ABSTRACT
In a wonderfully rich account written a few years later,2 he traced his path through the huge and varied range of the intellectual sources that converged in his own work. In doing so, he also incidentally provided us with a map, highly personal as it may be, of the routes by which the study of Late Antiquity took its various shapes in the second half of the last century. Here he spoke of the ‘refreshing and majestically unparochial challenge to the narrow secularity’ offered by his friend and mentor, Arnaldo Momigliano, to the prevailing British academic tradition of studies in ancient history, and the stress he had laid on religious factors in Late Roman history.3 For Peter Brown this meant ‘a break-through in the “dualism” that has plagued medieval historians: that is, the seeming hiatus between the structures of society (as grasped most obviously in its institutions) and the thought-systems of the same society’.4 These pointers within his own work towards religion, and
1 Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Toward a Christian Empire (Madison, WI, 1992), p. viii.
