-Reformation Europe already

attracted me. I liad begun to read Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle
Ages. There I learned that
At the close of the Middle Ages, a somber melancholy weighs on
peoples souls,
and, furthermore, that I should not be surprised: for
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Great evils form the groundwork of history.4

Rostovtzeff, therefore, merely pulled me back a millennium, not to classical
Rome itself, but to the seemingly disastrous beginnings within the Roman
empire itself of a post-Roman medieval world, that was itself destinedso it
appeared from my reading of Huizingato live out of its last centuries, also,
in the shadow of catastrophe.
Among the many disgruntled social groups, in many countries in midtwentieth century Europe, the Protestant, and especially the Anglo-Irish
Protestant, minority of Dublin had as good a claim as any to entertain a
melancholy sense of kinship with the beleaguered elites of the Roman empire
in its uglier last days. They had not, of course, suffered as die bourgeoisie of
Rostovtzeff s Russia had done, but they certainly knew that they now lived in
less glorious times. The ranks of their male members had been depleted by
major wars. Their horizons had become limited through the unravelling of a
world-wide empire. They faced, in their own country, that is, in the newlyindependent Republic of Ireland, the dominance of what appeared to them,
from their viewing-point, at least, to be a coarsened version of the national
community that they had once claimed to lead. Robustly untouched by the
more shrill, Central European notions of decadencesuch as I would later
encounter in Oswald Spengler and in the distasteful opening chapters of
Otto Seeck's otherwise memorable Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken
Weltwe, in Dublin, were resigned to the fact that empires did, indeed, pass
and that the ideals of an enlightened few could all too easily be swamped by
the narrow certainties and religious intolerance of the overwhelming mass of
their fellow-countrymen.
What was distinctive about this mood in Ireland, if compared with similar
groups in near-by England, was that the themes of religion and of the "exotic", the non-European, already had unusually strong resonance. Both aspects
brought me, unwittingly, closer to late antiquity proper than either to the
classical or to the medieval world. The Protestantism of the Church of
Ireland was profoundly unlike Anglicanism. It was untouched by the roman4

Huizinga 1919, 31; see Krul 1990.

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tic mystique of continuity with the Middle Ages. The "Roman" Catholics, in
our opinion, could keep the Middle Ages. Irish Protestants, indeed, deliberately stared through an overwhelmingly "Roman" Catholic present, across
the tragic devastation of medieval and early modern Ireland, to the pre-medieval glories of what is still called "Early Christian" Irelanda Christian
Ireland, that is, that was sufficiently distant from common images of medieval Rome to be treated as an object of interest even by Protestants. It was
our own Late Antiquity of the North. Indeed, the manuscripts of the Book of
Durrow and the Book of KelL, that I had begun to visit regularly in the
Library of Trinity College, Dublin, whose splendid exhibition gallery was, at
that time, invariably empty and usually ill-heated, all dated from before the
age of Charlemagne. They had been produced in monasteries first founded
in the old age of Justinian. Their artists were faraway contemporaries of
Heraclius, Justinian II and the Ummayad Califs of Damascus.
It was, also, a "Biblical" Protestantism. Though not Fundamentalist, it assumed extensive knowledge of the Old and New Testaments, and, hence, if
only indirectly, of the entire ancient Near East. Egypt, Babylon and Cyrus, as
"the Lord's anointed", and not Athens, was what the ancient world was for
us. As befitted a nation of self-styled poets, with high standards of elementary
education in Latin, Vergil and Horace were ever-present; but Rome itself was
brought to our attention, on a regular basis, more in the person of Pontius
Pilate and in the journeys of Saint Paul than in figures such as Cato, Cicero
and Augustus. My first serious confrontation with Greek was undertaken in
order to read the Gospel of Saint John. It was not a choice of Greek reading
matter that a classical purist, in England or the Continent, would have made;
but Basil of Caesarea, at least, might have approved.
The "exotic", also, was a strong presence. In the manner of generations of
Irish Protestants, England remained, for my family, a distant place, but the
British Empire and its peoples were ever-present. At a time of economic recession, the British Empire offered employment to our young men, and its
territories became the source of unexpectedly wide horizons in the otherwise
cramped life of a small and poor country. "Abroad" was a word charged with
meaning. My father's "abroad" took him, as a railway engineer, without his
knowing it, close to late antiquityto Egypt and the Sudan. Arabic was a required language for all officials of the Sudan Railways. When he finally returned to Ireland, in 1948, a handbook of Sudanese Courtesy Customs, containing delicate Arabic phrases of greeting and polite enquiry, was prominent
on his bookshelf, as was a de-luxe edition of T.E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars
of Wisdom, which I would read, from cover to cover, every time that I returned home on holiday from my school in England. I was told that, at the
age of three, I had been presented, by an Ethiopian nanny, to receive the
8

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blessing of the fugitive emperor Haile Selassie, at a church fte at the

Anglican cathedral of Khartoum, named Saint Julian'sthat is, named after
Julianos, the sixth-century Apostle of Nubia, whose mission had been fostered by none other than the empress Theodora. Such a close encounter with
the last, truly "Byzantine" Christian emperor in history was plainly considered a desirable event by those who retailed the story to me. More significant
still, I remember die manner in which the Hagia Sophia of Constantinople
was first impressed on me. It was not spoken of, as Gibbon might have done,
as a last touch of Roman grandeur raised by the decadent Greeks of the East.
Rather, I heard of it, in Ireland, as an unimaginably distant echo of concerns
of colonial administrators, who had to take into account the opinion of
Muslim populations in Egypt, Palestine and India: for such populations, its
vast dome was the proud symbol of the only major city of the Islamic world
not to have succumbed to the aggression of France and England. It was a
view of Constantinople seen, more naturally, from the countries of the
Middle East rather than from Rome.
This double legacy, with its roots deep in my childhood, already ensured,
perhaps, that both religion and the "exotic" (the non-European and, by implication, the non-classical) were both too large, too ever-present and too
rich for their intrusion into the classical world to be dismissed out of hand, as
unambiguously negative symptoms of decline. The power of both had begun
to puzzle and intrigue me. The collapse of an enlightened empire might, indeed, be a catastrophic event, for all I knew; but it was unlikely to be uninteresting.
It is an amiable and strictly necessary aspect of the young that they should
look with pertinacious skepticism on the more melodramatic and self-consciously nurtured pessimisms of their elders. But it is the unique service of
universities, with their up-to-date libraries in every European language, to
harness that obscure discontent to a scholarly agenda, so as to bring about
the revision of accepted opinions on the quality of an age. Dark images of
"the decay of ancient civilization" might easily have slipped into place in my
imagination. They were part of an obligatory, tastefully melancholic decor
that could be expected of any enlightened European. Many regretted the rise
of a Christianity which had triumphed and changed (and, it seemed, for die
worse) in the last, sick centuries of the ancient world. Others were only too
easily persuaded, given the disagreeable state of twentieth-century Europe,
that the changes of their own time were harbingers of return to a new barbarism and of the approaching shadow of a new Bas Empire.
This did not happen. Instead, it was possible, at Oxford, to settle down,
within a few years, to a dogged guerrilL against the dominant, melodramatic
notion of the decline and fall of the Roman empire. It was a guerrilla con9

