1What are the moments and personalities that stand out in your university education? How were your relations with Frenchspeaking colleagues or authors?
2I owe most in the opening phases of my work to two towering figures: Arnaldo Momigliano and Henri-Irénée Marrou. In 1956, Arnaldo Momigliano was nominated as the director of my dissertation on “The Social and Economic Position of the Roman Senatorial Aristocracy of Italy in the Sixth Century AD.” Although I was a student in Oxford (having received a Junior Fellowship at All Souls College) and he was a professor at University College, London, he agreed to take me as a student as he was working at the time on Cassiodorus and the Italian culture of his age. I did not complete this dissertation. But my relation with Momigliano soon developed into a deep friendship. He was more to me than a teacher: indeed, he intervened very little in my work at this time and I never attended his seminars in London until much later. Instead, he was a mentor and, above all, an exemplum – one might say, an ego-ideal.
3Momigliano stood for European scholarship in its most wide and generous manifestation. His vast knowledge of the historiography of the ancient world from classical times to the present reassured me that I was never alone: he showed that almost every problem that preoccupied scholars of the Later Empire in the present had already been discussed by European scholars since the Renaissance. He directed my attention unfailingly not only to what scholars said about different themes of ancient history. He showed why they said it, in what wider cultural context, and with what long-term consequences.
4Thanks to Momigliano, I have always seen history as more than mere problem-solving. For Momigliano, to resolve any question about the ancient world involved listening to the long dialogue of Europe on the nature of its own past. As I came to know him better over the years, Momigliano’s commitment to a historiographical approach to scholarship – his acute respect for the constant effort of historians of all kinds, in all ages and in all countries, to reach an understanding of the past -- seemed to be the cause of his rare intellectual generosity, and of his truly cosmopolitan vision – a vision that was lacking in the more parochial world of British scholarship at that time.
5It was mainly to European scholars that I turned as an undergraduate and as a graduate student. Most of them I did not know through direct contact. One must remember that, in the 1950s, 1960s and even the 1970s, the exchange of students between European countries was rare, and conferences, also, happened much less frequently. I knew those who influenced me through their books. Of those whose books I read, Henri-Irénée Marrou stood out as a giant in his field.
6It is difficult to exaggerate my debts to Marrou. The most obvious debt is that, in the famous Retractatio of his Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, he gave me, for the first time as a young student in 1956, the term “Late Antiquity”. He made plain that he borrowed this term from German art historians who had used it to describe the art of the period between 200 and 600 AD as if it was a vigorous cultural epoch of its own. He deliberately used the original German term, Spätantike.
“L’allemand, qui accueille facilement les néologismes, a pris l’habitude de parler de la Spätantike…1”
7This suggestion was crucial. From then onwards, I had a name for the period that had begun to fascinate me: “Late Antiquity”.
8By using the term “Late Antiquity”, Marrou showed that he had changed his mind. He had written his grande thèse (Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique) to show that Saint Augustine was a lettré de la décadence – the product of a decadent educational system. Then, twelve years later, he declared that he now thought differently. He argued that the culture of the 4th and 5th centuries was far from being dead. It was taking on vigorous new forms – the extraordinary blending of classical and Christian in works such as Augustine’s Confessions and City of God being the best known examples of a late antique sensibility.
9Marrou made his views plain in a remarkable Retractatio – a critique of the notion of decadence which had pervaded his Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique. He presented it as a culture which had changed, subtly but irrevocably, from classical times; but it had retained much of its ancient vigor. It was not on the way to annihilation:
“Non…La civilisation du Bas-Empire, telle qu’elle se reflète dans la culture d’Augustin est un organisme vigoureux, en pleine évolution…2”
10I still have a copy of Marrou’s Retractatio which I bought in 1956, at the age of 21. I notice that I marked in the margin: “Hurrah! Hurrah!”.
11I later came to meet Marrou, at the Oxford International Patristic Conference in 1963, and we remained in contact until his death. Though we did not meet often, he was a constant “presence” to me as I completed my Augustine of Hippo, which was translated into French by his wife, Jeanne Marrou.
