Peter Brown, an emeritus professor of history at Princeton, is also the author of many books.
Few rulers have set in motion developments of such momentous consequence as the emperor Constantine, with his conversion to Christianity in 312 and subsequent halting of the persecution of Christians, ratified a year later in the Edict of Milan. Over the 17 centuries since then, theologians, historians and even novelists, including Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code, have claimed that a change...
Sometime in the late 430s, the pious nun Melania recalled a vision she and her husband had shared thirty years before in Rome when they were young and very rich: One night we went to sleep,...
When the Romans won wars, they brought home large numbers of enslaved foreign prisoners, to work the fields, mills and mines of the countryside, and to provide an enormous range of domestic...
In AD 362 – only fifty years after Constantine’s conversion to Christianity – the pagan Emperor Julian, hoping to undermine the privileged position of this new religion, banned...
If the past is another country, the study of its thought-forms, its insights and its foibles has all the complexities of foreign travel. Some intellectual historians write travelogues –...
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