A Review of Tom Holland's "Dominion"

Dominion is the third book by Tom Holland that I have read in the past two years, and my reviews of the first two can be found here and here. In all three, we encounter fascinating details about antiquity, presented in Holland’s signature engaging and lively prose. The present work stands out in that it traces and documents one of classical antiquity’s greatest legacies, namely, the emergence of Christianity, which represents, for reasons which we will see below, the most revolutionary outcome in all of human history. It would become the world’s largest religion and spread across virtually all parts of the globe. It overturned the classical world’s deepest assumptions about humanity, even though in some ways it is very much a product of that period; this paradox lies at the heart of Christianity’s impact on world history, making this a subject of enduring fascination and intellectual contestation. In this review of Tom Holland’s Dominion, I will present some of the more salient features of how Christianity revolutionized language, morality, law, and politics in Europe and beyond, and then offer a few minor critiques of what is overall a highly enjoyable and engaging text.

Antiquity

The ancient world continues to evoke awe and fascination among many contemporaries, myself included, and one of Tom Holland’s gifts is to bring it to life; through his account of the main characters and stories, he adds flesh and therefore humanity to what is often visually represented by the ruins of Rome’s great monuments. It is relatively easy to see how different Romans and other ancients were from us moderns in terms of technology or economic development, but much less so in terms of beliefs, norms, and how these translated into legal and political frameworks. For instance, homosexuality was tolerated, but not in terms of how contemporaries might understand it as a monogamous union based on love. Rather, married men could do as they pleased, sexually speaking, with their slaves or servants, regardless of gender. Here, stigmatization occurred only if the man was the recipient of penetration, highlighting how power hierarchies were deeply entangled with sex. The concepts of sexual orientation or homosexuality did not exist; this in itself might be difficult for the contemporary reader to imagine, given how much they are ingrained and taken for granted.

Readers of Dominion will discover that it was Saint Paul who created an entirely new category of sexual relations to include same-sex partners. As is well known, he had a decisive role in formulating and propagating the new belief system across Roman territories and beyond, and in so doing, he included many of his own interpretations which reflected his upbringing and training as a Pharisee, the scholarly class of Judeans who had very different sexual norms from the Romans. In his travels across the empire, he witnessed and was repulsed by Roman sexual practices, and in his efforts to interpret and analyse them, developed the vocabulary to refer to women and men who preferred partners of the same sex. His purpose, of course, was to define proper sexual conduct as heterosexual and monogamous. Paul’s successors in the Church went further and defined traditional marriage as a sacrament, and therefore unbreakable except in the rarest of circumstances. This new conception included the necessity of the consent, and therefore love, of both parties. Together, these features—sacred, monogamous, consent-dependent, life-long—represented a revolution in human sexuality that lasted the better part of 1900 years. That it developed a taken-for-granted status and was rarely questioned only highlights how thoroughly ingrained this arguably unnatural (in the neutral sense) institutional form became. 

The notion that there is a sphere of life we call “religion” separate from other spheres also did not exist in ancient Rome, or in other civilizations. In Latin, the word “religio” referred to what man owed to the gods, but religious practices were thoroughly integrated in daily life, society, and politics. One of the important offices of the Roman state, for example, was Pontifex, and, among other things, was considered a bridge between the gods and the state. Functions included interpreting the will of the gods for decisions on war and peace or other important political matters. Individual households had gods, and ancestor worship was the norm. Social life was characterized by regular rites and festivals, rich in symbolism that connected the material and the supernatural worlds. Belief in gods was either taken for granted or less important than participation in the rituals inherited from ancestors. With the emergence of Christianity, belief became central, and in so doing interiorized religion in ways that would have been alien to previous generations. As ever, it was Paul who helped to define and shape what these beliefs were. They included to love and care for others as we would want for ourselves, also known as the golden rule, which he said is the new law, or covenant between man and God, which replaces the old. 

This was innovative in many ways, one of which is how it radically redesigned group membership, which previously was based on birth or legal citizenship. Now, it depended on belief, which in principle was open to all regardless of origin or socioeconomic status. With the formulation of the Nicene Creed in 325 AD, which would be propagated to every church and parish in the Roman Empire from Britain to Syria, and which is still expressed every Sunday in Mass, the new definition of group membership based on belief became widespread. In Dominion, we are helpfully reminded how this occurred only 100 years after Roman Emperor Caracalla granted citizenship to all inhabitants of the empire, and the proximity between these two events greatly helps to understand Christianity’s transformative impact. Rome perhaps was one of the first examples of globalization in the sense that such vast space under a single administration greatly reduced barriers to the movement of goods, people, and ideas. Caracalla’s granting of citizenship was perhaps the apotheosis of this trend. Meanwhile, Christianity’s redefinition of group membership as based on belief was equally globalist, and the two developments coincided in ways that greatly enlarged the horizons of humans’ conception of themselves in relation to their fellows. 