12As for my other contacts with French scholars, these have been continuous up to the present day, and have taken many different forms. They began, in the 1960s, when I drew constantly on French scholarship on the life and intellectual evolution of Augustine of Hippo. It takes some effort to recapture the extent to which, at that time, French scholarship (especially French liberal Catholic scholarship) dominated the study of Augustine and, indeed, of the entire patristic era. In those years, I found colleagues and interlocutors more easily in Paris than in Oxford – most notably the Pères Augustiniens, such as Goulven Madec, Georges Folliet and Albert de Veer. It was through them that I came to know one of my most dear friends, Claude Lepelley, whose work on the cities of North Africa in the later empire placed the life and activities of Augustine against the background of an urban culture whose resilience had been ignored up to that time.
13It was through the study of Augustine’s relations to ancient thought (especially to Neo-Platonism) that I first came to know Pierre Hadot. We met at the Oxford Patristic Conference of 1967 and remained close ever since, exchanging books and articles frequently. Having first known Hadot in relation to his studies of the Neoplatonic elements in the thought of Augustine, I was deeply impressed when I read his masterpiece on the nature and goal of ancient philosophy as a whole, his Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, when it first appeared in 1981 (I did this, very appropriately, in the library of the Institut d’Études Augustiniennes). This book opened up an entire new world for me and a new way of studying the role of philosophy and of the philosopher in the classical and late-classical world. It has been a constant presence to me ever since.
14Another decisive contact with French scholarship occurred in the field of social and economic history. I came to know the work of Évelyne Patlagean on wealth and poverty and on many other issues of Byzantine social and religious history in 1970. Her book, Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale à Byzance3 has remained for me an inspiring study of the transformation of East Roman society from a classical to a Byzantine world.
15How and why did you choose to work on Late Antiquity? How do you envisage this concept today? Do you think that your very innovative views on this period transformed the traditional image of the “decline” of the Roman Empire?
16I think that it was important to me that I began my studies at Oxford as a medievalist, not as a classical scholar. At the time, medieval history and ancient history were taught in entirely different faculties. This meant that, as a medievalist, I was aware of the long-term future of ideas, of institutions and of social structures that began in the late antique period and which continued into the middle ages. These long-term continuities seemed to me to contradict the notion of a rapid and catastrophic “decline and fall” of the ancient world. What ancient historians (even those with great knowledge of the late Roman period) saw as the end of the world I saw as the beginning of a new world.
17This insight has remained with me ever since. I think that it is the basis of any approach to the history of this period – too much happened between 300 and 700, in terms of the emergence of new social forms, of new religious institutions, of a new aesthetic in art and architecture, and of a new sensibility in literature and thought, for all of these new developments to be seen under the negative sign of decadence, decline and fall.
18During your scientific life did you observe some significant “turn” in the field of Humanities and more specifically in the study of the Greek and Roman history?
19As is only to be expected, there have been many changes in our approach to the history of the Greco-Roman world in the past half century. Scholars are always searching for new ways to approach such a vast and complex field as Late Antiquity. But the word “turn” seems too melodramatic: it carries with it the implication of an irreversible change in direction. I would rather speak of the slow build-up, over the years, of a sense of the need to apply a new approach to old subjects, and the very real sense of freedom when such a new approach is found.
20I have been grateful for many such “turns”. Some are methodological. One of the most widespread of these is the increased sophistication with which scholars (often with a classical training in textual analysis rather than historians) approach late antique texts as conscious creations designed to project a specific “representation” of reality. These representations are no longer treated as passive evidence, to be examined for traces of bias and of ideological deformation. They are seen to play an active role in the historical process itself. My work on the nature of Christianization in late antiquity has always owed much to this approach: a careful analysis of the exaggerations and the silences of the texts that narrate the growth of the Christian Church can tell us more about the horizons of the possible for those who took part in this process than if these texts were treated as raw evidence in themselves. The work of Éric Rebillard on Christians and Their Many Identities4 is a model example of such an approach.
