ABSTRACT
Basil’s management of the local church and its endowment has now come under scrutiny, and claims have evidently been made that Roman government is being damaged. Basil’s is the early charitable development documented in contemporary or near-contemporary writing. For a relatively brief period, the Romans had occasionally built hospitals for slaves and soldiers: buildings within which the two categories of labourers who mattered most to the functioning of the empire might be repaired when broken down and then sent back to work. Slave hospitals were favoured by some of the richest owners from the first century bce to the end of the first century ce. The hospital is an idea, an invention, and not a reflex response to growing poverty in a Christianizing empire. It spread first, quite rapidly, around the Mediterranean from its Byzantine homeland in Asia Minor: westward to North Africa and Italy, and from Italy to Spain and parts of the Merovingian kingdoms.
