Peter Brown. Journeys of the Mind. A Life in History.

    Peter Brown decided to reconcile the history of the Roman Empire with the dogma of the Catholic Church. The result transcended his Catholic Orthodoxy. It was the revision of the history describing the Empire after the Second Century as decaying and the fall of the Western Roman Empire as a watershed. He proved that, intellectually, the Roman Empire evolved quite naturally from a pagan worldview of the mid-Second Century to the conservative Christian society of the Late Empire. Furthermore, culturally, there was no watershed between the Late Roman Empire and the Germanic states, which replaced it thereafter. Currently, these views are accepted as normative in historical science. 

    The memoir is splendidly structured as recollections of his meetings with colleagues in a rough chronological sequence, so that one travels with him to Middle East, Iran and the United States. 

    However, Peter Brown's great revisionist coup obscures the following undeniable facts. Fourth century Roman Empire was less populous and poorer than the Empire at its zenith, the fact noticed by the most prescient of contemporary authors. Civic construction was at a standstill -- after the Baths of Diocletian there were few buildings of comparable size and stature -- and the cities started to be abandoned, first by the upper classes. Secular literature of any quality disappeared. The quality of sculpture and minting declined significantly, which suggests that the urban middle classes devoid of support by the magnates, were fewer and far between. The only mention of economic decay of the Late Empire, which I encountered in his 700 page book is "Trans-Mediterranean trade had already run down considerably before the Muslims reached the sea". 

     This reinforces a currently dominant view -- largely due to Peter Brown himself and others mentioned in the book -- that the fall of the Western Roman Empire was not as much of a watershed as a contiguous process of mutual adaptation between Roman and Germanic societies, but it was a slow decay nevertheless.