21Paradoxically, the other significant “turn” is a turn away from texts. The “archaeological turn”, associated with the application of radically new techniques for the analysis of material culture, has revealed developments “on the ground” which have been recorded in no late antique text. It is like a planetary probe that reveals, for the first time, the surface of Mars after endless fabulation on the “canals” and other imagined features of the red planet. Surveys of agrarian development as far apart as northern Gaul and Syria have shown landscapes changing in ways of which the texts give no hint – sometimes an agrarian boom is discovered in areas previously dismissed as characterized by recession and the growth of oppressive latifundia; sometimes the exact opposite: the splendid villas described in aristocratic texts (such as the letters of Symmachus) are shown to have stood in the midst of agrarian slums. In my most recent work on wealth and poverty, I have tried to do justice to these images of unexpected landscapes (beamed, as it were, from Mars) by recent surveys and excavations.
22But for me the biggest “turn” of all has been the turn towards the East. I began with the study of Augustine and of the society of Africa and Italy that formed the background to the life of Augustine. This was followed by a widening of my field of study, both intellectually and geographically. I became more interested in wider themes, such as the overall religious mood of late antiquity – a mood often shared to an unexpected degree by pagans, Jews and Christians – in a geographical area that reached beyond the frontiers of the Roman Empire, to Mesopotamia and Iran.
23My study of the diffusion of Manichaeism marked the beginning of this swing to the East. It has proved to be a decisive turning point in my scholarly career. It has included my learning Hebrew, Syriac, and eventually, Coptic, Armenian, and Ethiopic. For me, “Late Antiquity” has always been associated with the opening up of horizons on to a wider world, which emerged when the vivid but narrow circle of the classical Mediterranean opened itself up to the rich hinterland of Africa and the Middle East. It was this sense of the discovery of a wider world toward the East which led me to write the World of Late Antiquity (1971) and to add the subtitle – From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad.
- 5 Bowersock 2017.
- 6 Tannous 2018.
24Hence the importance of the recent flourishing of the study of the late antique background to the rise of Islam, shown, for instance, in the work of my friend and colleague, Glen Bowersock, in his The Crucible of Islam5 and of my student Jack Tannous, The Making of the Medieval Middle East. Religion, Society, and Simple Believers6. It seems to me that greater understanding of the Middle East at the time of the rise of Islam and a better appreciation of the late antique elements in the thought, religion and social structure of the Islamic empire in its early centuries is essential to our understanding of the nature of Islam and its role in the modern world.
25Do you remember important methodological or conceptual “struggles” or “controversies” that helped transforming our scientific approach to Antiquity?
26Some of the most significant controversies that have affected my work have been those that have taken place among medievalists rather than among ancient historians. One of the most fruitful of these was the debate on what the Germans call the Kontinuitätsproblem – the issue of the continuity between the institutions of the later Empire and those of early medieval Europe. This issue was hotly contested, as it affected the balance between the Roman and the Germanic basis of the institutions of early medieval Europe. It mattered greatly to Frenchmen and to Germans as to whether institutions associated with feudal Europe – such as dependence on a lord – had first appeared among the great landowners of Late Roman Gaul or whether they had been brought to France by triumphant warbands from across the Rhine.
- 7 Pirenne 1937 et Effros 2017.
27Henri Pirenne’s brilliant short book, Mahomet et Charlemagne7 was a crucial intervention in this debate. It put forward the notion of a long-lasting Late Antiquity in the West, that was brought to an end only by the Muslim invasions of the seventh century„. He stressed the continued, central role of the Mediterranean as the enduring heart of a late antique civilization which lasted until the seventh century.
28Furthermore, those Islamicists who criticized Pirenne did so because he had treated the rise of Islam as a final, catastrophic break in the continuity of late antique civilization. They increasingly arrived at the conclusion that many crucial elements of late antique culture and society lingered longer than we had thought in Islam itself. Many of our present debates on the “Pirenne Thesis” are crucial to our view of the nature of Late Antiquity: they concern the importance of the Mediterranean and the role of Islam in the final phases of a late antique civilization still centered on the Mediterranean.
29To what extent is the relation to the past, especially to the Graeco-Roman history, different in Europe and in the States?
30This is not an easy question to answer. America is remarkable for the diversity of its universities and their openness, since the nineteenth century, to European thought and teaching institutions – most notably British and German. Hence a similarity of approach on many matters, particularly in classical studies, which tend to be treated as a timeless international tradition, common in outlook and methods to America and Europe. I am, however, struck by certain features which have determined the “shape” of late antique studies in America.
