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

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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? 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. 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.

Yes, but women were women, not becaue of their subservience, but because of their biology. Holland is trying to suggest that anyone who was subservient ( boys, servants, women) were all socially gendered as ‘women’. That ‘woman’ effectively is a synonym for subservience, and is not a stable category of its own ( as in an adult human female). 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). Then again, as Karl Popper points out, communist theory undermines the very possibility of ethics, with all absolutes of knowledge or perception, as a mere projection of “class interest”. To such refined philosophers, morals are not even conscious hypocrisy; they are delusional. Two ancient sources, Suetonius and Cassius Dio both claim that the Emperor Domitian (81-96 AD) brought in the prohibition.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. A stunning portrait of Rome’s glory days, this is the epic history of the Pax Romana. Request Desk/Exam Copy The Roman slave system was brutally exploitative, but, unlike the North American slave system, it was not based on racist assumptions and, as Holland shows, it did offer those enslaved in the households of the rich and famous a path to prominence. All the Ancient empires celebrated power, crushing, killing and humiliating the kings’s enemies, for example Assyria, and they shouted these sentiments loud enough on many inscriptions. In Rome, death by crucifixion was a shameful death reserved for what would have been thought of as the dregs of society. Then, in the reign leading up to Nero, women become incredibly powerful, because if a man can have the blood of Augustus in his veins, then so do women, and that gives them a massive, divinely sanctioned authority. By and large, the men who are writing the histories are terrified by this. Think of the role that Livia has in I, Claudius, reconstituted in The Sopranos as the most terrifying mother perhaps in any drama. Messalina’s very name is a byword for sexual depravity. There’s Agrippina, the mother of Nero. These woman are portrayed in the histories as kind of terrifying predatory viragos. And that is a kind of tribute to the power that they have, in the wake of the extinction of the family of Augustus. (That power is obviously cut off and women again, certainly in the sources, start to play a more subordinate role.) I mean, you do not offend a powerful woman.

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.’ Halfway up the inside of a church tower in central Italy, upside-down, is an epitaph of a ‘T. Flavius Clymenus’. A freedman of the imperial household, a former slave, his middle name indicates who had owned and freed him: one of the ‘Flavian Emperors’, Vespasian, Titus or Domitian, who ruled Rome at the end of the first century. Not far from Antrodoco, where the church of Santa Maria Extra Moenia stands, stood a villa at Cutiliae where Vespasian was in the habit of spending the summer months, and indeed both Vespasian and his elder son Titus died there. This is no doubt where T. Flavius Clymenus had been employed.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.