TRANSFORMAtIONS OF LAtE ANtIQUItY

Peter Brown
Transformations of Late Antiquity
Essays for Peter Brown

PHIlIp ROUSSEAU
Catholic University of America, USA

MANOlIS PApOUtSAKIS
Princeton University, USA
First published 2009 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Transformations of late antiquity : essays for Peter Brown
1. Civilization, Classical 2. Rome – Civilization – Influence
I. Brown, Peter Robert Lamont II. Rousseau, Philip III. Papoutsakis, Emmanuel
937'.09

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Transformations of late Antiquity : essays for Peter Brown / edited by Philip Rousseau
and Emmanuel Papoutsakis.
p. cm.
Festschrift.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-7546-6553-3 (alk. paper)
1. Rome—Civilization—Influence. 2. Civilization, Classical—Influence.
I. Brown, Peter Robert Lamont. II. Rousseau, Philip. III. Papoutsakis, Emmanuel.

DG77.T73 2008
937'.09—dc22
2008016618

ISBN 9780754665533 (hbk)

 Contents

Contributors vii
Editors’ Preface: Philip Rousseau and Manolis Papoutsakis ix
Abbreviations  xiii
Peter Brown: Select Bibliography xv

I Between Marrou and Brown: Transformations of Late Antique
Christianity 1
Robert Markus

II Old and New Rome: Roman Studies in Sixth-Century
Constantinople 15
Averil Cameron

III Old and New Rome in the Late Antique Near East 37
Glen Bowersock

IV Regulations for an Association of Artisans from the Late Sasanian
or Early Arab Period 51
Sebastian Brock

V Crosses, Icons and the Image of Christ in Edessa: The Place of
Iconophobia in the Christian–Muslim Controversies of
Early Islamic Times 63
Sidney H. Griffith

VI Alle origini della tradizione pagana su Costantino e il senato
romano 85
Rita Lizzi Testa

VII Four Funerals and a Wedding: This World and the Next in
Fourth-Century Rome 129
John Matthews

VIII Les réticences de saint Augustin face aux légendes hagiographiques 
d’après la lettre Divjak 29* 147
Claude Lepelley

vi Transformations of Late Antiquity

IX Language, Morality and Cult: Augustine and Varro 159

Philip Rousseau

X A World Full of Stories 177
Charlotte Roueché

XI Safe-Conducts to Heaven: Holy Men, Mediation and the Role
of Writing 187
Claudia Rapp

XII Book Burning as Purification 205
Judith Herrin

XIII Gregorio Magno e i ‘Libri dei Re’ 223
Lellia Cracco Ruggini e Giorgio Cracco

XIV The Late Antique Origins of the Lunatic Asylum? 259
Peregrine Horden

XV Family Men: Masculinity and Philosophy in Late Antiquity 279
Susanna Elm

XVI Radegundis peccatrix: Authorizations of Virginity in Late
Antique Gaul 303
Julia M.H. Smith

XVII Gemistus Plethon and Platonic Political Philosophy 327
Peter Garnsey

Index  341
 Contributors

Glen Bowersock: Professor Emeritus of Ancient History, Institute for Advanced

Study, Princeton.

Sebastian Brock: Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and Emeritus

Reader in Syriac Studies.

Averil Cameron: Warden of Keble College, Oxford, and Professor of Late Antique
and Byzantine History.

Giorgio Cracco: Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Università degli Studi di

Torino. Lellia Cracco Ruggini is Professor at the same University.

Susanna Elm: Professor of History and Classics, University of California,

Berkeley.

Peter Garnsey: Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and Professor Emeritus of

the History of Classical Antiquity.

Sidney H. Griffith: Professor and Chair in the Department of Semitic and Egyptian
Languages and Literatures, Catholic University of America.

Judith Herrin: Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, King’s College
London.

Peregrine Horden: Professor of Medieval History, Royal Holloway College

London.

Claude Lepelley: Professor Emeritus of Roman History, Université de Paris X

(Nanterre).

Rita Lizzi Testa: Professor of Roman History, Università degli Studi di Perugia.

Robert Markus: Professor Emeritus, University of Nottingham.

John Matthews: John M. Schiff Professor of Classics and Roman History,

Yale University.
viii Transformations of Late Antiquity

Manolis Papoutsakis: Lecturer in Syriac and Classical Armenian Languages and

Literatures, Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University.

Claudia Rapp: Professor of History, University of California, Los Angeles.

Charlotte Roueché: Professor of Classical and Byzantine Greek and Head of the
Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, King’s College London.

Philip Rousseau: Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Early Christian Studies, Catholic

University of America.

Julia M.H. Smith: Edwards Professor of Medieval History, University of

Glasgow.
 Editors’ Preface

This book focuses on a simple dynamic: the taking in hand of a heritage, the variety
of changes induced within it, and the handing on of that legacy to new generations.
Our contributors suggest, from different standpoints, that this dynamic represented
the essence of ‘Late Antiquity’. Historians of that period are still sometimes seen
as idealists, wishing to claim for the age a distinctive character beyond its reach.
Does one not have to admit in the end that ‘Late Antiquity’ remains what it always
was, the demise of an ancient culture incapable of understanding the novelties
that threatened its survival? ‘Decline’ remains, does it not, unchallenged, and the
‘medieval’ (albeit ‘early’) and the ‘Byzantine’ retain the note of difference and
disruption?
Increasingly few would now believe it so. There was a real sense, among men
and women of the late third and fourth centuries, that behind them in time there
stretched an ancient world – or rather, worlds – where their roots might lie, but in
relation to which they were embarked on new endeavours. They were indebted;
they were obliged to be loyal; but they were not conditioned or restricted. As
Roman society, and the societies by which it was immediately bounded, continued
to develop, through to the late sixth and early seventh centuries, the interplay
between what needed to be treasured and what needed to be explored became
increasingly self-conscious, versatile and enriched. By the time formerly alien
peoples had established their ‘post-classical’ polities, and Islam began to stir in
the East, the novelties were more clearly seen, if not always welcomed; and one
witnesses a stronger will to maintain the momentum of change, of a forward reach.
At the same time, those in a position to play now the role of heirs were well able
to appreciate how suited to their needs the ‘Roman’ past might be, but how, by
taking it up in their turn, they were more securely defined and yet more creatively
advantaged.
The peoples of Late Antiquity were like the members of a great industrial
dynasty in our own era. They were the grateful beneficiaries of earlier skills,
techniques and labours. They were then able to enhance the potential of their
inheritance and apply it even beyond the bounds of their own culture. Thus they
invested, and with time allowed others to invest, in a world beyond the imagining
of those pioneers a century or more before them. This is what we mean by the
mechanism that inherits, transforms and bequeaths.
‘Transformation’ is a notion apposite to essays in honour of Peter Brown.
‘The transformation of the classical heritage’ is a theme to which he has devoted,
and continues to devote, much energy. The character of our book is, however,
special. Peter has been offered many volumes in recent years; volumes devoted in
particular to the fortunes of Late Antiquity as a discipline, and to the ‘holy man’
 Transformations of Late Antiquity

that he examined with such novel perception. Our own collection is, we think,
more intimate and less declamatory. Seventy is a noteworthy age, and much less
ominous than it used to be; and a quiet birthday gift is what we have collected,
a token of our gratitude, respect and affection. He has instructed all of us in one
way or another; but even more forceful is the sense that we share with him a
grander tradition, rooted in the work of Momigliano, Syme, Marrou, Baynes,
Bury, Mommsen and ultimately Gibbon.
It is also rooted in Augustine – another suitable association. Among his many
gifts, Augustine was par excellence a man who understood memory. His power
of recollection was markedly free of nostalgia. For him, memoria was a force that
drove him forward. He puts it well in book seven of the City of God:

One who engages in an activity ought to keep both beginning and end in view;
anyone who does not look back to the beginning throughout a course of action,
does not look forward to the end. Hence it necessarily follows that an intention
which looks ahead depends on a recollection which looks back; and a man who
forgets what he has begun will not discover how to finish.

