Princeton (2023) h/b 713pp £38 (ISBN 9780691242286)
It is fitting that a scholar who made his name with a biography of Saint Augustine of Hippo should write an intellectual autobiography, but Peter Brown has gone way beyond that startling early work and brought into being an entire new historical period, ‘late antiquity’. Although Moses Finley, Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge, was unimpressed, and although even the strongly sympathetic Averil Cameron is on record here as having on least one occasion sounded a cautionary note, the concept is now common coin. Of course there were intimations of its arrival before Brown’s time (and one of the many attractive features of the book under review is the generosity with which the author acknowledges his debts). But whereas, before Brown, we had Rome, its decline, the arrival of barbarians, decadence, the ‘Pirenne thesis’ (on the break-up of the Mediterranean world), and eventually (praise be) the arrival of the Middle Ages, nowadays the years between about 200 and 800 AD have a distinctive life of their own, an innovative life that embraces not only aspects of the culture of Rome (especially East Rome) but also, and especially, the new Christian and Muslim cultures that, originating in the Middle East, came to include north Africa, the former Sassanian Empire, and, in good time, western Europe. Where once we had Edward Gibbon, now we have diversification, growth, re-invention, cultural interaction and fusion. ‘[T]he Patristic period ... was not a period of decline’ (p. 265)’; Islam did not kill off the cities of the ancient world, because they were already being ‘outflanked by a capillary system of great monasteries’ (p. 639); ‘transformation, not conflict’ (p. 230) is the principal characteristic of the greater part of the first millennium; the ‘Holy Men’ of the early Christian Near East were late antiquity’s equivalent of the temples of the classical world and the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, human rather than material embodiments of the sacred (p. 360).
Proselytisation on behalf of themes and propositions such as these has lain at the heart of Brown’s work. ‘To rehabilitate lost centuries,’ he says, ‘has been my particular joy’ (p. 6). At one point he echoes Gibbon’s famous decision to write the history of Rome in the course of ‘musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter’. Whenever he goes to Rome himself, he tells us, he visits the Capitoline Museum to sit ‘between the two figures—Marcus Aurelius and Constantine—musing on the nature and the causes of the distance between these two images of two very different Roman emperors: one so very ‘classical,’ one challengingly ‘late antique’ (p. 185). In other words, again, the world which came into being in the centuries to which he has devoted himself deserves to be studied for its own sake, not treated as a mere tailpiece to its predecessor or prelude to its successor. And so it is now is. ‘When I began to study it,’ Brown says, late antiquity was ‘a marginal field, barely recognized as a field at all’; now, ‘it is ... studied all over the world’ (p. 689).
The book is in six parts: the author’s childhood and schooldays (1935-53); his undergraduate years at New College, Oxford, when he was awarded the best First of his year in History and shortly afterwards became a Prize Fellow of All Souls (1953-6); his time as a don at Oxford, where he published the first two of his many books and, despite not being obliged to do so, took pupils for one-to-one tutorials and gave lectures which (I speak from experience) made him into something of a cult figure (1956-74); his ever-growing interest in the Middle Eastern dimension of his concept of ‘late antiquity’ (1971-4); the short period when he was Professor and Head of the Department of History at Royal Holloway, University of London, which gave him the opportunity to lecture on a much wider range of topics than he had taught at Oxford (1975-8); and his translation to Berkeley and then Princeton in the USA, where his professorships permitted him to spend more time on research and postgraduate teaching, and where, in particular, he founded (with John Dillon, head of Classics at Berkeley) The Transformation of Classical Heritage, a series of publications under the imprint of the University of California Press which now includes some fifty volumes (1978-87). The book ends in 1987 because that was when the author’s mother died, his quondam mentor Arnaldo Momigliano also passed away, he submitted to Princeton University Press the manuscript of his first wholly ‘American’ book (The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity), and he gave the plenary lecture at the tenth Oxford Patristics Conference, a forum which had been instrumental in ‘internationalizing’ him at the time of its 1963 and 1967 incarnations. Although Brown seems to have published books without number since 1987, he probably feels that by then his advocacy of ‘late antiquity’ had secured its acceptance as the discrete period of historical research he wanted it to be.
