Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age ΓÇö Tom Holland
Little, Brown / Basic Books, 2023
There is a sentence in Tacitus that has haunted every serious account of the Roman Empire written since: *they make a desert and call it peace*. Tom Holland puts it near the centre of his third volume on Rome, and the whole book can be read as an extended argument with it ΓÇö not a refutation, exactly, but a long, uneasy circling. The result is the most morally complicated of Holland’s Roman books, and probably the best written.
The territory
*Pax* completes a trilogy begun two decades ago with *Rubicon* and continued in *Dynasty*. Where those covered the death of the Republic and the poisonous brilliance of the Julio-Claudians, this one opens in the wreckage of AD 69 ΓÇö the year four men wore the purple and Rome burned its own capitol ΓÇö and carries through to the death of Hadrian some seventy years later. In between: the Flavian dynasty, the destruction of Jerusalem, Vesuvius, the Colosseum, Domitian’s paranoid endgame, Trajan pushing the frontier into Dacia and Mesopotamia, and Hadrian pulling much of it back again while building a wall across northern Britain.
This is conventionally the empire’s high-water mark, the stretch Gibbon called the happiest period in human history. Holland’s subtitle is doing quiet work. *Golden Age* is not offered straight.
What Holland does well
Very well indeed, in fact. Holland came to history from Gothic fiction, and the training shows in his command of pace and image. The opening sections on the civil war of 69 move with genuine narrative drive ΓÇö Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian rising and falling in sequence, each collapse feeding the next. The Vesuvius chapter is superb, and the account of the Jewish revolt and the sack of the Temple is handled with more gravity and less relish than a lesser popular historian would manage.
He is also unusually good at the texture of empire: what Roman peace actually felt like from Alexandria, from the Rhine forts, from a provincial town whose elite had just discovered it could buy its way into the Senate. A recurring strength of the book is its interest in the periphery ΓÇö Spaniards and North Africans and Greeks entering the imperial system, an emperor from Italica, a wall in Northumberland. Readers who know Holland mainly from *The Rest Is History*, the podcast he co-hosts with Dominic Sandbrook, will recognise the register: erudite, digressive, alert to the odd detail, willing to be funny without becoming flippant.
The book’s real argument is the one embedded in that Tacitean phrase. Roman peace was real ΓÇö trade, law, cities, an unprecedented stretch of the Mediterranean world not at war with itself ΓÇö and it rested on violence so routine that the sources barely bother to flag it. Holland refuses to resolve this into either celebration or denunciation. He simply keeps both in view, chapter after chapter, and lets the reader sit with the discomfort. It is a more honest position than the triumphalism the period usually attracts.
Where it is weaker
The trouble with the second century is that the sources thin out badly. Tacitus runs out. Suetonius is gossip, and Cassius Dio survives in fragments and summaries. Holland is candid about this, but candour does not fill the hole, and the later stretches of the book ΓÇö particularly the years between Trajan’s death and Hadrian’s ΓÇö move at a different speed from the headlong opening. Some of the gaps get papered over with speculation about motive that is plausible rather than evidenced.
There is also a structural question. This is emperor-centred history, organised around reigns and the men who held them. That is a defensible choice for a narrative aimed at general readers, but it means the economic and social machinery of the empire ΓÇö how the grain actually moved, how slavery was organised, what the vast majority of people were doing ΓÇö enters mostly as backdrop. Readers who want that will need Mary Beard’s *SPQR* or Greg Woolf alongside it.
And the prose occasionally overheats. Holland’s instinct for the vivid sentence is mostly an asset, but the accumulation of blood, portent and fire can tip into something close to a register the material does not need. A reader coming to the Flavians for the first time may find it thrilling; one who has read widely in the period may find it a little insistent.
Verdict
*Pax* is popular history of a high order ΓÇö not a scholarly intervention, and not pretending to be one, but a genuinely intelligent piece of narrative that takes its central moral problem seriously rather than gesturing at it. It works as a standalone; there is no need to have read *Rubicon* or *Dynasty* first, though the trilogy read in sequence makes an unusually satisfying arc from Republic to imperial maturity.
Recommended for readers who want the second century as story rather than as system, and who are willing to have their assumptions about the *Pax Romana* gently unsettled along the way. Best paired, eventually, with something drier.
Rating: 4 / 5
*A note on sourcing: the background material supplied for this review covered Holland’s biography but contained no article on* Pax *itself, so the discussion of the book’s contents and structure draws on general knowledge of the text. Readers should treat specific details ΓÇö publication particulars, chapter organisation ΓÇö as worth confirming, and the piece can be tightened if a fuller source on the book becomes available.*