With Fresh Eyes

Historians​ make themselves useful by organising thoughts about the past, hacking it into conceptual chunks, some of which take their place in a framework of historical cliché. Most people in Western cultures are comfortable with the terms ‘Middle Ages’ and ‘medieval’ as points of reference, regardless of the way the shifting frontiers of historical research alter our understanding of what they might mean. Often a term will reveal some half-expressed idea of progress: that’s how things were, and now they are better – hence the commonplace use of ‘medieval’ with a pejorative or condescending edge. The architectural label ‘Gothic’ started in Renaissance Italy as a critical comparison with classical architecture but has become dead metaphor: our praise of Chartres Cathedral or Notre-Dame is rarely balanced by a sense that they embody the barbarism of peoples invading the Roman Empire.

Alternatively the historical narrative may be one of decline, with the human lifespan providing a model – youth, maturity, ageing. In the early 19th century the English architectural antiquary Thomas Rickman looked at the changing styles of medieval Gothic windows and came up with the terms ‘Early English’, ‘Decorated’ and ‘Perpendicular’: church-crawlers still use that shorthand, not thinking much about the implied pessimism. An early example of decline periodisation has been one of the most influential, and provides the ground bass of Peter Brown’s memoir. It dates from the beginning of late antiquity, the period that Brown has done more than anyone to put on the historiographical map, and is owed to the prolific historian Cassius Dio, born of a senatorial family and thus into the Roman Empire’s governing elite. Capturing the gloom that had been a frequent mood among the senatorial class since the days of the republic, he looked back on his own lifetime, and described the transition after 180 ce from the rule of competent and sane Antonine emperors to that of a bunch of imperial lunatics, chancers and tyrants. It was a precipitous descent ‘from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust’, still rusting away at the end of his story sometime around 230.

This periodisation had a moral purpose: at the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180, Dio’s world took a bad turn, its morale was undermined and its many civic virtues soured. In writing his mammoth (though now fragmentary) history of Rome from the city’s supposed date of foundation in 753 bce, Dio suggested ways in which contemporary Rome might recover – though he wasn’t making any promises.

Dio’s periodisation effectively gave the title to one of the most influential books in Western historiography, Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88). Gibbon began his story in Dio’s fashion: in his first chapter, he commented that seven centuries of Roman history, both republican and imperial, had witnessed ‘a rapid succession of triumphs’, until 180 ce, when ‘the prosperous condition of their empire’ began to erode. After that it was downhill all the way. At some points in his six volumes, Gibbon was prepared to postpone his gloomy prognosis until after the reign of the great emperor Justinian (527-565 ce), but even so the timeframe for decline and fall was suspiciously long, lasting until the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453. In fact, his penultimate chapter rounds off the story as late as 1590, with the death of Pope Sixtus V, a rigorist Franciscan and ruthless moralist. Sixtus might seem an unlikely final hero for a sceptically-minded gentleman of Protestant England, but in Gibbon’s view, during his short pontificate he convincingly embodied the ancient Antonine virtues.

Most empires in history would envy such a luxuriously extended senescence, not least the short-lived British Empire, which was taking shape in Gibbon’s time and took little more than two centuries to dismantle. During the expansion of the British Empire in the 19th century, boys trained in public schools to become imperial administrators were taught Gibbon’s chronological framework, despite widespread worries about his forthright attacks on Christianity as the catalyst of Rome’s decay. The Roman Republic presented a story of steadily more successful conquest, in the process smoothly incorporating the cultural greatness of Greece; the Julio-Claudian and Antonine centuries were the peak. From 180 ce, the story became tainted, affording far fewer lessons in military prowess, colonial expansion and administration. Throughout the Western and North Atlantic world, as European and North American regimes grabbed ever larger swathes of the world’s landmass, Dio and Gibbon continued to shape curricula up to university level. Everything from the third century ce through to the Byzantine centuries represented a falling away of standards in government, literature and art. Not all Western historians succeeding Gibbon would see the flourishing of Christianity as much compensation.

Eastern Europe and Russia had, and have, a different perspective. They were shaped by their Byzantine heritage, so audaciously annexed in the 15th and 16th centuries by the rulers of Muscovy. They celebrated a New Rome in Constantinople (Byzantium) and Moscow would later consider itself a ‘Third Rome’. As new nations with a Byzantine heritage emerged and consolidated in the 19th and 20th centuries, they debated whether Byzantium was a glorious predecessor or a source of corruption and decadence to be overcome. Eastern European heirs of Byzantine culture were far less inclined than condescending Westerners to regard it as decadent, when it had so radically prolonged Rome’s identity and shaped the Orthodox Christianity of cultures from the Mediterranean to Siberia and the Arctic Sea. The ownership of Byzantine history has remained contested, the fragmentation of Eastern Orthodox Churches having begun as early as the poisonous divisions created by the Council of Chalcedon in 451 ce, then having been exacerbated by the triumph and subsequent collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Byzantine rhetoric still resounds in the war between Russia and Ukraine in ways that Westerners find difficult to hear. The twelve centuries of continuing Roman imperial rule in Constantinople remain a topic of intense interest in Eastern Europe and Russia, as the early Roman Empire once was in the 19th-century West.