This insistent association of intentio and memoria conjures exactly the dynamic
we have in mind. Memoria is not a place of retreat, but a source of creative novelty,
summed up in the urgency of intentio.
Now, it would be foolish to force the essays in this collection into a simplistic
straightjacket. The scholarly experience that they display makes inevitable a
richness, a breadth of allusion, within each one of them. Yet all their reflections
relate to the work of Peter Brown himself, and each contributor explores in some
way the notion of transformation – the late antique ability to turn the past to new
uses; to set its wealth of principle and insight to work in new settings.
We open the collection with a tour of the historiographical scene. Robert
Markus reminds us of the scholarly traditions we share with Brown himself;
traditions that have effected a transformation of their own, which has made ‘Late
Antiquity’ mean much that is new, precisely during the years in which we have all
worked, alongside our colleague. Then we have chapters by Averil Cameron and
Glen Bowersock that explore the very notion of what it meant to be ‘Roman’, and
how that notion changed. Sebastian Brock and Sidney Griffith (already anticipated
in general terms by Glen Bowersock) then provide illustrative vignettes, showing
how the post-Roman Orient provided precisely a workshop within which practices
and attitudes typical of an earlier age were allowed to take on new complexions in
the world of Islam.
Rita Lizzi, John Matthews and Susanna Elm suggest ways in which fundamental
characteristics of Roman society – specifically, structural relations within the
governing elite, the aristocractic values of the senatorial order, and the conduct
of family relations and the ‘philosophic life’ – were, in spite of a strong sense of
tradition, given new form, not least under the impact of a Christian polity.
 Editors’ Preface xi

Claude Lepelley and Philip Rousseau then tackle issues relating to Augustine,
emphasizing the unfettered stance that he took in the face of more broadly held
convictions; in this case, concerning miracles and the errors of the pagan past.
Of course, he reflected deep Christian principle; but he qualified constantly the
simpler forms of credence and rejection that he detected among some fellow
believers. A balanced view of the natural world and an appropriate respect for the
pagan era’s cultural legacy were thus safeguarded.
Charlotte Roueché, Claudia Rapp and Judith Herrin then venture further along
the cultural axis, observing how Christians in particular continued to negotiate not
only over pagan legacies but over the very definition of what a Christian culture
should look like – how it made use of its own sacred texts, how it honoured those
figures who might seem at first sight to question the value of erudition, how it coped
with the dangerous liberty that literary skill might foster. We sense something
of the tension that was sustained beneath the surface of polished exegesis and
authoritative doctrine.
Gregory the Great stands, in the western narrative, as the doorkeeper to a later
age in so many respects. Aristocratic in his background, monastic in his inclination,
classical in his learning (and, in that, interestingly dependent on Augustine),
he seems the late ancient figure who most bravely, perhaps, acknowledged the
likely shape of things to come, and marshalled the biblical, psychological and
administrative achievements of the past two centuries to cater for a society in
Italy and beyond that was plague-ridden and economically depressed, alarmed by
the uncertainties that afflicted it, and required to cope with a barbarian presence
more forceful than anything visited earlier upon the West by the Goths. Three
scholars (Lellia and Giorgio Cracco, and Peregrine Horden) examine his notions
of leadership and authority and his subtle understanding of the inner life.
Finally, Julia Smith and Peter Garnsey carry us into worlds that are more
clearly post-classical, clearly medieval and Byzantine. Julia Smith’s ‘holy’ ones
have come a long way since the men and women discussed by Susanna Elm and
Claudia Rapp; and yet there is a reminiscence, a lingering imitatio, that allows to
Peter Brown’s exemplars long familiar habits, even when the self-image of saints
and their understanding of social relationships have been forced to develop and
operate in changed circumstances. Peter Garnsey, firmly placed in a later eastern
milieu, surprises us with the antique character of the civic and material culture of
the high Byzantine period, and reminds us that philosophy, in its classical sense,
continued to govern the exercise of economic and political power.
These are all topics that Peter Brown has explored, and the essays presented
here continue, as it were, a discussion that we have all enjoyed for decades
now, stimulated and guided by one another, and by our own particular scholarly
forebears, but enriched by the exciting insights and suggestions of the friend and
teacher we here honour.
This page intentionally left blank
 Abbreviations

ANRW Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt

BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
Byz. Forsch. Byzantinische Forschungen
BZ Byzantinische Zeitschrift
CC, ser. lat Corpus Christianorum, series latina
CIL Corpus inscriptionum latinarum
CSCO Corpus scriptorum christianorum orientalium
CSEL Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum
FGrH Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker
FHG Fragmenta historicorum graecorum
GCS Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten
Jahrhunderte
ILS H. Dessau, Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
JRA Journal of Roman Archaeology
MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica
PG J.-P. Migne, Patrologia graeca
PL J.-P. Migne, Patrologia latina
PLRE Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire
RE Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyklopädie der klassischen
Altertumswissenschaft
SHA Scriptores historiae augustae
This page intentionally left blank
 Peter Brown: Select Bibliography

Books

Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (London: Faber / Berkeley, CA: University of

California Press, 1967)
Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (London: Faber, 1972)
– collected articles
The World of Late Antiquity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971; repr. with
revised bibliography, New York: Harcourt Brace 1989)
The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978)
The Cult of the Saints (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)
Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (London: Faber / Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press 1982) – collected articles
Genèse de l’Antiquité tardive (Paris: Gallimard, 1983) – translation of The Making
of Late Antiquity with preface and revised footnotes
The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)
Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison,
WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992)
A Szentkultusz (Budapest: Atlantisz, 1993) – Hungarian translation of The Cult of
the Saints with a new preface
Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000 (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996; repr. 1997 with footnotes)
Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, reprint of 1967 edn with Epilogue (London:
Faber / Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000)
Geç antikçagda Roma ve Bizans Dünyasi (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfi, 2000)
– Turkish translation of the revised edn of The World of Late Antiquity, with a
historiographical epilogue
Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (Hanover, NH: University of
New England Press, 2002)
The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000 – 2nd
edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003)
xvi Transformations of Late Antiquity

Articles

‘Palestine and the Making of Christianity’, in The Concise Encyclopedia of World

History, ed. John Bowle (London: Hutchinson, 1958): 122–45
‘Sutri (Sutrium), 701785: Chapel of San Giovanni “a Pollo”’ Papers of the British
School at Rome 36 (1958): 127–9
‘Religious Dissent in the Later Roman Empire: the Case of North Africa’, History
46 (1961): 83–101, repr. in Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine
‘Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman Aristocracy’, Journal of Roman
Studies 51 (1961): 1–11, repr. in Religion and Society in the Age of Saint
Augustine
‘Religious Coercion in the Later Roman Empire: the Case of North Africa’,
History 48 (1963): 283–305, repr. in Religion and Society in the Age of Saint
Augustine
Review of The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century,
ed. A.D. Momigliano, Oxford Magazine (16 May 1963): 300–301, repr. in
Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine
Review of Kirche und Staat im Spätrömischen Reich, by H.J. Diesner, Journal of
Theological Studies n.s. 15 (1964): 409–11, repr. in Religion and Society in the
Age of Saint Augustine
‘St Augustine’s Attitude to Religious Coercion’, Journal of Roman Studies 54
(1964): 107–16, repr. in Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine
‘Saint Augustine’, in Trends in Medieval Political Thought, ed. Beryl Smalley
(Oxford 1965): 1–21, repr. in Religion and Society in the Age of Saint
Augustine
Review of Donatisten und Katholiken, by E. Tengström, Journal of Roman Studies
55 (1965): 281–83, repr. in Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine
‘The Later Roman Empire’, Economic History Review, Essays in Bibliography
and Criticism, 56 2nd ser. 20 (1967): 327–43, repr. in Religion and Society in
the Age of Saint Augustine
‘Approaches to the Religious Crisis of the Third Century A.D.’, English Historical
Review 83 (1968): 54–258, repr. in Religion and Society in the Age of Saint
Augustine
‘Christianity and Local Culture in Late Roman Africa’, Journal of Roman Studies
58 (1968): 85–95, repr. in Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine
‘Pelagius and his Supporters: Aims and Environment’, Journal of Theological
Studies n.s. 19 (1968): 93–114, repr. in Religion and Society in the Age of Saint
Augustine
Review of Das Ende des Kaisertums im Westen des römischen Reichs, by
M.A. Wes, Rivista Storica Italiana 80 (1968): 1018–22, repr. in Religion and
Society in the Age of Saint Augustine
‘The Diffusion of Manichaeism in the Roman Empire’, Journal of Roman Studies
59 (1969): 92–103, repr. in Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine
 Peter Brown: Select Bibliography xvii

