The world of Peter Brown

And the rise of Late Antiquity

We tend to see history as divided into three ages - the ancient, medieval and modern. This idea is so central, indeed almost mystically so, that to see the world in another light requires the work a great and imaginative mind.

Which is why it is only right to mark the 90^th birthday of perhaps our greatest living historian, Peter Brown, widely regarded as inventing and popularising the concept of ‘Late Antiquity’, a period that encompasses both the ancient world and early medieval.

Born into a Dublin Protestant family, Brown divided his childhood between Bray in Co Wicklow, and the Sudan, perhaps the two most unlikely pairings on earth and surely the only person in history who can claim such a biographical detail. Early travels abroad sparked an interest in the Arabic language and the civilisation of the Middle East, as well as the study of collapsing empires (perhaps a relatable one for a southern Irish Protestant in the mid-20^th century).

As an academic, Brown first worked at Oxford and Royal Holloway before heading to the new imperial citadel, first in Berkeley and then Princeton. Over many decades he became known for his lectures, his research and editing of historical journals - but also for his books, surprisingly accessible for the level of expertise and academic rigour.

Among the best known are The World of Late Antiquity (1971) and The Rise of Western Christendom (1996). The former tells of a society in which structures and institutions are transforming, and in some ways collapsing; it is dominated by the struggle between two worldviews and the eventual triumph of Christianity over its polytheistic, conservative rival. The latter focuses more on the world that arose in its place, although there is much overlap - both are brilliant.

As a respected academic as readable as a popular historian, Brown is skilled at painting a picture of late Roman life. The World of Late Antiquity mixes chronological narrative with sociological adventures, combining overarching analysis with quirky, often amusing minutia. For instance, he recalls how Cassius Dio had been present at a meeting in the Senate when an astrologer had denounced ‘bald-pated men’ for conspiring against the emperor, and ‘instinctively his hand had shot up to feel the top of his head’.

The dominant theme of the earlier book is the transformation of the empire from traditional Roman religion to Christianity. The aristocracy were not initially enamoured of the new faith: Aristides, a conservative writer, talked of ‘men in Palestine who show their impiety as you would expect them to, by having no respect for their betters’. They were not at all impressed by Christian revelation, viewing it as both irrational and low-brow. As Brown writes: ‘”Revelation”, for a philosopher such as Plotinus, was not merely irrational: it led to second-rate counterfeits of traditional academic philosophical culture. It was as if the inhabitants of an underdeveloped country were to seek to catch up with western technology by claiming to have learnt nuclear physics through dreams and oracles.’

In contrast, Christians thought that paganism was a form of opium for the masses powered by non-human demons. One scholar even attributed negative book reviews to demonic inspiration – a novel explanation we should all try.

Christianity offered not just new beliefs in the sacred, but a completely different worldview, one formed by a universal community that transcended borders and cultural barriers.

Although the empire stretched from Baghdad to Britain, Brown notes that each town was self-governing and had its own laws. This state of affairs shocked Tatian, a Syrian Christian student, who thought that ‘there should be one code of law for all mankind, and one political organisation.’ This also reflected the different experiences of social classes, too, and ‘Tatian spoke for thousands of men whose experience of the Roman empire was diametrically opposite to that of its dominant classes. To the articulate Roman and Greek gentleman, the peace of the empire had come as an opportunity to fortify and cherish the customs of one’s ancient town.

‘To humbler men it meant nothing of the sort: it meant wider horizons and unprecedented opportunities for travel; it meant the erosion of local differences through trade and emigration, and the weakening of ancient barriers through new wealth and new criteria of status. Imperceptibly, the Roman empire dissolved in the lower classes that sense of tradition and local loyalties on which the upper class depended.’

Christianity had huge advantages. The early Church worked as a sort of parallel state and Christians helped each other in crucial ways that gave it a demographic edge. During times of plague the clergy were the only effective relief agency in many areas, organising food supplies and burials where the state had failed. Christians were also more generous, inspired by a desire to secure their status in the next life, and by AD 250 the church in Rome was supporting 1,500 widows and orphans. They also sent large amounts of money to Africa and Cappadocia to ransom Christian captives after barbarian raids in 254 and 256. ‘In this way, being a Christian brought more protection than being a civis romanus.’ As our own age illustrated, if a belief system conveys material advantages, then all other things being equal, that belief system will grow and spread.

