The ancient world experienced times of war, but also times of prosperity settled in peace. The reigns of Trajan and Hadrian were the most celebrated in the time of the Roman Empire. The British historian Tom Holland now explains what that time of happiness was like in Pax (Ático de los Libros), a work that traces the history of the Roman Empire from Nero’s suicide to the end of Hadrian’s mandate.
Nero, the last emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, “ruled – explains the author – as the heir of Augustus, who kept Rome at peace for decades and after he died was raised to heaven, he became a god His dynasty had five emperors related to Julius Caesar”.
Nero “was jealous of his rivals and was ready to eliminate them. In the end, there was no one left in the family who could succeed him. When he committed suicide he left a great problem for Rome: there was no one who could take his throne. Holland points out that he did not have an heir “because the great love of his life, his wife, Popea Sabina, the most elegant woman in Rome, the most beautiful, had died while pregnant. The emperor was devastated by the loss”, he married another woman, “aristocratic, sophisticated and classy… but he continued to miss Poppaea. So, he looked around for someone who looked like him. He sent agents all over the empire and finally found what he was looking for. But that person was not a woman or a girl, it was a boy. He castrated him, dressed him and made him up to look even more like the lost wife and made him the new empress”.
After Nero, the requirement to be emperor was “the ability to exercise a monopoly of violence, to command the lethal killing force that was the Roman professional army. Any warlord with a sufficient number of legions at his back could claim the government”.
Pax begins with a year of war, AD 69, which ended with Vespasian as emperor, inaugurating a new dynasty, the Flavian. He was a master of propaganda who was succeeded by his sons, first Titus and then Domitian. Titus was unlucky: during his reign, the temple of Jupiter burned again and “then the most famous natural disaster in history took place: the lava of Vesuvius buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. The Romans believed that the wrath of the gods had been unleashed.”
Upon his death, he was succeeded by his brother Domitian, murdered in 96. “That same day Nerva was hailed emperor, and he appointed a successor: Trajà, from Baetica”, who would lead “the happiest era of the Roman Empire, the one I would have liked to live there” because “it gave the Romans the best of the new and the old. It offered the people in the capital itself bread and circuses at an unprecedented level. He built a large new port that ensured the city never went hungry. He erected the largest bath complex the world has ever seen. He completed the reconstruction of the center of Rome in marble and gold”. And he also conquered a large expanse of territory beyond the Danube, rich in gold and silver.
Pax ends with the reign of Hadrian, who achieved that “such a vast expanse of territory in a pre-industrial world remained united, that the entire Mediterranean for the first and only time in its history was governed by a unitary power and with a kind of single market. It generated unprecedented wealth, not only for the elite, but for the population”.