Review of The Transformation of the Roman World: Gibbon’s Problem after Two
Centuries, ed. Lynn White, Jr, History 54 (1969): 248–50, repr. in Religion and
Society in the Age of Saint Augustine
Review of The Great Church in Captivity: A Study of the Patriarchate of
Constantinople from the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of
Independence, by Steven Runciman, Oxford Magazine (20 June 1969): 380–1,
repr. in Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine
‘Sorcery, Demons and the Rise of Christianity: from Late Antiquity into the
Middle Ages’, Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations: Association of Social
Anthropologists Monographs, 9 (1970): 17–45, repr. in Religion and Society
in the Age of Saint Augustine
‘The Patrons of Pelagius: The Roman Aristocracy between East and West’, Journal
of Theological Studies n.s. 21 (1970): 56–72, repr. in Religion and Society in
the Age of Saint Augustine
‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity’, Journal of Roman
Studies 61 (1971): 80–101, repr. in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity
‘A Dark Age Crisis: Aspects of the Iconoclastic Controversy’, English Historical
Review 88 (1973): 1–34, repr. in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity
‘Mohammed and Charlemagne by Henri Pirenne’, Daedalus 103 (1974): 25–33,
repr. in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity
‘The View from the Precipice’, New York Review of Books 21 (1974): 3–5, repr. in
Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity
‘A Social Context to the Religious Crisis of the Third Century A.D.’, The Center for
Hermeneutical Studies, Colloquy 14 (Berkeley, CA: Center for Hermeneutical
Studies 1975), pp. 1–13
‘Artifices of Eternity’, written with Sabine MacCormack, New York Review of
Books 22 (1975): 19–22, repr. in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity
‘Society and the Supernatural: A Medieval Change’, Daedalus 104 (1975):
133–51, repr. in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity
‘In Gibbon’s Shade’, New York Review of Books 23 (1976): 14–18, repr. in Society
and the Holy in Late Antiquity
‘Gibbon’s Views on Culture and Society in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries’, Daedalus
105 (1976): 73–88; repr. in Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, ed. G.W. Bowersock, J. Clive and S.R. Graubard (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), repr. in Society and the Holy in Late
Antiquity
‘Town, Village and Holy Man: The Case of Syria’, in Assimilation et résistance à
la culture gréco-romaine dans le monde ancien, ed. D.M. Pippidi (Bucharest,
1976), repr. in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity
‘Eastern and Western Christendom in Late Antiquity: A Parting of the Ways’, in
The Orthodox Churches and the West, Studies in Church History 13 (Oxford,
1976), pp. 1–24, repr. in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity
‘Learning and Imagination’, Inaugural Lecture, Royal Holloway College, 1977,
repr. in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity
xviii Transformations of Late Antiquity

‘Relics and Social Status in the Age of Gregory of Tours’, The Stenton Lecture,
1976, University of Reading (1977), repr. in Society and the Holy in Late
Antiquity
‘The Last Pagan Emperor: Robert Browning’s The Emperor Julian’, Times
Literary Supplement (8 April 1977): 425–6, repr. in Society and the Holy in
Late Antiquity
‘Parthians and Sasanians’, in Persia: History and Heritage, ed. John A. Boyle
(London: Melland, 1978), pp. 24–30
‘Islam’, New York Review of Books 26 (22 Feb. 1979): 30–33
‘The Philosopher and Society in Late Antiquity’, The Center for Hermeneutical
Studies, Colloquy 34 (Berkeley, CA: Center for Hermeneutical Studies, 1980),
pp. 1–17
‘Dalla “Plebs romana” alla “Plebs Dei”: Aspetti della cristianizzazione di Roma’,
Passatopresente 2 (1982): 123–45
‘The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity’, Representations 1 (1983): 1–25
‘Augustine and Sexuality’, The Center for Hermeneutical Studies, Colloquy 46
(Berkeley, CA: Center for Hermeneutical Studies, 1983), pp. 1–13
‘Sexuality and Society in the Fifth Century A.D.: Augustine and Julian of Eclanum’,
in Tria Corda: Scritti in onore di Arnaldo Momigliano, E. Gabba, Biblioteca di
Athenaeum 1 (Como: New Press, 1983), pp. 50–70
‘Paedeia and Islamic Adab: Contrasts and Comparisons’, in Moral Conduct and
Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam, ed. B. Metcalf (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 23–37
‘Histoire de la vie privée: Antiquité tardive’, in Histoire de la vie privée, ed.
P. Ariès and G. Duby (Paris: Le Seuil, 1985), 1: 226–99
‘The Saint as Exemplar’, in Persons in Groups, ed. R.C. Trexler (Binghamton,
NY: SUNY Press, 1985): 183–94
‘The Notion of Virginity in the Early Church’, in Christian Spirituality, ed.
B. McGinn, J. Meyendorff and L. Leclercq (New York: Crossroad, 1985),
pp. 427–43
‘Pagans and Christians’, New York Review of Books 34 (12 March 1987): 24–8
‘Arnaldo Dante Momigliano’, Proceedings of the British Academy 74 (1988):
407–42
‘Bodies and Minds: Sexuality and Renunciation in Early Christianity’, in Before
Sexuality, ed. D.M. Halperin et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1990), pp. 82–94
‘Islam medievale: una “religione del libro” e le sue tradizioni’, in L’Europa e il
Mondo nel Medio Evo, ed. G. Cracco (Turin: Società editrice internazionale,
1992), pp. 82–94
‘Introduction’, Augustine’s Confessions, trans. F.J. Sheed (Boston: Hackett, 1993):
IX–XXVI
‘Il filosofo e il monaco: due scelte tardoantiche’, in Storia di Roma III: L’ età
tardoantica: 1 Crisi e trasformazioni, ed. Aldo Schiavone (Turin: Einaudi
1993), pp. 877–94
 Peter Brown: Select Bibliography xix

