Peter R. L. Brown

The author published this book in 1971, intended as an extended essay to bring attention to the late Roman Empire. He summarizes the complex history of this time in a very entertaining way, telling stories of priests, generals and ordinary people during times of warfare and peace, while explaining the great changes in thought, social structure and religion that occurred in this time. He explains why this period is so different that Medieval times.
Until the late 4th century, the western empire remained largely under the control of the senatorial classes who controlled great estates, and maintained the pagan traditions in Rome. (The vestal virgins were disestablished in 382 AD). They were patrons of the people and negotiated with the imperial tax collectors. In Greece, city states maintained schools of philosophers who studied Plato, and authors like Plotinus infused Christian doctrine with Platonic thought. Educated pagans believed in one high god, like the distant Roman emperor, with many local gods like provincial governors.
In the period around 250 AD all of empire’s frontiers collapsed, and the core of the empire was saved by emperors who started as soldiers on the Danube frontier (like Diocletian), and who remade the Roman army, but at great expense paid for by burdensome taxation.
Christianity continued to expand its power, with bishops taking over administration of cities, and nobleman increasingly moving into the administration of the Church. In the 4th century, Syrian monks and holy men like Simeon Stylites became arbiters and judges in disputes. The populace thought of them as a bulwark against the myriad of demons that caused illness and misfortune.
The gnostics were an early variant of Christianity, active in the second century AD. The name comes from their emphasis on “knowing” the truth of god without mediation by revelation or the Church. Their belief in a remote unapproachable God who spawned a lesser evil spirit resembled Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism active in the Persian empire.
In the early sixth century, the emperor Justinian and his general Belisarius reconquered much of North Africa, the Balkans and Ravenna, which had become the seat of the western empire and later an Ostrogothic kingdom in northern Italy. All these gains were lost with the revelation of Islam in the Arabian peninsula, and the Islamic armies that conquered Syria, Persian, North Africa and Persia. This essay claims that the Arabs left intact the mercantile Christian greek world of Syria and the Near East, although most people learned Arabic. Further east, in Iraq, Baghdad was founded in 752 within 50 miles of the ancient Persian capital Ctesiphon, and the eastern Arabs absorbed and became Persian. The nominally Islamic kings continued to worship Zoroaster and tolerated Nestorian christians
The Christian church in Italy and the west, in the 4th century, became more exclusive and aristocratic after suffering persecution for longer than the churches in Syria and Asia. The author writes: “Like many minorities they had reacted to this situation by treating themselves as a superior elite”
After the sack of Rome in 410, the emperor Theodosius erected a great wall around Constantinople. It was not breached until 1453. The emperor and his advisors decided political, military and religious matters in the Silenton, the Hall of Silence in Constantinople, and the people of the city continued to enjoy Imperial parades and staged combats.… (more)

I enjoyed Brown’s dense prose, and this is both engagingly written as well as packed with interesting information and references. The main focus of this book is on the continuation of paideia among the aristocratic elite, and the transference of the practice of parrhésia from the philosophers to the bishops as the Roman Empire became Christianized – the book deals mainly with the eastern provinces however. While Brown makes repeated references and comparisons with the decorum found in connection with the autocracy of 17th century France, there’s only little mention of, or comparisons made, with the paideia of the early Greek city states, or the Graeco-Roman world in general, in the centuries leading up to the period of late antiquity discussed in this book – except, indirectly, when briefly discussing (the image of) earlier philosophers in the subchapter about parrhésia. Brown also mentions only as an aside that parrhésia was never simply the exclusive domain of philosophers, without getting much further into that. Also, the way Brown presents it, you could easily get the impression that the Christian bishops were the first to ever give any attention to the existence of the noncitizen, and, as well, that this had never been used as a political argument before. However, he does show how increased immigration and urbanization lead to an upsurge of the noncitizen class in the East Roman cities, making it a more pressing social issue, along with that of underemployment, and how the bishops became "Controllers of the Crowds" (p. 103) and developed this argument (on behalf of the masses of noncitizens and abject poor; noncitizens were not necessarily poor) into a stance of moral authority, as representatives of the general populace, because "before the emperor, as before God, all subjects were poor" (p. 154).– Make no mistake about it; perhaps complementing the title of his book, Brown aims to persuade, and he generally manages well with that within the narrow focus of this study – yet, just because of its narrowness, it appears to some degree incomplete. Still, within its own limit, this is a noteworthy and compelling analysis.




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.… (more)