Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire.

POWER AND PERSUASION IN LATE ANTIQUITY 

Towards a Christian Empire

Peter Brown

University of Wisconsin Press, $12.95, 182 pp.

"If the decline of the Roman Empire was hastened by the conversion of Constantine," remarked Edward Gibbon, "his victorious religion broke the violence of the fall, and mollified the ferocious temper of the conquerors." In this once influential view, both the advantages and disadvantages of Christianity for Roman political society stem from the faith's softening of moral character. Although this "softening" did help to lessen the savagery of the barbarians from the north, within the civic structure of the empire the effects of the religion were almost entirely negative. While the bishops "inculcated the duty of passive obedience" and discouraged the "active virtues of society," the monks engaged in lives of "sacred indolence," or so Gibbon famously maintained.

When Peter Brown taught at Berkeley, he taped a photograph of a cage in a zoo on his office door. Attached to the cage's bars was a large sign that read, "Do Not Approach the Gibbon: It Bites." The ability to provide fresh approaches to issues that date back to Gibbon's mordant phrases is surely one of the qualities that has made Peter Brown, now at Princeton, the preeminent contemporary historian of late antiquity. In Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity, he reopens the question of how the empire's transformation from paganism to Christianity affected its civic culture.

Brown describes this volume as a "synthesis" of themes found in a large body of modern scholarship. An old view of late Roman government, expressed by J.B. Bury in 19 10, held that the empire of the fourth and fifth centuries was an "absolute monarchy," with all power vested in the emperor, and that its political constitution was a relatively simple matter of centralized personal authority and popular obedience. Given this division of the Mediterranean world into ruler and ruled, Gibbon's argument that Christianity's sole contribution to Roman political life was an attitude of compliant otherworldliness seems plausible.

Recent students of the period, however, tend to emphasize that the late empire remained a system of laws, and that the Hellenistic tradition of the philosopherking restricted the emperor's freedom of action. To these normative limitations on autocracy, Brown adds the limitation of distance. The empire was a big place. Communication, always slow and troublesome in antiquity, became even more difficult as the northern barbarians blocked overland routes through Western Europe and the Balkans.

Imperial government, in this pretelegraphic era, depended on the cooperation of local elites with the emperor and his representatives. Power and Persuasion, therefore, treats how the devotio, or "loyal support," of local notables toward the central government was maintained by the upper-class culture shared by the indigenous provincial notables and officials of the imperial administration. In the matter of taxation, in particular, the empire remained a "commonwealth of cities." The cities held the responsibility of extorting taxes from the peasants of the surrounding countrysides. While the peasants could be coerced into obedience, this coercion depended on an elaborate system of courtesy to ensure the collaboration of provincial aristocracies.

The upper-class culture that united the rulers of the Roman world was inculcated by the system of education known by the Greek term paideia. Paideia bound the ruling classes in codes of courtesy and assigned a special role, that of persuaders and admonishers of the powerful, to philosophers. A long and intellectually demanding training in Greek literature and rhetoric provided social distance from the lower classes, an ethic of friendship that created widespread networks of contacts, and ideals of deportment that helped limit violence by prizing self-restraint.

Since the emperor himself was expected to stand at the apex of this pyramid of cultivated social values, even the monarch's behavior was bounded by educated opinion. When educated opinion proved insufficient against the power of the emperor, however, tradition assigned to the philosopher the duty and fight of parrhesia, or "freedom of speech," to act as privileged moral adviser to the court. In this way, the elites, in their own eyes, were connected to the ultimate source of political power and were convinced that they could exercise persuasive control over it.

During the last decades of the fourth century, Christian monks and bishops began to replace philosophers as the moral bridges between the rulers and the ruled. These Christian notables usually emerged from the old upper classes and shared many of the ideals of paideia. However, instead of basing their claims to eminence strictly on membership in a cultivated social group, the Christian leaders presented themselves as "lovers of the poor." A worsening economic situation and an apparently rising population throughout the Eastern Empire made the poor, those without a defined place in society, an increasingly visible and political presence. Overflowing the countryside and crowding into the cities, the poor were readily mobilized and integrated into the retinues of the bishops.

In the Christian literature of the fifth century, the juxtaposition of autocratic secular authority and the mass of impoverished humanity provided "a new language of power." Power and Persuasion describes how power was recast in a Christian image. Appeals to the emperor moved away from references to the shared classical culture of an elite minority and began to emphasize that, just as God had condescended to become man through Christ, so the ruler should condescend to recognize his common humanity with the broad masses of the ruled.

Brown's attention to the role of culture in maintaining such tenuous social systems as the late Roman Empire offers a useful corrective to the tendency of many contemporary social scientists to deal exclusively with formal structures and material resources. His reading of primary sources, such as the works and letters of Libanius of Antioch and newly discovered letters and sermons of Saint Augustine, is at once sympathetic and objective, offering both a sense of the writers' experience of their world and a modern interpretation of that experience.

The description of the impoverishment of the empire's population during the fourth century may be a bit misleading. This impoverishment does not appear to have been the result of a sudden crisis, as Brown leads the reader to believe. It was the product of a gradual, long-term trend created by the steady growth of commercial farming rather than subsistence farming, the drying up of slave labor as the empire reached its territorial limits, and the continuing increase in absentee ownership of agricultural land that concentrated wealth in urban areas. Seen in this context, the image of society presented by the Christianity of the bishops was a long overdue response to a world that had changed drastically since the empire's creation.

While there may be some debate about the socioeconomic roots of this transformation in civic culture, professional historians and general readers alike will find Brown's book an erudite and convincing portrayal of the emergence of Christendom from the remains of the classical state.