‘The Problem of Christianisation’: Raleigh Lecture 1992, Proceedings of the

British Academy 82 (1993): 89–106
Preface to E. Rebillard, In hora mortis. L’évolution de la pastorale chrétienne de
la mort su IVe. et Ve. siècle, Bibliothèque des écoles françaises d’Athènes et de
Rome 283 (Rome: Palais Farnèse, 1994), pp. VII–XI
Review of Thomas F. Mathews, The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early
Christian Art, The Art Bulletin 77 (1995): 499–502
‘Arbiters of Ambiguity: a Role of the Late Antique Holy Man’, Cassiodorus 2
(1996): 123–42
Review of The Glory of Byzantium, Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, March–July 1997 and The Glory of Byzanitum: Art and Culture of the
Middle Byzantine Era, Catalogue ed. H.C. Evans and W.D. Wixom (New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997): ‘A More Glorious House’, New York
Review of Books 44:9 (29 May 1997): 19–24
‘The World of Late Antiquity Revisited’, Symbolae Osloenses 72 (1997): 5–90
‘Asceticism: Pagan and Christian’, in Cambridge Ancient History 13 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998): 601–31
‘Vers la Naissance du Purgatoire: Amnistie et pénitence dans le christianisme
occidental de l’Antiquité tardive au Haut Moyen Age’, Annales 52 (1997):
1247–61
‘Gloriosus Obitus: The End of the Ancient Other World’, In The Limits of
Ancient Christianity. Essays on Late Antique Thought and Culture in Honor
of R.A. Markus, ed. W.E. Klingshirn and M. Vessey (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 289–314
Review of Gary Wills, Saint Augustine, New York Review of Books 46:11 (24 June
1999): 45–50
‘From Antiquity to the Middle Ages: Center and Periphery in a Post-Imperial
Western Europe’ (in Japanese), Shigaku-Zasshi 108 (1999)
editor (with G. Bowersock and O. Grabar), Late Antiquity: A Guide to the
Postclassical World (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1999)
Preface to Autorita a Posvátné (Brno: Centrum pro Studium Demokracie a Kultury,
1999) – the Czech translation of Authority and the Sacred
‘The Study of Elites in Late Antiquity’, Arethusa 33 (2000): 321–46
‘Enjoying the Saints in Late Antiquity’, Early Medieval Europe 9 (2000): 1–24
‘Charmed Lives’ (review of Antioch: The Lost Ancient City Exhibition at the
Worcester Art Museum and of its Catalogue, ed. C. Kondoleon, Princeton
University Press, 2001), New York Review of Books 48:6 (12 April 2001):
43–9
‘Introducing Robert Markus’, Augustinian Studies 32 (2001): 181–7
Interview with Elliot Horwitz and David Satran, Historia 7 (2000): 5–18 (in
Hebrew: now in Western Humanities Review 55 (2001): 125–35)
‘Emotion and Peace of Mind: from Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation’,
Philosophical Books 43 (2002): 185–208
xx Transformations of Late Antiquity

‘Gregory of Tours: Introduction’, in The World of Gregory of Tours, ed. Kathleen

Mitchell and Ian Wood (Leiden: Brill, 2002): 1–28
‘A Life of Learning’, Charles Homer Haskins Lecture for 2003, American Council
of Learned Societies Occasional Paper 55
‘Remembering the Poor and the Aesthetic of Society’, Journal of Interdisciplinary
History 35 (2005): 513–22
‘Augustine and a Crisis of Wealth’ (University of Villanova, Saint Augustine
Lecture 2003), Augustinian Studies 36:1 (2005): 5–30
‘Conversion and Christianisation in Late Antiquity: the Case of Augustine’, in
The Past Before Us: the Challenge of Historiographies of Late Antiquity,
ed. Carole Straw and Richard Lim, Bibliothèque de l’Antiquité Tardive 6
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 103–17
‘Commercium Spirituale: Paulinus of Nola and the Poetry of Wealth’, in Medieval
Paradigms: Essays in Honor of Jeremy Duquesnay Adams: vol. 1, ed. Stephanie
Hayes-Healy (New York: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 79–98
 I
Between Marrou and Brown:
Transformations of Late Antique Christianity
Robert Markus

‘If I were to sum up in a nutshell’, Peter Brown wrote in the preface to his Power
and Persuasion,

the changes in the his­toriography of the late Roman Empire that have affected my
own presenta­tion in these chapters, I would say that we are better informed about
and also consider­ably more sensitive to the religious and cultural expectations
with which late Roman persons approached the politi­cal, administrative, and
social developments of their time’.

In a wonderfully rich account written a few years later, he traced his path through
the huge and varied range of the intellectual sources that converged in his own
work. In doing so, he also incidentally provided us with a map, highly personal
as it may be, of the routes by which the study of Late Antiquity took its various
shapes in the second half of the last century. Here he spoke of the ‘refreshing and
majestically unparochial challenge to the narrow secularity’ offered by his friend
and mentor, Arnaldo Momigliano, to the prevailing British academic tradition of
studies in ancient history, and the stress he had laid on religious factors in Late
Roman history. For Peter Brown this meant ‘a break-through in the “dualism” that
has plagued medieval historians: that is, the seeming hiatus between the structures
of society (as grasped most obviously in its institutions) and the thought-systems
of the same society’. These pointers within his own work towards religion, and


  Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Toward a Chris­tian Empire
(Madison, WI, 1992), p. viii.

  Peter Brown, ‘The World of Late Antiquity Revisited’, Symbolae Osloenses 72
(1997): 5–30; and his ‘Reply to comments’, ibid. 70–80 (further references will be given
as ‘SO Debate’).

  SO Debate, p. 72. See also his fine Memoir of Momigliano in Proceedings of the
British Academy 74 (1988): 407–42.

 Quoted by Franco Bolgiani, ‘Decadenza di Roma o tardo antico? Alcune
riflessioni sull’ultimo libro di Henri-Irénée Marrou’, in La storiografia ecclesiastica
nella tarda antichità, Atti del Convegno tenuto a Erice (3–8 xii 1978) (Messina, 1980),
pp. 535–87 n. 74. The statement referred to his ‘relationship with the British tradition
 Transformations of Late Antiquity

especially Christianity, as one of its central themes suggest that it is not inappropriate
to devote this essay written in honour of a dear friend and hodêgos to the subject of
Christianity – a subject that relates my own research to his work and one on which
he has had an impact the depth of which we can hardly as yet gauge.
The phenomenal vitality of the study of Late Antiquity since the 1950s has
been dominated by the work of Peter Brown and by the great scholar of the
previous generation, Henri-Irénée Marrou. On the eve of the War, in 1938, Marrou
had published his epoch-making Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique.
For launching the concept of ‘Late Antiquity’ on its scintillating career – its
‘explosion’, or ‘elephantiasis’, as one critic has described it – the Retractatio that
Marrou published eleven years later as his second thoughts on his own book could
be said to have been even more significant than the original book: we are now all
aware of his denunciation there of his earlier self as an ‘ignorant and arrogant jeune
barbare’ who had written patronizingly of Augustine’s literary accomplishment.
Its importance lay not, or not primarily, in the revision of his view of Augustine’s
literary skills, but in the adoption of a new perspective and new norms for
evaluating, not just Augustine, but, more widely and more fundamentally, the
décadence that Augustine had been taken to represent as a man of letters. This
vindication of what one of his pupils described as ‘the originality, the positive
novelty, we might say the specific historical autonomy’ of Late Antiquity was to
be summed up in the title and the thrust of Marrou’s last book, published not long
after his death and intended for a wider public, Décadence romaine ou antiquité
tardive? IIIe–VIe siècle.
The sense that Late Antiquity was a period – whatever its beginning and closing
dates – with its own positive character, especially in its cultural and religious make-
up, encouraged in our generation of historians – if I may thus bracket together all
those of us who have been engaged in the study of Late Antiquity in the half
century that has passed since Marrou’s Retractatio of 1949 – a kind of euphoria

of social anthropology [that] has always been a measure of my ever-renewed debt to the
respect for the concrete cunning of institutions and law that was first implanted in me by the
Oxford school of medieval history’.

 A. Giardina, ‘L’esplosione di tardoantico’, Studi storici 40 (1999): 157–80.

 H.-I. Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique and Retractatio (Paris,
1938, 1949), p. 665: ‘jugement d’un jeune barbare ignorant et présomptueux’. For the
‘décadence’, see pp. 663–86.