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ducted, on every level of detail, and in many environments. It took place in

the Classics, Theology and Oriental Reading Rooms of the Bodleian Library.
Its favored terrain was, often, the New Accessions shelves of learned periodicals: for, at any moment, an archaeological report or the chance discovery of
some artifact might bring into question long-established verdicts as to the
prosperity of a late Roman city, settlement or region and the tenacity of the
classical tradition within it. It depended, to a large extent also, in a manner
that seems unimaginable in the 1990s, on the availability and relative cheapness of books in all languages, stocked on the shelves of book shops such as
Blackwells, Parker's and Thorntons. Such activity is usually called "research".
It is that, but it is, of course, far more than that. It amounts to nothing less
than the hesitant search for a new language of historical change, indeed, for a
new historical sensibility, attuned to different phenomena, or prepared to
view the same phenomena in a different, less sinister light. This change of
view is brought about, most usually, through scanning the shelves of specialized libraries; but it is accompanied throughout by a deeper process of intellectual and imaginative reassessment. It involves the moving of much of the
heavy, traditional furniture which an entire culture, and not simply a university discipline, had placed in that capacious regionthe back of the historian's mind.
The books which did most to provoke the installation of new mental furniture, and the rearrangement of the old, are those that one would expect.
What is difficult to seize is their peculiarly sharp and, often, idiosyncratic impact in the late 1950s and 1960s. The Oxford Honors Examination in
Modern History included a Special Subject on the Age of Augustine. No
such thing, of course, was offered to ancient historians in the proud school of
Litterae Humaniores. It was while preparing for that paper, in 1955 (and not
for any previous work, which had been devoted to English History in its entirety and to the European High Middle Ages, from 919 to 1273) that I absorbed with fascinated delightand did so, for the first and last time in my
life, in a properly Oxonian manner: that is, lying in a punt through a long
summers day on the river CherwellHenri-Irne Marrou's Saint Augustin
et h fin de h culture antique, his Retractatio (Marrou 1949) and, late into the
same night, Andre Piganiol's L'empire chrtien (Piganiol 1947). Marrou, of
course, transformed for me the entire notion of the "decadence" of late antique cultureas he did for any other reader of his Retractatio. But it was the
combined impact of Marrou and of the more robustly lac Piganiol which
proved decisive for me. Both authors conveyed a powerful impression of the
sheer resilience of the Roman empire of the fourth and early fifth centuries
at least, until the onslaught of the Germanic invasions. The world in which
Augustine grew to manhood was far from being a "disaster zone". Ancient
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civilization was not a drained corpse, that could be briskly dragged from the
stage, for the next act of the Christian Middle Ages to begin.
I was thrilled by the glimpse which both authors offered of the sheer resilience of a pre-Christian society and culture at the very moment of the triumph of the Christian church within the Roman empire. Institutions and
powerful bodies of ideas, that I had known only in the medieval and postReformation periodsand many of which, in their modern form, still hung,
like chill clouds, above the heart of any Irish boy, Catholic or Protestant
were shown to have originated first in a very distant, ancient world. Evidence
of the joining of the sacred and the profane, of the intimate dependence of
Christianity on its cultural, social and political context in an ancient world
that plainly had not grown pale by 400 A.D.a joining that was a peculiarly marked feature of the post-Constantinian Christian Empiredid not in
any way shock or dispirit me. If this was a "perversion of Christianity" (as
some of my more upright colleagues continue to assert), I had seen enough
of self-styled "unperverted" Christianities, by 1955, to welcome a change. A
remarkable tradition of French liberal Catholic scholars had turned their attention since the late 1930s to the intimate links between late classical civilization and the thought-forms and culture of the great Christian writers of
the Patristic age. This tradition gave me my first sighting of a pre-medieval
Christianity, of unexpected warmth, richness and flexibility, and, above all,
of a Christianity held at a safe distance from the present, by having been
firmly planted back where it belonged, in its native, ancient soil.
Other books were closer to me in tone and culture. In Norman Baynes,
devout Baptist and eloquent spokesman for the central values of Byzantine
civilization, I met a kindred soul. His Hellenistic Civilization and East Rome
was the first of his many essays that I would read (Baynes i960,1-23). Here
was a view of Byzantium that defended the authenticity of its long Hellenic
heritage and the resilience of the "steel framework" of its Roman, imperial
notion of the state, against those who tended to dismiss East Rome as already
a hopelessly non-classical society, characterized by "oriental" forms of monarchy. And yet, at the same time, Baynes spoke with infectious interest of a late
Hellenism, of a Hellenism very different from that of the classical Greek citystate, a Hellenism that had come, over the centuries, to push deep roots into
the cultures of the ancient Near East. This late Hellenism tapped, without
apparent detriment, the darker energies of a new religious universe. That religious universe was already plain to see in the miracles and in the many tales
of possession and exorcism in the New Testament. It flowered in the fifth,
sixth and seventh centuries A.D. in the Lives of the Saints, which both provided unique spiritual sustenance to the Byzantine man in the street and, for
modern scholars, precious evidence, which Baynes assembled with consum11

SO DEBATE

mate artistry, for the daily cares and hopes of the humbler Christian subjects
of a vast, multi-ethnic empire.'
In the 1950s, this was not everyone's Byzantium. Authors of books on the
Classical Tradition could still remark, in a joking manner, of Byzantines, that

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If their spiritual ancestors had fought at Marathon, it must have been in

the Persian ranks.6
Such a remark made the Byzantines, if anything, all the more interesting to
me. It meant that they were far more like people I had known and wished to
know, than if they had been the descendants of the ancient Greeks, whose
"beautiful, hard Hellenism"? belonged, not to the sprawling reality of the
Hellenistic and late Roman Near East, but to the unreal, perfect "Dream
Time" of a modern classical purist's image of antiquity.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the book that came closest to me, at that time,
was William Frend's The Donatist Church (Frend 1952). For this was an inspired synthesis of phenomena that had hitherto been treated in isolation
from each other. Rostovtzeff's theme of the collapse of urban civilization
served Frend as the backdrop to a crucial period of ecclesiastical historyto
the rise of the Christian church in North Africa and the emergence, in combative and tenacious Christian form, of the non-Roman, Berber substratum
of an entire region. It was in the century between Constantine and
Augustine, and not at the time of the Islamic conquests, that Roman Africa
had begun to become Barbary. No matter how much I came to dissent from
Frend's picture of North Africa, as I settled down to write my biography of
Saint Augustine and to produce articles on religious dissent, on religious coercion and on the relation between local languages and religious change (always taking Augustine's Africa as my starting-point),8 there was no English
scholar who showed, with such conviction, that the history of late antique
Christianityand especially of its "dissenting" variantsmust be seen rooted in a real world, with real social structures and real social conflicts, among
local cultures whose particularity was revealed, by Frend the archaeologist,
with an almost mystical zest for the concrete. I could not have wished for a
better intellectual pace-maker.
What I had come to, by the time that I faced the commission to write The
World of Late Antiquity, was a view of the last centuries of the ancient world
of which part, at least, had been solidly installed in my mind for the best part
5

