Book Review: Through the Eye of a Needle Part 1

Peter Brown, "Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West 350-550AD"

This book review will in parts because I'm only done Ch.1 and there's lots of material.

So, as a writer, strictly as far as writing is concerned, Brown's kind of annoying. He's got that journalistic style where he gives you odd one liners and weird phrases that don't really sit well with me in history. you can be funny and clever and all those things when you write history, but the way he does it seems to take away from the facts sometimes.

The intro is kind of boring, i guess he's trying to set up for the reader an idea of what class structure was like in the late Roman empire and the reality of being stuck in one class/difficulty of moving between classes. So he starts off by talking about this guy they call the harvester of Mactar. He's called the harvester because he wrote a big thing about his life and how he got lucky and worked really hard and moved up the social ladder. he ended up owning some farmland and just making the cut to be a town leader, which just means you need to be a free man, landowner, and have a certain amount of liquid assets. he went from a farmhand to a town councillor, rare and difficult, so he wrote a big thing about it that they found in his tomb i think it was. anyway he's called the harvester rather than his name because there's no name on the inscription. Brown doesn't say whether the harvester forgot to sign it or it wore away over time.

Anyway the point of this book is to explore wealth in late Rome, who had wealth, how they acquired it, what the levels of being rich were like--being a town councillor, for ex, is good because you now have more legal rights, but it's not being rich. rich is you have a ton of gold at your disposal. so it's supposed to explore what vast wealth was like and how christianity and wealth became intermingled and what effect this wealth had on the development of the religion.

Some cool facts, and i'm not going to list who he cites because it's too much work:
-the eco footprint left behind from this era of Rome is the bottom of the mediterranean is littered with more shipwrecks than any other era produced before or since excepting modern times.
-also the lakes in sweden and icecaps in greenland show deposits of lead dating to the 1st and 2nd centuries due to an unprecedented amount of emissions from mining and purifying silver in Roman Spain.
-granaries were a symbol of wealth. it meant you could afford to store your grain and didnt need it immediately. this meant you could wait until a few months before the next years harvest to sell it, by which point everyone else was out of food. so you could sell it for 2x the original price.

The rest of the chapter is more background, how the economy worked, how 80% of the people were labourers, 60% of the wealth came from harvests. Thus obviously a good harvest was important, and in the odd years of bad weather famine struck.
What did you do then? Jews, christians and followers of the old gods all had religious ceremonies and tried to please their gods in order to bring good weather and good harvest and keep the locusts away.

Later when Constantine was emperor he invented the gold coin called the solidus. soldiers and high officials were paid in this currency. soon the bureaucracy demanded taxes be paid in gold rather than grain. this created a greater class gap-many flourished, many couldn't keep up. the average person could only barter with food or bronze coins, and the wealthier middle class might have had silver. i guess here his point was how even among the rich there were giant class gaps if some could have their assets in gold and others dealt grain.

anyway that's it for this instalment!