  Bolgiani, ‘Decadenza di Roma’, p. 538. J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz, ‘The Birth of Late
Antiquity’, in Antiquité tardive 12 (2004): 253–261 (at p. 253) quotes the recent reference
work, Late Antiquity: a Guide to the Postclassical World, ed. G. W. Bowersock, P. Brown
and O. Grabar (Cambridge, MA, 1999), where the editors write in their Introduction
(p. ix), ‘The time has come for scholars, students and the educated public in general to treat
the period between 250 and 880 AD as a distinctive and quite decisive period that stands
on its own.’

  (Paris, 1977).
 Between Marrou and Brown: Transformations of Late Antique Christianity 

that discountenanced talk of ‘decline and fall’. We have come to turn away, almost
without thought, from language implying any notion of decline, deterioration or
decay. Peter Brown has recalled the experience of settling down in Oxford in the
years after the War ‘to a dogged guerilla against the dominant, melodramatic
notion of the decline and the fall of the Roman empire’ and identified its result:
‘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.’10 That
‘dominant, melodramatic notion’ has, happily, lost its dominance – so much
so that we might wonder whether it is not now in some need of rehabilitation;
whether we have not become so deeply con­ditioned by the alternative model and
the new historical language that we should consider settling down to a guerilla of
our own against it. In the process of eliminating a discourse of decline, corruption
or superstition, which Averil Cameron has rightly characterized as ‘highly
authoritarian’,11 it could be that we have become captive to another discourse, no
less authoritarian for insisting on being non-judgmental.12
We have come to frown on talk of ‘decline’ and to prefer ‘transformation’,
as for instance in the European Science Foundation’s mammoth project devoted
to the ‘Transformation of the Roman world’.13 We are happier to speak of
‘transformation’ without thereby implying either any deterioration or catastrophic
mutation.14 Accompanying the recognition of Late Antiquity as a period with its own
character rather than as a degenerate version of classical, or a prelude to medieval
civilization was the enhanced importance given to religion. It goes without saying
that some great scholars – André Piganiol, A.H.M. Jones among others – have not
adopted such a focus on religion, and attempts have been made – mainly in recent
years, since the idea of Late Antiquity has gained wide currency – to define the


  SO Debate, p. 9.
10
  SO Debate, p. 10.
11
 Averil Cameron, The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, AD 395–600 (London,
1993), p. 129. See her reflections in ‘The Perception of Crisis’, in Morfologie sociali e
culturali in Europa fra tarda Antichità e alto medioevo, Settimane di studio del Centro
Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo 45 (1998): 9–34.
12
 For a powerful and convincing critique, see J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz, ‘Late Antiquity,
the Rejection of “Decline”, and Multiculturalism’, in Atti dell’ Accademia Romanistica
Constantiniana XIV Convegno Internazionale in memoria di Guglielmo Nocera (Napoli,
2003), pp. 640–52; and his Decline and Fall of the Roman City (Oxford, 2001).
13
 See the exhibition volume The Transformation of the Roman World, AD 300–900,
ed. L. Webster and M. Brown (London, 1997) for an overview.
14
  Unlike Augustine: ‘The Roman Empire has been afflicted, rather than transformed
[adflictum est potius quam mutatum]’, De civ. Dei 4.7). Affliction, he thought, could
be endured; it had often been experienced before, and, no doubt, would be again in the
future. Recovery from affliction was not to be des­paired of, for who can know God’s
will? Transformation, however, he viewed as something altogether more drastic, more
catastrophic.
 Transformations of Late Antiquity

period in alternative, not cultural terms.15 Notwithstanding such attempts, religion

came to assume a growing importance in understanding new loyalties, new forms
of leadership, new modes of belonging to a community. The obverse is equally
true: by the 1950s the study of Christianity had come – especially, as Peter Brown
has reminded us, in the work of a ‘remarkable tradition of French liberal Catholic
scholars’ – to insist on 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’.16
That remarkable generation of French liberal Catholic scholars reached
its zenith with Henri-Irénée Marrou. As a glance at the chapter headings of his
posthumously published book confirms, Marrou’s interests remained comparatively
narrowly focused. They are overwhelmingly concerned with the religious
and cultural transformations of the period from the third to the sixth century.17
Moreover, what Marrou understood by culture was the personal intellectual
culture (‘la forme personnelle de la vie de l’esprit’),18 which he liked to contrast
with the more sociological conception he associated with German Kultur, which
he took as equivalent to the French term ‘civilisation’.19 The life of the mind,
its expressions in artistic and literary productions, and above all, for Marrou, in
religiosity, remained the central thread in his work. It is, however, Peter Brown,
who has drawn together, more than any other scholar, the two extremes of this
spectrum, integrating the force of ideas and attitudes into the historical study of
the societies in which they were active, in which they were formed and which, in
turn, they helped to shape.

15
 Notably, among others, by Jean Durliat, Les Finances publiques: de Dioclétien aux
Carolingiens (284–888) (Sigmaringen, 1990). For critique, see C. Wickham, ‘La Chute de
Rome n’aura pas lieu’, Le Moyen Age 99 (1993): 107–26.
16
  SO Debate, p. 11. On this development in British scholarship, see M.F. Wiles,
‘British Patristic Scholarship in the Twentieth Century’, in E. Nicholson (ed.), A Century of
Theological and Religious Studies in Britain (London, 2003), pp. 153–70, at pp. 164–5.
17
 An early and key chapter in Marrou’s posthumous booklet, entitled ‘La Nouvelle
religiosité’, defines this central focus: ‘the major characteristic of this period is the important
part played henceforth by religious considerations’. Décadence romaine, p. 15. On ‘la
nouvelle religiosité’, see also Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique and Retractatio,
p. 694.
18
 Marrrou, Retractatio, p. 658, where he refers to his original discussion of the
concepts in Saint Augustin, pp. vi–viii.
19
 See the particularly useful discussion of the context of Marrou’s distinction by
Bolgiani, ‘Decadenza di Roma’, pp. 556–7. See also M. Vessey, ‘The Demise of the Christian
Writer and the Remaking of “Late Antiquity”: From H.-I. Marrou’s Saint Augustine (1938)
to Peter Brown’s Holy Man (1983)’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 6 (1998): 377–411,
at p. 385, reprinted in M. Vessey, Latin Christian Writers in Late Antiquity and their Texts
(Aldershot, 2005), XI. In his Théologie de l’histoire (Paris, 1968), Marrou seems to have
toyed, if only in passing, and with unconcealed distaste, with adopting ‘le jargon germano-
américain des ethnologues’, p. 15.
 Between Marrou and Brown: Transformations of Late Antique Christianity 

The study of Christian history and the study of Roman history thus came to
converge, and to become more interdependent and intertwined, assuring a centrality
to cultural and religious features in the study of secular history on the one hand – to
the extent even of becoming part of the defining characteristic of ‘Late Antiquity’20
– and attention to secular context in the study of religious history on the other.
This is not the place to attempt a balance-sheet of what has been achieved, or
to assess either Peter Brown’s, or Marrou’s – or anybody else’s – contribution to
the ‘transformation of Late Antiquity’. They are the fountainheads of two streams;
as a beneficiary of both, I am taking Henri-Irénée Marrou and Peter Brown as
signposts to indicate the two different directions from which I received the impetus
to my work.
I first met Peter Brown in 1963, at the height of the ‘new excitement’ added to
‘that most solemn and elevating of all track-events: the relay race of the formation
of Western Christian civilization’ by the great philological breakthroughs of the
1950s and early 1960s.21 That was more than a decade after I had begun to take
a serious interest in Augustine and to work on his views concerning history and
society. I had been swept along, not unnaturally, by the force of the current that had
been set in motion by Marrou. The thrill of reading Peter Brown’s work, starting
with his biography of Augustine, led me not so much to change my direction
as to expand the horizon. Peter Brown and Marrou, as Mark Vessey has noted,
picking up a phrase of Peter Brown himself, differ ‘in their manner of “living
among texts”’: Brown, writes Vessey (referring to the biography of Augustine),
‘expands the French scholar’s intellectualized, text-centred approach to Late
Antiquity, to write a cultural history at once broader in social compass and far
richer in narrative color and variety’;22 and in so expanding the horizon, ‘he has
wound the grey thread of intellectual history back into the skein of Augustine’s
texts and experience, and drawn it out again polychrome’.23 Apart from occasional
forays into that polychrome world, I have returned to the thinner air of Marrou’s
version of cultural history, drawing out the ‘grey thread of ... intellectual history’
from the more polychrome texture of Peter Brown’s work.