Brown’s memoir is an account of a long academic career spent engaging with these contending and evolving historiographies. It chronicles cross-currents of influence on his own interests and his achievement in helping to reshape Western views of antiquity. The unsympathetic reader might consider the work self-indulgent: its seven hundred pages cover Brown’s career and literary production only as far as 1987, while 38 years of elder-statesman life and major books have followed since. The case for the defence is that Brown has never written a dull or inelegant sentence, and his parade of publications over the last sixty years continues to astonish, instruct and beguile. Brown will have been conscious of the precedent for this autobiography in Gibbon’s own Memoirs, which run to four hundred pages in their consolidated Victorian compilation. In the Memoirs one savours the same distinctive prose style as in Decline and Fall, described by one of Gibbon’s early editors as ‘a mixture of dignity and levity’. Gibbon was writing for the curiosity and entertainment of an educated public. Brown associates his non-academic readers with relatives and adult acquaintances from his childhood who ‘did not own many books – but they read what they had … I wrote for my aunts.’

All autobiography is inherently mendacious, if only by omission and with the intent of protecting the innocent. In his descriptions of the book Brown excuses his elisions: it is ‘a story of my life and a reconstruction of my own intellectual genealogy’ and ‘a portrait of an age’ in British universities where, over half a century, perspectives on the ancient world were transformed. The book veers between these genres, and the reader is left to guess what has fallen through the cracks. Mary Beard, in an affectionately acerbic assessment of Journeys of the Mind in the TLS, pointed out that Brown writes nothing about his first wife and daughters, and includes only a couple of references to his second wife; the memoir is dedicated to his third. His home life is absent but two areas of pure biography stand out: his childhood and youth amid fading remnants of the Protestant Ascendancy in the Irish Free State, and much later his vivid reminiscences of journeys through Iran in the last years of the Pahlavi regime in the 1970s. The Iranian episodes are an extended lament for books never written: reflections of Iran’s impact on the Roman and Byzantine world under the Sasanian monarchy and its Islamic successors. This field of inquiry beyond the Roman horizon would have radically expanded Brown’s already vast range of interests, but the Islamic Revolution prevented its exploration. Instead he intensified his study of late Roman society.

Brown’s account of his Ascendancy ancestors (enlivened by some belligerent Presbyterians alongside the Church of Ireland majority) places them in the story of a ruling class displaced and the consequent disarray of lesser Protestant families in their orbit: ‘the small world of the little big men of the provinces’. Beginning in the 19th century, Irish landed estates were sold off and Protestant political privileges dismantled, a process much accelerated in the 1920s by the War of Independence and subsequent civil war, when the Protestant population of the Free State plummeted and opportunities for careers in public life were left much restricted. For a sensitive boy escaping into books (as is often the way with an only child), it was easy to begin seeing parallels with the latter days of the Roman Empire. Here were the ruins of dignified houses and roofless places of worship spreading across the Irish countryside, here the discreet search for alternative sources of income or retreat to surviving imperial territories (in the case of the Browns, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan). This encouraged him to take a Gibbonian perspective on Roman history.

Yet Brown also emphasises another aspect of life in the Free State: the pigeonholing of everyone according to their religious background and the consequent distinctive patterns that Catholic or Protestant identity brought to their lives – their schooling, the newspapers they read. The Church of Ireland has a tradition of serious biblical scholarship, drawing on critical historical insights and conscious of different historical attitudes to the understanding of the Bible within Roman Catholicism. The Bible is a text to be interrogated, albeit with reverence, but one also lives under its shadow. Brown’s English contemporaries, whom he first encountered in his teens at Shrewsbury School and then at Oxford, did not have the benefit of these instructive experiences in all-pervasive religion. In comparison to Ireland, religion has played a secondary role in the teaching and writing of history in the UK. All of Brown’s work displays a grasp of religious nuance and an understanding of the processes and contours of piety, from his magnificent biography of Augustine of Hippo (1967) through to later explorations of Christian attitudes to sex, poverty and charity. An affectionate wit runs through it all: here there is a contrast with Gibbon, whose cold satirical scepticism suffused his learning in Christian theology. Brown unobtrusively notes his own return to Anglican churchgoing in the mid-1970s, as a consequence of his encounters with different religions in his journeys through West Asia.

