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? 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. 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? 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).

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? There are Romans who are extremely anxious about this, the most influential of whom is Tacitus, the great historian. Tacitus writes the biography of his father-in-law, Agricola, the governor of Britain. He describes how Agricola fostered the art of civilisation on the island: getting the natives to wear togas, to enjoy fine dining, to have baths. He says that the natives mistook these things as the marks of civilisation, when they were actually marks of their servitude. He is not writing this as a lecture in post-colonial studies. He’s not saying, “Oh, it’s terrible that we’ve conquered the Britons”. What he’s saying is that Britons are being seduced into the moral decrepitude that has already paralysed the Romans.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. 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. 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. 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.

Nonetheless, Edward Gibbon described this period in Rome’s history as a “golden age” of peace. In Pax, the third in a trilogy of books that began with Rubicon in 2003, Holland sets out to explore precisely how that peace was brought about and maintained after the death of Nero in AD 68 – the point at which Dynasty (2015), Rubicon’s successor, concluded. Over the next 70 years, and 9 emperors, the Pax Romana would struggle to sustain itself after a period of civil war, with fire, plague, famine and military exhaustion threatening the empire’s very existence. What a tissue of slanted generalisations –“all ancient empires celebrated power”, for example – a statement so broad that it resists all enquiry. Which ones? How? When? Under what circumstances? Indeed, he is in the grip of a new gnosis: not the religious sort, but that of the historicist, who believes nothing exists until it is theoretically defined in writing; and that therefore (as an example), Christianity “invented compassion”. In the same way, idiotic wokesters pretend that because some Europeans expressed the universal human weakness called racial prejudice in print, they must have brought it into being.And – by the way – the Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic branches of that Christianity would have have distinctly different approaches. Protestant Germany murdered the Herero. Where is your “axial transformation” now? 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? 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? 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. To prevent the fracturing of the community in the churches as had happened in the synagogues, the converts could not be defined as previously. There could not be Greek and Jew. The Apostle Paul insisted that circumcision was ‘nothing’. It didn’t define a person. Therefore, why insist on it for a new convert.

The narrative features many of the most celebrated episodes in Roman history: the destruction of Jerusalem and Pompeii; the building of the Colosseum and Hadrian’s Wall; the conquests of Trajan and the spread of Christianity.Once removed from the synagogue, the followers of the Way had to hold meetings elsewhere. A model for the required organisation was at hand in the free associations that honeycombed the Roman world. While the social purposes of these clubs were extensively varied, all had the same organisation. Why didn’t ancient Judaism become the universal religion of the Roman world after it had been freed of its cultic centre? The Christian people have no metropolis. This is what seems so odd to the Romans in the early years of Christianity. They are a kind of universal people — that ultimately makes Christianity so suited to an empire that is universal in scope: you can have churches, anywhere, and they’re all consecrated to the same God. So it doesn’t matter if it’s in Egypt or in East Anglia. And that enables a sense of being Roman to endure for as long as it does. So I think that actually Gibbon gets it the wrong way around. With Pax Romana, you get this extreme world, extreme development, a concentration of wealth, inequality increasing. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

FS: What’s going on in your head when you are researching these characters? Does it make you think differently about our own morality today? 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: 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.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. The nub of Holland’s contention appears it me that Christianity somehow “reimagined” morality, imposing something new on human nature. Having listened to him, and despite having being swayed in his direction by his very readable books (which have influenced my thinking greatly), I have to say I now disagree. I think that Christianity articulated or revealed to people something that is innate to their very humanity – that abusing, raping and murdering fellow humans is just wrong and abhorrent. But it did not *invent* a whole new morality. Whoever you are, whenever you lived, something in you would be disgusted by the witnessing the exercise of raw power in watching someone be ravaged and brutally murdered – Judeo-Christianity or no Judeo-Christianity. However, in calculating the Pauline effect, it must be added that the Roman poets had written extensively about sin and the impossibility of overcoming it long before. The Roman earth had been tilled to receive ‘my Gospel’, as Paul described it. 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. 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.