In each generation there may be a few history books to be read with profit and no little pleasure not only by scholars and students of the discipline concerned, but more widely by all those who seek to understand a culture which has exercised a lasting influence on our own. Peter Brown's magisterial study of attitudes to wealth in late antiquity, and in particular ‘the impact of wealth on the Christian churches of the Latin West’ from the fourth to the sixth century ce (p. xix), is one such book. Across some thirty chapters, it elucidates the shifting meanings of wealth for pagans as well as Christians in large part through sympathetic attention to selected individuals from different regions and periods of the western empire who encapsulate particular stances towards that wealth: Symmachus, Ambrose, Augustine, Ausonius, Paulinus of Nola, Jerome, Pelagius, Salvian, Leo, Gelasius and Gregory of Tours. If readers think these figures are familiar to them, Peter Brown so situates their stories in a wider ‘landscape’ and scholarship as to challenge or reject a number of traditional narratives.

The individual portraits are prefaced by four chapters which place them in a wider social context. The first describes the landed wealth of the fourth-century elites, its generation and its meaningful display in coin, dress and architecture. Here, Brown stresses, for example, the need to relinquish an older vision of the countryside divided largely into vast latifundia. Attention to the late Roman clothing worn by the very rich – silken garments heavy with gold thread and social significance – reveals the desire to imitate the fashions and values of an imperial court where divides between military and civil, Roman and Goth, could be glossed over. The second chapter offers a profile of the western Churches for much of the same century, to emphasise how few of their members belonged to the uppermost echelons comprising the senatorial families, generals and upwardly mobile courtiers. Though bishops and their churches had been singled out for privileged status by Constantine, their wealth was at best limited and ‘polyfocal’ (p. 40); most Christians belonged to the middling ranks of artisans, members of the urban collegia and minor officialdom. This leads to Brown's second major quarrel with commonplace accounts of Christianisation in the West: ‘It was the gathering pace of the entry of the rich into the Christian churches in the period after 370 – and not the conversion of Constantine in 312 – that marks the true beginning of the triumphant Catholicism of the Middle Ages’ (p. 32).

The next two chapters explore traditional benefactions to cities and their citizens together with the gifts which Christians gave in alms to the destitute. Here, the aim is to see past the contrast between such gifts in many sermons. While fourth-century preachers often sought overtly to divert the rich from an older pattern of civic benefaction to Christian charity, no such sudden transformation ensued. Rather, Christianity would eventually transform social relations from the late fifth century onwards through an identification of the wider populace with the ‘poor’ of biblical Israel, whose cause was championed by the bishop (p. 81). The book returns to this theme in its two closing chapters, where Peter Brown observes how the Church rose to prominence and comparative wealth within the newly founded barbarian kingdoms, when a secular elite had been cut off from estates that extended across many provinces. These final chapters have in view a further popular misconception: the imposition from above of clerical celibacy, which Brown sees firmly as the product of lay pressure, as donors sought to secure the ‘otherly’ or sacral status of beneficiaries whose prayers would secure the donors’ salvation (p. 519). A book that opens with the silken robes of lay magnates deftly closes with the imposition of clerical dress. Across the span of some two centuries Brown charts the shift by which wealth could no longer be ‘mythologised’ as the ‘unproblematic abundance’ lavished on the rich by the natural order but acquired a ‘higher purpose’ in attaining salvation (pp. 197–9, 522–3).

The twenty-three chapters between these book-ends are rich in detail. In each case a theology of wealth is related to a wider social and political history without reducing such beliefs or their articulation to being merely an expression of the will to power or some other underlying cause. A number of major theses recur and gain credence across the different portraits, not least the inability of Christian bishops to influence the age-old structures by which central government and local oligarchies co-operated to levy the heavy taxes required to fund mercenary armies or placate potential adversaries (pp. 36, 145–6, 383). Brown explores the circumstances in which Paulinus of Nola, and later the younger Melania and her husband Pinianus, divested themselves of spectacular wealth, and notes that this did not necessarily mean that they ceased to command significant riches. Paulinus, rather, spurned the splendour associated with the wealth now lavished on the shrine of St Felix (p. 220). Melania and Pinianus enrolled themselves on the matricula of the Jerusalem church to identify themselves with the men and women of Acts ii–iv, but were very far from destitute (p. 300). Against these displays of ascetic renunciation, where geographical relocation mirrored or intimated a desired social dislocation, Brown reveals the widespread and lasting conviction among most wealthy Christians that their riches were better retained and managed for the use of the churches and of the ‘poor’ variously understood, whether the destitute, the ‘shame-faced’ poor who had fallen from respectable prosperity, or, increasingly from the fifth-century, the voluntary poor – monks and the clergy.

