Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire examines the formation of the "poor" as a distinct social class in Roman society, a class for which the church claimed special responsibility. This is the story of a society that gradually saw itself as responsible for a certain group of people, a group that previously no one cared about, and of those who benefited from this change in priorities. "The poor" serve as a kind of lens that reveals with wonderful clarity the delicate network of connections and social relations that made the late Roman Empire a changing world.
Peter Brown seeks to restore the condition of the poor before the rise of Christianity, to stand for the true nature of the Christian rhetoric about the love of the poor: were its motives always sincere or were they sometimes selfish? Brown uses not only Greek and Latin sources, but also Jewish sources, to document the interrelationships between Middle Eastern societies and Roman classical traditions. He succeeds in shedding light on a crucial aspect of the transition from classical culture to Christian culture, the main point of which is the growth of a new concept regarding the debt owed by society and the church to the poor.