These beliefs included that the last will be the first, and here we have perhaps one of the most radical changes of all. During antiquity, Romans believed the gods favoured the strong—kings, conquerors, masters. They often raped mortal women and sired children who, because of their divine origins, were gifted in the arts of war and conquest. Even ancient Judeans believed that God would send them a messiah in the form of a warrior who would help to defeat the mighty Romans. The idea that God, instead, would take the form of a humble shepherd or carpenter, and would die by execution, for ancient both Romans and Jews, was grotesque and utterly incomprehensible. That God would take human form and preach that the last shall be first and the first shall be last (Matthew 20:16), and who commanded “whatever you do for the least….you do for me” (Matthew 25:40), for Jesus's contemporaries, was obscene. And yet these radical ideas were held with utmost conviction by Jesus’s followers, martyrs who experienced excruciating death rather than recant their beliefs.

Dominion traces the far-reaching implications of this radically new moral framework, the most important of which was the idea of human equality. If all were created in God’s image, and if the lowest had value, certain practices became conceptually untenable. One was slavery, and it was Gregory in the 3rd century who became history’s first recorded abolitionist. Of course, there were anti-slavery revolts well before Jesus, led by Spartacus in 75 BC, but they were fighting for the rights of their masters rather than to abolish the practice outright. Gregory’s efforts did not succeed, in part because the bible itself contained passages that justified slavery, and in part because it was an integral part of the economic structure. By the Middle Ages, slavery had largely disappeared from Europe, mainly because of the economic transition to feudalism, but in the Americas it remained widespread, and there, unlike in Europe, it was race-based, and consequently far more brutal. It was the Quakers in the late 18th century who, after witnessing the inhuman treatment of slaves, successfully led the efforts to abolish it. Importantly, they were not motivated by ideas of enlightenment or liberalism, but rather by their deeply held Christian faith, specifically that blacks were as much children of God as whites and therefore deserved dignified treatment.  

An idea that derives from the Christian assumption of “dignity” that most now take for granted is human rights, which has become an integral and largely unquestioned part of humanity’s moral grammar and vocabulary. Many readers are vaguely aware that, in the scope of human history, it is relatively recent, but fewer know that the origins are the church. It was Medieval canon lawyers who developed the idea of “rights”, applied in a rudimentary fashion to cases of marriage, property, inheritance, legitimate authority, etc, but several centuries would pass before the fully formed concept of universal human rights emerged, and the context was, again, the Americas, where colonialism led to the brutal treatment of locals. A Spanish priest, Bartolome de las Casas, who witnessed this, denounced it to the crown on the grounds, in his own words, that natives enjoyed “derechos humanos,” which derived from their status of being children of the same God. His detractors cited Aristotle in their rebuttal that some were destined to be slaves, but Las Casas's arguments convinced the crown, which ordered a halt to unjust treatment of the natives (given the great distances, this was not always enforceable). 

The idea of human rights would change history in other ways.  Both the American and French revolutions were led by actors who believed, falsely, that human rights were somehow inscribed in nature. In the American case, Christian assumptions—humans are endowed by their Creator—appeared—but in France, the Jacobins' virulently anti-Christian positions excluded this; consequently, they attempted to enact a moral framework, human equality, unmoored from its religious foundations. Some revolutionaries saw through the charade and were more intellectually honest, saying that if Christianity was to be abolished, its baggage would also have to be cast aside, and for this he was jailed, showing the limits of the Jacobins' commitment to the ideals they professed. Later, it was Nietzsche who most clearly saw through the blinders of modern ideologies and political movements that claimed to reject God even while promoting ideas, like human dignity for the oppressed or the poor, which derived from Christianity. Because Nietzsche clearly saw the Christian character of modern ideologies, which of course he opposed, he promoted a return to classical antiquity’s norms, which glorified conquest and cruelty. 

When Marx was writing his magnum opus in London, he perhaps did not look to them as an example, and in fact, as is well known, he condemned religion as the opium of the masses. And yet it would not be too much of a stretch to say that the first socialists were the apostles, even though this concept did not exist at the time: they sold all their possessions and held all goods in common, distributing them based on need. Jesus himself and his successors condemned greed and selfishness, and emphasised the need to help the poor, and this contributed to the radical break from classical antiquity’s moral framework of glorifying the strong. Marx was very much a product of this civilization, and as Dominion points out, the morally charged language used by Marx when referring to capitalists certainly did not derive from a strictly materialist conception of the cosmos. Thus, the attempt to separate communism from its religious underpinnings is an artifact of Marx’s status as an unbelieving German Jew rather than the substance of the ideology. 

Some of Marx’s successors saw this very clearly. Hugo Chavez, for example, was a populist, socialist, and devout Catholic. He was not in the least shy about how his faith informed his political beliefs, and during his rallies would ostentatiously display the cross. He only exaggerated a little when he said “Jesus was the first socialist”, as in fact it was his successors, the Apostles, who could more convincingly be described with that label. In this sense, he was more intellectually honest than many of secular Marxists who consciously or unconsciously attempt to unmoor communism from its religious roots. Another implication is that attempts to use Christian morality to justify capitalism, as is the case among many Protestants especially in the US, lack historical foundation. Certainly, the examples of Jesus and the apostles cannot be used to defend private property, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a small minority, or to object to the redistribution of wealth.