A third recurrent theme is the unsettled but charged relationships between the sacred and the profane or secular, and between Church and State. On the one hand, an edict of Constantine from 329 could speak with confidence of two spheres and distinguish how wealth was to be handled in each: ‘The wealthy must be there to support the obligations of the secular world, while the poor are maintained by the wealth of the churches’ (p. 44). Yet, Brown recognises that behind this rhetorical clarity, the division between Church and State ‘emerged only slowly in late antiquity and in very different ways in different regions’ (p. 505). Thus, a century after Constantine's edict, writers from southern Gaul ‘concentrated to an unusual degree on defining the uneasy boundary between the new demands of the ascetic movement and the average Christianity of well-to-do secular persons’ (p. 413). They did so because ascetics and wealthy laymen (to whom they were often closely related) shared ‘a sharp sense of the unresolved opposition between the sacred and the profane’. Brown distinguishes the world of Arles as a centre of secular authority within the diminishing Respublica from the intellectual and ascetic currents prevalent around Marseilles (pp. 411–12). In the sixth century, as Robert Markus already recognised, a secular realm was in retreat, and Brown stresses the role which lay benefactors played in placing the clergy within the distinct sphere of the sacred: ‘As givers, the laity came to insist that the clergy should be clearly other to themselves’ (p. 517). Brown does more, however, than merely observe such developments; he offers insight into the mechanisms at work: the division of Church and State ‘grew from a remarkable polarization of the social imagination, by which nonviolent pastoral power was pitted against mere “worldly” power’.

The great strength of the book's approach to its topic by way of ‘portraiture’ is then its sensitivity to the particularity of a given time and milieu. This gives additional value to the chapters that look at what, for many, will be the lesser known writers of fifth-century Gaul. Where Salvian's De gubernatione dei has often been ‘quarried for evidence of the abuses that are held to have caused the fall of the Roman empire in the West’, Brown focuses on why Salvian wrote as he did ‘for the sancti of southern Gaul’ (pp. 433–4). Political disaster is understood as God's punishment of Christians in an empire which has failed to heed the teachings of the Gospel. Against this background of sin and coming judgement, Salvian places new emphasis on deathbed gifts to the Church to rescue the penitent donor (p. 440).

The book typically brings together narratives that have often been told separately but which prove mutually illuminating, revealing suggestive threads that link, for example, the actions of the Anicii during the sack of Rome in 410, Pelagius’ relation to the family as evidenced by his Letter to Demetrias, and the imperial condemnation of Pelagius in 417 (pp. 303, 306, 373). Likewise, Brown draws upon and integrates the findings from an extremely wide range of scholarship. Thus, a rumour seemingly entertained by supporters of Pelagius that Alypius, bishop of Thagaste, had given eighty ‘Numidian stallions’ to courtiers in advancing the ascetic's condemnation is correlated first with the fighting between different factions in Spain ‘which had cut off the supply of fine horses that had been provided by the ranches of Lusitania’ and second with the price of a horse (‘a minimum of twelve solidi’) thereby allowing the reader to recognise these stallions as an extremely ‘well-timed gift’ (p. 371).

This confident reconstruction from often fragmentary sources of the finely-woven pattern of meaningful events, and of the contextual landscape in which treatises and sermons on wealth are to be understood, is not entirely without difficulties. In the above instance, the extant source for the rumour is Augustine's Unfinished book against Julian, in which at three points the Italian bishop refers to Alypius’ gift of eighty horses of some kind ‘fattened up across practically the whole of Africa’ (iii.35). The precise origin, sex and likely price of a horse must be surmised. Where previous scholars like Simon MacDowall have thought that the late Roman cavalryman could buy a mount for seven solidi, Brown has silently sided with scholars such Hartwin Brandt who draws on the price edict under the tetrarchs to argue that the maximum price for an ‘excellent military horse’ was thirty solidi ‘(‘All the king's horses’, BICS xlix [2006], 224). We certainly know that Lusitania was contested territory between different warlords in the period concerned. The impact on trade is harder to ascertain.

As with many pre-modern restorations of a classical statue, it may be impossible for the non-specialist to tell where one piece of the evidence ends and a more speculative join has been made. A more serious example concerns the Rule of St Augustine. This, we are told, was ‘drawn up in around 397’ and fell ‘into two parts, an Ordo monasterii …which laid down a daily routine of prayer and work – and the Praeceptum’ (p. 173). The reader is then referred to George Lawless's 1987 work Augustine of Hippo and his monastic rule. The appendix to this latter study examines, however, the differing opinions of scholars concerning the authorship of the Ordo monasterii. While Lawless was here sympathetic to the possibility that Augustine was indeed the text's author, he concluded that the author ‘remains anonymous and [the rule's] place of origin is by no means established with certainty’. Should the general reader be alerted to where the original marble ends and the interpretative art of the restorer begins? There is a question here as to what the general reader should be able to take on trust.

A single caveat should not detract from the overwhelming achievements of a book that gives a series of compelling portraits based upon mastery of wide research and judicious readings of the central texts. Imagery abounds to bring the past before us in much of its complexity, without recourse to academic jargon or the freight of explicit theoretical reflection. Readers will be encouraged to abandon long-cherished but faulty histories as they discover both long continuities and significant changes in attitudes to wealth on the journey from late antiquity into the early medieval world.