The emperor Trajan, who ruled from 98 to 117 and took Rome’s territory to its greatest recorded extent, certainly felt the tension between maintaining control and satisfying the innate Roman desire for conquest, as became evident in his invasion of Parthia in his final years. He had hoped to follow in the footsteps of Alexander the Great by subduing Mesopotamia and crossing into India, but realised he had overreached. The eruption of a rebellion in Mesopotamia prevented him from fully transforming the territory into a Roman province; he died shortly afterwards. Attempts to impose peace did not always bring contentment. Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.’ 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. 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. 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?

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? Holland is trying too hard to superimpose his understanding of current issues around sex and gender ( and I say ” his understanding” of them which is itself open to critique) onto ancient Rome. 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.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.

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. 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. 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.

Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’ 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? 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.