As Christianity grew more powerful, so it became less tolerant (again, and I don’t want to labour the point with modern parallels). From 388 onwards there was religious rioting, with mobs of monks burning a synagogue at Callinicum in Syria and terrorising the temples of that country. The shrine of Serapeum in Alexandria was purged by monastic vigilantes.

On the plus side, the takeover by Christians led to a surge in learning in some areas: ‘Belonging to a group vigorously committed to asserting its identity against the outside world is a spur to creativity. The senatorial aristocracy needed to maintain the high standards of culture that were supposed to mark it off from other classes; the Catholic church, in touch with exciting movements of Greek thought and Greek asceticism, was anxious to catch up, and so was in constant need of good literature’. And so the generation of the late fourth century produced the third great age of Latin literature.

Yet there were social forces that spelled doom for Roman civilisation, in particular the changing attitudes and lifestyles of its elite, who lost interest in the burdens of government.

Brown argued that the most basic reason for the failure of imperial government between 380 and 410 was that the two most powerful groups in the Latin west, the senatorial aristocracy and Catholic Church, disassociated themselves from the fate of the Roman army.

This aristocracy had always dominated politics, both nationally and locally, a duty as well as a right, and yet they were increasingly shying away from politics in the western half of the empire. An observer from the east wrote that: ‘There is at Rome a Senate of wealthy men… Every one of them is fit to hold high office. But they prefer not to. They stand aloof, preferring to enjoy their property at leisure.’

The Roman aristocracy had been defined by Otium – leisured scholarship as a mark of status – but even this began to decline, and by the late sixth century no one had time for leisure. One wrote that ‘if our concern were with secular erudition, we think no one nowadays can boast much learning. Here the fury of the barbarians burns daily, now flaring up, now dying down. Our whole life is taken up in cares, and all our efforts go back to beating back the war-bands that surrounded us.’

By now most of the west was ruled by barbarian settlers, Visigoth, Vandal and Frankish elites ruling over a discontent Roman population: ‘to be tacitly disliked by 98 per cent of one’s fellow men is no mean stimulus to preserving one’s identity as a ruling class.’ Roman aristocrats were forced to work for barbarian overlords, and Sidonius Apollinaris was notably skilful at diplomacy, in particular his habit of tactfully losing at backgammon whenever he played Visigoth king Theodoric at Toulouse, their new capital.

Keen to please the new masters, Cassiodorus wrote a History of the Goths ‘that presented the tribe in general, and the family of Theodoric in particular, as co-operative participants in the history of the Mediterranean, from the time of Alexander the Great onwards.’

Classical learning continued in the east, and indeed would do so for centuries. ‘Highly respected Hellenes maintained university life in Athens, Alexandria and smaller centres until the Arab conquest. Paganism survived outside Edessa until the 10^th century. Indeed, Byzantine gentlemen of the fifteenth century were still using a recondite Attic Greek deployed by the Sophists of the Age of Hadrian.’

Funnily enough, the ancients found learning the classics hard and often tedious. Asked how he would punish a brigand, an expert in rhetoric replied ‘make him learn the ancient classics by heart, as I have to do’.

Civilisation entails globalisation, and as the western empire shrivelled, so did access to the outside world. ‘In the late fourth century, senatorial ladies from northern Spain travelled freely all over the eastern empire’, yet just a few decades later, \a bishop writing in Asturias hardly knew what happened outside his own province. In western Europe, the fifth century was a time of narrowing horizons, of the strengthening of local roots, and the consolidation of old loyalties.’

The west collapsed, but the east survived, despite the setbacks of plague and invasion, leaving Constantinople with ‘the pride of a city-state and the high morale of an outpost with the resources of a vast, Near Eastern empire.’