One of history’s puzzles is why Nazism is condemned far more than communism even though both are responsible for the deaths of tens of millions. Dominion provides a potential answer: communism is in many ways consistent with the Christian assumptions which saturate Western civilization, while Nazism, especially its idea of blood, soil, and racial hierarchy, is an explicit repudiation of it. Nazism, moreover, in some ways more closely resembles the pre-Christian past. For example, the Nazi practice of eugenics—sterilizing the weak or sick to create a stronger group—has its counterpart in the practice of Ancient Romans and Spartans of discarding babies deemed to be “defective”. This practice was abolished with the Christianization of the empire. Nazism, therefore, evokes greater disgust partly because it unconsciously violates norms which derive from the Christian heritage. 

Dominion explores the radical changes brought forth by the Protestant Revolution. In some ways, it went further in realizing the morality of human equality: by condemning the church hierarchy and making the bible the sole source of religious faith, it gave more agency to ordinary people in determining their own affairs. This decentralization and democratization of interpretation perhaps contributed to the tendency of protestants to develop more radical proposals for reform, including the anti-slavery efforts of the Quakers, and later of William Wilberforce in England. On the other hand, and here is where Dominion falls short somewhat, is that Protestantism also developed a tendency to adopt ideas that had no basis in the example of Jesus, his successors, and therefore in Christian morality. The most outrageous example is eugenics; in Western countries, it was Protestant countries which adopted it, and Catholic ones which condemned it and were a major obstacle to its implementation. In Canada, for example, the Protestant English-speaking provinces adopted eugenics as official policy, while French-speaking Quebec did not. Eugenics almost became policy in largely English-speaking Ontario, until the Bishop threatened politicians, telling them he would instruct Catholics to not vote for their party, and given their large numbers in the province, the threat was taken seriously and the proposal abandoned. In a similar vein, as Emmanuel Todd observed, the regions in Germany from which the Nazis enjoyed the greatest amount of support, and from which their leadership came, were mostly Protestant. This tendency of many Protestants to support morally questionable or outrageous endeavours was seen most recently in President Trump’s immoral war against Iran, which was strongly condemned by American Catholics, at both leadership and lay levels, while many American Protestants attempted to justify it by citing scripture.  

The question of the deeply paradoxical character of the Protestant Revolution, and how it could lead to both anti-slavery on one hand, and to racial supremacism and an utter disregard for human life on the other, is complex, and addressing it perhaps would have added unnecessary content to Dominion. But it is a question I have sometimes pondered, and would have liked to see Tom Holland’s impressive historical knowledge and analytical acumen deployed to provide a potential answer. On the other hand, Dominion provides clues that further our understanding in this direction. One of the characteristics of the Catholic Church, and especially its institutionalization of intellectual authority with high barriers to entry, was that the precepts were formed by scholars who applied the techniques of reason inherited from antiquity. This tendency of the Church to adopt some of the best parts of classical antiquity’s legacy can be seen most visibly in the consciously classical architecture of churches and cathedrals. Intellectually, it can be seen most obviously in the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who merged Christian teaching with Plato and Aristotle and who operated on the principle of universal reason. 

For Protestants, including Martin Luther, this represented what they called “paganism”, that is, importing non-Christian elements into the faith, and therefore needed to be extirpated. Coming back to the question posed above, this perhaps helps us understand some core differences between Catholicism and Protestantism. By preserving antiquity’s intellectual and artistic authority even while it discarded and transformed its moral framework, the Catholic Church perhaps preserved the rigours of philosophical thinking, especially rules on logical consistency, and consequently had higher standards and therefore a much higher threshold to cross for proposals and ideas to be accepted. By attempting to purify Christianity by throwing away the legacy of antiquity, and by rejecting intellectual authority, Protestantism perhaps became more prone to fanaticism, which was a double-edged sword. On one hand, it produced activists like the Quakers committed to ending injustice whatever the cost, but on the other, it produced those who used their faith to justify monstrous human practices, whether eugenics or the death and destruction of innocent life wrought by unnecessary wars in the Middle East. 

A review of Tom Holland's "Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic"

I recently had the pleasure of reading Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic, by Tom Holland, which maps one of the most impactful periods of Western history, namely, the end of the Roman Republic and its replacement with the non-republican regime of Emperor Augustus. It was in this period that some of history’s most fascinating characters emerged in the human pageant, such as Julius Caesar, whose image continues to reverberate to the present day, as a symbol of excess or heroism; many common English expressions, such as “the die has been cast” or “crossing the Rubicon,” come directly from his exploits over 2000 years ago. The text under discussion, therefore, extensively discusses Caesar, and in so doing gives readers scintillating details of this larger-than-life figure who evokes fascination, admiration, but also, in some instances, horror. Another important contribution of Rubicon that this blogpost will elaborate on is its account of Roman institutions such as citizenship and slavery. Contemporary readers know, of course, that they were two defining characteristics of ancient Rome, but often they remain theoretical abstractions given the gap between contemporary and ancient sensibilities and experiences. After reading the text, I had a somewhat better sense of these institutions as embodied, lived, and concrete realities, and consequently felt I could better understand what it was like to be alive during that time. 

