The whole narrative is built around evolving social contrasts: the contrast between the rich and poor, the rulers and the ruled, and the struggles that defined each. At the outset there was the status quo of the empire, a world where the cities of the third century were islands of civility and culture in a sea of barbarism, both within and without the physical confines of the empire. This comfortable world of conservative rulers was upset in the crisis of the 240s, when those barbarians beyond Rome’s borders suddenly attacked in the 240s. War on every front led to the necessity of promoting men of action and this “aristocracy of service” came to dominate where before had been cultured elites. In this new climate the middle class flourished, but the fourth century revival also saw the consolidation of the local elites as some senators served out their office without ever visiting Rome. This trend solidified with the barbarian invasions, the loss of the West leaving it narrow in focus and ambition. In the West, the locals were now governed by the militant barbarians and church fathers, and while the East was reduced to governance by the church as Emperor Justinian cut the empire down to its bare bones, the locals turning to their bishops and clergy to replace the magistrates removed by the autocrat. At last, the rulers and the ruled of both the East and West shared the same cultures. The world of Brown’s narrative at last knew peace; in a sense, the world came full circle, back to an ancestral religion and a state of harmony. These changes came about thanks to the internal efforts of Christians and the external pressures of barbarians.The conflict between the Christians and the pagans is another theme of change and contrasts. It is a curious theme, for though Brown attempts to cut the upstart Christians down to size whenever he gets the opportunity, he does give them their due with regard to their work in the changing fabric of the empire. Despite early pressures, the church filled a vacant hole in a changing world, where the “barbaric” peasants were suddenly socially mobile. Thus Christianity unexpectedly exploded in the third century and filled in where the pressured paganism receded, offering a home to the physically and spiritually homeless. But this new strength brought the church into direct conflict with the elite Hellenes, the representatives of pagan culture. Brown likes the Hellenes because, unlike the new Christians, they turned to the old ways to meet the new problems. At first he treats the Christians and pagans similarly, allowing that Christianity offered social bonds and salvation, and expressing quiet reverence for the twilight of the tenacious pagans. But Brown shifts tones as the story progresses, almost defensively building up the pagans, willing the reader to see that “The ‘Hellenes’ created the classical language of philosophy in the early Middle Ages, of which Christian, Jewish and Islamic thought, up to the twelfth century, are but derivative vernaculars.” He even grants to a Hellene, Plotinus, the honor of delivering the notion of connections between the seen and unseen to the “crude” monotheism of the Christians. Brown then depicts the Christians’ worship as “cold,” while describing the vigorous warmth associated with pagan sacrifice. As paganism finally died out, it bestowed its dramatic grandeur to its Christian successors: as the world risked growing “pale in the harsh light of the Christian Apologists’ call to the simple worship of a half-known high God” it “became suffused again with colour.” Where paganism had infected Gibbon’s pure Christian worship, Brown sees it as invigorating its successor. This bias for pagan things continues on as Brown makes it clear that Constantine was a poor Christian, his “conversion” a result of propaganda with which those Christians in his circles “besieged” him. Then, with the advent of the popular, empire-wide church, Brown’s rhetoric suddenly takes on heavily pro-pagan color as he takes the Christian elites to task for (sniff) only learning Homer for his literary value, even asserting that “Such men deserved the sudden fright of nineteen months of ostentatiously pagan rule” of Julian the Apostate, whom he favors with the note that he received a “proper” education. However, Christianity was there to stay and Brown moves on to acknowledge, like Gibbon, those formidable saints and abbots who moved their worlds – he is not favorable towards them, but cannot ignore the grave power of the pulpit.
Curiously, it is on the subject of barbarism that Brown pulls out all the stops in his rhetorical whipping of the Christians in his simplistic view of a complex time. Not only are the Christians made guilty of allowing the barbarians into the flourishing empire, they are also written up for alienating their conquerors. While he addresses the notion of barbarism in general terms, Brown largely ignores the invasions of the fourth and fifth centuries. Brown argued for a “barbaric” countryside, where the sensibilities of the senators and cultured elite were assaulted by an alien world of peasants, almost barbarians themselves: “bilingual aristocrats passed unselfconsciously from Latin to Greek; an African landowner, for instance, found himself quite at home in a literary salon of well-to-do Greeks at Smyrna.” Images of an empire united in opinion against the northern aggressors is attributed to the revival of the fourth century, where Brown has the divide between “us” and “them” fit the familiar mold: less of “city v. country,” more of “Romania v. the Outside.” Brown does not trouble himself too much with reasoning behind the causes for the fall, mainly asserting that it is complicated and related to economic and social weaknesses. But what he does think important is the reception of the barbarians by their Roman enemies. The subject of violence is abbreviated as much as possible here. After all, Brown is a busy man with a whole story of social change and restructuring to tackle in just two hundred pages, so he glosses over the invasions between 376 and 410, relegating them to a mere blip on the radar while quickly dropping the uncomfortable words like “invasion” and “campaigns” and casually asserting that “immigrants” from over the Rhine had come to seek a better living in Roman country. The above development of what Brown calls intolerance had a direct impact on his depiction of a newly barbarian world. In setting up his grand defense of the barbarians, Brown first makes the claim that the main problem with Rome’s weakened defenses was the disassociation of the Catholic Church and the senatorial aristocracy with the army. As the invasions continue and gain in strength, Christian distrust of soldiers goes on to divert blame for the fall of Rome back onto the Christians rather than those who overthrew them. The unbending Roman society could not handle the invasion and moreover the poor barbarian “settlers” were not welcomed by their Christian neighbors – described as “civilians” that could not stomach a soldier – who threw up “a wall of dumb hatred” at the presence of Arian heretics. Moreover, the formation of violent barbarian kingdoms is blamed upon the “intolerance that greeted the barbarian immigration.” Brown continues to ignore the violence of the era, preferring to note the discomfort felt by the Italian elites as their new equilibrium was upset by Justinian’s reconquest of the peninsula in 533.
Brown has offered us a short introduction into a deep subject. While doing a credible job of delving into the why of his subjects, much of history is left untapped. This book is perhaps a good starting place to get an idea of the world of the late antique and to be presented some new ideas that fit with politically correct molds, but its very brevity is more suited to recounting, in concise form, what is commonly held to be true. Brown has done a fair job with this, but the challenges he puts forth, most notably the nature of the barbarian “immigrations,” would require whole extra books to adequately address them.
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