Even now, ‘It was possible for a merchant from Alexandria to cash a cheque in a bank at Constantinople – a service which no medieval state could offer until thirteenth century China.’ There was the mid-5^th century Olympiodorus of Thebes in Egypt is the ‘first colourful representative of a long tradition of Byzantine diplomats: he went on missions as far apart as Rome, Nubia and the Dnieper – accompanied by a parrot who spoke pure Attic Greek.’

The eastern empire was developing its own, distinctive, ‘Byzantine’ character, even if they thought themselves members of ‘the fortunate race of the Romans’. The east’s transformation from an ancient Roman to a medieval Greek empire was subtle, and the barbarians of the west in the 6^th and 7^th century still referred to the state in Constantinople as Respublica. Heraclius (610-641) is seen as the first medieval ruler, and it was during his reign that Greek replaced Latin as the language of the court.

Despite Byzantium’s deeply Christian consciousness - emperors claimed to be ‘colleagues’ or ‘co-rulers’ with Christ - the old religion lurked in the shadows. Governors were still reared on the literature of the old gods, and there was even a still-functioning old Greek theatre in Alexandria. Indeed, one of Brown’s fascinating observations is that much of Roman paganism only disappeared with the Islamic conquest.

‘Paradoxically, the arrival of the Arab armies completed the Christianisation of the public life of the cities of the near East. The last vestige of a secular culture based on the Greek classics disappeared.’ Aristotle, Plato and Galen survived but Homer, Thucydides and Sophocles disappeared for a thousand years: ‘It was the end of a millennium of literary culture’.

The sack of Rome in 410 and again in 455 also strengthened Christianity’s hold, again a paradoxical turn of events considering it was still much less Christianised than the east. This calamity resulted in the religion becoming much more strongly identified with the city’s sense of self, so that even ‘the last pagans, therefore, rallied to the Church.’ Mosaics were now built of St Peter praising Rome ‘in language that echoes exactly the punctilious devotion of Symmachus to the Capitone gods. In a world increasingly conscious of the presence of the non-Romans, Catholicism had become the single “Roman” religion.’

Brown writes: ‘In a sense, we have come full circle to the days of untroubled, pagan conservatism in the age of the Antonines. Heaven and earth have settled down to a well regulated harmony, Christianity is now the ancestral religion. If scrupulously performed, its public ceremonies were certain to avert misfortune and to secure the good favour of the supernatural. God is the remote emperor: but the towering figures of the angels, joined by long-dead heroes of the Christian religion, watch over the earth. The men of the early Middle Ages were as quietly certain as Marcus Aurelius had once been that those who held to the ways of their ancestors could expect to be cradled in the care of unseen protectors.’

‘It was more than a social evolution. The new popular devotion marked the resurgence of an ancient theme – the ideal of a totally religious culture.’

Rome’s cultural revolution was over.

Brown is critical of Justinian, a forceful figure much damned by the most famous historian of his own era, Procopius (but only behind his back.) Justinian’s reign was eventful, seeing the building of the Hagia Sophia, the Nika riots and most of all the plague which killed a third of Constantinople. It also saw increasing religious intolerance:

‘The autocracy of Justinian fatally weakened the aristocratic basis of Late Antique culture; the traditional bureaucracy was weakened by local government and the independent life of the provincial cities, for centuries the recruiting ground of the Greek scholar-gentry, was sapped by centralization. The collapse of an independent, classical elite followed swiftly: in the late sixth century the culture of the governing class of the empire finally became indistinguishable from the Christian culture of the average man.

‘An atmosphere of intolerance, manifested in the occasional savage punishments of Jews and of the few remaining pagans, shows the norms of Roman law bending before the storms of public opinion.’

In The Rise of Western Christendom, Brown noted of the new rulers: ‘Even when polytheism was tolerated, it was allowed to exist only on condition that it was seen to be an empty shell, drained of supernatural power, and characterized by the increasingly dilapidated state of its once-glorious temples.’

Whereas men had been allowed to play a public role so long as they kept paganism to themselves, that all changed under Justinian, and in 528 pagans were given three months to be baptised. The following year, pagan professors of philosophy at Academy in Athens were banned from teaching in public, these ‘persons diseased with the insanity of the unholy Hellenes’.

