The Making of Late Antiquity (Jackson Lectures) [Paperback]

Peter Brown (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 11, 1993 | ISBN-10: 0674543211 | ISBN-13: 978-0674543218

Peter Brown presents a masterly history of Roman society in the second, third, and fourth centuries. Brown interprets the changes in social patterns and religious thought, breaking away from conventional modern images of the period.

Editorial Reviews

Review

No summary of its contents can do justice to this complex and fascinating book, written with all Peter Brown's refreshing panache. We are presented with an age of vitality, where historians used to find a creeping paralysis; the canvas comes alive with the spectacular successes of individuals who belie the conventional wisdom of the stifling oppressiveness of late Roman institutions...In a book devoted to human beings it is the portraits of individuals, perceptively located in their social and religious surroundings, which are naturally to the fore. (Classical Review 19970101)

The Making of Late Antiquity is most successful, I think, as a study of shifts in the religious imagination... Brown is sensitive to the multifaceted quality of the Late Antique view of the soul, and some of his most creative work is in discussions of demons and angels as imaginal faces of the self and its changing relation to the holy. From the private dreams of Aristides to the public withdrawal of Anthony, Brown has sketched a remarkable shift in a culture's vision of itself. His argument is as persuasive as it is eloquent.
--Patricia L. Cox (Church History )

A provocative book.
--Robert L. Wilken (Religious Studies )

[Brown's] interpretations are sensitive, vivid, and strongly persuasive. He offers a fascinating sketch of the distinctive configurations and interactions of religious, cultural, and social factors which gradually came to define life in the Mediterranean world of the late fourth and early fifth centuries…he has, by judicious use of analytic concepts and graphic vignettes, captured the "feel" of the religious life of the period.
--Eugene V. Gallagher (Theological Studies )

complex and fascinating book, written with all Peter Brown's refreshing panache. We are presented with an age of vitality, where historians used to find a creeping paralysis; the canvas comes alive with the spectacular successes of individuals who belie the conventional wisdom of the stifling oppressiveness of late Roman institutions; and the cautious uncertainty of the "age of anxiety" disappears in a vigorous emphasis on the recognition and display of power…[Brown] has shifted the emphasis of late roman studies from institutions to individuals, and to the discernment of what made late antique men "tick"--a task which he is without equal.
--E.D. Hunt (Classical Review )

This brief work by one of the most influential social historians of the twentieth century...provides scholars and serious students of the period of the second through fourth centuries with a well-documented and colorful exposition of the nature of the holy and of popular society in the late Roman Empire...Many will find its call to view the period with the ancients' own eyes quite refreshing.
--Jason T. Larson (Near East Archaeological Society Bulletin )

About the Author

Peter Brown is Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History, Princeton University. Among his publications is The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, 200-1000 A.D.

Product Details

• Paperback: 148 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (March 11, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674543211
• ISBN-13: 978-0674543218
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #186,798 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excelent introduction to the Late Antiquity, February 16, 2001

By 

Peter (SALT LAKE CITY, UT, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Making of Late Antiquity (Jackson Lectures) (Paperback)

Brown does an excellent job of introducing the reader to the period of late antiquity in this work. He is able to cover the major political, social and philosophical transition of the Roman Empire of the Antonines to the emergence of the Christian Succesor States with clarity, and accuracy. Although this work does not take an indepth look into any of the many subjects that fall in this period, it is an excellent overview, and maintains a level of scholarship that is almost unparalled in a work of this nature. The book is documented to an excellent degree, so that even the most critical reader can see where it is that Brown is comming from. I would recomend this book to anyone from the avid scholar to the most casual reader.

20 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The poisoning of the classical spirit, August 10, 2003

By 

OAKSHAMAN "oakshaman" (Algoma, WI United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Making of Late Antiquity (Carl Newell Jackson Lectures) (Hardcover)

From an Age of Equipoise to an Age of Ambition- the Poisoning of the Classical Spirit

I found this book to be an extremely clear and well-written explanation of the decline of classical Greco-Roman civilization. The period from the second to the fourth centuries, from the Antonines to Constantine, is covered. The author makes a very good case that the cause for this decline in the classical world was primarily due to a concentration of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands. He shows this to be true in economic, political, cultural, and most especially, religious spheres. He also shows the obvious parallels with our own age without being heavy handed.

First he shows the grand show of power and tradition in the age of the Antonines to be primarily an empty hollow thing. It was the gigantism that precedes decline even if the players of the time could not see it. The societal restraints and governors that constrained individual ambition began to erode. The old code of civic virtue, of demonstrating your greatness by contributing to the benefit of the society, the polis, crumbled. Wealth was concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. The common people were forced off of the land. Bankruptcy became commonplace across the empire. Politically, power concentrated into a smaller and smaller circle centered on the court in Rome, and then Constantinople, and away from the provincial towns and capitals. Culturally and scholarly, all status depended on ones mastery of polished Greek and the ability to quote precisely from the classics (i.e. scholarship depended more on the size of your library than the size of your intellect.)

It is in the religious and spiritual sphere that this tendency to place all authority in the hands of an elite becomes the most insidious, and the most damaging. It is demonstrated that ,traditionally, the average man of the Greco-Roman world saw that world as alive with supernatural forces that he interacted with on a daily basis. The pagan participant in the mysteries experienced the divine through direct contact. This slowly changed with the rise of Christianity. Men were told that only "official" intermediaries could bridge the gap between heaven and earth. As a result this gap widened into a chasm. The old comforting classical assumption that heaven and earth lived side by side in gentle communion faded away. In the author's words, the leaders of the Christian church came to stand between heaven and an earth emptied of the Gods.

With all economic, political, scholarly, and religious power concentrated in the hands of a tiny, ruthless, corrupt elite, is it any wonder that the common man lost any interest in maintaining the empire? The old system of civic virtue and of the old delicately balanced system of obligations from ruled to the rulers, and the rulers to the ruled, had been poisoned.

Any of this sound familiar?

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best books on the subject, August 29, 2006

By 

Diatrope "Diatrope" (Berkeley, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Making of Late Antiquity (Carl Newell Jackson Lectures) (Hardcover)

I cannot say enough about this extraordinary book. Everyone who is interested in the environment that led to the rise of Christianity will find this book fills in many details. Brown's analysis of the decline of classical Greco-Roman civilization is well done, concise, and comprehensive. I highly recommend this book!