 

Institutions: Citizenship and Slavery

 

Citizenship is a very basic concept that, in contemporary terms, denotes legal membership to an internationally recognized sovereign state. But beyond this simple definition, there are many other layers of meaning that reflect distinct historical experiences and civilizations. The etymology is Greek, and as is well known, the practice and conceptualization emerged from ancient Greek city-states. But, of course, different polities had different rules of membership. Romans did not have a blood-based conception of citizenship, and boundaries were more permeable. For example, in Greece, citizenship was transmitted via both parents, while in Rome, conquered people and slaves could attain that desired status. In contemporary terms, we might define these differences as civic and ethnic, or jus jus soli and sanguinis.  Citizenship regimes also greatly differ in terms of the conferred rights and responsibilities. Often it meant the right to vote for representatives or for laws, or the obligation to serve in the army. In Rome, only some citizens could run for office, for any number of reasons (gender, lineage, social class, etc). 

 

At its peak, there were 1 million inhabitants of Rome, and tens of millions across the empire, and this would have required a rather large and complex legal and administrative infrastructure to identify and categorize the different classes of citizens. How, one wonders, was this possible in an era that did not have paper or databases? How could officials determine whether a random person they encountered was a citizen? 

 

Rubicon helps to provide answers to these questions. In the text, we learn for example, about the Villa Publica, where every 5 years Roman men were obligated to present themselves and declare all their possessions, including slaves, and the names and details of their wives and children. Modern notions of privacy did not exist; the “public” in republic was taken quite literally, and hence the state had the right to document and practice surveillance on the most intimate details of citizens’ lives. This information, accumulated over centuries, was written on papyrus using ink pens, none of which survive because of their fragility. Most likely, they burned in one of the fires that periodically inflamed the city, or they just decayed and were thrown out. At the time, however, these piles of documents were an essential part of the republic’s nervous system and were used to make major policy decisions on war, taxation, or public investment. After reading Rubicon, I could develop an image of this complex in Villa Publica, with many rooms where bureaucrats would be sitting down documenting information, and perhaps large storage rooms with shelves or cabinets which contained the piles of documents, perhaps divided into different sections: year, location of citizens (i.e., Rome, provinces, etc). When citizenship was extended beyond the confines of Italy, it would have been impossible for the vast majority to travel to Rome for this purpose, and so most likely, the information was gathered by governors of the provinces, who then had it transported back to the capital for record-keeping.

 

Another core institution of Rome was slavery. This institution, of course, was not unique to Rome, but like citizenship, it had different features in different civilizations and epochs. The image that most contemporary readers have derives from the race-based slavery of the modern period, when Africans were transported to the Americas. In ancient China, slavery was a legally recognized and practiced social institution, but unlike modern slavery, it was not predicated on irreducible racial differences, as many slaves came from the dominant Han ethnic group, while others were from surrounding regions and hence Asian, that is, not significantly different. Ancient Greece also had slaves, and here too, many were either Greek in origin or from polities not too far away, and consequently, ethnically similar. Rome displays the same pattern of non-race-based slavery, in part because they did not have modern notions of race in their imaginary or vocabulary, even though they observed and described physical differences between, for example, Germans, Romans, and Africans. But there were some peculiarities in the institution that were distinctly Roman. One was the relative ease and frequency with which slaves could become freemen and citizens, as their masters could purchase their freedom, or they could gain it via rewards for excellent service, or their master’s will. Foreigners who travelled to Rome were often taken aback by this relative ease with which slaves could become citizens. This more fluid and permeable categorization meant that social mobility was much higher in Rome than elsewhere, and many prominent Romans actually had slave ancestry.

 

Another feature was the ethnic diversity of slaves, which reflected the vastness of the empire; Greeks, British, Gauls, Syrians, Germans, and other defeated peoples often entered slave markets. In Rubicon, the reader discovers the ethnic stereotypes about different slaves; the Gauls were the best herders, the British were best at manual labour, and the Greeks did the intellectual work. Readers of Rubicon will be surprised to learn that some slaves of wealthy Romans were actually medical doctors. It was Greek slaves who had the skills to perform this task, and the same was true for other intellectual work, such as editing or accounting. Readers will also be surprised to discover that some of the poorest Roman citizens had slaves, even though the wealthy possessed them in larger numbers. There is no evidence that this state of affairs was ever questioned; there were slave revolts, like the famous revolt of Spartacus and 130 thousand slaves in 73 BC for their abominable treatment, but they were demanding the rights of their masters, not the end of slavery as an institution. For various reasons too complex to address in this blogpost, it was only in 18th-century England that there emerged a movement to end the practice, which gradually led to its universal prohibition.