Writing of St Augustine (the subject of another of Brown’s books), he wrote that ‘As for pagans, they were simply told to “wake up” to the fact that they were a minority.’ (You’re on the wrong side of history, bigot!)

Justinian was also intolerant of competing Christian heresies, and official persecution would weaken their loyalty, proving fatal during later invasions. These new sectarian divisions even changed the empire’s ancient civic identities: ‘Large Christian groups, Chalcedonians quite as much as Monophysites, were prepared to forget their ancient loyalties to their cities. Religion provided them with a more certain, more deeply felt basis of communal identity. Even when they lived in villages and cities where their own church predominated – as was often the case in strongly Monophysite regions, such as Egypt – they saw themselves above all else as a religious community. They were fellow believers. They were no longer fellow citizens.’

What is so fascinating, and so relevant to today, is how religion transformed the identity of the empire’s subjects, in ways that must have troubled conservatives: ‘Paulinus had redefined pietas, the essential Roman virtue of loyalty to friends and to one’s homeland, in starkly Christian terms. Piety to Christ was all that mattered for him. His loyalties lay with a new group of like-minded friends: “slaves of God, insurgents against the world.”’

The west was notably poorer. When Cyril of Alexander turned up in Constantinople he gave out bribes worth 2,500 pounds of gold – enough to feed 45,000 people for a year, or 25 times as much as Caesarius of Arles was able to pay for the ransom of captured Gauls.

It was going to get poorer still, what with the barbarian invasions and collapse of civilisation, and all that. Hydatius, bishop of Chaves in modern-day Portugal, wrote that he was caught ‘within Galicia, at the edge of the entire world… not untouched by all the calamities of this wretched age… [faced with] the domination of heretics, compounded by the disruption brought by hostile tribes.’

Southern France and Spain were conquered by the Visigoths, although he estimates that they were no more than one-sixtieth of the overall population. Italy fell to the Lombards, ‘the fiercest of all nations’. Many groups weren’t exactly tribes in the ethnic sense, and as Brown writes: ‘The forces of most barbarian rulers were like the “Free Companies” of the Hundred Years War – diverse bands, brought together by ambitious impresarios of violence.’

Worst of all were the Hun.

In 451 Attila’s Huns got as far as the Loire and the people of Orleans looked to Annianus, their bishop for help: ‘He advised them to prostrate themselves in prayer and with tears to implore the help of the Lord… “Keep a watch on the city walls [he said] to see if God, in his pity, will send us help.” When their prayers were finished, they were ordered by the old man to look for a third time. Far away they saw what looked like a cloud of dust… the Roman cavalry of Aetius, along with a Visigothic army, were on their way to relieve the city… “It is the help sent by God.” The walls were already rocking under the shock of the battering rams.’

In Paris, St Genevieve was almost drowned as a witch and ‘false prophet’ after she suggested that the townsfolk stay as the Huns approached. However, Attila changed his mind about attacking at the last minute, and her prayer marathon was credited with saving the city.

Fifty years later, Paris would be made the capital of an incoming German tribe who would prove the most significant of all. Franci comes from Frekkr, ‘the fierce ones’, and the Franks had often been used by the Romans as allies, until the relative strength of the two groups had shifted towards the former’s favour.

Something of their frenemy relationship can be seen in the grave of Childeric, king of the Franks from 457 to 481, which was discovered in 1653 and contained a Roman official signet ring with his portrait. Childeric’s dynasty claimed descent from Merovich, or ‘sea warrior’, and his successor Hlodovech, ‘pillaging warrior’, would become the most significant of the Merovingians.

Better known as Clovis, it was he who made the fateful decision to embrace Christianity and the Roman Church’s variation in particular, forming an alliance between Rome and Paris that would shape western civilisation. Although Clovis converted at the behest of his wife – one of many male secondary converts to a religion often spread by women – there were political considerations, too. He needed the support of the Church, now run by Gaul’s landed aristocracy and effectively running the country’s cities.