31When I began to edit the series on the Transformation of the Classical Heritage for the University of California Press, in 1981, I was immediately struck by the importance, for the study of Late Antiquity, of Religious Studies Departments and of Divinity Schools attached to major universities. These were thriving, non-confessional institutions, for which there were no equivalents in Britain or Europe. Religious Studies (not History or Classics, as I had expected) proved to be a major source of manuscripts for the series.
32Furthermore, I realized that there was a marked preference for the Greek world – for the study of Early Christianity, and of Second Temple Judaism. Latin Christianity (even major figures such as Augustine) received less attention.
33My experience as an editor taught me the extent to which the academic culture of America had remained robustly Protestant. Greek was preferred to Latin, because it was the language of the New Testament. The Early Church, Gnosticism, Second Temple Judaism (along with the classical background to Early Christianity) were the principal objects of study, at the expense of the Latin, Catholic West.
34For this reason, among many others, American scholarship on late antiquity has tended to be unusually open to the turn to the East, to the study of Greek and oriental Christianity, and to the world East of Rome. These were “Bible Lands”, familiar from the Old and New Testaments: for many American students, the regions where Judaism, Christianity and Islam emerged were of greater interest than was the birth of nations in Western Europe.
35Different historiographical models have been proposed to account for the emergence and so called “triumph” of Christianity. What is your opinion about them today?
36To explain (and even to explain away) the “rise” and “triumph” of Christianity in the ancient world has been the goal of innumerable historians. Even when issues of religious belief are not at stake, it is something of a Holy Grail, a toison d’or that tests to the limits the methodologies of our field. It is easier to warn against mistaken approaches than to claim to have found the right way to write about this topic.
37I myself have found it helpful to apply the utmost scepticism to most Christian “representations” of the process of the rise and triumph of the Christian church. These “representations” tend to turn a far from unified process into a single movement towards a pre-established goal – towards triumph. These representations played a very important role in the self-awareness (indeed, the self-confidence) of Christians at the time. They cannot be dismissed as mere ideological distortions of reality. But they do not explain what they claim to describe.
38Hence the abiding appeal of explanations that take us outside the vivid but narrow circle of Christian texts. In recent times, many of these explanations have been taken from the social sciences. Hence the use of sociological language when describing the Early Christians. We write about the Christian communities as if Christian writings reflected the stresses and strains of small groups, the effects of social mobility, the appeal of religious groups as communities where ambiguities of status might be held in suspension, and so on.
- 8 Carrié and Rousselle 1999, 433-438.
39But the “society” whose tensions they invoke in order to explain the growth of Christianity bears little relation to what we can discover in the Roman world. One of the most urgent needs for a history of the Early Church is a social and cultural history of the non-elite classes that does justice to their creativity, especially in the religious field. This would throw light on an aspect of the third century to which Aline Rousselle already pointed in 1999: that is, a rise of religious curiosity – a drive towards l’explicitation du croire; a need to explain the content of religions and their attendant practices. This was a change in religious sensibility in which Christians participated with great vigor. They did this precisely because they were not unified – as their self-representation might lead us to believe – but because they were constantly breaking up into competitive groups anxious to make their message known to others8. Paradoxically, the divisions among Christians may have done more to spread knowledge of their faith than unity.
40Such detailed studies may contain many surprises. For instance, we have come to a greater appreciation of the role of upper-class Christians in the third century AD. Hence the importance of the detailed epigraphic and archaeological study of Christians in Greek cities at this time, undertaken by Anne-Valérie Pont in her masterly study of the last days of the pagan Greek city9. Far from the dazzling light of Christian representations of rise and triumph, town-councillors who combined Christian belief with traditional Greek education and Greek ways of showing social status in the little towns of Asia Minor, were perhaps waiting in the shadows for Constantine.
41A certain kind of humour seems to run through your work. What heuristic benefit can be gained from such a stepping back with a smile?