Esp. "The Pratum Spirituale", Baynes 1960, 261-270, and Baynes and Dawes 1948.
Bolgar 1954, 64.
7
C. Cavafy: "Of the Jews (50 A.D.)", Poimata, Athens 1958, 102.
8
Brown 1967, 1961, 1963, and 1968.
6

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of a decade. It was a world less depleted by catastrophe than I had been led to
suppose. It was also, I had come to think, in my debate with William Frend,
a world less divided within itself by irreversible and unbridgeable chasms.
The center held, and could still control and even attract into itself the new
"non-classical" forces along its periphery. The work of Santo Mazzarino, and
most especially his Aspetti sociali del quarto secok, was crucial to the consolidation of this view. Here was a Roman world, of the fourth century, that
could be convincingly interpreted "sotto il segno dlia continuit" (Mazzarino 1951). Even the "democratization of culture" that characterized the period was shown, by Mazzarino, to have co-existed with strong vertical links, in
a "pyramidal" society, which ensured that the idioms, the outlook and the resources of the masses remained, for the most part, caught in the net of firm
and adaptable upper-class leadership (Mazzarino i960).
So dazzling a vision of the later empire needed, of course, the quiet certainty of a British voice to carry complete conviction for me. In his lecture in
the Warburg Series on The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the
Fourth Century A.D., delivered in 1959, A.H.M. Jones had already suggested,
with his habitual unassuming, inspired common sense, that it was precisely
the fluidity of the elites of the fourth century empire, drawn in around the
court from relatively humble backgrounds, that fostered the spread of
Christianity in the governing classes. It was, indeed, the age of the
Antonines, with its stable urban oligarchies, and not the later empire, which
had been a society marked by rigid and permanent class differences (Jones
1963). In 1964, Jones' Later Roman Empire more than confirmed this impression. Here, without melodrama, but with firm and matter-of-fact good
judgement as to its strength and weaknesses, was the society of the later empire presented, for the first time, in its entirety. It was a society seen, frankly,
from the top down. But it seemed to hold together on those terms.
Furthermore, the "steelframework"of the late Roman state, of which Baynes
had spoken, together with the opportunities for advancement opened up in
its newly-created partner, the established Christian church, ensured that a
healthy flow of talent constantly circulated towards the top, bridging the
many potential fissures of a relentlessly-governed but cohesive society.?
The Greek-speaking and oriental provinces of the Eastern Roman empire
were the favored site of this gigantic experiment in government. Jones had
taught at Cairo and was already the author of a History of Ethiopia (Jones
1954). It was from an unmistakably eastern viewing-point that he scanned the
Roman world. If the Western Empire fell, in his opinion, it was not for any
9

Jones 1964; Brown 1967a is as good a summary as any of my late Roman reading and interests, outside Augustine and Roman Africa, up to 1966.

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peculiarly sinister reason: it simply paid the price for having failed to become
a Latin Byzantium. Splendidly absorbed as he was in the master-craftsmanship involved in turning an overwhelming body of late Roman evidence of
all kinds, from all regions and in all languages, into a portrait of a great empire at work, Jones took the overall message of his work for granted. The
message of the book was obvious to those who read it, with enthusiasm, in
1964. The Roman empire had lasted, in its eastern territories, with its frontiers and its administrative apparatus intact, for as long after the conversion
of Constantine as it had lasted before. Christian empire amounted to one
half of the history of imperial Rome. By Jones' workaday criteria, at least, a
large part of the ancient world proved to have been alive and well for three
centuries after Rostovtzeffhad signed its death-warrant.
What needs to be remembered is that, in the Britain of the 1960s, social
mobility (usually associated with some form or other of governmental sponsorship of opportunities) was considered to be an interesting and altogether
desirable phenomenon. The tensions and anxieties that social mobility could
create, the creativity that it might release were the subject of grave sociological, psychological and anthropological attention throughout the Englishspeaking world. Novi homines no longer disgusted us. In fact, we rather liked
them. In 1963, Keith Hopkins' brilliant study of the role of eunuchs at the
imperial court now showed how those figuresonce dismissed as repellent
representatives of an irremediably "orientalized" autocracyfunctioned in
such a manner as to secure for the emperor a larger degree of flexibility and
enterprise in the face of more entrenched, conservative groups (Hopkins
1963). His study of the career of Ausonius emphasized an impressive degree
of social mobility in both the teaching profession and the bureaucracy
(Hopkins 1961,1965). This was not the "vast prison house", the society rigidly stratified into castes by imperial fiat of which we had been told. An English
zest for prosopography, first placed at the center of the study of Roman history by Ronald Syriie's The Roman Revolution, came to turn, with increasing
success, to the later empire, to create a very different picture than we had
possessed before of the recruitment of elites and of the relations between
elites and the imperial court.10
I stress this exciting "growth-point" in English late Roman scholarship because it would provide me with a basic model, securely rooted in social reality, that would help to explain a similar pattern of vertical mobility, up and
down the social and intellectual scale, associated with the rise and diffusion
of religious ideas, and, most especially, with the rise of Christianity. This conviction would eventually enable me, when writing The World of Late Anti10

Matthews 1975 emerged from a thesis written under my supervision.

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quity, to commit with confidence, indeed with palpable enthusiasm, the