20
 It remains true, of course, that the concept emerged much earlier among art historians:
since Alois Riegl’s Die spätrömische Kunst-Industrie nach Funden in Österreich-Ungarn
(Wien, 1901). See Liebeschuetz, ‘The Birth of Late Antiquity’, pp. 254–5; F.M. Clover and
R.S. Humphreys, ‘Toward a Definition of Late Antiquity’, in Clover and Humphreys (ed.),
Tradition and Innovation in Late Antiquity (Madison, WI, 1989), pp. 3–19.
21
  Peter Brown, ‘Introducing Robert Markus’, in Augustinian Studies 32 (2001):
181–7, at p. 183. Brown here recalls the circumstances of that meeting, in the company of
Marrou among several other giants in the post-war wave of patristic scholarship. His article
(especially pp. 184–5) offers a better description of my central concerns than I am able to
provide.
22
  Vessey ‘Demise’, p. 403, with n. 62.
23
  Vessey ‘Demise’, p. 400.
 Transformations of Late Antiquity

Not, however, without pondering the wider historical reality that surrounds the
texts. My retreat from full immersion in the complex historical developments of
the Roman world between AD 300 and 600 has not been to the texts – even the
texts as read within their broader social and cultural context24 – but rather from that
wider tapestry to a particular group of threads within it, those that we might loosely
label the ‘intellectual’ and, especially, the ‘religious’ history of Late Antiquity.
Where Peter Brown might have focused on religious change as part of a larger
bundle of social and cultural changes, on the ‘intimate dependence of Christianity
on its cultural, social and political context’25 or on its function as the catalyst of
other developments, I have reversed the direction of my attention: to focus rather
on the ways that Christianity came to change in response to the changes – drastic
or subtle – in the world that surrounded the Christian community.
The ‘Constantinian revolution’ (as I persist in calling the fourth-century
transformation in the mode of the Christian community’s existence in the world
around it) furnishes a good example of the forking of this road between the wider,
Rome-directed and the tighter, Christianity-directed focus. The conviction that
for the Christian Church this upheaval has cataclysmic significance has been the
ground-bass of much of my work; but most historians of Late Antiquity are, quite
justifiably, uncomfortable with it. Peter Brown is by no means alone in minimizing
its importance: ‘I had been particularly concerned to emphasise the elements of
continuity that had linked the features of the late antique world of the fourth
and fifth centuries to their distant roots in the classical, Roman past.’26 Where
he stresses continuity with the Roman past, I would stress discontinuity with the
Christian past.
Notwithstanding the wider canvas of his work, it has also profoundly affected
the ways we have come to approach the development of the Christian Church. The
revision of the established approaches to Donatism in one of the earliest of his
publications offers a good example of such a profound change.27 J.-P. Brisson had
already argued convincingly for continuity in the African theological tradition.28 He
had recognized that the Donatists could claim the heritage of Cyprian’s theology
more readily than could the Catholics. Peter Brown’s generalization of Brisson’s

24
 Marrou has, of course, been criticized for neglecting the social dimension in his
historical work. While this is in a sense true, I cannot think that the author of Saint Augustin
et la fin de la culture antique, or of Mousikos anêr, or innumerable other studies, would
have countenanced a dissociation of religion and ‘culture’ from the social structures and
relationships in which they were embodied.
25
  SO debate, p. 11.
26
  SO Debate, p. 28. See also his remarks on the alleged ‘perversion of Christianity’ in
the post-Constantinian era, ibid. p. 1.
27
  Peter Brown, ‘Religious Dissent in the Later Roman Empire: the Case of North
Africa’, History 46 (1961): 83–101, reprinted in his Religion and Society in the Age of Saint
Augustine (London, 1972), pp. 237–59.
28
  P. Brisson, Autonomisme et Christianisme dans l’Afrique romaine (Paris 1958).
 Between Marrou and Brown: Transformations of Late Antique Christianity 

insight was at one level a radical reinterpretation of the generally received view,
that ‘Donatism’ was a schismatic movement that had come to separate itself from
the mainstream of Catholic orthodoxy. On the contrary, it was ‘Catholicism’ that
was the separatist movement in North Africa, imposed by the imperial authorities.
What was and still is generally called ‘Donatism’ was no mere aberration, nor
simply a perpetuation of a local schism rooted in a disputed episcopal election to
the see of Carthage. It was the continued survival of traditional African Christianity
into the post-Constantinian world. In this paper he insisted on the significance of
the ‘Constantinian problem’: ‘it lies at the root of Later Roman history’: ‘the issue
at stake is not the protest of a particularist group, but the autonomy of a provincial
tradition of Christianity in a universal and parasitic Empire. It was Constantine
who provoked this struggle by allying the Empire with the universal Catholic
Church.’29 It was the world that changed, not African Christianity. The Donatists
were right to complain that the Catholicism of the emperor and the European
bishops was imported to Africa from overseas.
The ‘Donatists’ assumed a dissenting stance in their society simply through
remaining faithful to the established traditions of the North African Church.
Seen as manifesting a dissenting stance in the secular world around it, that is
to say, in the Constantinian Empire, Peter Brown’s (and Brisson’s) interpretation
also encouraged a re-examination of the nature of Christianity in North Africa. I
had begun such a re-examination at a much later point in time, scrutinizing the
evidence concerning the African Church at the end of the sixth century, in Gregory
the Great’s time. This quickly revealed to me something that was very closely
analogous to Peter Brown’s insight into the problem in its fourth-century guise.
The state of affairs in the African Church around AD 600 turned out, on close
examination, to have been very different from what it had almost universally been
taken to be. Far from a resurgence of the ancient schism, what Gregory thought
of as ‘Donatism’ was in fact the re-assertion by the African Church, especially in
Numidia, of its habitual stance of independence of autonomy. The evidence, far
from pointing to a Church divided and weakened by schism, indicated a Church of
remarkable vitality and cohesion, jealously upholding its own traditions. As Peter
Brown had seen the division in the African Church of the fourth century as one
generated by the intervention of the imperial authorities, so, it became clear to me,
the absence of such external constraint allowed an undivided African Church to
assert itself against overseas pressure. That church’s stubborn resistance in the sixth
century to pressure from Justinian’s government to impose the emperor’s views
concerning the `Three Chapters’, and its refusal to accept what was in Africa seen
as Roman compliance with it, all served to strengthen its attitude of independence
in the face of both imperial and papal authority. It was only a matter of time before

29
  Peter Brown,‘Religious Dissent’, 97 (Religion and Society, p. 255). See A. Murray,
‘Peter Brown and the Shadow of Constantine’, Journal of Roman Studies 73 (1983):
191–203.
 Transformations of Late Antiquity

