This is in large part because of Brown's considerable artistry both as historian and as writer. He has long been admired for the eloquent precision of his prose but here it is the construction of his book that most prompts admiration. By taking wealth and the related areas of expenditure and charitable giving as his theme he has found a way to portray not only entire classes of hitherto neglected people, such as the mediocres of the fourth century, "the lower and middle classes of the towns", but specific long-forgotten individuals, such as "the Harvester of Mactar", a poor labourer from the hinterlands of Tunisia, who worked his way up "under the rabid sun", to become a small land-owner; we know of him only from an inscription which he left behind where he boasts that "I sat in the Temple of the City Council and from a little farmer I have become a civic elder — a censor." Brown excels at portraiture, such as the obscenely ostentatious Petronius Probus, one of "the super-rich whose estates spanned southern Italy, north Africa, and other regions of the Mediterranean like the branches of a modern ‘multinational' company", and of whom the late Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus — one of Brown's favourite sources — wrote that he "languished like a fish out of water if he was not in office." Probus is given as a representative figure: he embodies the lavish spending on public spectacle as well as the greasy pole-climbing of late Roman society but at the same time, in Brown's hands, he stands before us as a specific living individual; we feel with a shudder that we have met Probus. Other figures, such as those of the poet Ausonius of Bordeaux or the splendidly named Sidonius Apollinaris, the fifth-century poet who has left us enduring images of what Brown aptly calls a "landscape of the heart", emerge too in all their complexities of refinement from these pages. And often, as with Probus or Symmachus (another of Brown's wonderful depictions), these figures recur like characters in a Balzac novel.

Brown punctuates his grand narrative with sharp aperçus. He notes, for example, that "other-worldly religions — whether this be late — antique Christianity or its exact contemporary at the other end of Eurasia, the Buddhism of central Asia and western China — often manage to become very rich very soon." And he follows this up by remarking, "as Chinese observers noted, with characteristic economy of words, there was a lot of wealth to be gotten from fo-shih — from ‘Buddha business'." Or he will allude, quite unexpectedly, to Jorge Luis Borges who wrote that "any coin is a repository of possible futures" and then use this to "follow the track of gold at the very top of Roman society". Brown's skill in introducing such allusions lightens his narrative by providing little nuggets of surprise that both delight and illumine. Finally, by arranging his account in brief, rather dramatic chapters — few longer than five or so pages — Brown manages both to create momentum and to keep his reader pleasantly unprepared for what comes next; a disquisition on architecture and a small family estate will be followed by a chapter on "the happy body" of the affluent — an ideal as much connected with notions of the microcosm as with a celebration of personal good fortune.

To do justice to either of these books in a short review is itself a bit like attempting to thread a camel. Perhaps the best I can do in the end is to evoke one of the fascinating plates in Brown's book. Captioned "the touch of empire", it shows a metal pepper pot in the form of an empress. Part of a treasure discovered at Hoxne in East Anglia, it displays its empress with wide eyes and a soft but commanding smile. The figure is at once regal and gently amusing. An exquisite example of multum in parvo, it embodies a long-lost world, as distant as the early days of nascent Christianity or the vast and intricate realm of Late Antiquity and yet, in its genial humanity a world that is still just recognisably our own.