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The earliest holy man known by name was Antony “of the desert.” In his late teens, he is said to have discovered ascetics already living a solitary life away from their villages in his part of Egypt. This, his “external” history as opposed to “internal,” is what Brown focuses on also: “the role of the holy man.… his position” (80), his historical importance. But at the outset of my alternative treatment, I do draw attention to my intended focus, not on ascetical experiences so much discussed, but on what contemporaries and near-contemporaries observed from the outside and wondered at in the behavior of the holy man. Footnote 6įurther criticisms may be left for my concluding pages, since constraints on the length of my own essay prevent a review of prior scholarship. Footnote 5 It is thus no antiquarian whim that prompts my critical interest in it and my attempt to sketch out something better. The fact remains, however, that Brown’s essay still represents the scholarly consensus, at least in English. If the two crises cannot be established, it is not easy to see how they can serve as the foundation for further argument and understanding. It is a “crisis,” however, like the cultural one, above, that has somehow escaped notice.

“It is precisely at this point that the holy man comes to the fore as a figure in village society and in the relation between the village and the outside world” (87). It is a turning point transforming the whole “Roman world,” “the later Roman empire,” “the empire” as a whole (86, 87), its society (99), and general human “needs” in “the Later Empire” (92, 93). He detects “a seismic shift in social relations” induced by “rising prosperity” (87), in turn producing a “crisis of leadership” (85), to be remarked in “the tendencies of later Roman agricultural life” (90). Brown discerns a second “crisis,” a profound change in the relations of dependency and influence or power binding together the Have-nots and the Haves. Footnote 4 Unsupported, how can this proposition be taken seriously?Īs to what the holy man did-his function in society-it was to fill a gap in local leadership.

This sampling, however, is used to justify a general conclusion that some half-billion persons were noticeably anxious across this very considerable stretch of time. Their readership cannot be imagined above a few thousand in any decade. Dodds a few years prior, where the mind of “the West,” that is, of the Roman Empire, is to be read through the writings of the intellectual elite and of no more than nine or ten among them scattered across more than four hundred years. Footnote 3 Brown takes as his admired “model” the work of E. A person trained in languages and literature may be less demanding. Historians and their readers are of course familiar with broad-brush statements serving the flow of an argument if the underpinning has been properly established through conventional treatment, that is, with adequate challenges and response and proportionate documentation. The flow of explanation here is presented in sweeping terms, descriptive of the entire empire (81–82) and its fifty or sixty millions. “The predominance of the holy man” can even be taken as a boundary-marker to distinguish “late antiquity as a distinct phase” in history (100). Footnote 2 Into the place and faith that had been the gods’ for so long (93) now stepped this new being in a crucial role, thanks to his ascendancy, attaining “such eminence” (81). This revolution, however, was not the victory of Christianity over polytheism in itself (100) the essence of it was rather “the rise of the holy man,” constituting a “ leitmotiv” (99), which happened to “coincide” with the “natural death” of polytheism (100) and of the polytheists’ belief in “divinity” and “great temples” (98, 99). Footnote 1 There (its page-numbers in parentheses) he accounts for the appearance of the holy man on the stage of history by positing two “crises.” The first, cultural (99), was the “religious revolution” of the Roman Empire in Late Antiquity (99, thrice 93 and 100). The importance of the rule can be illustrated through Peter Brown’s essay on my subject appearing in the journal at the center of Roman studies for over a century: the venerable JRS, in its web-site advertising Brown’s article as its most famous publication.

Any way to skip level 89-2 in cooking madness