I came to see the history of North African Christianity after Constantine in such a
perspective.
Peter Brown’s reinterpretation of Donatism, though crucially important for
our view of African Christianity, also had far wider bearings. It made a general
assertion of the decisive significance of religion: ‘The historian of Donatism must
start’, as he wrote in a review published a little later, ‘not with the social history
of North Africa, but with the implications of two distinct views of the role of a
religious group in society.’30 Those rival views were described in the following
terms: ‘the one, that the group exists above all to defend its identity – to preserve a
divinely-given law, Machabaeico more; the other that it may dominate, “baptize”
and absorb, by constraint if need be, the society in which it is placed’.31
This distinction between two types of religious group gave me the key to
understanding the development of Christianity in the two and a half centuries
between Constantine and Gregory the Great as well as the long shadow cast by the
Constantinian revolution – which I take to be a process that took something like
a century from Constantine to complete – over the whole history of Christianity.
It dawned on me that for a century or more the Christian community underwent
a major crisis of identity. This crisis stemmed from the transformation of the
Christian group from being a suspect, unpopular, cliquish and inward-looking
minority (albeit by the end of the third century a minority growing both in size
and in respectability), liable even to persecution, into a dominant group whose
religion was recognized, adopted and patronized by the emperor and increasingly
by members of Roman elite families. The Constantinian revolution created a gap
between persecution and respectability: how could a Church whose members
rejoiced in growing status, prestige, wealth and public office claim to be identical
with the Church of the martyrs? The Catholic Church had passed, almost overnight,
from the status of a group that, in Peter Brown’s distinction, ‘exists above all to
defend its identity – to preserve a divinely-given law, Machabaeico more’ – to one
that saw itself as called to ‘dominate, “baptize” and absorb, by constraint if need
be, the society in which it is placed’.32 Its continuity with its own past became
acutely problematic. Where was the identity of the post-Constantinian Church
to be located? The question continued to haunt the Christian generations from
Constantine to the Theodosian age around AD 400, and beyond.
In my pursuit of the answer to this question, I sought to elucidate the mechanisms
of adjustment by which Christians of the fourth and fifth centuries tried to allay the
anxieties over the gulf that had come to divide their triumphant Church from its
persecuted predecessor. It appeared to me that some of the major developments in

30
 Review of E. Tengström, Donatisten und Katholiken, Journal of Roman Studies
55 (1965): 281–3, at p. 283, reprinted in Religion and Society, p. 338 = Journal of Roman
Studies, p. 283).
31
 Ibid., Journal of Roman Studies, p. 283 (Religion and Society, p. 338). The same
distinction had been made in ‘Religious Dissent’ (Religion and Society, p. 246).
32
 See above, n. 30.
 Between Marrou and Brown: Transformations of Late Antique Christianity 

the Christian Church in the fourth century – the cult of the martyrs, the interest in
the Church’s past and, especially, the growth of asceticism – were best understood
as parts of the response by the Christian community to a felt need for restoration
of the lost continuity with the past. Their growing appeal had to be understood
in terms of furnishing means by which the Christian community could convince
itself that, appearances notwithstanding, it was still identical with the Church of
the martyrs.
The contrast highlighted by Peter Brown between the two fundamental types
of relation between religious groups and their societies (not too distantly related
to Ernst Troeltsch’s distinction between ‘sect’ and ‘church’) provided the clue to
my understanding of the post-Constantinian Church. I soon found myself spurred
on by his work in my studies of the religion and culture of the Theodosian age.
I found the clue to much that interested me in the development of Christian
thought and the life of the Church in a group of his studies that contained some of
the groundwork to his biography of Augustine, and were, indeed, sketched there.
It is these studies that first made me appreciate the force of the ancient traditions
that continued to hold the Roman elites in their grip. These tenacious traditions
shaped their culture and their lifestyles, and ensured that the break with their pre-
Christian past was painless to them and barely visible to their contemporaries.33
Peter Brown himself showed the way to understanding the strains within the
Christian community brought about by this invisibility. His studies of Pelagianism
allowed the movement to be understood as a ‘puritan’ reform movement within the
Church, summoning its members to something more than respectable conformity,
something more exacting than a Christianity ‘in name only’.34 He showed that
it had to be seen in the context of a Christian community whose lifestyles and
culture rendered it invisible in the surrounding society. For Pelagius, the Christian
community was called to ‘stick out in bold relief’35 in the social landscape. Peter
Brown taught us to see Pelagianism as a summons to Christian perfection rather
than as aiming for the preservation of ancient virtues within a Christian context.36

33
 Above all, Peter Brown, ‘Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman Aristocracy’,
Journal of Roman Studies 51 (1961): 1–11, reprinted in Religion and Society, pp. 161–82.
34
  This view had been anticipated in part by G. Plinval, Pélage: ses écrits, sa vie
et sa réforme (Lausanne, 1943). It does not appear to me to have been invalidated by
J.-M. Salamito, Les Virtuoses et la multitude: aspects sociaux de la controverse entre
Augustin et les pélagiens (Grenoble, 2005).
35
  The phrase is Adolf Harnack’s. Harnack was, of course, thinking of the early
Christian community in its pagan Roman setting. See his The Expansion of Christianity in
the First Three Centuries, trans. James Moffat (London and New York, 1904–05), i: 349.
36
  Peter Brown, ‘Pelagius and his Supporters: Aims and Environment’, Journal
of Theological Studies n.s. 19 (1968): 93–114; ‘The Patrons of Pelagius: the Roman
Aristocracy between East and West’, Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 21 (1970): 56–72,
both reprinted in his Religion and Society, pp. 183–207; 208–26.
10 Transformations of Late Antiquity

Here was a convincing reinterpretation of a movement within the Christian

community seen as a response to wider social realities: just the kind of theme that
my interests were focused on. It revealed links to a central thread in work I had
already done on Augustine of Hippo, links that I had failed to appreciate. I came
to see the age of Jerome, Cassian, Augustine, Pelagius – the decades from about
AD 380 to 430 – as a decisive stage in the struggle for Christian identity. The great
question Christians found troubling them was: what, really, made a Christian in the
society that was taking shape around them? Among the diverse responses I came
to see Augustine’s as offering a mediating answer, defining a Christian identity
without a need for radical repudiation of the culture and values of the Roman
world, and at the same time without embracing them unconditionally. Later on,
I allowed myself to speak of Augustine as a defender of Christian mediocrity,
setting him apart from Pelagius and his followers as well as from the ubiquitous
influence of ascetic ideals. My ‘passionate concern’, as Peter Brown described it
(and it was that, indeed!) was to reconstruct those aspects in Augustine’s thought
‘that served to protect the merciful opacity of human affairs’. I saw Augustine as
protecting ‘the richness of human culture from the hubris of those who wanted to
relate every aspect of the world around them directly to the sacred’, refusing to
follow his contemporaries by accepting ‘a false antithesis between the sacred and
the profane’.37
Augustine provided for me an alternative to the ascetic model of Christianity.
But continuing my investigations into the period up to Gregory the Great
confirmed what I – along with many others – had always suspected: that not only
was Augustine’s voice unique in his own time, but also his legacy was quickly
effaced in the decades after his death. The ascetic model, as I interpreted it,
sought to impose severe standards on all aspects of life and action, endeavouring
to subordinate them directly to the sacred. It elided the middle ground of what
Peter Brown once called the ‘the technology of Mediterranean living’; it set up
a simple polarity between Christian perfection and, over against it, worldliness,
the secular, the profane, all amalgamated in a single category, leaving no space
for an autonomous secular sphere between the sacred and the profane: the world,
the flesh, and the devil, as Christians would later say, lumping together the massa
damnata they were called on to renounce. (This theme has continued to preoccupy
me, under the guise of the ‘sacred and the secular’.)
The large intermediate area elided by the simple duality in ascetic discourse did
not, of course, vanish, although it did shrink. The increasing prestige and influence
of the ascetic impulse constricted the range of Christian culture in the period after
Augustine. The sermons, preached to widening circles of lay people, by bishops
often educated in communities of ascetics, helped to transform asceticism from an
option for the few into a demand on the Christian community as a whole.
It was in this light that I came to consider the narrowing of horizons of Christian
life and culture. The spectrum of what clergy were prepared to tolerate in Christian

