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

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All these questions, serious answers to which might give your statement a smidgen of authority, go by the board. And haven’t modern empires similarly celebrated power? Haven’t modern empires sought to crush their enemies? You think the Ottomans were social workers? The Japanese were nannies? Do you? Or, by some miracle of independent mindedness, are you saying that the Christian empires of Russia, Britain, France or even Germany, were fully informed by this “transformed” morality? Cutiliae was situated in the rural territory east of Rome known as the Sabina. 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. But in the Roman imaginary the Sabina evoked tough and thrifty peasants and solid, old-fashioned values. Tom Holland’s Pax, the third instalment of his Roman trilogy, describes the collapse of the Julio-Claudian dynasty with the assassination of Nero, the civil conflict that followed, the Flavians who emerged from it, and the ‘Spanish Emperors’, Trajan and Hadrian, to whom has been attributed the settled heyday of the Roman Empire, the Pax, ‘peace’, of Holland’s title. A persistent theme is how the various contenders for power presented their credentials to the Romans. In Vespasian’s case, his origins in a part of Italy that might appear a few hundred years behind Rome, appealing in itself, also complemented the blunt, no-nonsense military manner he cultivated. ‘Woe is me, I think I’m becoming a god!’, he joked on his deathbed, while a response to his son Titus when he questioned the propriety of a new tax on toilets has resulted in the French word for a public urinal, vespasienne. From a “remarkably gifted historian” ( New York Times), the definitive account of the golden age of Rome — an ultimate superpower at the pinnacle of its greatness FS: The 100-odd years that you’re covering in this volume is a period of great peace and prosperity and power, and yet at each juncture, it feels like there’s this anxiety. That’s what surprised me as a reader. There’s this sense of the precariousness of the empire — maybe it’s become softer, maybe it’s decadent, or maybe it needs to rediscover how it used to be. However, in calculating the Pauline effect, it must be added that the Roman poets had written extensively about sin and the impossibility of overcoming it long before. The Roman earth had been tilled to receive ‘my Gospel’, as Paul described it.

I think Holland is essentially right and you are unfortunately wrong! Your last sentence is particularly lame; of course there are big gaps in our understanding of the experiences of Roman subjects (and later) subjects, especially of the plebian and slave majority, but we know a lot about the cultural attitudes of the upper classes. Pax, the third book in a trilogy telling the story of the Roman Empire by award-winning historian Tom Holland, has been unveiled by Abacus. Question One: How much credit can you give the emperors for Pax Romana? And how much was it just good timing and circumstance?

Before the destruction of the Temple and the consequences of that, there had been another event that carried the same effect. The followers of the Way, later called Christians, had been taken out of the synagogue (Acts.xix.9). There were also forcible expulsions (John. ix. 22). TH: Well, it wasn’t just young men, but we’ll come to that. There is always a temptation to emphasise the way in which the Romans are like us, a mirror held up to our own civilisation. But what is far more interesting is the way in which they are nothing like us, because it gives you a sense of how various human cultures can be. You assume that ideas of sex and gender are pretty stable, and yet the Roman understanding of these concepts was very, very different to ours. For us, I think, it does revolve around gender — the idea that there are men and there are women — and, obviously, that can be contested, as is happening at the moment. But the fundamental idea is that you are defined by your gender. Are you heterosexual or homosexual? That’s probably the great binary today. Sex has always been binary, though the concept of ‘gender’ has been more fluid for the reason it is socially constructed according to time and to culture. I think he is also confusing today’s concept of ‘sexual orientation’ with the actaul nature of biological sex. I take your point, Steve. Historical patterns don’t necessarily reflect those of our own time. And It’s true, as you say, that World War I and World War II did nothing to support confidence in civilization. Maybe the depravity that emerged suddenly in the mid-twentieth century, seemingly out of nowhere, was the last straw. But antipathy toward civilization had a much longer history in the West.

Pax is a captivating narrative history of Rome at the height of its power. From the gilded capital to realms beyond the frontier, historian Tom Holland shows ancient Rome in all its glory: Nero’s downfall, the destruction of Jerusalem and Pompeii, the building of the Colosseum and Hadrian’s Wall, the conquests of Trajan. 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. 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). Before this separation, Greek converts to the Way were made in the synagogue (Acts. xviii. 4). The Apostles also attempted to make converts in the Temple. After disputes over alms (Acts. vi. 1) and, especially, circumcision (Acts. xv. 1), the separation, when it comes, is mutually acrimonious (Revelation. ii. 9). In the late 30s, Vespasian charmed Caligula with flattery and proved his merit during the invasion of Britain under Caligula’s successor, Claudius, in 43. His absence of senatorial ancestors made him appear to be a safe choice at a time when Nero was otherwise engaged in slaughtering members of established aristocratic families and seeking a commander for the army in Palestine. One long succession crisis later, Vespasian became emperor.Trajan could nevertheless claim to have upheld the Pax Romana, thanks to his earlier work in Dacia (present-day Romania), which inspired many of the scenes on the Column at the centre of the Forum that both bear his name today. It was his fortune to go down in history as one of the “good” emperors. As Holland explains, however, Trajan’s reputation might have been very different had it not been for his “bad” predecessor-but-one, Domitian, who ruled from 81 to 96 and laid much of the groundwork. According to the later Historia Augusta (an entertaining yet notoriously unreliable source), Trajan ungratefully wrote Domitian off as “a terrible emperor, but one who had excellent friends”. One realises while reading Holland’s book just how much an emperor’s record was determined by the circumstances he inherited.