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

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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. Throughout ancient history, imperial assassination tended to be an inside job. The emperor Galba, who tried to succeed Nero, was killed by imperial guards. Domitian, the last emperor in the next dynasty, tried to head off insubordination by killing a variety of suspicious or unenthusiastic Roman officials until the palace staff had enough and killed him too. Interesting tidbits but a lot of cheap present-day parallels like World Cup of Gang Rape or Glastonbury equated with Hadrian’s wall. Coupled with (get it?) the lewd, even quasi-pornographic emphasis, I’d say there’s a certain luridness or sensationalism in Tom Holland’s narrative approach. When the centuries-old pattern of limited conflict between Rome and Persia broke down, the results were catastrophic. Goldsworthy gives an excellent account of the war the Persian king Khusro II launched in the early 600s. The conflict lasted for almost 30 years and Khusro refused to negotiate even from positions of great strength.

Pax is a captivating narrative history of Rome at the height of its power. From the gilded capital to realms beyond the frontier, historian Tom Holland shows ancient Rome in all its glory: Nero’s downfall, the destruction of Jerusalem and Pompeii, the building of the Colosseum and Hadrian’s Wall, the conquests of Trajan. Vividly sketching the lives of Romans both ordinary and spectacular, from slaves to emperors, Holland shows that Roman peace was the fruit of unprecedented military violence. 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.

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. The definitive history of Rome’s golden age – antiquity’s ultimate superpower at the pinnacle of its greatness A stunning portrait of Rome’s glory days, this is the epic history of the Pax Romana. Request Desk/Exam Copy Before the destruction of the Temple and the consequences of that, there had been another event that carried the same effect. The followers of the Way, later called Christians, had been taken out of the synagogue (Acts.xix.9). There were also forcible expulsions (John. ix. 22). 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.

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. 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 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. 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. 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?

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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.Holland, who co-hosts the podcast The Rest Is History, is at his best when having fun with Rome’s bloody history’ The Times The Pax Romana has long been revered as a golden age. At its peak, the Roman Empire stretched from Scotland to Arabia, and contained perhaps a quarter of humanity. It was the wealthiest and most formidable state the world had yet seen. 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. 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? FS: You say in your book that “an immense reward was offered to anyone capable of implanting a uterus into the eunuch”. He’s literally trying to turn Sporus into a woman.