THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYwhich constituted a particularly fl ourishing genre among educated Christians
in the early fi fth century; a large number survive, testifying to a close network
of shared culture and common interests stretching between Gaul, Italy, North
Africa and elsewhere. But unlike most classical writers, Augustine was also
supremely conscious of the techniques necessary in addressing himself to an
uneducated audience, and kept returning again and again to the problems of
reconciling intellectual and rhetorical aims with religious faith. His great work,
the City of God, written in the aftermath of the sack of Rome by Alaric in AD
410, is less an extended meditation on the reasons for that event than an dis-
cussion of the place of the classical world and classical culture in the scheme
of Christian providence.
Christianity and popular cultureHagiography – the lives of saints and holy men – was a major form of writing
in late antiquity, and while its literary range varied greatly, many saints’ lives
were permeated with literary tropes from secular literature;^42 similarly, while
Christian world chronicles, running from Adam to the writer’s own day, have
often been regarded as ‘credulous’, the genre began with the great Christian
scholar Eusebius and the surviving examples have much in common with
classicizing historiography.^43 But the impact of Christianization changed read-
ing practices, especially through the availability of the Bible. A specifi cally
Christian learning developed, with the early monastic communities in the
west, as on the island of Lérins, setting a precedent in the late fi fth century for
the great medieval monastic centres of learning. A large body of sayings and
lives of the ‘desert fathers’ (and a few ‘mothers’) in Egypt also developed, and
Palladius’ Lausiac History and Theodoret’s Historia Religiosa collected stories of
holy men and women.^44 A vigorous culture of translation had developed in
the eastern Mediterranean by the sixth century for the circulation of saints’
lives and Christian apocryphal texts dealing with Christ’s descent into Hades
and Mary’s assumption into heaven; many such texts, originally composed in
Greek, survive only in translations into Syriac, Georgian, Latin or later Ara-
bic.^45 Unlike classical culture, Christianity did indeed consciously direct its
appeal to all classes of society, explicitly including slaves and women. While it
is true that St Paul’s famous declaration that ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek,
there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all
one in Christ Jesus’ (Gal. 3:28) did not, and was probably never meant to,
lead to the abolition of social differences, nevertheless, along with such say-
ings as that about the diffi culty of the rich man in entering the kingdom of
heaven, Christianization did bring with it something of a change of attitude
towards those groups who had been barely considered at all in the pagan
Roman world.
The meeting of the old classical cultural and educational system with Chris-
tian ideas has often been associated with the idea of a ‘new, popular culture’,
more universal in character and based less on the written word and more