6
LATE ANTIQUE CULTURE
AND PRIVATE LIFE
The title of this chapter in the original edition of this book was ‘Culture and
mentality’. ‘Mentality’ is a concept associated with the French historians and
sociologists who together comprised the ‘Annales School’ in the twentieth
century, whose aim was to look for deep-seated structures in history over long
periods of time, including structures of thought and ideas in particular socie-
ties (‘mentalities’). However, this concept, which could be broadly sociologi-
cal or broadly psychological, has given way to considerations of discourse and
power under the infl uence of Michel Foucault, and of symbols under that of
Pierre Bourdieu,^1 and given the enormously wide variety of attitudes, beliefs
and ideas highlighted by the last generation of writing about late antiquity it
cannot be applied in any simple form. Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiq-
uity, published in 1971, is a book whose approach has often been described as
impressionistic or kaleidoscopic, and which presented a world of great vari-
ety. In later works Brown himself has turned more to cultural issues and to
questions involving discourse and power,^2 and many others have taken this
emphasis considerably further. Late antiquity used to be seen unproblemati-
cally as a time of increased spirituality.^3 This too needs to be challenged.
Peter Brown, who would probably best be termed a social historian, has
defi ned the starting point of late antiquity as lying in a ‘model of parity’ which
existed among the (male) urban elites of the high empire, with their civic
paganism; what emerged from the upheaval of the third century was, on this
view, ‘Late Antique man’.^4 At the same time he has also suggested that late
antiquity saw a distinct shift away from traditional public values towards the
private sphere, and, with it, a signifi cant step towards the growth of individual
identity. He has also engaged with the suggestion made by the Italian historian
Santo Mazzarino that late antiquity saw a ‘democratisation of culture’, a move
away from the elite high culture of classical antiquity. Whether this was really
the case, and if so how far it may have been connected with the process of
Christianization, is a matter of considerable discussion,^5 and Brown has also
argued against the common tendency to divide late antique culture into elite
and popular. If values were changing, how far was this under the infl uence of
Christianity? As we have seen, late antiquity has often been regarded on the
one hand as an age of increased spirituality, but on the other of descent into