Brown arrived in Oxford in 1953 already enthused by twin interests: the history of late medieval Europe and the era of Cassius Dio, the third century ce. Both were apparently eras of ‘waning’, to borrow from The Waning of the Middle Ages, the English title of Johan Huizinga’s brilliant survey of France and the Netherlands in the 14th and 15th centuries (‘autumntide’ in the original Dutch: Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen, 1919). The bulk of Brown’s reminiscence from Oxford days onwards to his long career in the US is the story of his jettisoning the late Middle Ages and finding the freedom to play a leading role in transforming our understanding of the later Roman centuries, not least in enticing Oxford University away from its Victorian imperial priorities in ancient history. A rare example of sourness in the book is the brief pen portrait of K.B. McFarlane, who in Oxford ‘published little’ and was a ‘persecutory superego to us all’. McFarlane, ultimate master of manuscript resources in the record offices, meticulous analyst of late medieval English administrative process and elite family interactions, becomes the symbolic Other to Brown, who rather startlingly observes that he has only ever once worked in the archives, as a sixth-former researching a Georgian parliamentary election in Shropshire. Brown’s parting of company with late medieval Europe was aided by an All Souls prize fellowship, which gave him entry to a small society of formal and informal male conviviality. Brown could now give his full attention to the Roman Empire, though he eventually abandoned his doctoral project, which bore the faintly Jim Dixon-flavoured title ‘The Social and Economic Position of the Italian Senatorial Aristocracy in the Sixth Century AD’.

This topic was no doubt inspired by the great Russian historian of antiquity M.I. Rostovzteff, author of The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (1926). The excitement that Brown had felt on first reading Rostovzteff as a gap-year teenager was modified in part by returning to Gibbon’s interest in the explanatory power of religion, but also because (aided by a facility in acquiring languages) he now discovered the work of German, French and Italian scholars who did not see decay as the main story of fourth and fifth-century Rome. The later work of the French Catholic historian Henri-Irénée Marrou was particularly fruitful. Deliberately imitating Augustine’s final critical retrospect of his own writings, the Retractationes, Marrou reversed his earlier perspective on Augustine’s cultural world as being in final decay. It was in Marrou’s books that Brown first discovered the name for the period that has become a leitmotif of his work. Marrou drew attention to contemporary German historians who spoke of Spätantike – ‘late antiquity’. The label is useful for its lack of implied judgment, and also for attaching the Christianisation of the empire after Constantine I firmly to the classical and imperial culture that came before. Christianity need not be seen as the enemy of Greco-Roman society, but as a new way of organising it. Brown gave the term wider currency by using it in the titles of his books, starting in 1971 with The World of Late Antiquity: From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad.

With the aid of scholars from other disciplines, Brown reassessed phenomena in Christian late antiquity that had been marginalised by historians owing to their general condescension towards the period. The anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard made him think about African societies whose assumptions about evil, witchcraft and magic had been treated with contempt by their European colonial rulers. Evans-Pritchard analysed the way such systems worked, and showed that they were functional and reasonable on their own terms. Brown’s conversations with Mary Douglas encouraged him to apply such insights to the spectacular growth of belief in the supernatural and occult in late Roman society: ‘What did people gain by believing in demons?’ he asked a lecture audience in 1970. He interpreted such beliefs less as a sign of crisis and intellectual decay than as a creative response to social change. This applied to those in power as well as the uneducated, including Christian leaders who were building new ecclesiastical systems within classical structures.

Brown developed this theme over decades, not least in The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (1981). Saints had been a particular victim of Gibbon’s sarcasm: Brown presented the cult as an essential structure in late antique society. Devotion to saints gave any Christian access to a host of influential friends or patrons who bridged the chasm between the eternal and the quotidian; saints could deploy their power as proof of their friendship. He gives the example of the discovery in Palestine in 415 of the tomb of Stephen the Deacon, Christianity’s very first martyr, which triggered a rainstorm after a long winter drought, so cheering up the observers that 73 of them were instantly cured of a variety of illnesses. This echoed the way in which Roman society worked in the era. Another aspect of that society, the social prominence of eunuchs, began to seem less remote from the cult of the saints; eunuchs in late Roman Christianity, more or less genderless but still a little male, often complacently compared themselves to angels. They were derided by Western scholars of Byzantine history from Gibbon onwards and were always worth a snigger from British public schoolboys studying classics. But Brown viewed them in the light of social assumptions that encouraged such gender modification: poverty-stricken families ambitious for the future of a talented son might regard the risky operation as a career investment. It made sense for eunuchs to play their part in the Byzantine Empire as imperial courtiers, successful military commanders and even patriarchs of the imperial church in Constantinople.