hubris of narrating the entire history of the religious and cultural revolution
associated with the end of the ancient world without invoking an intervening
catastrophe and without pausing, for a moment, to pay lip service to the
widespread notion of decay. I proposed a social and cultural history that
could be narrated, from end to end, almost in terms of ever-widening ripples
of change, as different strata of the Roman world, and eventually, indeed,
much of its non-Roman periphery, came to participate in a core of central
concerns. "New" men, from hitherto neglected social groups and regions,
brought with them to the centers of power new ideas, new, distinctly "nonclassical" religious options and, with these, a heightened need to find, within
the continuing classical tradition itself, the basis for a new equilibrium between the old and the new. Put bluntly: from the point of view of religious
and cultural creativity, "the shaking of an ancien regime" could do nothing
but good to a traditional society (Brown 1971b, 37).
The notion of newly-organized empires as agents of quickening fluidity,
which might, in turn, provoke unexpected cultural and religious changes,
gave to The World of Late Antiquity a narrative, and an implied analytic consistency, that enabled me to span centuries and regions. The narrative passed
from the "New Model Army" of the late third century (itself a positive designation for English readers, with its overtones of Cromwellian seriousness), to
the Constantinople of Theodosius II, to the Ctesiphon of Khusro I Anoshirwan and eventually even to the social and cultural origins of the revolution that led to the formation of the Abbasid Califate." In the late 1960s, it
seemed as if the past decades of scholarship on the social and cultural history
of the later Roman empire had taken us not only a long way from the melancholy history of decline and fall, and of decay, that was associated with the
names of Gibbon and Rostovtzeff. It had done more than that. It had taken
us to the edge of a major discovery. It seemed as if it was possible to find, in
the peculiar balance of fluidity and stability that characterized die social
"style" of the later empire, a clue to the unabated religious and cultural ferment which was so marked a feature of other aspects of the period.
I have lingered on the emergence of these opinions. They form one part of
the intellectual structure of The World of Late Antiquity. They are, as it were,
the piles that had already been driven deepest and that seemed to stand most
firmly. But they do not account for the distinctive tone of much of the book
itself. Many of the themes that characterized the central chapters of The
World of Late Antiquity, the themes of religious change which I would develop more fully in subsequent studies, were barely present in my work before
11 Brown 1971b, 24, 141, 165-167, 198.
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1967.12 A reader of the 1990s should have no illusions on this point. The
World of Late Antiquity did not arise as the result of the tranquil working out
of a long-premeditated agenda, like the orderly advance of a regiment complete, from the start, in all its units. Far from it. As I re-read the book, I am
struck by the raw electric "charge" that runs through it, generated by the sudden onrush of new ideas, new problems and new methods, in the very years
in which it came to be written. The book itself marked a new departure for
me.
Put bluntly: the completion of my biography of Saint Augustine, in 1967,
had left me emptied and suffering from an acute feeling of crampedness. I
had lived in harness for too long with the greatest mind in Latin
Christendom. I wanted out. This painful numbness eventually ebbed, finding me at the other end of the Mediterranean. By early 1968, I was learning
classical Hebrew and had begun to read deeply, for the first time, in the
Greek pagan literature of late antiquity. A few years earlier, a rare decision to
bend a little the immemorial rigidity of the Oxford examination system had
led to the creation of an optional subject on "Byzantium and its Northern
and Eastern Neighbors: 527-700 A.D." I was free, at last, to roam the Middle
East with a clear conscience, preparing lectures on Sassanian and early
Islamic history. My study of the diffusion of Manichaeism in the Roman empire reflects the new horizons which that joyeuse chevauche across the Middle
East and Central Asia, from Edessa to Hsian-fu, had opened up for me
(Brown 1969). It is the sudden emergence of a sense, on my part, of the geographical dimensions of late antiquity which should be stressed. Despite my
long engagement with NortJi Africa, it was the social structures of later
Roman empire that had held my attention. Seen, now, from Mesopotamia
and the Iranian plateau, it was the Mediterranean itself which seemed truly
distinctive.
It was time to turn to Pirenne. But Pirenne's Mohammed and Charlemagne, we should remember, was taken for granted in the 1960s. What held
the foreground of my attention, rather, was Fernand Braudel's La Mditerrane et le monde mditerranen l'poque de Philippe IL (Braudel 1949). The
infinite richness ofthat book had not yet begun to flow as fast as it now does,
in the veins of the English and American academic world, as a result of the
superb translation of Sin Reynolds. But it was Braudel's intense, almost
poignant, awareness of the distinctive nature of a Mediterranean climate,
ecology and life-style which suddenly bathed the coastlines of the late antique world, endowing them, for me, with a warmth, with a concreteness and
with a tenacity that seemed rooted in the long rhythms of the landscape it12

See esp. Brown 1971a and 1978.

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self, in a manner that was absent in the brilliant but frail flash of Pirenne's
synthesis. It was Braudel who gave The World of Late Antiquity its coordinates. The inner frontier within the Roman empire, between its Mediterranean and non-Mediterranean regions, now seemed to be a more significant
dividing-line, along which to align the history of the later empire than were
RostovtzefFs stark divisions between town and countryside, solider and civilian. At the end of the period, the triumph of the Abbasids over the
Ummayads could be seen as the long-prepared triumph, in the Middle East
and within Islam itself, of a Mesopotamian and Iranian version of empire at
the expense of a Mediterranean option that still lay so close to the Ummayads of Damascus. The criticisms offered by historians of early Islam struck
me as the most convincing contributions of all to the debate on the Pirenne
Thesis (Brown 1974). They ensured that, in The World of Late Antiquity,
Charlemagne had to step down in favor of Harun al-Rashid, the true heir to
the end of the ancient world.
I was in the right place for such ruminations. It was at Fayence, in the Var,
where I would regularly spend my holidays, diat I received the invitation of
Geoffrey Barraclough to contribute a volume to die Thames and Hudson
Library of European Civilization. I almost missed the commission. I found
Barraclough's letter weeks later, after it had been placed in the hole in the
dry-stone terracing that served as a mail box, blown by die force of the mistrat into the prickly undergrowth of a neighbor's olive-grove. It was when driving across the last porphyry ridges that stood between the mountain and the
sea, on the way to Frjus, that I decided that I could write the book that he
had asked for. The Mediterranean had already given it a shape in my mind.
As for "Late Antiquity" itself, the term was relatively new to me. It may
well be that Barraclough himself suggested the title: his knowledge of
German historiography, in which Sptantike already played a significant role,
makes this likely. I had usually been content with "late Roman". It was the
new geographical spread of my interests that eroded the traditional, political
definition of the field. The cultural and religious phenomena that had come
to concern me crossed widi ease the political boundaries of die Middle East.
They also emerged and developed according to rhythms that were not directly related to the political history of any one empire. Art historians, for whom
the concept o Sptantike had already achieved a definite profile, could teach
me more about the pace and logic of the slow transformations of certain aspeas of the classical tradition and about the rise of exotic forms than did the
brisk, imperial narratives of a Rostovtzeff or a Piganiol (esp. Marrou 1968).
But, above all, die new width of the horizons against which the changes of
die period occurred led me to favor the term "World of Late Antiquity". It
was, after all, possible to write of a buddhistische Sptantike in Central Asia
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(Le Coq 1923). But one could hardly describe the haunting echoes of late
Hellenistic and Iranian themes in the frescoes of Turfan or the Manichaean
and Nestorian fragments discovered in its caves as the relics of a "Buddhist
Later Roman Empire".
Then I found that I had to become, for the first time in my life, a historian of religion. From the recent author ofAugustine of Hippo this may seem a
strange admission. But I had studied Augustine still very much as a renegade
medievalistin Latin and with particular attention to those aspects of his
thought that would endure, in the Latin West, until modern times. His notions of grace and freewill and the distinctive outlines of his views on the relations between the Catholic church and Roman society were what had held
my attention. Of the themes that came to preoccupy me in the 1970s and
1980s, such as monasticism, sexuality and the cult of saints, there is singularly (indeed, shockingly) little trace in that book. Rather I had grazed on the
high ground of an unequalled theologian and master of words.
Religionsgeschichte, as the Germans defined itthe study of the interrelation of the various forms of religious belief and practice current in the ancient Mediterranean worldwas an altogether different matter. I had
touched upon it, but only in passing, in my studies of Manichaeism and so as
to understand the wilder hopes of personal transformation, connected with
conversion and baptism, in Pelagian circles. Coming down from the articulate heights of Augustine, I now found myself in a vernacular Babel, surrounded by innumerable dialects, mostly dispersed and fragmentary, deeply
unverbalized compared with the voice of the master; but yet endowed with
an explosive charge of meaning that was rendered all the more unsettling,
psychologically as well as intellectually, through lacking a convincing social
context and a clearly defined aim and audience. Violent shouts in the dark
from a distant past, they bruised me at a time when I was, in any case,
bruised. Such were the papyri from Nag Hammadi, that had recently begun
to circulate, and the Hermetic treatises to which Festugire had devoted four
masterly volumes (Festugire 1949-1954, 1967). They were joined, in my
reading at that time, by many editions of magical texts and by all the appropriate monographs of the Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten. It
was with some relief that I found the ground rising again, as I encountered
Arthur Darby Nock's extraordinary introduction and edition of Sallustius'
Concerning the Gods and the Universe (Nock 1926), the de Mysteriis of Jamblichus (Jamblichus 1966) and began to savor, for the first time in my life, the
epigraphic commentaries in Louis Robert's Hellenica.
Much of the story of the appropriation of this new world belongs, more
naturally, to a discussion of my work on the rise and function the holy man
in late antiquity, on the Byzantine Iconoclast controversy and on the rise of
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the cult of saints (Brown 1971a, 1973, 1977a, 1981). The World of Late Antiquity marked only the very first stages of what was an entirely new agenda.
Parts of the book, indeed, marked a welcome, somewhat old-fashioned rest
from the new concerns that troubled me increasingly at that time. It is important not to read back too much of my later agenda into the years when
The World of Late Antiquity was conceived and written. What needs to be
stressed is that I had been led into a strange and troublingly unmanageable
world by one memorable book and by one crucial intellectual encounter.
The book, of course, was E.R. Dodds' Pagans and Christians in an Age of
Anxiety, which appeared in 1965, and of which I had already written a review
for the English Historical Review of 1968 (Dodds 1965, Brown 1968b). The
book came, in many ways, as a surprise to me. I had drawn gratefully, at
every stage of my work on Augustine, on Dodds' uncanny sympathy for the
thought of Plotinus and the late Platonic tradition, in both its darkest and its
most serene aspects (esp. Dodds 1947, i960). His The Greeks and the Irrational I regarded as a model of psychoanalytically sensitized history, of the
sort which I considered, at that time, to be essential to any examination of
the nature of religious change in any period of history (Dodds 1963). I admired, if from a shy distance, which Dodds' own unfailing courtesy to a
young person did not fully succeed in bridging, the resolute, almost impish
individualism of a fellow Protestant Irishman in an Oxford environment.
When Dodds gave his Pagans and Christians (originally delivered as the Wiles
Lectures at Belfast) as a course of special lectures at Oxford, it was possible to
glimpse for a moment, in this small man with his protruding, bald head and
silvery, almost disembodied voice, what a late antique pagan might have
seenthat in his serene detachment, the wise man had already, indeed, become a god.
But it was just that which jarred on me in Dodds' book. To put it briefly:
after they had passed beneath his searching, psychoanalytic gaze, the persons
whom we met in The Age of Anxiety were left so isolated from each other, so
alienated from the world around them, so indifferent to the future that it was
quite impossible for the medievalist in me to recognize in them the same persons whom I knew to have been the reformers of empires, the leaders of
churches, the founders of institutions that would endure for millennia
throughout Europe and the Middle East. And when Dodds went on, to cite
with approval the dictum of Festugire, that "misery and mysticism are related phenomena", and to appeal to the Social and Economic History of
Rostovtzeff in support of his contention that
For a world so impoverished intellectually, so insecure materially, so
filled with fear and hatred as the world of the third century, any path
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that promised escape must have attracted serious minds,1'