Despite its length (and, dare one say it, the esoteric nature of some of its subject matter), the book is highly accessible. The ninety-nine chapters average a mere seven pages each (and are themselves often sub-divided). In respect of literary style, the author shows marked respect for what Yeats called ‘the folk of few books’ (Brown’s quotation, p. 5). He adheres consistently to the principle he describes as ‘writing for his aunts’ (p. 474). In view of his belief in the importance of lucid communication, it is no surprise to learn that he was delighted to be able to publish his first-ever academic article in History, the journal of the UK’s Historical Association (which is aimed at schoolteachers and their pupils as much as professors), and that he particularly welcomed the opportunity to publish his trailblazing 1971 study of The World of Late Antiquity in a Thames and Hudson series which required at least as much attention to illustrations as it did to text. One might add that because ‘At least half’ of Brown’s many publications ‘have grown out of rhetorical occasions’ (p. 227), they retain much of the linguistic vigour of the oral medium in which they often found their first expression.
Readers will have their own preferences among the many themes which come to mind in a reading of this book, but the present reviewer was struck above all by Brown’s insistence on his Irishness. As a Dublin Protestant, he stems from a minority community in a country which, at the time of his birth in 1935, was still adapting to secession from the United Kingdom. I remember asking him in early 1973 (when I was sent to him for tutorials) what had attracted him initially to the late antique period which became his specialism. ‘I was at home in Ireland in the long vacation,’ he said, ‘working my way through Stubbs’s Charters [a long-time set book in the Oxford undergraduate history degree], when I began to hear the clank of the iron.’ This seemed to me to be a particularly Irish response. Perhaps I was affected by the Irish vocal lilt with which it was delivered, but I think I also perceived it, even then, as an inherited evocation of former English oppression.
Be that as it may, Ireland certainly figures througout the book. Brown claims Yeats as a distant cousin and speaks in passing of fellow Irishmen E.R. Dodds, C.S. Lewis, J.G. Farrell, and, as we have seen, the Berkeley classicist John Dillon (pp. 100-1, 143, 284, 572). He conveys a sense of being something of an outsider both at Shrewsbury School in England (where he received his secondary education) and also in his undergraduate years (not least, in the latter case, because, as a foreigner, he did not qualify for a UK undergraduate ‘State Scholarship’ and so was poorer than some of his peers). By virtue of his Irish background, Brown has experienced first-hand the ambivalence of empire (one of the central features of his scholarship): on the one hand, he inherited a sense of what it is like to be subject to rulers from elsewhere, and, on the other, his family embodied the paradox that empires sometimes open doors for their non-metropolitan subjects—one of his ancestors became the first Prime Minister of New Zealand and his own father spent his working life in Sudan—with the result that Brown himself acquired in his youth ‘a constant sense ... of the Middle East’ (p. 46). A visceral understanding of empire has surely played a part in the way in which the author writes about late antique Romans, Sassanians, and Muslims.
It is religion, however, which most obviously connects Brown’s background and his work. ‘In Ireland,’ he writes, ‘religion was serious. It could be expected to have hard edges. ... I was convinced that it was to those hard edges, where state power merged with religion, that thinking persons should direct their attention if they were to understand the history of Europe’ (p. 243). Understanding, on the one hand, the relationship between religion and state power, and, on the other, the interactions among the many competing beliefs of late antiquity, has been one of his overriding concerns. Having learned, in the Ireland of his youth, that it was impossible not to take religion seriously, and then that in England it was apparently easy to do so, he did not go along with the English. Although (perhaps because) he would be the first to say that religion can be at least as damaging as it is comforting—one of his many penetrating formulations here is that Christianity hardened prejudices in late antiquity ‘like manganese added to medium carbon steel’ (p. 300) —he has remained true to his conviction that human beings’ attitudes to the supernatural were the central phenomenon of the first millennium.