Clovis overturned the previous confederation of Frankish chieftains, making himself an all-powerful ruler. He did this by eliminating his rivals, and in old age he felt sad that he did not kill more of his relatives.

‘He is said to have made the following remark about the relatives he had destroyed. “How sad a thing it is that I live as a stranger like some solitary pilgrim, and that I have none of my own relatives left to help me when disaster threatens.” He said this, not because he grieved for their deaths, but because in his cunning way he hoped to find some relatives still alive whom he could kill.’

The Franks were a vital part of Catholicism’s victory over the Arian heresy, an achievement partly secured on the battlefield. The Arian Visigoths still ruled the south of Gaul and when the two tribes fought at Vouillé, south of Poitiers, in 507, the Franks, once again, were victorious. Gaul would be France, and France would be Catholic.

It is understandable why the Gauls called the Franks barbarians. He describes ‘a group of bellatores, men of war, enthusiastic hunters and spasmodically pious givers to new, northern-style monasteries, the nobles of Austrasia owed little to a south still cluttered with ancient memories’. These Franks could not understand Latin, unlike the ‘Romans’ of Aquitaine, and these distinctions between the northern and southern French would remain. Neither could they read, and ‘the things that counted for most in their world – oaths of loyalty and tales of heroic deeds – were best expressed by the power of the spoken word alone’.

Even conversion and literacy did not dampen their military ardour, and the hilt of a Frankish sword in Sweden has a verse from the Psalms, Psalm 144: 1: ‘Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war and my fingers to fight’.

Their history would be written by St Gregory from the sanctuary at Tours where aristocratic men would often flee to escape various murderous feuds. These religious shrines served as sanctuaries in a world that was otherwise collapsing, and the common theme of this period is an extreme form of pessimism: ‘Gregory the Great, even Gregory of Tours and John of Ephesus, had been both oppressed and heartened by a sense of the rapid end of the world and the imminent approach of the Last Days.’

It would get even worse, with the rise of a new force coming out of the desert on the fringes of the eastern empire, men who ‘intended to use these armies to inherit the earth’.

The Arab conquests were dizzying in their speed, even if the people they overrun were not sure what they were; to them, Islam was merely a heresy of Christianity. Yet their results spoke for themselves, and as Brown writes, ‘The Muslim achievement was unparalleled’.

‘Those who witnessed the events of the seventh century knew, without a doubt, that they were participating in the last and most dramatic, “changing of the kingdoms”.’

The Arabs at one point sent an embassy to Heraclius saying ‘God has given this land as an inheritance to our father Abraham and to his posterity after him. We are the children of Abraham. You have held our country long enough. Give it up peacefully, and we will not invade your country. If not, we will retake with interest what you have withheld from us.’ The Arabs defeated his armies, and seemed destined to conquer the whole world until finally stopped in their tracks in Constantinople itself.

Emperor Leo III had used Greek Fire to push back the invaders at the second attempt, but the eastern world was shaken by the ordeal. The triumph of Islam was followed by the iconoclasm controversy, which exploded just as a suitably portentous volcano erupted in the Aegean in 736. When the Lombards attacked Rome, the Byzantines were too busily immersed in this religious dispute to help; so Ravenna became the last part of the western empire to fall to the barbarians, in 751.

The ‘unspeakable Saracens’ in the meantime had conquered Spain, and by 732 were on their way to loot the shrine of St Martin at Tours when they were checked by the Franks.

The Muslim world instead looked east, and ‘with the foundation of Baghdad, in 762, the Islamic empire took on its definitive, oriental face.’ Small remnants of the old empire survived in parts, and the ‘tongue of the Latins’ was still spoken in isolated pockets of the Sahara in the 11^th century.

But a new Christian civilisation was emerging in the West, cut off from its Mediterranean birthplace. There was even a word to describe this world, Kristintumr, Christendom, spoken in the language of a people who came late to the new religion – the Saxons of Britain.

An eighth century Christian author had written how, on the outer fringes of Europe, lived ‘brutish peoples, without religion and without kings’. Yet Christianity now flourished in these distant rocky islands, especially among the Irish.