I knew that I was back where I had begun. The time had come for yet another guerrilL, conducted now, not on the social structure of the later
Roman empire, but on a wider fieldthe role of religion in society in the entire late classical period.
Plainly Dodds and I did not agree as to how, exactly, "serious minds" functioned: what had caused them to express the religious sentiments that they
did and what were the actual consequences for those around them of these
experiences? From a strictly psychoanalytic viewpoint, I found that the
judgements expressed by Dodds (and by similar authors) were old fashioned
and, for that reason, lop-sided. I carefully annotated the passages cited by
Dodds. Those that spoke so insistently of feeling "a stranger" and "alien"
seemed haunted, also, by an incipient sense of "newness". Xenos and kain
ktisis seemed to go together. Could it be that a language which generated a
"desolate sense of not belonging" (Dodds 1965, 21) might function, also, on a
less explicit level, as an idiom of change, with cultural and social implications
which a modern reader might not pick up at a first reading? Certainly, I
could not square the impression given by Dodds, and the principal authors
whom he citedto the effect that this was a time when "daylight reality was
ceasing to be trusted" (Dodds 1965, 45)with the manner in which persons
whose careers I had followed, in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, had
drawn on mighty visions to leave their mark on empires, churches and
learned traditions. What was at issue was a need to decode an alien language
of the psyche, that spoke, in reality, not of escape, so much as of the unexpected welling-up, in disregarded persons and neglected regions, of a new,
fierce sense of agency.
It was a matter of finding the right way to speak of phenomena already
made so vividly present by Dodds and Festugire. It simply shocked me, at
that time, that precisely those persons who could enter with such authority
and fascinated curiosity into the religious world of the second and third centuries A.D., should offer, by way of explanation as to why such thoughts
should happen at that time, judgements that were alternately banal or shrill.
It seemed almost as if the religious changes of the early centuries of late antiquity provoked, even in their most learned exponents, a form of religious
voyeurism. It seemed sufficient to peep, with repelled fascination, as if over
the edge of a great chasm, at the strange forms taken by the irrational, as it
slowly gathered desperate force even in the sunlit days of Marcus Aurelius. I
had come to wonder whether it was possible, rather, to write a history of re13

Dodds 1965, 100.

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ligious ideas and of their meaning and function in the late antique period,
without committing so many gross psychological and sociological faux pas
in blunt English, so many methodological "howlers".
Indeed, I thought that I could. For in late December 1967,1 had a long tea
with Mary Douglas at the Commonwealth Club in London. That first, decisive encounter with Mary Douglas occurred because I had received an invitation from the Association of Social Anthropologists to present a paper at
their annual meeting for 1968, to be held in honor of E. Evans-Pritchard and
devoted to the theme of Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations. I had originally been asked to write on some aspect of the thought of Augustine on evil
and freewill. A reading of Evans-Pritchard s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic
among theAzande and of Mary Douglas' own Purity and Danger had already
tipped the balance of my interest towards a more strictly social account of
late Roman sorceryan account that relied heavily on my notions of social
fluidity in the upper reaches of Roman society. I now saw the religious implications of aspects ofthat fluidity in a new light, thanks to the anthropological insights with which I had just become acquainted.1* It is worth noting
that it was my friend Paul Hyams, a student of medieval English law, who
first brought Purity and Danger to my attention. Such works did not circulate
among ancient historians; but they already spoke directly to those who studied the small, face-to-face societies that had always been the delight of
English historians of medieval law and government.
From that formidable, long tea and from so many later contacts (for instance, I read the manuscript of her Natural SymboL before it appeared in
1970) (Douglas 1970), I learned from Mary Douglas that I must be prepared
to be heroically consequential. Religious statements could not be understood
without reference to the structure of the society in which they occurred.
They were tightly-encoded messages that regulated social interaction. They
reflected social structures by the manner in which they determined forms of
personal interchange, as much with gods as with men, and regulated, with a
silent but firm hand, the possibilities of action on every level, including the
seemingly intimate options of isolated individuals, such as the ability to
speak with a god in dreams, to command a demon, to emerge as a new person from a transforming ritual.
I never totally succumbed to Mary Douglas' demand for utter consequentiality. It always seemed to me that something was lost in the lightning speed
with which she would make connections between ritual, social structure and
possible varieties of religious experience in the charmed bell-jar of her rigorously neo-Durkheimian vision of society. I notice, with a certain shame, how
14

Brown 1970; Evans-Pritchard 1937; see Douglas 1980, Douglas 1966.

