What ‘pax’ meant in Rome’s golden age of imperialism

The Roman emperor Domitian began life as a spare. At the end of the 1st century CE, while his brother Titus was the heir to their father Vespasian, the younger boy’s ‘sense of resentment and frustration had festered’, writes Tom Holland. ‘Rather than stay in Rome, where his lack of meaningful responsibility was inevitably felt as something raw’, Domitian moved away with a wife whom his family disliked, ‘doomed forever to be a supernumerary’, paranoid, attracting gossip, avoiding any company in which ‘innocent mention of baldness’ might be viewed as ‘mockery of his own receding hairline’.

In most judgments by posterity this Prince Harry of the early empire fulfilled all this lack of early promise. Big brother Titus became emperor only briefly. So the spare got the top job after all, but became mostly famous for catching flies to stab with his pen, enforcing castration and holding death-themed dinners for nervous senators. Within this provocative history of Rome’s ‘golden age’, a series of varyingly connected episodes between the deaths of Nero and Hadrian, Holland gives back to Domitian some of his bruised reputation.

Let the sensitive beware: this is a book that judges everything about Rome by the standards of the Romans themselves. The author is a master of immediacy – and not for him the fashion for deploring ancient virtues as modern vices. Providing peace, he argues, was the prime virtue for an emperor. But it was a particular kind of pax – the absence of wars in which Romans fought other Romans. Wars against other peoples were different. If the mass destruction or enslavement of Germans and Judaeans were necessary for Roman peace, so be it. For Holland, that is the key to understanding this time, which, as Edward Gibbon famously (and now notoriously) said, was part of ‘the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous’.