 

Civil Wars

 

The period covered in Rubicon is mainly the second and first centuries BC, when the empire was vast in terms of territorial and wealth accumulation, which led to class conflicts over the distribution of the spoils. These would eventually generate civil conflicts, which would culminate in the end of the republic, but the process would take over a century and a half to materialize. 

 

Throughout Rome’s history, beneath the surface of republican institutions, class conflicts were always simmering and threatening to explode, but a lid was kept on them because the elite was willing to gradually expand the rights of the plebs. And it is perhaps no coincidence that Rome’s greatest expansions occurred as the plebs’ rights increased, since their enfranchisement led to the democratization of the demand for glory, a core feature of Roman identity. This demand for glory could be satisfied in the Colosseum’s gladiatorial fights, in the Senate or courts, and through military conquest, which perhaps also allowed some of the pressures from the class conflicts to be externalized to other pursuits. But by the middle of the second century BC, it seemed as if these conflicts and the underlying inequalities that generated them had become incorrigibly acute, as evidenced by the economic transformation; whereas previously Roman citizens owned and tended their own farms, as inequality rose, the wealthy purchased large tracts of land and purchased large numbers of slaves to work on them. Plebs and other lower-class citizens were displaced, and many became homeless. They could voice their grievances via the plebian assemblies, which represented their interests, and populists emerged to satisfy their demands for fairness.

 

The Gracchus brothers represent the first wave of this populist backlash against Rome’s corrupt elite, which reached the highest echelons of the state and set in motion the train of events that would lead to the clashes that ended the Republic. Gaius Gracchus’s demands were mainly for the Senate to redistribute land to the plebs; this would have involved confiscating land from wealthy land owners, many of whom were either Senators themselves or had client-patron relations with them, and so the Senate’s veto was assured. Gaius persisted and even was willing to engage in extra- or anti-constitutional measures to enact his agenda. For this, he was killed by a mob of senators and their supporters, but this did not put an end to the underlying class conflict. His brother, Tiberius, was an even more radical populist reformer, and not only demanded the redistribution of land, but also measures to end corruption, and the provision of grain and maize to those in need. He, too, was unceremoniously taken out by those acting on behalf of the interests of the Senate (and, therefore, the beneficiaries of existing arrangements). 

 

The Senate was mistaken if it believed that eliminating the Gracchus brothers would restore the pre-populist status quo; the underlying class conflict would subsequently manifest in the civil wars between the Marius and Sulla factions. Sulla would ultimately prevail and would neutralize the plebeian assembly by removing their veto power.

 

Julius Caesar would turn out to be the most glamorous and consequential populist leader to enter the scene, and his qualities as a scholar, soldier, politician, lover, and adventurer have dazzled generations of historians and thinkers ever since. For these reasons, the pages of Rubicon, including the title, devote much attention to his exploits and legacy. He was born into a noble family, the Julio-Claudian dynasty, who believed they were descended from the Trojan hero Aeneus, and from Venus, the god of love. From an early age, he held a number of important political offices, including the “aedile”, which, to my knowledge, has no modern equivalent and was responsible for the management of the games and public spaces. He also held the prestigious and powerful office of pontifex maximus, or chief priest, who was the intermediary between the people and the gods. Caesar was also governor of Spain, a periodically rebellious province which he successfully subdued. The conquest of Gaul, or modern-day France, was one of Caesar’s most documented adventures in part because of how bloody they were, in part because Gaul was Rome’s ancient foe and its absorption into the Roman empire would not only permanently eliminate the threat, it would also create the civilization of France. The Gauls’ resistance, led by the famous Vercingetorix, was fierce. Caesar himself participated in the battles, and his courage, fighting ability, strategizing, plus his willingness to share in the hardships of his men led to soldiers’ unwavering love and loyalty to their leader. 

 

At the time, executive power over Rome's affairs was being shared with Pompey, and disputes arose between the Senate and Caesar over the legality of the Gallic wars. A message was sent to Caesar ordering him to disband his army and return to Rome, a decision with which he strongly disagreed, and this was when the moment of truth arrived. Disobedience would mean a resumption of the civil conflict that had destabilized Rome during the clashes between the Gracchus brothers and the Senate, and between Marius and Sulla. When the decision was made, Caesar uttered the phrase—the die has been cast—which would reverberate through the ages, and the moment he crossed the Rubicon, he not only would permanently change history, but he also gave posterity a new vocabulary to describe momentous decisions from which there was no possibility of turning back.

 

Pompey was Caesar’s existential foe in this battle, and on the surface, their disputes were over the exercise of political power. But as Rubicon helpfully reminds readers, there was also the underlying class conflict mentioned above; while the Senate and its wealthy patrons supported Pompey, the plebeian and lower-class faction supported Caesar. There were both economic and cultural reasons for this. Caesar’s policies entailed substantial redistribution of resources towards the lower class. And in a classic populist fashion, he was also very charismatic, spoke with a lower-class accent, and had a very frugal lifestyle despite all the comforts and riches that his position afforded him.

