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For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. The Pax Romana has long been revered as a golden age. At its peak, the Roman Empire stretched from Scotland to Arabia, and contained perhaps a quarter of humanity. It was the wealthiest and most formidable state the world had yet seen. 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. All in all, a glimpse of Rome’s future. A rich and fascinating period of history requires a companionable guide. Holland’s erudite and irresistibly readable account amounts to a marvellous vademecum. The emperor Trajan, who ruled from 98 to 117 and took Rome’s territory to its greatest recorded extent, certainly felt the tension between maintaining control and satisfying the innate Roman desire for conquest, as became evident in his invasion of Parthia in his final years. He had hoped to follow in the footsteps of Alexander the Great by subduing Mesopotamia and crossing into India, but realised he had overreached. The eruption of a rebellion in Mesopotamia prevented him from fully transforming the territory into a Roman province; he died shortly afterwards. Attempts to impose peace did not always bring contentment.
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. 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?TH: I think we are going through a process of moral change that is more analogous to the Reformation than anything you get in Roman history. But I think that Rome provides us with a model: we are shadowed by the sense that if you have a moment in the sun, if you have greatness, then you are doomed as an empire to decline and fall. And I think the contrast is with China, an equally great empire in this period, getting very rich. Of course, over the centuries, China, as Rome does, will succumb to barbarians. The Chinese Empire will disintegrate, be reconstituted, disintegrate, be reconstituted, and yet, in a sense, always remain China. An entity called China endures. Holland, who co-hosts the podcast The Rest Is History, is at his best when having fun with Rome’s bloody history’ The Times There are Romans who are extremely anxious about this, the most influential of whom is Tacitus, the great historian. Tacitus writes the biography of his father-in-law, Agricola, the governor of Britain. He describes how Agricola fostered the art of civilisation on the island: getting the natives to wear togas, to enjoy fine dining, to have baths. He says that the natives mistook these things as the marks of civilisation, when they were actually marks of their servitude. He is not writing this as a lecture in post-colonial studies. He’s not saying, “Oh, it’s terrible that we’ve conquered the Britons”. What he’s saying is that Britons are being seduced into the moral decrepitude that has already paralysed the Romans. 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. Nor is this an un-Christian view, for Christianity, although it reposes upon the supernatural in its central doctrines (the Incarnation and the Resurrection, for example), does not insist that supernatural intervention changed the whole of human nature in the first three centuries AD – which is perilously near to what Mr Holland is saying.
As for your reference to hunter gatherers, that is easily disposed of. You, like all irrational believers in “zeitgeist”, are positing some entrenched mentality, inimical to question and typical of all people at one, hazily defined, time. Whereas in fact all humans are so malleable that their morals will shift with their circumstances, and the stringent demands of hunting and gathering would make ruthless killers of us all. FS: Do you think that the incredible success of the Roman Empire was due to the fact that so much power was concentrated in one person?Question Four: You talked a lot about the radical break that Christianity represented — the contrast with the extremely ruthless, pre-Christian, Roman world. Do you think there’s a case to be made, as I seem to recall Gibbon did, that Christianity was the ultimate example of the Romans getting soft? 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. 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. The Pax Romana has long been shorthand for the empire’s golden age. Stretching from Caledonia to Arabia, Rome ruled over a quarter of the world’s population. It was the wealthiest and most formidable state in the history of humankind.
Question One: How much credit can you give the emperors for Pax Romana? And how much was it just good timing and circumstance? When the other Apostles agreed that Paul should preach to the Gentiles, they certainly were not going to do that themselves. Peter couldn’t have preached what he didn’t understand. Not having Paul’s talents, they would have had even less success in preaching in the synagogues if they had preached Paul’s theology. If James – Jesus’s brother no less – is an example, they didn’t. Galatians ii.12 implies that James was ‘of the circumcision’ party who consistently opposed Paul (Acts. xv.1). As a consequence of that party’s preaching, the followers of the Way within the synagogue would not have become anything very distinct. They believed Jesus was the Messiah, but such claims were evidently not that unusual.To rule as Caesar,” writes historian and The Rest is History podcaster Tom Holland, “was to drive the chariot of the Sun.” Pull the reins too tight, and one risked plunging the Roman empire into chaos; not tight enough, and the entire system of governance could crash. By the mid-2nd-century AD, the point at which Holland’s latest book ends, Rome ruled from Scotland to Arabia, a stretch so large that even a divine chariot might have struggled to overfly it in one go. Many an emperor had his fingers burned while striving to keep a grip on his growing domain. It was a bold imperial adviser who uttered the name of Icarus. The series began with Rubicon, and continued with Dynasty, and now arrives at the period which marks the apogée of the Pax Romana," the publisher says. “It provides a portrait of the ancient world’s ultimate superpower at war and at peace; from the gilded capital to the barbarous realms beyond the frontier; from emperors to slaves. And – by the way – the Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic branches of that Christianity would have have distinctly different approaches. Protestant Germany murdered the Herero. Where is your “axial transformation” now? 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 Two: There are centuries in between those figures. Who’s running the Empire then? Is it the deep state of Rome that’s in charge?
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