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

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FS: Today a lot of people worry that we are somehow rather like the Roman Empire in its declining phases. There’s the sense that this world that seemed totally everlasting is crumbling and breaking. I was filled with hope reading your book because it starts with what feels like the end of the world — the chaotic Year of Four Emperors — and is followed by 100 years of peace. So maybe, we are in a moment more like AD 69 than the actual end of the Roman Empire. Does it feel to you like we’re on the downslope of a civilisation? 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: 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? Now, to our way of thinking, that would be grooming, pure and simple. But that’s not how the Romans saw it. It’s not how the Greeks saw it, either, because they recognised that Hadrian was behaving like a Greek. He wears a beard, like a Greek philosopher. He was known as a young man as Graeculus, the little Greek. There’s a sense in which Hadrian’s adoption of a beautiful Greek boy is like Zeus sweeping up Ganymede to be his cup bearer — or like Hercules and Hylas. 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.’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. The sheer diversity of their empire had always exercised Roman writers, the greatest fear of many moralists and satirists being that Rome might find itself conquered by the conquered, that Romans would turn into Greeks, or that Roman values could disappear from Rome and become visible only among barbari, like Germans or Scots. The emperor Hadrian had no such qualms. He travelled all around the empire, pursuing a particular enthusiasm for Greek culture. When he sailed up the Nile in AD 130 there was a poet in his party called Julia Balbilla, the descendant of royalty from across the Greek and Persian east. Balbilla left poems commemorating their visit inscribed on the left shin of one of the ‘Colossi of Memnon’ at Thebes, two images of Amenhotep III that had become identified with a classical hero, and which emitted an unearthly sound when the sun came up. 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. Tom Holland’s latest book, the third instalment in the bestselling author and podcaster’s Roman history series, starts with the suicide of the last Julio-Claudian emperor, Nero, and ends with the ascension of the philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius. It provides context for some of the most famous moments and monuments in Roman history — the Colosseum, the razing of Jerusalem, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Trajan’s column, Hadrian’s Wall, the growth of Christianity — and follows the rise and frequently gory fall of ten emperors, covering AD68 to AD138. Christianity could never have become the universal religion of the Roman Empire without Paul. As a Pharisee, a member of the missionary sect of ancient Judaism, he was true to his calling, and, despite his conversion, was perhaps one of the truest of all Jews. The other Apostles were either pulled in two directions, like Peter, or perhaps too cultic-minded, like James with his reliance on the law and circumcision.

The Roman slave system was brutally exploitative, but, unlike the North American slave system, it was not based on racist assumptions and, as Holland shows, it did offer those enslaved in the households of the rich and famous a path to prominence. A stunning portrait of Rome’s glory days, this is the epic history of the Pax Romana. Request Desk/Exam Copy 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. Quite an extraordinary blunder, don’t they proof read these things anymore ? Or is Mr Holland* telling us that he is NOT a classicist? 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.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. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. Two ancient sources, Suetonius and Cassius Dio both claim that the Emperor Domitian (81-96 AD) brought in the prohibition.