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About the Author Tom Holland is an award-winning historian of the ancient world, a translator of Greek and Roman classical texts, and a documentary writer. He is the author of six other books, including Rubicon, Persian Fire, and Dominion. He contributes regularly to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. He co-presents the podcast The Rest Is History. He lives in London. 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? Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
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. 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.Thus, from the beginning the churches were an integral part of Roman civic society, not alien to it. They would have been indistinguishable from other clubs. In Paul’s epistles he finds it necessary to correct the mistaken impressions that some have that they have come to dining or debating clubs. Philo writes that the Alexandrian clubs, under the pretext of religion, were merely convivial meetings. Being private, all these clubs were held in suspicion, and subject to persecution, by the emperors until Alexander Severus, who considered them a conservative element.Some of these primitive churches may have been scholae. 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.
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? In this marvelous book, Tom Holland shows us the Roman empire at its height, in all its splendor and squalor, sophistication and superstition, majesty and cruelty.Ranging far and looking deep, he tells us about emperors and subjects, about a world that is at the same time both familiar and very alien.Highly recommended.” It’s significant that Paul’s definition of same-sex relationships as a unity on a par with male-female occurs in his epistle to the Romans. Just as it was more likely that the word ‘homosexuality’ would be coined in the German language and no other. 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.TH: The Romans didn’t care about that. In fact, if you were at the top end, they were all in favour of it. Roman society was founded on the principle that you defined yourself against the people who were below you socially. Right from the beginning, the Romans had an obsession with identifying where they stood in the social spectrum. They had a censor. A censor wasn’t someone who went around cancelling people or closing down newspapers; a censor was someone who, every few years, would go around, working out how much money each individual citizen had, and also his moral worth. And then kind of calibrating, and assigning them to a social class. 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. And of course, there is a very famous incident, 10 years after the Year of the Four Emperors, which is the explosion of Vesuvius. And this is definitely seen as another warning from the gods, because it coincides with a terrible plague in Rome, and it coincides with the incineration (for the second time in a decade) of the most significant temple in Rome — the great temple to Jupiter on the Capitol, the most sacred of the seven hills of Rome.
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.His contention is actually quite pernicious – the implication being that the Christian worldview was manufactured (he claims, at least, for the better of mankind) then it surely can be replaced by something else, even better. Like something that Yuval Noah Harari and his mates dreamed up with the help of some bot, for example. Dio goes on to say its purpose was to insult the memory of Domitian’s (deceased) elder brother Titus. Why didn’t ancient Judaism become the universal religion of the Roman world after it had been freed of its cultic centre? Eileen M Hunt: Feminism vs Big Brother - Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder; Julia by Sandra Newman You sound a bit like one of those Edwardian professors desperately trying to downplay, swerve around or completely ignore the ubiquity of pederasty in Ancient Greek culture, while still putting the same culture on a pedestal. The ‘ability to reason’ also seems to be compromised by those seemingly in denial about some stark cultural differences in sexual practice and gender roles!
While some were specifically religious, all had a religious element. Some clubs had a meeting hall, and almost all had a chapel or at least an altar to the presiding god. Gods not recognised by the Roman State were accommodated in them. In the Roman world a person could have two religions; one they professed and one they believed. Admitting women and slaves, some clubs were formed exclusively for slaves on large estates.A stunning portrait of Rome’s glory days, this is the epic history of the Pax Romana. Request Desk/Exam Copy TH: In the introduction, I quote a Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who argues that the Roman Empire in the second century, under Trajan and Hadrian, had the wealthiest economy prior to the emergence of modern capitalism in the Netherlands and England in the 17th century. I’m not remotely qualified to say whether or not this is true, but it is clearly the case that this is a spectacularly wealthy period. And people like Pliny absolutely do celebrate it. 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.
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