ABSTRACT
Few late antique authors, save perhaps Augustine, have granted the modern historian – the historian willing to take the plunge down their ‘long, twisting lines of speech’ crystallized into writing – better access into ‘the intimate, but no less real, disasters involved in their attempts to live at peace with themselves, their families
1 Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, 1988), p. 83, citing Irenaeus, Adv Haer. 4.34.1. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC. I would like to thank Philip Rousseau for his insightful remarks. Special thanks are also due to Boris Rodin Maslov.
