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TH: The question that haunts me, whenever I write about the Romans, is why am I so fascinated by them? When I went to Sunday school, and saw pictures of Jesus in front of Pontius Pilate, I was always on the side of Pontius Pilate. He was kind of glamorous: he had eagles, he had purple robes. By contrast, Jesus was a massive scruff. I much preferred the Romans, and I think that this speaks to something that is kind of inherent. There is a certain admiration, and a dread, and an appeal in power. Question Three: Did women figure in the Roman Empire at all? Was there a woman behind the throne? Or were they really all very subservient in this period? Thankfully, with Pax we are treated to good views of the Colosseum, the Palatine, and the Pantheon as well. Nor does the tour end there: we spend a dramatic few days in the Bay of Naples, watching in horror along with Pliny the Younger as Vesuvius wipes out countless lives and flattens cities; we visit the northern extremes along the Danube and the Rhine; cross the cold grey sea to meet the strange and barbarous Caledonians; traverse the mountains and plains of Parthia; and sail along the Nile mourning with Hadrian for the loss of his lover. And then there is the written style, both flamboyant and eloquent, that is the hallmark of Holland’s writing. Although there is nothing to rival my favourite quotation – of any history book – ‘that the Athenians were content to ascribe the origins of their city to a discarded toss-rag’, there is still a delightful turn of phrase that brings to life his subjects ‘in all their ambivalence, their complexity and their contradictions’. Tom Holland, Persian Fire (London: Abacus, 2006), p. 101; Pax, p. xxiv. Just as the ‘golden age’ of Rome is a story of assimilation, of peoples coming together under an all-encompassing flag, in Pax Holland has achieved a remarkable synthesis of ideas and themes, of astounding scholarship and beautiful accessibility, to make something that truly stands out from the crowd.
Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? 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. But authenticity could take many forms in Rome. When Vespasian’s second son Domitian succeeded to the throne after Titus’ premature death, having hitherto acted, arguably, like the archetypal spare, his approach was to style himself as censor. This was a time-honoured role in Rome that encompassed not only morals (though he did bury alive a Vestal Virgin convicted of adultery) but also enhancement of the physical city (‘a lunatic desire to build’, as one author described it), and increasing the silver content of the coinage. As well as being an impeccably traditional office, the censorship was an ideal vehicle for an emperor whose talent was micromanagement. Domitian was also an emperor, it is fair to say, who had little time for the polite fiction, maintained since the first emperor Augustus, that any institution other than the army (the Praetorian Guard in Rome and the legions scattered around the Empire) was necessary for establishing and maintaining imperial authority. 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.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? 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. 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?
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. 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. I understand those commonalities across time, which is part of why I’m skeptical of the widespread sexual “omnivorousness” that Holland describes, such as the purported rarity of sleeping only with one sex or the other (for a man of status) during this period of Roman antiquity. I’m not discounting the details he cites, but questioning the general conclusions he seems keen to draw.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. 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.
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.
Commitment is an apt title for this family epic; Mona Simpson’s chronicle of deeply depressed single mother Diane and the effects of her illness on her three children across the sweep of the 1970s US demands close attention and, sometimes, patience. But it’s worth it; Simpson’s quietly devastating writing eventually carves out distinctive and memorable multigenerational characters, each with their own compelling stories, motivations and locations. Ultimately, Commitment is a familiar tale of survival, love and friendship, but the precise detail of the relationships makes it stand apart. 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? 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. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Why didn’t ancient Judaism become the universal religion of the Roman world after it had been freed of its cultic centre?
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