Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire

Abstract

In three magisterial essays, Peter Brown, one of world's foremost scholars of society and culture of late antiquity, explores emergence in late Roman society of the as a distinct social class, one for which Christian church claimed a special responsibility. It is story of how a society came to see itself as responsible for care of a particular class of people -- a class that had not previously been cared for -- and of who benefited from that shift in interests. In his characteristically elegant and lucid prose, Brown seeks to recover pre-Christian status of poor people, actual nature of relations between Christian church and poor, and true motivations -- sometimes sincere, sometimes self-serving -- behind Christian rhetoric of love for poor. He draws not only on standard Greek and Latin sources for later Roman Empire, but also on Jewish sources to document interactions between Middle Eastern provincial societies and classical Roman traditions. Brown gracefully illuminates a crucial transition from classical to Christian culture: emergence of a new understanding of what society -- and Church -- owes to poor that continues to resonate.

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