42I learned early from Arnaldo Momigliano that courtesy and a sense of humor are more than personal ornaments in the profession. They are based on an appreciation of the difficulties which we all share as scholars grappling with the past. Inflexible certitudes are out of place in the study of late antiquity, as of any other period of history. So, also, is dogmatism. I am told that French mountaineers abandon formal speech and address each other as tu once they reach a certain altitude. We are all like that: we hang on slender ropes above the chasm of a past of which we still know so very little. Our smile (like the mountaineer’s tu) is our recognition that we are in a danger zone. But it is there that the real discoveries can be made.
43You wrote that, in the early years of your career, “The odder the phenomenon, the more you were attracted to it”. How did such a sense of oddity manifest itself in you, later?
44It was important to overcome many prejudices against the period of Late Antiquity by showing how persons (such as stylite hermits or court eunuchs) or practices (such as the cult of relics or the medieval ordeal) which shock a modern sensitivity made sense to those who engaged in them at the time. They had a functional logic which ensured that they were not outrageous or bizarre. To see Symeon Stylites not as a freak or a masochist, but as a charismatic arbitrator serving the needs of a vigorous and contentious peasantry, robbed him of the false aura evoked by modern notions of “Byzantine decadence” or “the rise of superstition”.
45To do this was not only to interpret the late antique period differently. It was to follow some of the best traditions of anthropology in France and Britain. These effectively criticized notions such as “primitive mentality” which classed whole segments of the human race as “backward” and “mentally deficient”. It was to strike a blow for the full humanity of populations who, until very recently, had been denied their full humanity by colonial powers.
46I also did this because I believed (along with many anthropologists) that it was often the manner in which society handled extreme forms of the human condition or the more outrageous forms of human behaviour that revealed most clearly the values, hopes and fears of that society. The outsider was the mirror in which to catch an unexpected glimpse of the world of the insiders. This method suited very well the ascetic literature on which I based my work. But it left much of late antique society unaccounted for. The more I studied themes that involved average members of the laity and clergy – such as almsgiving, donations to the church, and the establishment of a marital morality – the less I found that these deliberately stylized portrayals of great holy men and women helped me. My work on wealth and poverty (which I owe in large part to the challenge of Évelyne Patlagean’s Pauvreté) has led me to add a new layer to my image of Roman society in both East and West – more average persons, their outlook and activities.
47You have shown that the “problem” of wealth in late antiquity was not the cause of as much torment as one might have thought. Before taking primarily into account poverty, don’t you think we ought to look at Late Antiquity as a period of time during which asceticism emerged (in particular with regard to the repetitive tasks carried out by the first monks)?
48One of the outstanding, unresolved questions in the study of late antiquity is the relation between monastic and lay values in late antique society. It has proved only too easy to take dramatic representations of the ascetic life for the reality of that society, thereby perpetuating a peculiarly depleted image of the life of the average man and woman in regions such as Syria and Egypt.
- 10 Brown 2016.
- 11 Caner 2021.
49The main thrust of research by scholars has been to show the opposite. Even in provinces where the ascetic life had a high profile, the lay world retained a robust sense of its own values, inherited from millennia of settled life. In my most recent book, Treasure in Heaven. The Holy Poor in Early Christianity10, I took the example of attitudes to work in various ascetic milieus (in Syria and Egypt) and in the lay world. I found that the debate on whether or not monks should or should not work was the focus of intense debates on the nature of human society. But these debates happened among monks: they had little effect on the lay world. The outstanding new study of Daniel Caner, The Rich and the Pure11, has taken up these issues with great learning and rare sophistication. Once again, we have the impression of an ascetic world of immense sensitivity as to the proper use of wealth flanked by an agrarian economy which changed little under Christian influence except in adding to its charges the support of the clergy and of the “pure” monks.
50You have often repeated that you like to cater for an educated audience in your publications. Our journal focuses on the reception of Antiquity in modern times. In your view, how can men and women from Late Antiquity can still help us to address contemporary issues?
