Peter Brown had an essay recently in the NYRB, and I'd had a conversation not long before that on neoplatonism, so I picked up this book. It is a set of lectures that extend the argument in his book The World of Late Antiquity (1971) that Gibbon had it wrong, and that the period in which paganism subsided and Christianity took power was not one of decline but of striving transition. In particular, it was a transition from communities in which competition was kept in tense check by various moral and social pressures, to a society in which there were almost no limits to power-seeking. The book also offers an interesting interpretation of daemons, of mystics both pagan and Christian, and other fine points often seeming to be directed at specific scholars, most of which are over the head of a non-specialist.

Perhaps I find Brown's arguments easy to accept because they fit in the same world as Braudel and later on, Foucault; that is to say, more on the anthropology side of history than the classics side. One can't help wondering, however, whether Brown is convincing because his view echos contemporary concerns. Gibbon, writing in the mid-18th century, had his reasons for poking a pin in the balloon of Christian orthodoxy, and for envisioning a civilization that has irrevocably declined since its golden youth. Perhaps Brown too had reasons, already in the 1970s and certainly in this new century, to see unbridled ambition as the engine of change.

Seminal. ( )