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little of my debt to her appears in the footnotes of my work after 1970. But
what I took from her at the time was the thrill of finally having found a way
to overcome the dualism between text and context that had haunted the
study of religion and society in the ancient and medieval worlds. If, in some
sense, varieties of religious experience also reflected, in an intimate if studiously unverbalized manner, varieties of social experience, then the persons
known to us through the agonized and triumphant texts to which Dodds
and Festugire had directed our attention, could be assumed to carry with
them, in the texts themselves, clues as to the social context in which they
moved. Likewise, what we had come to know of the social conditions of the
post-Antonine Roman world needed no longer to be treated as a distant
"background" to religious change, of significance only when some mighty
crash stirred sensitive souls to flight from reason and the world. A more daringly holistic vision of the age might dare to entertain the notion of the constant presence of the social order in the religious world itself, as a mute reflection of fluctuating social structures, some rigid, some increasingly fluid,
that characterized Roman society as a whole, as that society developed, without notable catastrophe, from the age of Marcus Aurelius to that of Justinian.
If that was so, then it was possible to write about as massive and as decisive
a change as the transformation of late classical paganism and the rise of
Christianity without disquiet and without shrill value-judgements, in the
same way as it was possible to follow, without undue foreboding, the slow
emergence, across the Mediterranean and the Middle East, of post-classical
forms of government, of social relations, of urban life and of profane culture.
It would be possible, in fact, to write The World of Late Antiquity.
It is the nature of every book, and most especially of a work of synthesis
such as The World of Late Antiquity, that it should bear the irrevocable imprint not only of the enthusiasms but of the limitations of a specific time and
place. I have outlined the processes that led to its writing in some detail, precisely so that a modern reader should not be tempted to read back into its
pages knowledge and interests which I did not possess, indeed, could not
have imagined, when I wrote it. It is unmistakably a book of the late 1960s. It
reflects with gratitude how far the scholarly tradition on which I chose to
draw had come by that timeso far and no further. We were all, indeed, a
full quarter of a century away from 1997.
My fellow-contributors to this SO Debateso many of whom inspired
me at the time and have continued to do so ever sincewill have their own
opinions as to what has happened in that quarter of a century. So as "to set
the ball rolling", as the English say, let me itemize, very briefly, three principal points on which I myself consider that The World of Late Antiquity falls
short of what a synthesis written in 1997 might offer.
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First: Despite the range of its horizons, the geographical focus of the book
strikes me now as having been too narrow. My decision to place so strong an
emphasis on the distinction between the Mediterranean and non-Mediterranean regions of the empire mirrored, only too faithfully, the hcunae of
late Roman scholarship at that time. It was the survival of the civilian elites
and the religious ferment of the Mediterranean cities and their immediate
hinterlands that concerned us most. We ourselves, and not, perhaps, the
Romans ofthat time, are the ones who should be blamed for having turned
our backs on the North. By effectively excluding the Germans from any role
whatsoever in the social and cultural evolution of the post-imperial West,
Henri Pirenne had given us permission to do so. His perspective was confirmed by the brilliant, Marxist studies of E.A. Thompson. Thompson
stressed throughout the fragility of the northern tribes, the height of the social and economic threshold which they crossed when entering the empire,
and, hence, the ease with which their leaders were assimilated into the solid
structures of landowning around the Mediterranean.1'
What many of us had not discovered, at that time, were the cultural and
social implications of the limes, of the regions adjacent to the Roman frontier. We were less aware than we have now become, of the manner in which
the frontier (on both its Roman and non-Roman sides) had come to form a
distinctive social and cultural unit. It was through the formation of an extensive "Middle Ground" (to use a term that has recently been generated by
studies of the American frontier in the colonial period) (White 1991), and not
through a dialogue between North and Southa dialogue in which the
Mediterranean could be assumed to have invariably held the upper hand
that some of the crucial features of the early medieval West emerged.
I myself have tried to remedy this Ucuna in my recent book, The Rise of
Western Christendom (Brown 1996). It is my amende honorable to the West,
the Cinderella of my narrative in The World of Late Antiquity. But it is not
only the history of the West that is affected by these considerations. Though
hotly debated, Whittakers book on The Frontiers of the Roman Empire has
shown that it is essential to recapture the distinctive human geography of regions far from the Mediterranean.16 From the "Celtic Mediterranean", the
North Britain, Wales and Ireland of the time of Saint Patrick, through the
northern Gaul and the Rhineland of Clovis, to Nubia and the extensive networks of the Banu Lakhm and the Banu Ghassan, these areas have come to
deserve our close attention.1? As Garth Fowden has shown, in his Empire to
15 See esp. Thompson 1956, 1963a, and 1966.
16
Whittaker 1994; see Carri 1995a.
17
Brown 1996, 76-92; Whittaker 1994, 192-278; Anderson 1995; Trk 1989; Shahid 1995.
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Commonwealth, it is the proliferation of Christian kingdoms and Christianized regions on the peripheries of the eastern Roman empire which marks
the difference between the monolithically universal empire of Constantine
and Constantius II and the more loose-knit "Monophysite Commonwealth"
of the late sixth century. Along the "Mountain Arena" of the Middle East,
from Armenia to Yemen and Ethiopia, and in the steppelands of the Fertile
Crescenta long way from the Mediterraneanwe can sense a change in
the pace of empire, through the taking on of quasi-imperial status by so
many Monophysite regions, that is quite as significant, if less blatant and well
known, as that which occurred, at the same time, in the "barbarian" West
(Fowden 1993).
Secondly: My notion of "late antiquity", in the late 1960s, dispensed, prematurely, with the Roman state. It is easy to understand why this was so. The
scholarship of the 1960s had shown that the later Roman empire was not the
totalitarian monster that we had thought it to have been.
Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.18
It was not like that at all. The sense of having cleared up a major historical
misconception gave me the freedom, in the 1970s and 1980s, to pursue
themes of religious and social history with little reference to imperial structures. The empire had become a distant presence when I set about a series of
studies which revelled, as only a former medievalist could revel, in the role of
religion in small, face-to-face communities as far apart as Anatolia, Syria and
Gaul. By the time that I began to write on Power and Persuasion in Late
Antiquity I realized that I had been wrong.1?
I had installed in the back of my mind the principal assumption of Henri
Pirenne, that a defining feature of late antiquity had been the capacity of a
sub-Roman style of life to continue long after the political superstructure of
the Roman empire had disappeared. The relative independence of social life
from its political framework was a comfortable belief, characteristic of a great
cosmopolitan bourgeois such as Pirenne. But I now consider that Pirenne had
misled me. Recent studies, from all directions, if with widely differing degrees of measure or exaggeration, have brought the late Roman state back
into the heart of late Roman society.20
18

