What is Philosophy in Late Antiquity?

How can one write a history of philosophy in the late antique period? Would it be possible to produce a synthesis that would do justice both to the breadth of such a title and to the material required? What would its underlying method and contours need to look like? Naturally, collections of essays within the field abound; volumes which deal with this or that important, but often rarefied topic. Sometimes these collections aim at some degree of comprehensiveness and thereby come close to being “histories”. This is true of the 2010, twin-tomed Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity. The book is self-consciously designed to replace its precursor of 1967, The Cambridge History of Late Greek and Early Mediaeval Philosophy. The change of title is itself enough to underline the victory of the Brownian “late antique” revolution and one hopes that as a result the material and the structure might be suffused with a unity that shows its subject to be neither “late Greek” nor “early mediaeval”. 1 In this it no doubt succeeds, for the new title is clearly an improvement on the old, and the list of chapters provide an excellent up-to-date account of a number of philosophers belonging to the period in question (it being an inexact science to define the period, but debating the point again is so much pedantry that we need not dwell on). 2