37
  Brown, ‘Introducing Robert Markus’, p. 184.
 Between Marrou and Brown: Transformations of Late Antique Christianity 11

living was contracting, gradually outlawing previously acceptable traditional

practices, subjecting their flocks to more exacting norms. Their notion of what
Christianity was had come to differ from Augustine’s. The crucial transformation
of Christianity itself lay in the extent to which ascetic norms and habits of mind
came to penetrate Christian consciousness.
The growing hold of ascetic ideals was one of a variety of social changes
that combined to lead to the impoverishment of the cultures in western societies.
Although horizons were closing in the East, too, as Peter Brown and others have
noted, it would be impossible to trace anything in Western Europe corresponding
to the unbroken tradition of non-Christian Hellenism traced in the Greek
world by Glen Bowersock.38 Working on the later sixth century, and especially
on Gregory the Great, I could not but become conscious of having entered a
world very different from Augustine’s. As Gregory often said, ‘everybody was
now a Christian’; Christianity could be taken for granted, and had become the
more or less unquestioned framework of discourse. Whereas Augustine, as we
had been taught by Marrou, had himself been a product of and still inhabited
the Hellenistic-Roman culture of paideia: the traditional educational programme
and the cosmopolitan and pluralistic culture of the very diverse and sophisticated
urban society of his North Africa. Such a background was shared to a steadily
diminishing extent by Augustine’s successors: they truly were the cultural
products of the programme envisaged in his De doctrina Christiana. The complex
heterogeneity of Augustine’s world gave way to a more homogeneous simplicity.
The secular culture that could be taken for granted in Augustine’s time and in
shrinking educated circles down to the AD 530s, had become a hazy memory by
the AD 580s and 590s. The conditions of a living debate among contemporaries,
a debate such as had formed and nourished Augustine’s intellectual culture,
were no longer there. The second half of the sixth century, I had come slowly to
realize, again assisted by Peter Brown’s diagnosis of a new ‘otherworldliness’ in
Christianity, was a major watershed.39
I had come to the threshold of this discovery through Marrou. He had spoken of
a theopolis – ‘a Christian culture subordinated to a religious ideal’ but keeping ‘the
continuity of its link with the classical origins from which it derived’40 – wedged

38
 In his Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 1990).
39
  Peter Brown speaks of ‘a watershed in the Christian imagination that falls
somewhere in the late sixth century’ (‘Images as a Substitute for Writing’ in E. Chrysos
and I. Wood (eds), East and West: Modes of Communication (Leiden, 1999), pp. 15–34
at p. 32). He also remarks that ‘it was precisely this sharp sense of “otherworldliness”
that had been gloriously absent in large areas of the late antique Christian mentality’, ibid.
pp. 30–31. In his The Rise of Western Christendom, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2003), he makes
the point more widely, locating ‘a profound change in the imagination’ in the period AD
550–650, p. 220.
40
 Marrou, Retractatio, p. 695. In his editorial introduction to Part 4 of The Limits of
Ancient Christianity, Vessey notes that ‘Marrou it was who, having once essayed a liberal
12 Transformations of Late Antiquity

between the classical paideia and the culture of medieval Christendom in which that
link was broken. The culture of which Marrou gave Julianus Pomerius, Caesarius
of Arles and Gregory the Great as examples, is characterized by a drastic human
impoverishment (l’appauvrissement humain).41 I found this notion a uniquely
helpful schematism to define the difference between the world of Augustine on
the one hand, and the world of Gregory and later on the other – the ‘wholly sacral’
world (in the phrase Marrou adopted from Maritain) of Western Christendom,
characterized as a society organized around a religious, even an ecclesiastical,
pole.42 Trying to trace some implications for the new ways in which Christians
came to see their world and, especially, their scriptures strengthened my sense of
the emergence of a world in which Christianity had become unquestionable and
had come to define the contours both of the society and of its culture.
It was such a ‘decisive shift within the continuum of ancient Christianity
itself’ that made Peter Brown suggest that we might need, ‘alas’, to coin a phrase,
spätere Spätantike, to do it justice.43 Both his own work, and a great deal of work
carried out by others, much of it under the inspiration of Peter Brown’s, have
traced various trajectories of change within Late Antique Christianity. Among the
subjects which have thus been transformed in recent decades, several reflect Peter
Brown’s preoccupations: the body and society, asceticism, sexuality, the evolution
of Christian sensibilities, the exercise of authority within Christian Roman society,
and lately, death and the other world. I cannot survey the ever-growing heap of
work – much of it of the highest quality and importance – on such themes, or trace
the multifarious redirection of interests.44
More fundamental than any of these transformations within Christianity is the
emergence of a concept of a Christianity subject to a series of transformations.
Peter Brown has spoken of ‘the end of a very ancient Christianity’ in his preface
to Éric Rebillard’s outstanding study of profound changes in beliefs, practices and

Catholic apology for a proto-medieval Augustine similar to the one portrayed by Harnack,
later reverted to a view more like Troeltsch’s, in which the bishop of Hippo stood for a
relatively short-lived, post-Constantinian “culture of the Theopolis,” common to Christians
and non-Christians alike’, p. 210.
41
 Marrou, Retractatio, p. 684.
42
  ‘La Place du Haut Moyen Age dans l’histoire du christianisme’, Settimane di studio
del Centro di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 9: Il passaggio dall’Antichità al Medio Evo in
Occidente (Spoleto, 1962), pp. 595–630, at p. 608. The view had been stated by Marrou
in his Saint Augustin and Retractatio, pp. 691–2. On a ‘totally Christian society’ and a
culture defined by religion, see Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (London, 1971),
pp. 174–6, 186.
43
  SO Debate, p. 28.
44
  Peter Brown’s chapter ‘Asceticism: Pagan and Christian’ in Averil Cameron
and Peter Garnsey (eds), Cambridge Ancient History, 13: The Late Empire, 337–425
(Cambridge, 1998), pp. 601–31 provides many of the signposts.
 Between Marrou and Brown: Transformations of Late Antique Christianity 13

attitudes associated with death.45 The particular end he was referring to here was
linked to the Pelagian controversy. Quoting the concluding remark of Rebillard’s
book in a paper that is a landmark in accenting another ‘end’, this time one that fell
in the late sixth and seventh century, Peter Brown asked whether the time may not
have come for the historian to take the final step, ‘to envisage “des christianismes
dans l’histoire” – to envisage, that is, a succession of distinctive “Christianities”
spread out in time’.46 He has taught us to appreciate not only that there were a
number of ends within ancient and Late Antique Christianity, but also the nature
of some of these ends – and ends are new beginnings! – and that what can often
look like marginal beliefs and practices can in fact mark decisive boundaries
between different ‘Christianities’.47 We can no longer fail to recognize that the
nature and the boundaries of Christianity are not an unchanging given, but are
always subject to uncertainties, shifts, doubts and often to debate, and are rarely
uncontested. And along with such recognition of shifting boundaries, we have also
come to appreciate the need to reinterpret the delicate balance of continuities and
transformations that define a historical Christian self-identity. Among the insights
into Late Antique Christianity that Peter Brown has brought us I would rank this
as the most crucial.

45
  É. Rebillard, In hora mortis: évolution de la pastorale chrétienne de la mort aux ive
et ve siècles dans l’Occident latin (Rome, 1994), p. viii.
46
  Peter Brown, ‘Gloriosus Obitus: The End of the Ancient Other World’, in
W.E. Klingshirn and M. Vessey (eds), The Limits of Ancient Christianity: Essays on Late
Antique Thought and Culture in Honor of R.A. Markus (Ann Arbor, MI, 1999), pp. 289–314, at
p. 290, quoting Rebillard, In hora mortis, p. 232.
47
  ‘Gloriosus Obitus’, p. 311.
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