Among these people, who had never even experienced the gift of Roman rule, churchmen attracted huge prestige and power for their learning. One, Mo Chuoroc maccu Neth Semond, was styled ‘doctor of the whole world’. In 697 Adomnán of Iona persuaded 51 kings to agree to the Cáin Adomnáin, an Ireland-wide Law of Innocents that protected women and priests from intertribal violence; a collection of Irish Law, the Senchas Már, appeared in the 720s.

Irish holy men turned up in Britain and on the continent, enduring absurdly harsh conditions and working miracles, persuading brutish kings of the benefits of Christianity. Columba is said to have been responsible for a miracle where a woman married to an ugly man was able to obtain sexual gratification. Aidan converted the northern Anglo-Saxons after their southern brethren had been brought into the faith by Italians.

The spread of literacy enabled by this conversion lit up Anglo-Saxon civilisation in a burst of creativity, in works of history, poetry and laws, the very first law in English protecting the Church. None would flourish more than distant Northumbria, whose king Oswald was engaged in a form of holy war with the still-pagan kingdom of Mercia around the same time as the Muslim armies were conquering the Christian Near East.

The Saxons turned missionary too, and the Devonian Boniface, born Wynfrith, travelled to the continent to convert the Old Saxons, men ‘of the same blood and bone’. Boniface did a good job of converting them, until killed by one of the most fearsome of tribes, the Frisians - also among the most reluctant to embrace Christianity. Their king, Radbod, had refused to change religion because he was told by a Frankish bishop that he would not meet his ancestors in heaven. ‘He would rather be in Hell with the great men of his lineage than share Heaven with lower-class persons such as the bishop.’ But the Frisians, too, were persuaded to convert, and to abandon old traditions such as infanticide. The Germanic peoples were largely convinced by Boniface’s argument that ‘the customs of past ages’ must be measured by ‘the correct taste of modern times’.

The early English even saw their perpetual grumble, the weather, as an argument for the new faith. Daniel of Winchester advised that ‘whilst the Christians are allowed to possess the countries that are rich in oil and wine and other commodities’ the gods ‘have left to the heathens only the frozen lands of the North’ so they were ‘frequently to be reminded of the supremacy of the Christian world’. Nothing like a dose of rain in July to remind you of the inadequacies of your gods.

Just as the collapse of the empire had shrunk horizons, so the rise of Christendom opened them again. Remarkably, in 724 some Anglo-Saxons reached as far as Syria where a local Muslim dignitary recorded that they meant no harm and ‘wish only to fulfil their religious law’. They came from ‘the western shores, where the sun sets… and we know of no land beyond their islands, but only water’.

The story concludes with the rise of the Carolingian empire, which signals the end of ‘micro-Christendoms’ and the emergence of a common western identity. Charlemagne had crushed the Saxons, defeated the Lombards and confirmed the alliance between the Franks and the Romans which would shape what became known as the medieval world.

Charlemagne’s rule would bring a burst of energy, with new libraries – admittedly minuscule compared to those of the Islamic world – and a determined effort to promote the written word. Some 50,000 books were copied in ninth-century Christendom, the first of Europe’s renaissances. Across the Frankish empire, the core of a new civilisation, ‘village, church and cemetery had come together’ and ‘even church-bells could be heard’, the everyday sound of this new civilisation.

At the Council of Nicaea in 787, Pope Hadrian spoke of Charlemagne as the Pope’s ‘spiritual son’ because he had ‘conquered all the west’ and ‘subjected barbarous tribes to the Christian faith’. Thirteen years later, Charles the Great famously entered Rome where Pope Leo ‘adored’ the Frankish leader, threw himself at his feet as he would have done to the ruler in Constantinople, proclaiming him the Emperor of the West. From this year on, significantly, papal documents are no longer dated by the regnal year of the emperor in the East. The Latin West had risen again, quite distinctively different to what before, and with it the age of Late Antiquity was over. It’s an age that Peter Brown has done an immense job of bringing to life.