 

When he entered Rome with his soldiers—an illegal and unconstitutional act—he discovered that many of his enemies, including Pompey, had fled. And so the fighting between the factions would occur far from the capital. Pompey was ultimately captured and beheaded; now, Caesar had no serious rivals, and as is well known, he abused his power. When the Senate voted to make Caesar dictator for life, his fate was sealed, and on the fateful Ides of March, he was killed by a group, right beside a statue of Pompey, who had wanted to restore the Republic. The plebs who provided the backbone of Caesar’s support were outraged and rioted, destroying the homes of the attackers and several government buildings.

 

Caesar’s chosen successor was his nephew Octavius, who shared power with Mark Antony and Lepidus. To restore order, the three held executive power without reference to the Senate. This martial law, they believed, would be temporary, and constitutional rule would return after stability was restored. As it turns out, Mark Antony and Octavius had a falling out when the former went to Egypt, began a love affair with Cleopatra, who not only seduced him physically, but he also developed an affinity for Eastern ideas of universal and divine monarchy. The disputes between Octavius and Mark Antony could not be resolved peacefully, and the latter was ultimately defeated in the battle of Actium. 

 

Now, Octavius became the unrivalled emperor and was given the name, Augustus, the Holy One, through which he is known by posterity. For many historians, this was the definitive end of the republic and the beginning of the imperial period. But a little probing reveals that this reflects an attempt to neatly divide historical periods rather than an actual reflection of a messy reality. For one, Rome was an empire well before Augustus assumed power. Meanwhile, republican institutions arguably stopped operating effectively during the clash between the Gracchus and the senate 150 years prior. The meaning of “republic” is a polity where citizens are equal and are represented irrespective of class or other categories, and yet as inequality increased, the Senate became more and more corrupt, while the plebian assemblies could no longer effectively represent the interests of the lower class majority; under these conditions, it would be stretch to call this “republic” or “democracy” even if they continued to be enshrined in formal constitutional rules.

 

The picture is further muddied by the fact that the available evidence suggests Augustus was very popular and supported by the majority of plebs. The reason is that he ended the civil wars, and by restoring peace, established the conditions for a new golden age. Moreover, much of this wealth was distributed to the plebs in the form of pensions, or land, or free food. Thus, a strong case can be made that he enjoyed popular legitimacy because of the outcomes—peace and prosperity, without which liberty is not possible—of his successful governance. In the contemporary political science literature, this has a technical term—output legitimacy—and is extensively documented as a viable alternative to input legitimacy, namely, the consent which derives from elections. A related question is whether, in the absence of elections, there was any process to hold Augustus accountable in the event of failure. A short answer is yes, because Roman citizens could and did participate in riots or violent protests, while Roman emperors could and would be killed for their failures. From these reflections, I conclude that Augustus does not fall neatly into any familiar categories, such as dictator or autocrat; he was the emperor, resembled a monarch, but evidently supported by the majority, and this popular mandate depended on his keeping the end of the bargain, namely, governing in a way that ensured the people’s desire for peace, prosperity, and liberty was satisfied. 

A Review of Tom Holland's "Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age"

This blogpost is the first in a series on the works of Tom Holland, a popular writer on ancient Roman history. He is a professional historian, but one of his many talents is to make the study of Roman history compelling and engaging for non-specialists via prose written in an accessible style. In his works, he does not merely compile the facts, dates, and significance of the events; rather, he weaves them together to form a narrative that helps the reader experience what it was like to live during the period. On its own, this is a noteworthy accomplishment, but his works have other benefits for readers, like me, who have an enduring fascination with ancient Rome. One is to learn in great detail about the personal lives of second-century AD emperors, such as Trajan and Hadrian, who left an enduring legacy in the history of the empire. Another is to obtain a bird’s eye view of the empire, which during this period stretched from Britain to Arabia, and because of a single administrative system covering such a vast and diverse territory, had created an unprecedented level of exchange of goods, services, people, and ideas. As such, it would only be a little bit of a stretch to characterize this period as the first wave of globalization (at the time, goods from Asia reached Rome; only the Americas were not connected to the Eurasian landmass). 

 

In this blogpost, I will present Tom Holland’s Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age with an emphasis on several themes, including the deepening and intertwined relationship with Greece, which would eventually determine the cultural composition of the empire, and the successful conquest and pacification of key regions on the opposite ends of the empire, Judea and Britain, which would delineate the empire’s boundaries and which contributed to a proto form of globalization destined to dramatically alter the course of Western history. Lastly, we will explore some of the great emperors who contributed to these events, such as Titus, Vespasian, Trajan, and Hadrian. 

