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In two new books, the historians Adrian Goldsworthy and Tom Holland portray an empire that knew how to hold back from a fight and make room for upstarts. The ‘ability to reason’ also seems to be compromised by those seemingly in denial about some stark cultural differences in sexual practice and gender roles! Tom Holland's latest book, Pax, continues his epic journey through ancient Rome, from the Republic to – one assumes – the eventual decline and fall of the once-mighty empire. And for people who enjoyed being a passive partner, who gained emotional sustenance from it, it must have been excruciating. Vividly sketching the lives of Romans both ordinary and spectacular, from slaves to emperors, Holland shows that Roman peace was the fruit of unprecedented military violence.
Goldsworthy sees in the tangled demise of the ancient Roman and Persian empires a warning about the 21st-century war in Ukraine.
A censor wasn’t someone who went around cancelling people or closing down newspapers; a censor was someone who, every few years, would go around, working out how much money each individual citizen had, and also his moral worth. Admittedly, the way those issues, which on the surface feel so familiar, were solved is less recognisable. Vespasian himself, with his rustic accent and manners, was considered a bit of a country bumpkin, and might seem an improbable emperor from an improbable source. It wasn’t just safe to walk the streets at night, it was safe to travel the roads and sail the seas, from one end of the empire to the other. In both books, we see that an accurate sense of the possible is critical to a great power’s success.
And of course, there is no figure in the empire who has to wrestle with that tension more significantly than Caesar himself. Familiar elements of this period, such as the destruction of Pompeii, still feel fresh in his retelling and he avoids the temptation of so many joyless modern classicists to moralise about what rotters these Romans were with their slavery and their bloodshed and their lack of a proper safeguarding mission statement. Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them. One was killed and the other shot and arrested in what has been described as the biggest shoot-out in Secret Service history.Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around September 26, 2023. What he’s saying is that Britons are being seduced into the moral decrepitude that has already paralysed the Romans.
Ranging far and looking deep, he tells us about emperors and subjects, about a world that is at the same time both familiar and very alien. There’s a description in Suetonius’s imperial biography of Claudius: “He only ever slept with women. This does not bode well for our multicultural societies, especially since we are teaching our kids to consider us the barbarians.
In one poetic passage he describes ‘smoke drifting from the roofs of tenant farms; vineyards and orchards laden down with succulent fruit; herds of cattle lowing softly in the deepening twilight’. I personally cannot imagine he would have been anything other than, on one level, very grateful to have been raised up from a provincial backwater. The Roman legal and sexual dynamics licenses pretty much perpetual rape if you are subordinate in a powerful household. to catch the occasional Biblical quotation slipped into the text, and while a point can be made about Pax Romana as an essential precondition for the spread of this new religion, Pax might not be the most appropriate stage for it.
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