The best work on late ancient philosophy is genuinely interdisciplinary. Historians cannot write histories of philosophical communities without attending to the philosophies of their subjects. Philosophers understand that philosophical discourse is shaped by, and in turn shapes, wider cultural and social processes. Historians and philosophers alike ignore the literary character of their sources at their peril.

Arthur Urbano's volume balances these demands adroitly. The source and subject of U.'s study is late ancient Bios literature, both individual lives and biographical collections. U. makes a convincing case that Bios literature offers a particularly useful site from which to explore the complex collage of social context, philosophical discourse and literary production that we call late ancient intellectual culture.

U. brings together within a single study many of the major works and figures that lie at the centre of current studies of historical relationships between Christians and philosophers. The book is organized around themes illustrated by textual pairings. Ch. 2 compares Porphyry's and Iamblichus’ biographies of Pythagoras with Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Moses to illustrate how biography functioned in competition over paideia, while ch. 3 focuses on Porphyry's Life of Plotinus and the sixth book of Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History to examine competition over philosophical pedigrees. Chs 4 and 5 present, respectively, an assessment of Bioi of emperors (Eusebius’ Life of Constantine/Libanius’ Funeral Oration for Julian) and a comparison of the mutual production of ‘philosophers’ and ‘monks’ (Athanasius’ Life of Antony/Eunapius’ Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists). A sixth chapter compares Bioi of the Cappadocian ascetic Macrina the Younger and the philosopher Sosipatra. A final chapter presses the investigation into the fifth century, tracing the themes identified in earlier chapters within Theodoret's Religious History and Marinus’ Life of Proclus.

U. also does a fine job of addressing some significant theoretical and methodological questions, worth discussing at length. The principal theoretical framework for the project is Pierre Bourdieu's theorization of ‘fields’ of cultural production (8). Rather than positing ‘Christians’ and ‘philosophers’ as distinct social and/or ideological groups locked in a polarized conflict with ‘others’, U. understands the producers of late ancient Bioi as constituting a shared field of production. This approach offers a lens, as U. puts it, into the ‘“nuts and bolts” of the intellectual machinery and social networks of late antiquity within the broader cultural complex’ (8). Following on previous scholarship, U. identifies paideia as the Bourdieuian habitus that structured Christian and non-Christian intellectuals’ shared ‘feel for the game’ within their competitive field (11). In Bourdieu's model, individual fields are structured homologously to the underlying field of economic production; the symbolic capital of the field of intellectual production is connected (though not always obviously or directly) to material capital. Cultural producers produce for others within the field, and have a shared sense of standing outside of or above the mundane and instrumentalist concerns of hoi polloi. Consequently, U. does well to advert to the fact that a Bourdieuian analysis is always also a critique of political economy.

U. is also aware of the limitations of a Bourdieuian approach for scholars of Late Antiquity. We are often wanting the sort of detailed economic data one would hope for in order to trace homologies between the field of intellectual production and the economic base that makes Bourdieu's analysis of, for example, twentieth-century French literary culture a potent political critique. A detailed study of the economic locations of late ancient philosophy is a desideratum. What scholars of Late Antiquity have done effectively is provide increasingly detailed analyses of the inner workings of the intellectual field. This is precisely how U. reads the evidence of Bios literature: as both product and productive of symbolic capital. The literary elements and patterns of Bioi index competitive position taking within the structure of the field. In turn, Bioi make claims upon (and thus structure) the habitus of the field. This approach offers a potent historiographic tool, for it frees the work of history from a simplistic divide between ‘rhetoric’ and ‘reality’, and provides a model for mapping change within a field over time.

U. contrasts his Bourdieuian approach with another strand of scholarship that approaches ethnic, religious and philosophical identities from the perspective of post-colonial discourse analysis (6–8). Specifically, U. suggests that Bourdieu's concepts of field and habitus are a better tool for getting inside the machinery of the late ancient intellectual field than Homi Bhabha's theories of mimicry — that is, the disruptive mimesis of metropolitan culture by the periphery. His challenge to applications of Bhabha's theorizations of mimicry — including the work of the present reviewer — is well taken. Discussions of mimicry can risk suggesting that there are ‘real’ (that is, unconstructed, pre-discursive) differences between self and other, colonizer and colonized, centre and periphery. The point of a Bhabhalian analysis, though, is in part a psychoanalytic one; namely, that mimicry exposes inherent instability within the seemingly static and essential (though in fact constructed and historical) difference between self and other. Those who read the Second Sophistic and early Christianity in terms of mimicry do so not to provide a more accurate mapping of identities (Hellenic, Christian, Roman etc.), but to analyse the psychic economies at work in the production of imperial subjectivities. In the end, then, these two current trajectories in the scholarship are complementary. Both take the evidence of textual corpora as their starting point; concepts like field and habitus help to unlock the structures within which identities are produced and trafficked, while mimicry provides leverage into the psychic flows and resistances that unfold within empire.

If this review has focused on the theory and method of U.'s study it is because the volume, particularly the introduction, does such a fine job of engaging some fundamental and emergent theoretical and methodological concerns among scholars of late ancient Platonism and early Christianity. The book is highly recommended for specialists and students alike.