 

Unruly peoples in the periphery

 

Greece was conquered in 146 BC, well before the period covered in the text under discussion, and by the first and second centuries AD had become a shadow of its former self. The city’s glory was during the golden age of the 4^th and 5^th centuries BC, during which, as is generally known, it produced proto forms of democracy, rationalism, and philosophy. This golden age was snuffed out by Athens and Sparta’s—and their respective allies’—mutual destruction during the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC. Despite the war’s official ending, quarrels continued between various Greek city-states, and it was the Roman conquest, we learn in Pax, which finally put an end to them and established a semblance of stability and peace. Moreover, it integrated the Greek world into the Roman empire, and as is well known Greek language, culture, religion, literature, and architecture had an enduring influence. During the second century BC, for example, many Roman elites were educated in Athens and became “hellenized”; this distanced them from their local compatriots, who were more conservative in the sense of being attached to Roman traditions. At the same time, in echoes of the relationship today between America and its European satellites, while Romans admired the beauty and culture of Greece, Greeks viewed their Roman overlords as philistines. 

            

During the period under discussion in Pax, Greece continued to be frequently visited by elite Romans for education and tourism. Many Greeks also lived in Rome, often as slaves, although not doing menial tasks or hard labour. Rather, they worked for many nobles as personal doctors, secretaries, editors, and other fields that required intellectual effort. They had an enduring reputation for being educated, clever, and witty, but also effeminate and hedonistic. It was partly for this reason that many Romans warned against their influence, believing that it threatened to undermine the manly and martial values which made their empire redoubtable. 

Thus, Romans were ambivalent in their views of Greeks, but for some, they continued to merit respect and admiration. One of the emperors discussed in Pax, Hadrian, had a deep fondness for Greece, and one reason was that Antonius, a beautiful young Greek boy of 19 or 20, was his lover and offered Hadrian, says Holland, “a distinctly Greek kind of love, which blurred the erotic with the poetic”. In his travels to various Greek cities accompanied—strangely to contemporary sensibilities—by both his wife and his young male lover—Hadrian committed to re-establishing their glory, via massive investment in public works and refurbishment of crumbling buildings. His vision included the establishment of a pan-Hellenic union which would unite Greek cities under a single administration and Roman tutelage. The Roman Senate gave its approval, highlighting the special place that Greece had in the Roman Empire. So special, in fact, that when the city of Rome was sacked, and the Western part eventually collapsed, the empire became divided into Latin and Greek parts, and it was the latter which would survive, in the form of the Byzantine empire, until 1452. 

Britain was conquered and pacified much later than Greece. In 43 AD, Vespasian successfully defeated locals in the Battle of Medway, and the Southern part of Britain became a Roman province. At the time, the island was divided into many different tribes, all, believed the Romans, in various states of barbarism as they did not have the refinements of Roman or Greek life, including literature, art, or architecture. One particular British tribe, the Caledonians, we learn in Pax, was among the most barbarous, as they practiced human sacrifice, and they had not yet been subdued. Agricola, in the major battle of Goaupius, finally defeated and subjugated them. And as with other Roman provinces, Britain gradually became Romanized and adopted all the advanced accoutrements of Roman civilization. The entire Island was not yet conquered, however, and Hadrian, in his travels to Britain, participated in further campaigns against locals, which were often costly and inconclusive. After these experiences, he decided that it would not be worthwhile to conquer the northernmost parts of Britain, and ordered the building of the famous Hadrian’s wall—which still is visible—to demarcate the northernmost borders of the Roman empire. This line, which separated Romanized regions and peoples from others, would eventually lead to two distinct nations, English and Scottish. 

A large part of Pax is devoted to recounting the gory details of the conquest and destruction of Jews’ homeland, Jerusalem, in AD 71. It was Pompey the Great who initially conquered the capital 100 years prior, and subsequently, relations had been cordial, in part because Judean leaders had accepted Roman rule and paid their taxes. In some cases, they even integrated Roman civilization into their capital city. Herod the Great, who famously rebuilt the temple after its destruction by the Babylonians, had also built temples to honour Augustus, plus Roman-style theatres and monuments to impress visitors from the capital. Because of these cordial relations, it was relatively cheap to govern them, and Romans only had a small contingent to ensure order and authority.

Relations deteriorated in 66 AD, and the famous revolt against Roman rule commenced the same year. Vespasian made the order to send 3 legions, a total of 60 thousand men, and Titus arrived at the Jerusalem gates in AD 70. They preferred that the Judeans surrender, as he knew that there were internal divisions and that some accepted Roman authority. But the rebel faction evidently had the upper hand, and Titus made the decision to siege the city and starve it into submission. As supplies dwindled, food had to be rationed to fighters, and many Judeans starved to death. In some of the macabre scenes in the book, their bodies, with bulging bellies typical of starvation, were thrown over the wall towards the Romans. Some rebels in desperation took the risk of sneaking out to obtain supplies of food, but they were caught by the Romans and crucified in front of Jerusalem’s walls to send a message to those remaining inside that there would be no mercy unless they surrendered. After three months, the final assault was ordered, and the gates and walls of the Holy City were penetrated; Judeans fled into their holiest place, the temple, believing that their god would save them, but it was not to be. The Romans mercilessly slaughtered them and rased their sacred temple to the ground.