W.H. Auden, "The Fall of Rome"; see Bowersock 1995b and 1996.
19 Brown 1992, with the literature in the notes to pp. 17-19.
20
See esp. Wickham 1984 and 1988; Durliat 1990; Haldon 1993.
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This is largely because we have come to look at different phenomena. In

the debate on the nature of the late Roman state, in the 1960s, the later empire had been placed on the scales and received a guarded bill of good health:
it was declared to have been top-heavy, but not grossly overweight. In the intervening years, modern historians of all periods have become notably more
subtle on the nature of power. What is now stressed is the nature of the "presence" of the state, and the habits of mind and behavior that this "presence"
induced. Seen in these terms, the century that follows the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine can be acclaimed, without any sense of deprecation,
as the apogee of the Roman state. The ability to make itself present to its subjects, after 300 A.D., is all the more impressive in the light of recent evidence,
from as far apart as Augsburg and the Euphrates, of how close the empire had
come to disintegration.21 The imperial laws, for instance, are now allowed to
speak for themselves. They are no longer panned for nuggets of fact, as Jones
had done in 1964. Their tone of voice is impressive. As Marie Thrse Fgen
has shown, in the case of imperial legislation on magic, we are dealing with a
bid to monopolize knowledge, to generalize and to define, that had hitherto
been absent (Fgen 1993). Not only did the empire preach its own notions of
the social order as persistently as did any Christian bishop; the unremitting
presence of the tax-collector, and the cultural practices that this presence fos- .
tered, had the effect of widening the range of literacy, even so far as to provoke the origins of a Coptic literature, in a manner that no Christian church
could equal (Hopkins 1991).
Looking back, I should have been yet more consequential, as Mary
Douglas had urged me to be. What strikes me, on re-reading the chapters in
The World of Late Antiquity devoted to the rise of Christianity, is the extent to
which they were dominated by my concern with the internal dynamics of
small groups in what I presumed to be a fluid social world. What was lacking
in those chapters was a sense of the presence of the Invisible State. There was
no attempt to catch the sharp flavor of the notion of a monotheism, rendered
universal through the possession of a single, written Law. The commissioners
of the Great Persecution, who caused the "Divine Law" of the Christian
Scriptures to be burned in public at the command of the emperor, understood a truly crucial aspect of the period that I barely touched upon in The
World of Late Antiquity, the relation between monotheism, literacy and the
status of sacred texts. Quite frankly, at the time, it was difficult to speak of
the theme of monotheism and universalism without lapsing into grandiose
and teleological terms, such as those used by Adolf Harnack in his Mission
und Ausbreitung. Now it is possible to return, in a more humble and crafts21

Potter 1990; Strobel 1993; Lavagne 1994; Feissel and Gascou 1995.

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manlike manner, to follow the implications, on every level, of the one, crucial change associated with late antiquity: the emergence of monotheism in a
polytheist world.
Third: I now think that the model of social fluidity that I had adopted
with such zest was too narrow and assumed too simple a structure of late
Roman society to bear the weight that I had placed upon it. I have made
plain why I favored such a model in the 1960s and applied it so persistently
throughout The World of Late Antiquity. It is worthwhile to linger on some of
the aspects of late antiquity that this model excluded.
In the first place, I had adopted wholeheartedly a largely "instrumentalized" view of the secular culture of the late antique elites. I was content to
treat this culture as a badge of status and as a factor in the homogenization of
a newly-established governing class. In the second chapter of my Power and
Persuasion I have tried to take the paideia of late antiquity more seriously. It
carried a moral and quasi-legal weight of its own, as heavy and as penetrating
as the courtoisie of a medieval nobleman (Brown 1992, 35-70). When I dealt
with the moral grooming of the late classical elites in the 1960s, I could not
have imagined the recent explosion of interest in "techniques of the self",
which has come to be associated with the name of Michel Foucault.
I myself moved slowly in that direction. It was not until the end of the
1970s that my own work abandoned the largely "functional", even "instrumentalist", view of religion and culture of which The World of Late Antiquity
offered a foretaste. I can produce, if needs be, a valid methodological certificate to justify my change of view. By moving to America in 1978,1 found myself in an intellectual atmosphere very different from that of Britain, and was
brought into contact with very different problems and approaches.22 But,
looking back, I think that the change had much to do, simply, with growing
up. An intellectual style that had revelled in the cunning of small communities, as they drew on holy things and holy persons to solve their day-to-day
problems, gave way to greater interest in the quality of the love and loyalty
that such holy persons might inspire (whether living or in the grave) and, ultimately, to a concern with the hard labor on the self implied in the late antique Christian call to holiness. I came to know of Foucault's work on sexuality, and to know him personally, only after I had begun to plan The Body
and Society (Brown 1988a). The truly decisive influence, at that time, was a
figure whose work Foucault and I were of one mind in admiring deeply
Pierre Hadot. The rousing essay that gave the title to his book, Exercices spiritueh et philosophie antique (now available, with other papers, in English, as
Philosophy as a Way of Life), enabled me to feel for the first timeas his earli22 Brown 1983, 1015, offers a partial account of these changes.
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er work on neo-Platonism had not donethe human weight and urgency of

those classical texts that spoke of philosophy as a commitment to personal
transformation.2?
But that was a full decade after the writing of The World of Late Anquity.
It coincided with a dam-burst of religious studies of late antiquity, that were
characterized by an interest in the more resolutely "existential" aspects of the
period. Studies of asceticism, of the body, of attitudes to sexuality and to gender tended to eclipse the theological and philosophical concerns of an earlier
generation, and even to swing those concerns into their own orbit. When
this flood has subsided a little, it will be possible, at last, to add, with greater
subtlety and without praise or blame, a section to The World of Late Antiquity
that had been notably absent at the timea history of the "behavioral revolution" provoked by the rise of ethical monotheism in societies committed,
for obscure reasons that by no means coincide with the spread of Christian
belief, to a new, brisker and more universal sense of order.
Secondly, I am acutely aware that our image of late Roman society has become immeasurably more differentiated. Though modified by prolonged debate with RostovtzefFand Frend, The World of Late Antiquity remained organized around the stark sociological dichotomies brought to our attention by
their work. Town and countryside, elite and masses, classical and non-classical: they now coexisted in a more fluid, less confrontational manner than
RostovtzefFand Frend had suggested; but they were still there, in the back of
my mind, as charged opposites. This has changed. On the ground level, for
instance, the remarkable extension of archaeology in the Near East has
caused Turkey, Syria, Israel, Palestine and Jordan to rival North Africa as the
favored terrain of the social and cultural historian of late antiquity. We now
have a far more differentiated, more regional vision of the period (Tte 1992;
Foss 1995). The great villages and cultic centers of Syria can hardly be labelled
as "rural"; nor can their religious life be viewed only as the locus of refreshingly "non-classical" forms of Christianity, destined to rise, like so many bubbles, to oxygenize the higher reaches of the Greek, Byzantine world (Mango
1992; Gatier 1994). In the same way, the many different forms of asceticism
practiced in late Roman Egypt have come to take on distinctive profiles, as
we come to an ever more differentiated view of the complexity of the cultural and social life of the province.2* We are recovering the sheer complexity of
the human geography of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and, with
it, a cultural, religious and social landscape whose variety had been flattened
by the massive antitheses invoked by scholars such as Rostovtzeff and Frend.
23 Hadot 1981, 13-58; on Hadots view of the difference between his own notion of "Souci de
Soi" and that of Foucault, see Hadot 1989.
24 Bagnall 1993; Elm 1994, 331-372; Wipszycka 1994; Brakke 1995.
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At the top of late Roman society, among the elites, I myself soon abandoned the theme which gave narrative coherence, even a sinister sense of drama, to my account of the eventual erosion of the classical tradition among
the scholar-gentry of East Rome.2' This view was based on too simple a
model of society and of the Christian culture of the time. For this reason, I
have come to appreciate the shift towards a more strictly "cognitive", discourse-oriented history of the last centuries of late antiquity, so ably advanced by Averil Cameron (Cameron 1991,1992). "Totalizing discourse" may
seem, to some, to be a somewhat airy term. But, as used by Averil Cameron,
the term does justice to our growing impression of the distinctive quality of
the later period of late antiquityespecially the sixth and seventh centuries.
Alas, we may yet have to coin the term sptere Sptantike to do justice to a decisive shift within the continuum of ancient Christianity itself. In The World
of Late Antiquity, I had been particularly concerned to emphasize the elements of continuity that had linked features of the late antique world of the
fourth and fifth centuries to their distant roots in the classical, Roman past.
In so doing, I looked backwards, by calling into question the notion of the
"crisis of the third century". But, as Robert Markus has made plain for the
Latin West, it is quite as important to look forwardsto study the changes
that came about between the age of Augustine and that of Gregory the Great.
The processes that took place in those, later centuries of late antiquity
amounted to nothing less than "The End of Ancient Christianity" (Markus
1990). Similar changes happened also in the East. The re-grouping of the east
Roman cities around their bishop and their new shrines was only part of a
process, begun in the fifth century and continued far beyond the reign of
Justinian, by which an entire civilization came to be caught in the light but
tenacious net of Christian words.26 Taken together, the work of Walter
Goffart, in the West (Goffart 1988), and of Averil Cameron, in the East, seem
to have placed the ideological content of Christianity itself at the center of
late antiquity. The rise of Christianity, in their opinion, was the cause of a
cognitive revolution, of a re-naming of all ancient categories, that reached its
fulfillment in the sixth century, compared with which barbarian invasions
and the creaking of the late Roman state seem of merely secondary, quotidian importance.
I do not know if I would wish to follow such an approach through to its
more extreme conclusions. What I have found myself to have abandoned is
the tendency to privilege the Christian church in many of the developments
that characterize the late antique period. I no longer regard Christianity as
the principal agent in the diffusion of a more adaptable form of classical cul25

