Pax: War and Peace in Rome's Golden Age - THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

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TH: In the introduction, I quote a Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who argues that the Roman Empire in the second century, under Trajan and Hadrian, had the wealthiest economy prior to the emergence of modern capitalism in the Netherlands and England in the 17th century. I’m not remotely qualified to say whether or not this is true, but it is clearly the case that this is a spectacularly wealthy period. And people like Pliny absolutely do celebrate it. Interesting enough but far more focused on the dominate sexual proclivities of the Roman elite than anticipated and not made clear to me how that impacted the fall, rise or effective governance of Empire? Maybe Holland did this to flog the book to a broader audience? Freddie is certainly pliable enough to acquiesce. Tom Holland: It opens in AD 68, which is the year that Nero committed suicide: a key moment in Roman history, and a very, very obvious crisis point. Nero is the last living descendant of Augustus, and Augustus is a god. To be descended from Augustus is to have his divine blood in your veins. And there is a feeling among the Roman people that this is what qualifies you to rule as a Caesar, to rule as an emperor. And so the question that then hangs over Rome in the wake of Nero’s death is: what do we do now? We no longer have a descendant of the divine Augustus treading this mortal earth of ours. How is Rome, how is its empire, going to cohere? In two new books, Tom Holland and Adrian Goldsworthy, both accomplished novelists as well as historians, offer lucid accounts of the challenges inherent to managing this complex imperial enterprise. Holland’s “Pax” concerns itself with a period of relative imperial tranquillity between the suicide of the Roman emperor Nero in 68 A.D. and the death of the emperor Hadrian in 138. Goldsworthy explores the relations between Rome and its most powerful neighbor, the successive Persian regimes ruling what is now Iran and Iraq, from their first encounters in the first century B.C. to the decline of both states 700 years later. There’s also a danger of using previous examples of historical change and superimposing them, or at least the terminology, on the current historical changes taking place. It’s a natural thing to do as we try to grapple with change, but supposing our current conditions are unprecedented; as the change from the earlier Roman world following its conversion to Christianity was unprecedented?

If you are lower down the scale, I think your life is pretty terrible. If you’re a slave girl, you are there to be raped. The Roman legal and sexual dynamics licenses pretty much perpetual rape if you are subordinate in a powerful household. I mean, the same is true for boys, but women are likely to be sexually abused throughout their life. And that is why Christianity is so radical, because Paul, when he’s writing to, say, the Romans of Corinth (Corinth is a Roman colony, so they’re culturally Roman to the Romans in Rome), he is saying to the male householder: “You are playing the role of Christ, your wife is playing the role of the church, therefore. That’s why you must have a monogamous, enduring relationship. Christ doesn’t go around raping the scullery maid. You mustn’t.” And that is the transformation that Christianity brings to sexual ethics. Vespasian’s rise, before he became the Roman ruler who would usher in the age of imperial peace, is another tale of social mobility. “Raised in a small Sabine hamlet some 50 miles from Rome,” Holland writes, he was a newcomer to the traditional senatorial aristocracy. Let the sensitive beware: this is a book that judges everything about Rome by the standards of the Romans themselves. The author is a master of immediacy: not for him the fashion of deploring ancient virtues as modern vices.” Yes, but women were women, not becaue of their subservience, but because of their biology. Holland is trying to suggest that anyone who was subservient ( boys, servants, women) were all socially gendered as ‘women’. That ‘woman’ effectively is a synonym for subservience, and is not a stable category of its own ( as in an adult human female).As a last word, one is bound to insist on the un-Christian quality of this Manichean view, because – as any well informed churchman will tell you – the transformation of the world is not immediately effected by the life, death and resurrection of Christ (we are, after all, still sinners); it is brought about by the Last Judgement, which completes the expression of God’s purpose for mankind. FS: It seemed to me, when I was reading Pax, that there was a recurring theme: a movement between what’s considered decadence, and then a reassertion of either a more manly, martial atmosphere, or a return to how things used to be — to the good old days. With each new emperor in this amazing narrative, it often feels like there’s that same kind of mood, which is: things have gotten a bit soft. We’re going to return to proper Rome. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Question Three: Did women figure in the Roman Empire at all? Was there a woman behind the throne? Or were they really all very subservient in this period?

Of course, it is true that the empires of Britain and to some extent France were more merciful than those of their rivals, but that is not the result of some Hegelian metamorphosis, but the consequence of a growing devotion to human happiness, typical of the Enlightened West.Thankfully, with Pax we are treated to good views of the Colosseum, the Palatine, and the Pantheon as well. Nor does the tour end there: we spend a dramatic few days in the Bay of Naples, watching in horror along with Pliny the Younger as Vesuvius wipes out countless lives and flattens cities; we visit the northern extremes along the Danube and the Rhine; cross the cold grey sea to meet the strange and barbarous Caledonians; traverse the mountains and plains of Parthia; and sail along the Nile mourning with Hadrian for the loss of his lover. And then there is the written style, both flamboyant and eloquent, that is the hallmark of Holland’s writing. Although there is nothing to rival my favourite quotation – of any history book – ‘that the Athenians were content to ascribe the origins of their city to a discarded toss-rag’, there is still a delightful turn of phrase that brings to life his subjects ‘in all their ambivalence, their complexity and their contradictions’. Tom Holland, Persian Fire (London: Abacus, 2006), p. 101; Pax, p. xxiv. Just as the ‘golden age’ of Rome is a story of assimilation, of peoples coming together under an all-encompassing flag, in Pax Holland has achieved a remarkable synthesis of ideas and themes, of astounding scholarship and beautiful accessibility, to make something that truly stands out from the crowd. Holland prefaces his narrative with two quotations. The first is from the Roman senator and author Pliny the Elder: ‘Truly, it is as though the Romans and the boundless majesty of their peace have been bestowed by the gods upon humanity to serve them as a second sun.’ The second comes from the greatest of Roman historians, Tacitus, writing in around AD 98: ‘Where they make a desert they call it peace.’ Tacitus, however, put this bitter judgement in the mouth of a Caledonian chief living at the very edge of the Roman Empire; Tacitus had his own reasons for expressing ambivalence. Within the empire, things were different. There, cities were granted a degree of self-government, or even, as Holland says, ‘the illusion of autonomy’, though Rome made sure that ‘the illusion never shaded too far into reality’. The Pax Romana depended on maintaining this delicate balance.