REVIEW BY MARC DESANTIS
Over several centuries, Rome met and bested every other organised state of the Mediterranean basin. By overcoming all rivals, Rome extinguished the ability of other states to make war, which was now its monopoly. It was an empire the likes of which had never been seen before. ‘The [Roman] empire was the wealthiest, the most formidable, the most terrifying state that had ever existed,’ writes Tom Holland in Pax. It was ‘a state that repeatedly… made a show of its invincibility, so that even its enemies came to believe it could never be defeated’.
This time of Roman paramountcy came to be known as the Pax Romana, the ‘Roman peace’. From roughly 31 BC, following the Battle of Actium – where Octavian defeated Mark Antony, and soon thereafter became Rome’s first emperor – until the late 2nd century AD, the lands under Roman control experienced decade after decade of unprecedented peace and the economic prosperity that accompanied it.
However, the Pax Romana did not come without a major caveat. ‘The Roman peace was maintained at the point of a sword,’ notes Holland. This central paradox – a time of general peace underpinned by the constant threat of violence, and much actual bloodshed – is one of the primary themes of this book, which will be of interest to readers for what it conveys concerning the relationship between overwhelming military power and the benefits that it brought to the Roman world for the two centuries of the Pax Romana.
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