Peter Brown is Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History, Emeritus, at Princeton University.

No summary of its contents can do justice to this complex and fascinating book, written with all Peter Brown’s refreshing panache. We are presented with an age of vitality, where historians used to find a creeping paralysis; the canvas comes alive with the spectacular successes of individuals who belie the conventional wisdom of the stifling oppressiveness of late Roman institutions; and the cautious uncertainty of the ‘age of anxiety’ disappears in a vigorous emphasis on the recognition and display of power… In a book devoted to human beings it is the portraits of individuals, perceptively located in their social and religious surroundings, which are naturally to the fore. [Brown] has shifted the emphasis of late Roman studies from institutions to individuals, and to the discernment of what made late antique men ‘tick’—a task for which he is without equal.

• 1. A Debate on the Holy 2. An Age of Ambition 3. The Rise of the Friends of God 4. From the Heavens to the Desert: Anthony and Pachomius Notes Index