Ideas in general, not merely religious ideas, have been a major concern of Brown’s historical writing. Even as a schoolboy and an undergraduate, he was anxious to move on from the standard political, institutional, and economic dimensions of the history that most of his teachers offered him. He deplored the ‘deeply philistine avoidance of grand topics such as religion and the history of ideas’ (p.95). He believed that learning German in the year before he went to university took him in the direction of ideas and away from British empiricism (p. 124). He speaks of ‘political and institutional history’ as ‘the lowest common denominator’ (p. 137). He is keen on the historical sweep of Fernand Braudel’s Mediterranean (pp. 165, 200). He deplores the pettifogging approach to the past of the celebrated Oxford medievalist K.B. McFarlane (p. 163). The whole point of his biography of Saint Augustine of Hippo was to put ideas centre-stage. One of the reasons he left Oxford for Royal Holloway in the mid-1970s was that he felt there was little ‘breathing space’ for his sort of history ‘in a university that was still locked, in so many ways, into ancient habits’ (p. 347). It was not by chance that he chose as the title of his inaugural lecture at Royal Holloway ‘Learning and Imagination’ (p. 508, my italics).
In the search for ideas that might advance his understanding of late antiquity, Brown has attempted to learn from many fields of intellectual enquiry other than his own, notably art history, sociology, and anthropology. He speaks valuably here not only of what he learned from the work of some great ancient historians (Rostovtzeff, with whom he came to disagree profoundly, Arnaldo Momigliano, A.H.M. Jones, Averil Cameron), but also of insights that came to him from looking at things (‘I became a medievalist through my eyes’, p. 110), from the anthropology of Max Gluckman, Mary Douglas, Ernest Gellner, and Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard (the last of whom he found easier to cope with on paper than he did in life), and from Michel Foucault, when he was working towards his representation of late-antique virginity as an expression not so much of renunciation as of freedom from social constraint.
Much the most remarkable of Brown’s supplementary skills, however, is his incessant learning of languages. On the last page of the book he reveals that, at the age of eighty-seven, he has ‘begun to read in Ge’ez’ (p. 699), the ecclesiastical language of Christians in Ethiopia. This may be because he has already mastered all the other languages he needs for the study of late antiquity. Although he was on the ‘Classics side’ at Shrewsbury for only a year (at the age of thirteen), Greek came back to him when he needed it. Latin and French he took throughout his schooldays, German he acquired (as we have seen) between school and university, Italian he seems to have picked up without trying (long before he lived in Italy for substantial periods in the 1980s), he read Russian-language excavation reports in Kabul in the 1970s (p. 496), and over the years he has studied Hebrew, Syriac, Persian, Aramaic, Coptic, Arabic, and Turkish.
Inter-disciplinarity, analytical breadth, constant intellectual development, geographical range, and a refusal to be constrained by the conventional borders of university departments are perhaps the principal features of Brown’s intellectual career. If there is anything to be regretted about his work, it is that the Iranian Revolution of 1979 prevented him from carrying to a conclusion the research he felt he needed to do in order to bring to fruition the grand comparison he had in mind of East Rome and Sassanian Persia—the one bureaucratic, the other a strange sort of confederacy, the one looking out on the Mediterranean, the other almost landlocked, both, in their very different ways, monotheistic.
But he has achieved more than seems possible in a lifetime. Speaking of another Protestant from the south of Ireland, Dr Johnson said: ‘[I]f a man were to go by chance at the same time with Burke under a shed, to shun a shower, he would say—“this is an extraordinary man”’ (Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 2 vols, OUP 1931, ii. 537). For Burke, read Brown.
David Saunders
(Emeritus Professor of the History of the Russian Empire, Newcastle University)