"Pax: War and Peace in Rome's Golden Age
By Tom Holland
(Basic, 480 pages, $32.50)
'They make a desert and call it peace." That harrowing critique of the high Roman Empire is often attributed to the historian Tacitus. In fact, the line is found in a speech that Tacitus quotes (or invents), delivered by a barbarian chieftain, Calgacus, on the eve of a battle against Roman forces. Tacitus surely didn't endorse the sentiment, especially since his own father-in-law was facing Calgacus that day. To Tacitus, pax Romana, "Roman peace," implied, first and foremost, stability and order across the Mediterranean world, not wanton destruction.
Whose viewpoint are we modern folk to adopt, that of Calgacus, the victim of Roman aggression, or that of his foes, who led the West on a path of unparalleled progress? The question is implicitly posed by historian Tom Holland at the outset of "Pax," a lively survey of Roman warfare and foreign affairs at the height of the empire. Mr. Holland gives the Calgacus quote as one of the book's epigrams, right beside an opposing opinion by Pliny the Elder. Pliny proclaimed "the Romans and the boundless majesty of their peace" to be a gift from the gods, as bright as a "second sun."
"If there was light, there was also darkness," Mr. Holland writes, balancing "sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order" and other fruits of the pax against the rivers of blood that were spilled to secure them. He ranges Edward Gibbon's famous pronouncement, that the high Roman Empire was the "most happy and prosperous" era in all history up to his day (the late 18th century), against the nightmarish portrait in Revelation of the Whore of Babylon, where Rome is reimagined as a gruesome, blood-drinking fiend.
"Pax" leaves it largely to readers to struggle with this opposition. As he exits his preface, Mr. Holland sets moral questions aside and turns his hand to what he does best: sure-footed, tight-wound historical narrative, enlivened with keen insights. He has a talent for making readers at home in the ancient world, even if they're first-time visitors. In this book he describes an era few but specialists know in any depth: the seven decades between the deaths of Nero (A.D. 68) and Hadrian (138), a span that saw nine rulers come and go, including four in a single, turbulent year.
That year, A.D. 69, occupies about half the length of "Pax." Mr. Holland takes us in painstaking detail through the civil war that brought Galba, Otho, and Vitellius to power in quick succession. Rome's first dynastic line, that of the Julio-Claudians, had come to an end the previous year with the forced suicide of Nero. Absent any other path to the emperorship, the leaders of Rome's far-flung armies used main force to establish legitimacy. Finally Vespasian, the first of the so-called Flavian line, managed to hold onto rule.
During his account of this year-long melee Mr. Holland casts frequent looks backward to Nero, a figure whose complex legacy had to be dealt with by all of the Flavians. Though lower-class Romans had idolized Nero, the political class deemed him an embarrassing failure, and his successors did their best to distance their reign from his. The Flavian amphitheater, aka the Colosseum, was built atop demolished portions of Nero's pleasure palace, the Golden House, to signal to Rome the end of the Neronian adventure in megalomania.
The second half of "Pax" moves at a faster clip, covering nearly 70 years and numerous foreign wars and rebellions. The siege of Jerusalem led by Vespasian was brought to a conclusion by Titus, his son, but the Jews rose up and were conquered twice more. Roman arms ventured north into Scotland and eastward across the Danube and the Euphrates. The empire reached its greatest extent under Trajan, who died on campaign in the East in 117; his successor, Hadrian, retrenched, relinquishing some of Trajan's conquests and building the wall across Britain that bears his name. To give up expansion was not a popular move, as Mr. Holland makes clear. Hadrian obscured the pullback by giving Trajan lavish funeral rites, then interring his ashes inside the carved column, still standing in Rome, that illustrates some of his triumphs.
More so than many who write about Rome, Mr. Holland has a droll wit. He likes to winkingly take the viewpoint of his subjects when they're at their most bloody-minded or biased: "Outlandish, of course," he writes when describing the monotheistic faith of the Jews, sniffing with the disdain of a high-minded pagan. After narrating a noted example of disciplinary rigor, in which a Roman commander sentenced his own son to death for a minor infraction, Mr. Holland snarks that the emperor Galba, being childless, "had never quite matched this edifying standard of severity."
Mr. Holland would have done well to return now and then to the problem he raised by quoting Calgacus -- of whether an empire attained by conquest can ever be justified. Without overarching questions to provide unity or a single dynastic family -- like the Julio-Claudians who featured in Mr. Holland's "Dynasty" (2015) -- the narrative of "Pax" can feel episodic as its series of wars and campaigns grows ever longer. Fortunately the two entertaining Plinys, scientist uncle and provincial-governor nephew, keep popping up here and there to vary the pace. As does the enigmatic Josephus, the Jewish revolutionary turned Roman imperial lackey.
The span of the conflicts Mr. Holland deals with in "Pax," from Britain to modern Iran, showcases the breadth of his learning. In the course of his authorial career he's taken on a wide array of topics, starting with classical Greece, then moving on to Rome in various eras, early Islam, and Western Europe's Christian heritage. Along the way he's also translated all of Herodotus's "Histories" out of ancient Greek. One looks forward to many future deep dives with this remarkably gifted historian.
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Mr. Romm's most recent book is "Demetrius: Sacker of Cities."" [1]
1. A Real-Life Game of Thrones. Romm, James. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 03 Oct 2023: A.13.