TIME: BEyOND LATE ANTIQUITy | 41with neighbouring cultural areas has become a problem of singular
significance.^91
A tremendous contribution to the opening up of those wider horizons
was soon to be made by a Protestant scholar from Dublin whose failure in
later life to embrace Romanocentricity had not a little to do with his up-
bringing—just as Strzygowski’s Germanized Polish ancestry and education
in first a Catholic and then a Protestant school presumably contributed to
his pathological inability to think in the foreordained boxes.^92 It was while
lecturing on Augustine in Oxford in 1964, and preparing a book on the great
bishop of Hippo worthy to be set beside the Catholic Marrou’s, that Peter
Brown began to use the concept “late Antiquity,”^93 which had been trickling
into English from German since the 1940s.^94 The context was once again
cultural rather than political history, the fourth and fifth centuries’ “haunting
mixture of classical reticence and new religiosity.” When he introduced the
whole World of late Antiquity to a wider audience in 1971, what had hitherto
been regarded as the catastrophe of 410 was given short shrift, as also were
the fifth-century Germanic successor states. By contrast, gradual cultural
transformations in the Roman East were highlighted. The book’s last two
sections were devoted to “Byzantium” and then the Islamic world, just as in
Riegl’s Stilfragen. The concluding chapter is subtitled “The late antique world
under Islam, 632–809.”^95
91 Quoted by Marchand, Down from Olympus [2:43] 359.
92 Brown, SODebate 7–9 (note the comment on Haghia Sophia perceived “from the countries of
the Middle East rather than from Rome”). On Strzygowski, see above, n. 35.
93 P. Brown, “What’s in a name?,” http://www.ocla.ox.ac.uk/pdf/brown_what_in_name.pdf p. 1; cf. id.,
SODebate 17–18, and M. Vessey, Latin Christian writers in late Antiquity and their texts (Aldershot 2005)
XI.393–94.
94 James, JLA 1 (2008) [2:27] 21. A measure of Brown’s achievement is the assumption that before
him all was a “black hole” (or, one might say, jāhilīya). For choice expressions of this perspective, see Car-
rié, in Carrié and Rousselle, Empire romain en mutation [1:26] 20; P. Heather, The fall of the Roman Em-
pire (London 2005) xii; C. Ando, “Narrating decline and fall,” in Rousseau (ed.), Late Antiquity [2:9] 59;
J. Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich 2009) 88. One
hundred ten French university teachers and researchers attended a Rencontre sur l’Antiquité tardive at
Chantilly in 1972: A. Solignac, “Rencontre sur l’Antiquité tardive,” Revue des études augustiniennes 18
(1972) 373–87. On Marrou’s research seminar at the Sorbonne, 1950–75, and the foundation of the
Centre de recherche sur l’Antiquité tardive Lenain de Tillemont in 1972, see http://henrimarrou.org
/historien/directeur-recherches.htm. For a more personal view of the French scene, see E. Patlagean,
“Sorting out late antique poverty in Paris around the ’60s,” in C. Straw and R. Lim (eds), The past before
us (Turnhout 2004) 79–87. Even confining oneself largely to English-language publications, one can as-
semble an impressive late Roman bibliography from the 1920s up to Jones: Cameron, in Gwynn (ed.), A.
H. M. Jones [2:85] 231–38.
95 P. Brown, The world of late Antiquity from Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad (London 1971; repr.
as The world of late Antiquity AD 150–750, with revised Bibliography [New york 1989]). The cutoff
point is notoriously hazy: apart from 809 we have 750 in the reprint title, 700 on the first page of the
Preface, and “Muhammad” in the original title. P. Brown, “Late Antiquity and Islam: Parallels and con-