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One point in reply: the communists were prior to the fascists in rejecting the core of pre-1914 morality. In the late 30s, Vespasian charmed Caligula with flattery and proved his merit during the invasion of Britain under Caligula’s successor, Claudius, in 43. His absence of senatorial ancestors made him appear to be a safe choice at a time when Nero was otherwise engaged in slaughtering members of established aristocratic families and seeking a commander for the army in Palestine. One long succession crisis later, Vespasian became emperor. Before this separation, Greek converts to the Way were made in the synagogue (Acts. xviii. 4). The Apostles also attempted to make converts in the Temple. After disputes over alms (Acts. vi. 1) and, especially, circumcision (Acts. xv. 1), the separation, when it comes, is mutually acrimonious (Revelation. ii. 9). 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. 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.
Holland prefaces his narrative with two quotations. The first is from the Roman senator and author Pliny the Elder: ‘Truly, it is as though the Romans and the boundless majesty of their peace have been bestowed by the gods upon humanity to serve them as a second sun.’ The second comes from the greatest of Roman historians, Tacitus, writing in around AD 98: ‘Where they make a desert they call it peace.’ Tacitus, however, put this bitter judgement in the mouth of a Caledonian chief living at the very edge of the Roman Empire; Tacitus had his own reasons for expressing ambivalence. Within the empire, things were different. There, cities were granted a degree of self-government, or even, as Holland says, ‘the illusion of autonomy’, though Rome made sure that ‘the illusion never shaded too far into reality’. The Pax Romana depended on maintaining this delicate balance. Despite all the instability at the top, part of what kept the imperial Roman system going for so long was the consistency of opportunity in the middle. Epaphroditus, one of the people whom Domitian killed in his paranoid murder campaign, first rose to an influential position under Nero; like many of his colleagues, he had once been enslaved. Vespasian’s rise, before he became the Roman ruler who would usher in the age of imperial peace, is another tale of social mobility. “Raised in a small Sabine hamlet some 50 miles from Rome,” Holland writes, he was a newcomer to the traditional senatorial aristocracy. 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 these questions, serious answers to which might give your statement a smidgen of authority, go by the board. And haven’t modern empires similarly celebrated power? Haven’t modern empires sought to crush their enemies? You think the Ottomans were social workers? The Japanese were nannies? Do you? Or, by some miracle of independent mindedness, are you saying that the Christian empires of Russia, Britain, France or even Germany, were fully informed by this “transformed” morality?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. 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? For the Romans, this is not a binary. There’s a description in Suetonius’s imperial biography of Claudius: “He only ever slept with women.” And this is seen as an interesting foible in the way that you might say of someone, he only ever slept with blondes. I mean, it’s kind of interesting, but it doesn’t define him sexually. Similarly, he says of Galba, an upright embodiment of ancient republican values: “He only ever slept with males.” And again, this is seen as an eccentricity, but it doesn’t absolutely define him. What does define a Roman in the opinion of Roman moralists is basically whether you are — and I apologise for the language I’m now going to use — using your penis as a kind of sword, to dominate, penetrate and subdue. And the people who were there to receive your terrifying, thrusting, Roman penis were, of course, women and slaves: anyone who is not a citizen, essentially. So the binary is between Roman citizens, who are all by definition men, and everybody else. In two new books, Tom Holland and Adrian Goldsworthy, both accomplished novelists as well as historians, offer lucid accounts of the challenges inherent to managing this complex imperial enterprise. Holland’s “Pax” concerns itself with a period of relative imperial tranquillity between the suicide of the Roman emperor Nero in 68 A.D. and the death of the emperor Hadrian in 138. Goldsworthy explores the relations between Rome and its most powerful neighbor, the successive Persian regimes ruling what is now Iran and Iraq, from their first encounters in the first century B.C. to the decline of both states 700 years later.
Trajan could nevertheless claim to have upheld the Pax Romana, thanks to his earlier work in Dacia (present-day Romania), which inspired many of the scenes on the Column at the centre of the Forum that both bear his name today. It was his fortune to go down in history as one of the “good” emperors. As Holland explains, however, Trajan’s reputation might have been very different had it not been for his “bad” predecessor-but-one, Domitian, who ruled from 81 to 96 and laid much of the groundwork. According to the later Historia Augusta (an entertaining yet notoriously unreliable source), Trajan ungratefully wrote Domitian off as “a terrible emperor, but one who had excellent friends”. One realises while reading Holland’s book just how much an emperor’s record was determined by the circumstances he inherited. At the same time, it can be appreciated that the declaration that circumcision was nothing could be felt as an existential threat just as much as the German national socialists felt that the very self-same preaching of Paul was an existential peril to their concept of Germanness. 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. 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.
I don’t think sex and gender is a particular obsession of Holland – he was asked some questions around the issue by Freddie Sayers, which I understand given the current ‘debate’ if you can call it. I can’t see any confusion on Tom Holland’s part, but I am a bit confused about your views!
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