51There are many ways to answer this question. My preferred answer was given by the great Russian medievalist, Aron Gurevich. He said that historians live, as it were, “in a third time”: that is, we live in the present, but in a present displaced, as it were, by attention to the past. It is precisely the pull of the strangeness of the past which may nourish us best. By making the past seem too like the present we lose the sense of alternative lives in other places than our own which gives us hope that we are not entirely prisoners of the present. Men and women have lived differently from the way we live and have thought differently from the way we think. In the “third time” of the historian we can meet them half-way, as it were, in a manner that relativizes our own values and our own dominant concerns. I always consider that I have been most successful in communicating the world of late antiquity when those who read or listen to me come to feel that it is they, their own age, which is strange: they look at themselves, if only for a moment, through the eyes of late antique persons.
52This is particularly the case with the Classics. The Classics are still close to us in innumerable many ways. They are part of the family history of Europe and America. But just for this reason, they have acquired a false familiarity. All too often, this false familiarity suffocates us. A journal that brings back a vital period of the ancient world in its full strangeness, that will place the reader in a third time, poised between past and present, will act like a deep breath of air in a stale room.
53Sexual practices of early Christians, especially renunciation and continence, celibacy and virginity, find an echo in current debates within the Church and more broadly the society. Do you think that history is “magistra vitae”, in other word that it makes people think about contemporary issues?
54I think that the best way to approach this is to think of the historian as a translator. What he or she tries to do is to turn into a language accessible to modern persons the preoccupations of persons in the distant past, in such a way that these preoccupations become, at last, intelligible. Only then can they be made active in the present. Otherwise they are blocked, much as a bad translation of a foreign novel or of the spiritual classic of another civilization (one thinks of the Qur’ân or the Buddhist sutras) can stand in the way of our appreciation of an entire treasure house.
55We can only derive comfort and guidance from the early Christians if we learn what truly preoccupied them, without imposing on them our own, crude modern translations. For instance: how do we see the exaltation of virginity in early Christian circles? Is it really due to a tightening of the screws of sexual repression? Or is it, rather, in its own strange language, a bid for freedom and a declaration of the opening of a new age – as Michel Foucault has shown to be the case in his posthumous work Les aveux de la chair12? It is only if we have done a good job of translation that we can listen to the distant past of the early Church and find, perhaps to our surprise, that it may have more to say to us than we had imagined.
56Should we save the classics, or remove them because racist and based on slavery and imperialism? What’s your opinion on the “cancel culture” debate?
57I deeply deplore this movement because it is so very arrogant. It replicates, in reverse, the proud belief that the Classics are somehow the leading influence in our culture, and so that to excise the classics from our curricula will, in some magical manner, purge our entire culture of the stain of racism. This is allotting to the Classics a grossly exaggerated role in the consciousness of a modern society. It is better to continue the long and painful debate with our own past by the normal rules of the historian – that is, by respecting the integrity of the past even if we deplore the outcome of much that happened – than to remove the past itself in an act of self-imposed amnesia.
58In many ways, scholars interested in Late Antiquity are in a favoured position. Because of the widening of the classical core of Greece and Rome to include non-classical cultures and movements of thought and religion in this period, we can see diversity in action in the ancient world more clearly than is the case when we study the more exclusively Greek and Latin world of the classical empire.
59During your career, did you work more with specialists of classical Antiquity or with medieval historians? Do you think that the way historical periods are usually divided in the academic system is an obstacle to study and understand Late Antiquity, or do you consider that Ancient history as a whole is still a relevant concept?
60I have found that the colleagues most open to my perspectives are often medievalists, as I have explained in my answer to question 2. I have constantly experienced the difficulties involved in finding a place for Late Antiquity in the conventional structures of many universities in Britain, Europe, and America. This has affected not only relations with the Classics, where their commitment to the teaching of Greek and Latin should have made them the natural home for late antique studies; but, at the other end of the period, it has also been hard to persuade Near Eastern Studies departments to introduce the teaching of non-Muslim history and languages, such as Syriac and Armenian. But this is now happening, especially at the level of graduate studies, and has been greatly helped by the internet, which allows students in one campus to interact constantly with like-minded enthusiasts from all over the world.
61What will be your next book?
62I am not yet certain. I may attempt to write a study of Christian universalism in which I deal with the tensions between the universal claims of Christianity and the intense localism of many of the regions in which Christianity found itself. In the mean time I am studying Ethiopic, in order to understand yet another Christian society, rooted in late antiquity and established for well over a millennium in the Horn of Africa.