The World of Late Antiquity

"This is an extraordinary book. It was commissioned by an art history publisher, Thames and Hudson, and was to be an illustrated history of the area that Peter Brown was exploring in the 60s and 70s. Really, Late Antiquity wasn’t much of a concept before that book came out. In very few words he managed to sketch out a whole new geography which taught us that you can’t think about the rise of Christianity without looking at the fate of the old established religions like Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Manicheanism; and that the rule of the Roman Empire had to be brought into the context of Persia, the Barbarian north and followers of Islam. That there was a much wider canvas on which to study the period of the third to the sixth centuries A.D. He really put the late Roman period into perspective in a completely new way. Instead of this notion of decline and being a shadow of its previous self, the Roman world of Late Antiquity took on a much more enriched, colourful and culturally wealthy existence. Peter Brown showed very significantly that by looking at the broader world one could see that Roman ideas, in their Christian forms, were spreading all over the Empire and way beyond, as in the case of the Nestorian Christians, who made their way through Persia to China."

"This remarkable book begins with the Emperor Hadrian in AD 117 and finishes with the emergence of the Prophet Muhammad in Arabia in the 620s. This end point and eastward dimension is thrilling now and was most unusual when Brown first wrote. Many books about the later Roman Empire concentrate on wars and Barbarian attacks in Northern Europe. They lose their reader in their endless campaigns. What I like about this book is that it is focused on cultural, religious and philosophical changes, particularly in the Greek-speaking world, where they were strongest. It extends from Italy to Asia to the Near East brilliantly, including the Persians and turning down to Arabia. Before Brown, nobody who was writing in English had ever linked that area together so powerfully. During my lifetime late antiquity has sprung to the centre of what so many undergraduates wish to study and what experts in the ancient world immerse themselves in. The primary reason is this book and Peter Brown’s own extraordinary teaching in a decade based in Oxford between 1965 and 1975. It was one of those explosive moments, and those who remember it will know that they were so lucky to be of that generation and to be touched by it."