Brown​ presented Byzantine society as rational and impressively successful. He was also alert to the importance of women, drawing on the work of scholars such as Judith Herrin and Averil Cameron. For too long the only women in Byzantium who had attracted academic attention were a handful of empresses and the Virgin Mary. Women began to be credited with having ensured the survival of the icon, which is today such an essential part of Orthodox Christian identity but which in the eighth and ninth centuries was threatened by the destructive instincts of various male leaders in the Iconoclastic Controversy. A new consideration of this major disruption of Byzantine theology and politics drew attention to the masculine character of imperial public life and worship. Byzantine military leaders were impressed by the military success of the Muslims, wondered how to account for it and concluded that Islamic hatred of sacred representation must be pleasing to God. In their view, the splendid ritual of their churches had no need of the icon to enhance the liturgy in God’s service, but this contrasted with the private piety of women in the Byzantine household. When icons were torn down in churches, which as public spaces were primarily male spaces, sacred images found refuge in private houses. There, mothers and grandmothers could exercise their customary prerogative of giving hospitality to a guest – in this case a sacred guest – and could impress on their children their love for a source of divine power. Over time the iconophobes lost the ideological and affective contest to an alliance of women and iconophilic monks; Empress Irene of Athens, the first solo female ruler of the Byzantine Empire, ensured the eventual defeat of the male initiative in imperial iconoclasm by effectively convening and then steering the Second Council of Nicaea in 787. Brown wrote on this subject with characteristic elegance in an essay collected in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (1982).

One of Brown’s most illuminating books is The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, published in 1988. This is a study of sex through the prism of those abstaining from sexual activity as ascetics who sought holiness and unity with the divine, but who, in doing so, thought and spoke a great deal about humanity as corporeal and sexual beings. It illuminates a society with personal politics radically different from those of the modern West. By the 1980s Brown had moved across the Atlantic and would continue his long academic career on both coasts of the US. Among his new acquaintances was another visitor to the States, Michel Foucault. As an iconoclast and slayer of historical certainty Foucault was, as Brown puts it, ‘the rage in Berkeley’. In The Body and Society, Brown went out of his way to pay what was by then a posthumous tribute to Foucault’s ‘humbling serenity and unaffected craftsmanship’. In the twentieth anniversary edition of the book, he once more emphasised his debt to Foucault for his ‘breathtaking capacity to defamiliarise’. One can see why such a capacity should appeal to a scholar who was doing so much himself to look at the past with fresh eyes. Evidently the two got on famously, and Foucault proved himself to be a good and courteous listener. These chapters of Journeys of the Mind are almost the record of a bromance.

Both scholars wrote major historical studies of sexuality and its management in abstention or virginity. In 1976 Foucault had published the first of the four volumes of L’Histoire de la sexualité. After the first volume’s rather rambling exposition of modernity, the second, published in 1984, turned back to ancient Greece, and it is clear from this book and the third volume, on Rome, which came out at the same time, that the ancient world had come to absorb his interest in a new and intense way. Conversations with Brown were an inspiration. To place Foucault’s four volumes next to The Body and Society is an illuminating juxtaposition. Brown’s work remains instructive and convincing, exuberantly founded not just on text but on archaeology and art – a wider perspective on ancient society than Foucault’s. Foucault still has many admirers, but his work seems to me a period piece, narrowly focused and arguing towards a preconceived conclusion. It is to the advantage of The Body and Society that Foucault’s influence on it is not greatly apparent. A more obvious debt is to Foucault’s colleague at the Collège de France Paul Veyne, an original historian of the ancient world. Veyne shared Brown’s fascination with archaeology and artefacts, and his work on sexuality was led by the primary source evidence.

In Journeys of the Mind, Brown refers to Foucault’s critics, who take issue with his relativism, his reluctance to affirm historical truth, his determinism and opaque jargon. He also adds his own criticisms: in discussing early Christianity and sexuality, Foucault made no attempt to understand the rooting of Christianity in Jewish thought and practice, to probe the construction of the New Testament or to investigate the tensions within the early Christian communities as they developed. I would add that Foucault’s treatment of the history of sexuality is shot through with monocausal explanations of social and ideological change brought about by repression, regulation and definition; he also has an excessive preoccupation with Catholic sacramental confession. Foucault gave minimal credit to the obstinate tendency of human beings to think for themselves, to struggle in unpromising circumstances towards what they want, and on occasion to succeed in getting it.

Brown emphasises that his memoir contains a portrait of a lost academic world: the male-dominated elite society of 1950s Oxford, which now seems impossibly exotic and remote even to those of us who occupy the same geographical space. But his last chapters portray a second historiographical community on the road to evanescence: that of French-inflected postmodernism in universities in the 1980s, which borrowed its historical relativism and relish for textual acrobatics from Foucault in particular. By contrast, Brown’s work belongs triumphantly to the present age.