This book is a study of the transformation, in two Latin patristic authors, of Classical ideals of human greatness. It is also, through a sometimes uneasy conflation, a selective study of the history of terminology for greatness of soul (‘megalopsychia’/‘magnanimitas’, in neither Greek nor Latin exactly equivalent, as Smith points out, to the Christian-influenced ‘magnanimity’, pp. 1–2).

The first part of the book sketches as much of the Classical background as is necessary to undergird the studies of Ambrose and Augustine which follow. After an introduction that situates the narrative first in the scholarship on ‘greatness of soul’, then on the attitudes of Ambrose and Augustine toward pagan ethics, Smith begins with the reception of Homer's heroic ideals in Aristotle and Plato. The second chapter sketches the accommodation of ideas of magnanimity (as I will for succinctness call it) to the political circumstances of Cicero, Seneca and Plutarch. Both historical and literary elements shape the later parts, so Smith is wise to incorporate them explicitly into the first part. That said, the first chapter's Homeric backdrop is largely (albeit not entirely) abstracted from the philosophers’ immediate cultural context. It would have anchored the narrative more vividly if Smith had devoted more attention to Athenian politics. We hear at some length (as we should) about the Alcibiades of Plato's dialogues (pp. 47–50), but only in passing about ‘Athens’ colonial adventures … such as the failed Sicilian expedition’ (p. 66). That the historical Alcibiades stood behind that disastrous invasion goes unmentioned. Especially for theologians less familiar with the Classical world, it would have helped to see, through so stark an illustration, how much a misguided ideal of greatness could seem to Plato and his readers to matter. The idea, furthermore, that Plato (who rarely speaks of megalopsychia, p. 46) should be treated second, in order to show up ‘the abiding flaws in Aristotle's great-souled man’ (p. 17), needed more development.

As one might expect from an expert on Ambrose's moral theology, the book's heart is its second part. The third chapter describes Ambrose's treatment of the patriarchs as models of the life of faith; the fourth, his reworking of Stoic ideas, mediated especially through Cicero and Seneca, of duty and mercy in De officiis; and the fifth, his starkly un-Classical choice to incorporate into his conception of magnanimity an acceptance of humiliation by the Christian confident of a good conscience. Here, the book's two facets, one turned toward the philosophical question of greatness, the other toward the vocabulary of greatness, experience some friction. Smith shows – quite powerfully, I might add – how far Ambrose departs from Classical norms of greatness, even while reworking ideas borrowed from the Latin tradition. The opening, third chapter, however, is not really about magnanimitas as such, so much as it is about the kind of people who, in modelling godly living, embodied Ambrose's human ideal (fittingly, the exempla the later chapters discuss are Joseph and David). Those readers who expect a straightforward development, in line with the second chapter, of Christian ideals of magnanimitas may come away confused. I find, therefore, that the second part is best read as a nearly self-standing study in patristic ethics that shares strong thematic ties to the first part but is only partially continuous with it.

That seems equally true of the third part in relation to the others. Two chapters study interrelated revisions of magnanimitas in Augustine. Chapter vi argues, against the criticisms of modern philosophers (especially Hannah Arendt), that Augustine did not deny the intrinsic value of other humans. At the centre lies the rhetorical question, in Confessions 1.9.15, whether anyone was ‘so great a soul’ – so attached, that is, to God – as to look on torture with the indifference with which Augustine's parents looked on his sufferings as a schoolboy. This is irony, Smith argues, and genuine magnanimity is, in Augustine's eyes, granted by God to the humble. The latter point, developed through detailed discussion of many relevant texts, is fully persuasive, though I wonder whether even Smith's careful picking apart of the magnus animus of Confessions 1.9.15 will in fact resolve philosophers’ qualms over the suggestion that human beings are to be ‘used’ on the path toward heaven.

The seventh chapter turns to an even more complex encounter with pagan magnanimity: the consolatio for the raped women in City of God 1. Though the steadiness Augustine enjoins outwardly resembles that of ‘Aristotle's great-souled man’ (p. 267) or Plutarch's Phocion, he does not claim for the Christian women a magnitudo animi to surpass Lucretia's, instead grounding their moral confidence in the love of God. That is an essential point, and reveals much about Augustine's convictions: a sense of the concept's inadequacy might explain why he uses magnanimitas and related terms only forty times in his vast corpus (p. 201 n. 15). It would have sharpened an insightful discussion if Smith had devoted more space in previous chapters to the issues of sex that recur from time to time in the footnotes. Pervasive use of the generic feminine suggests that Ambrose and Augustine took Christian women to be the subjects, interchangeable with men, of their moral discourses. This is not straightforwardly so: for example, Augustine directly addresses women at most two or three times in his extant sermons. The prominence accorded Monica in Confessions and the raped nuns in City of God would have been cast in appropriately high relief by painting the backdrop in its largely (if to modern eyes invidiously) masculine colours.

A brief epilogue reflects on the differences between Ambrose, who saw the virtuous saint as happy in this age, and Augustine, who placed full human flourishing in the eschaton.

Smith's narrative will interest historians of patristic ethics and of Christian reception of Classical philosophy alike. It may help some readers (as it helped me) to think of the language of greatness less as a unifying thread, than as a recurrent motif that joins its parts together.