Brown 1971b, 181-182; Brown 1973.

26 Brown 1992, 146-152; Feissel 1989.
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ture to previously marginal groups and regions. The spreading of a form of

classical culture by the Christian church appeared to me, in the 1960s, to be
pan of a process of the "democratization of culture", which struck me as a
central feature of late antique civilization as a whole. Such a view certainly
made better sense of certain central, shared features of the Christian culture
of the Middle East in the early Byzantine period than did an exclusive emphasis on the irreconcilably anti-Hellenic, anti-classical aspects of the "local"
Christianities of Syria and Egypt. But Christianity was not the only agent of
this diffusion of Hellenic cultural forms. The delight and admonition to the
thoughtful conveyed by Glen Bowersock's Hellenism in Late Antiquity was
precisely to have shown the extent to which a non-Christian Hellenism had
continued to provide a universal language for the many local, non-Christian
religions of the Middle East, giving a Greek face even to the aniconic gods of
the Arabian peninsula (Bowersock 1990).
Nor can every feature of the regional Christianities of the time be reduced
to the extension, to them, of the sub-classical styles of a Mediterranean
Christian core. In many sectors of society, "democratization" met solid conglomerates of local cultural and religious styles. The Hermetic treatises had
been presented by Festugire as containing little more than a "popPlatonism", downwardly-mobile echoes of the high, Greek culture of the
time. Garth Fowden's The Egyptian Hermes has shown conclusively that such
a view seriously underestimates the Egyptian, priestly element in them
(Fowden 1986). In the same manner, the study of central narratives of
Christianization in the Roman world, from Armenia and Georgia to Egypt
and Ireland, reveals how these narratives take on significantly different forms,
through a fascinating re-interpretation of a universal theme in terms of
strong local "representations".^
Last but not least, I myself have come to relish many of the phenomena
that lie, radier, in the penumbra of the texts of the late antique world. These
are only too often rendered invisible by the glare of triumphant or polemical
narratives. My recent book, Authority and the Sacred, attempts to draw attention to those mute areas, such as the religious bricokge between Christian
and non-Christian practice which occurred, along an extensive "Middle
Ground" that is all but invisible to us in Christian texts (Brown 1995a).
I have also come to relish the profane traditions of festival and good cheer,
from the widespread and persistent feast of the Kalends of January to the extraordinary re-organization of the circus factions that took place in the late
antique period. Indeed, the emergence of the circus factions seems to me to
have involved no small degree of civic bravado, in fostering the competitive
27

Thlamon 1981; Garsoian 1982; Rssel 1987; Stevenson 1990.

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aggression of young males throughout an empire deeply concerned, on other

levels, with the issue of unity and civil order (Meslin 1970; Rouch 1993).
Such phenomena cannot be neatly pigeonholed by the religious historian as
"pagan" or "Christian", nor by the sociologist as "elite" or "popular". I miss
their presence, as a mighty third force, in the pages of The World of Late
Antiquity. I now look with different eyes on the illustrations that I assembled
and captioned at the time. These illustrations speak not only of the vivid balance of classical and exotic, pagan and Christian in the late antique world,
but of the swaggering "pride of the world" of the homme moyen sensuel, which
is the most faceless, but most steadying, gravitational force in any great traditional civilization.
I have raised these three principal points not because they exhaust my
sense of the distance between the resources of our present scholarship and
The World of Late Antiquity, but so as to initiate a dialogue. In the same spirit,
I have introduced a strong autobiographical emphasis into my account of the
processes that led to the writing of that book, of the choices that I made at
that time and the implied limitations which these choices eventually imposed on me. I do not do this out of egotism, but radier out of an acute sense
of human limitations. What a review article must not communicate is a false
image of the scholar at work. However much we may relish the notion, no
scholar hovers above an entire field, as effortlessly and as noiselessly as a
hang-glider. There is much untidy crashing in the undergrowth. Much effort
is expended on false paths. One is tragically aware of the limits of one's field
of vision, and, for that reason, deeply and gratefully dependent on others, on
the work of colleagues and on current trends in other disciplines, to find
one's way to some small rise in the ground, from which to gain a fresh viewing point. To suggest otherwisethat scholarship is not an effort, that it does
not involve a hard and idiosyncratic labor of the mind, which academic
"schools" of research and current, interdisciplinary methodologies might facilitate but can never render unnecessarywould lead to the most deadening
of all forms of conformity: not to the conformity of the mediocre, but to the
dangerous conformity of the intelligent and the successful, of those confident
of the complete ease of their control of the field and of the instant efficacy of
their current methodology. It is far better to find, in the mutual collaboration
of scholars in a field so wide and so diverse that we must always depend upon
each other, the rarest form of tolerance: a truly late antique form of tolerance,
that is, based on a healthy sense of awe for something bigger than ourselvesUno itinere non potest perveniri ad tam grande secretum.2^
Princeton University
28

Symmachus, Relatio 3.9.