Power & Persuasion Late Antiquity Towards A Christian Empire [Paperback]

Peter Brown, perhaps the greatest living authority on Mediterranean civilization in late antiquity, traces the growing power of Christian bishops as they wrested influence from philosophers, who had traditionally advised the rulers of Graeco-Roman society.  In the new “Christian empire,” the ancient bonds of citizen to citizen and of each city to its benefactors were replaced by a common Christianity and common loyalty to a distant, Christian autocrat.  This transformation of the Roman empire from an ancient to a medieval society, he argues, is among the most far-reaching consequences of the rise of Christianity.

Peter Brown, perhaps the greatest living authority on Mediterranean civilization in late antiquity, traces the growing power of Christian bishops as they wrested influence from philosophers, who had traditionally advised the rulers of Graeco-Roman society.  In the new “Christian empire,” the ancient bonds of citizen to citizen and of each city to its benefactors were replaced by a common Christianity and common loyalty to a distant, Christian autocrat.  This transformation of the Roman empire from an ancient to a medieval society, he argues, is among the most far-reaching consequences of the rise of Christianity.

“A new book by Peter Brown is clearly an event. . . .  Peter Brown is a writer of highly emotive as well as extremely clever prose. . . . The Curti lectures complete the sequence of studies of the Christianisation of late antiquity on which Peter Brown has been engaged since the publication ofAugustine of Hippo(1967).  One by one, these studies have illuminated the world of late antiquity (the term he has made his own) by reference to what has preceded it. ”—Averil Cameron,London Times Higher Education Supplement

“There are few areas of humane scholarship so daunting as the study of late antiquity, that period wlC*