The significance of this can hardly be understated. Now, the Judeans’ holy land was a Roman province, which they would give the name that remains to this day, Palestina. It set a precedent and an example to other peoples around the empire, namely, that rebellion will lead to utter destruction. The wealth of Jerusalem was taken and paraded through the streets of Rome, and this was memorialized in the famous arch of Titus, which tourists can still visit and see up close, and in coins with the inscription “Judea Conquered.”Jews were now dispersed around the world, and many fled to Rome, where they lived among, and easily blended in with, ordinary Romans, made possible because they were Mediterranean peoples who resembled Italians and Greeks (unlike, say, the lighter-skinned and haired Germans and Britons, or the darker-skinned Ethiopians). Many became slaves, others citizens, and over time, some would assimilate entirely among Roman peoples and lose all vestiges of their ancestors’ faith. 

Hadrian, after his travels to Greece mentioned above, travelled to Jerusalem. Six decades had passed since the revolt and the city’s destruction, and the temple still lay in ruins. Some local Jews remained in the city and dreamed of rebuilding the temple. Hadrian had considered restoring Jerusalem just as he had done in Greece, but his vision clashed with the locals. Rather than rebuilding Judeans’ former monuments, he wanted to Romanize the city even more, and to add insult to injury, built a temple to honour Jupiter, the greatest of Roman gods. According to Holland, he believed the Judeans did not deserve his benevolence, as they were inveterately rebellious. 

Lastly, readers of Pax will learn some fascinating details about a civilization the Romans attempted, but failed, to conquer, namely the Persians. Both Romans and Greeks looked down on them as slavish and effeminate; approaching their king, they’d kneel like slaves, while they wore eyeliner and ringlets in their hair. Unlike the Britons and the Judeans, Persians were comparable to Rome in size and military strength, and many Romans dreamed of the glory of Alexander in their campaigns to conquer Parthia, which ultimately ended in failure. In 36 BC, Mark Anthony’s attempt ended in utter failure, and 30 thousand men were lost. Augustus recognized Rome’s limits and signed a peace treaty with them, but one of his successors, Trajan, took up the mantle for the glory of Rome, and initially scored some decisive victories, capturing the symbolically important Babylonia, the city where Alexander died. Next on the list was Mesopotopia, but the gods had other plans; some Jews who were scattered after the destruction of their temple went to live in Persian lands, and they joined the fight against the Roman invaders. Shortly after this failure, Trajan died from the exhaustion of these military campaigns. He was replaced by Hadrian, who concluded, correctly, that the empire was overstretched and ordered the withdrawal from Persian territories. 

At this point, the borders of the Roman empire reached their peak, and it was Hadrian who played a major role in establishing them from the Northernmost to the Southernmost reaches. This period is also associated with the golden age, in part because of the increase in trade which the empire’s connectivity across vast distances had produced. Shared languages among elites (Latin or Greek), a single currency that could be used for payments everywhere (denari), and a single system of law and transportation vastly expanded commercial opportunities, and many profited enormously. By 100 AD, the city of Rome’s population was 1 million, an unprecedented size in the ancient world. Most lived in precarious 4 or 5-story apartment blocks, while the wealthy lived in villas. The Bay of Naples became an ancient version of Dubai, a place where the wealthy purchased properties, lived in luxury, and practised debauchery. Here, we learn in Pax, money became the measure of everything, as the nouveau riche consumed luxuries from across the empire and beyond, including silks from China. These same elites were often educated in Greece, had Greek slaves, and were mesmerized by exotic ideas and philosophies produced by Greek intellectuals. Some Greek practices adopted by these Romans, such as cooking exotic recipes with ingredients from afar—a major departure from the Romans' traditionally manly and simple diet of locally grown food—were probably not that significant. But others, such as becoming more intellectual and hedonistic and less warrior-like, would probably have greater repercussions, especially for the nobility, as their sons were less and less willing, as their ancestors had done, to sacrifice themselves for the glory of Rome.

One Eastern influence, but this one from Jerusalem, Christianity, was destined, however, to forever change the fabric of the empire and history. It was Rome’s connectivity that facilitated the diffusion of all ideas, including those of Jesus, and consequently, many quickly converted. Rome was a multireligious empire, and Roman authorities did not interfere in locals’ religious practices. But in Pax, we learn about how many 1st-century Romans viewed this Jewish heresy with deep suspicion. For example, Tacitus was appointed by Trajan to govern Asia, and believed that the East’s influence posed a threat to Rome’s moral fabric. In a letter to the emperor, he said this sect, which called itself “Christian”, was particularly egregious, anti-social, and anti-Roman authority. Pliny, also a governor and an intellectual, noticed that this belief was spreading very fast and threatened Rome’s order. He accused them of, among other things, “depravity” and “stubbornness”.  He tried to nip it in the bud by prosecuting adherents. They were arrested, and commanded by Pliny to worship Caesar—by then believed to be a god—and Jupiter. Christians refused and were executed in cold blood, but this did not produce the desired results, as the faith spread quickly, first in the Eastern provinces, then eventually in Rome. The rest, as we know, is history, as the entire empire would eventually convert to this faith, which would utterly transform Roman civilization and set the foundation for what came next, namely, Europe.