In The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton once argued that “the next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it.” With characteristic paradox, Chesterton’s point was that most if not all the critics of Christianity he encountered were themselves so profoundly shaped by the faith as to make up part of its broader imprint in the landscape. For several years now, this has been one of the central arguments of the British historian and classicist Tom Holland, whose latest book, Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age, was published last year. Pax is intended as the third volume of Holland’s trilogy of Roman histories, after Rubicon and Dynasty, but it can be read perfectly well on its own.
Holland is an increasingly prominent public intellectual and popular historian. The (perhaps unexpected) rise to superstardom of his podcast, The Rest Is History, with political historian Dominic Sandbrook, has now garnered him an American fanbase, and the two are about to embark on a second visit to the United States. For the uninitiated, The Rest is History has been going since 2020, following what has become my personal favorite formula for podcasts: two affable and well-informed hosts, with ever-deepening layers of banter and in-jokes. What began as one-off, entertaining explorations of isolated incidents (Tutankhamen! Cromwell!) or thematic joyrides through the centuries (Top Ten Eunuchs! Top Ten Mistresses!) has evolved, with its fans’ devoted enthusiasm, into something more subtle and unexpected: multilayered, well-researched, nuanced explorations of complex events, presented in a conversational narrative (see, for example, their more recent series on the rise of Hitler, the sinking of the Titanic, the battle of Little Big Horn, and the beginning of World War One). Whether Sandbrook and Holland think of themselves this way or not, they are both very good teachers and storytellers, with a pedagogical style that is perhaps out of fashion in the academy today but which, in my experience, is the only way that ever actually works.
It is perhaps impossible for Holland to be a credible public intellectual in a country as secular as the United Kingdom without being a professed agnostic, and yet he has always been more sympathetic than most academics to the social and moral legacy of Christianity. For years he has been quite happy to debate with humanists, arguing that the moral basis for this or that position owes its existence to the fundamentally Christian moral bedrock of Western society — the legacy of a still present if increasingly forgotten Christendom, like the ghost of an older cathedral surviving as the crypt of the present building.
This position has become somewhat more complex in recent months by Holland’s recent encounter with cancer. In his telling, his diagnosis resulted in one desperate “foxhole” plea to the Virgin in the church of St. Bartholomew the Great in London. The medieval church of St. Bart’s housed, in the 18th century, a printing press and was, in the words of its current rector, the only place known to be visited by both the Blessed Virgin Mary and Benjamin Franklin. Holland, to his bemused surprise, seems now to be in remission, although he maintains that if he was healed, God and Our Lady must have a sense of humor. We may be fairly confident on this point at least, regardless of his health status.
Be that as it may, Pax is dedicated, generously, to Holland’s physician, and the book, if anything, is Holland’s imaginative effort to get “outside” Christendom, and thereby, perhaps, to have a standpoint from which to appreciate its real legacy. The book begins in the last years of Nero’s reign and extends to the death of the emperor Hadrian in 138, one of the so-called “Five Good Emperors.” In other words, it takes us to the opening shot of Gladiator: Rome at its greatest territorial extent, its boundaries now fixed by imperial fiat, its peace the boast of its rulers. As epigraph Holland quotes the famous laconic verdict of Tacitus, ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant (“The Romans created a desert and called it peace”). And indeed, the book is an ironic exploration, not of the stability of the Roman peace, but of exactly how fragile and febrile the political situation remained in these decades.
The first half of Pax, the strongest part of the book, is a truly gripping narrative of Nero’s ever more ambitious efforts to part company with the “reality-based community,” the tumultuous events in the “year of the four emperors,” and the iron-fisted rise of Vespasian and the Flavian dynasty, culminating in the wholesale slaughter of the Roman city of Cremona and, more famously, in the savage destruction of Jerusalem in 70. The catastrophe of Pompeii and Herculaneum is followed by the death of Vespasian’s son Titus, and the succession of his younger brother, the obsessive, effective, but paranoid Domitian. Domitian’s assassination in 96 paved the way to a slightly jittery imperial procession of Galba, Trajan, and Hadrian, by coup.
Throughout, Holland notes the myriad ways Romanitas, or the idea of being Roman, constantly evolved. Geographically, the empire’s frontiers expanded and contracted with imperial conquests in Britain and Scotland and, briefly under Trajan, of Ctesiphon and Iraq. The militarizing and militarized office of emperor in this period would end, not only in marginalizing the civilian Senate from any real political power, but in making it necessary for the emperor to be a solder in command of legionary loyalties and politics, while the legions themselves relied on auxiliary units of non-Roman but Romanized peoples from the frontier zones. Vespasian’s political rise hinged on the cooperation of the (Judaean) prefect of Egypt, Alexander, and his control of its grain supply, as well as the Syrian political operator Mucianus, while his son Titus kept Yosef ben Mattityahu, or Josephus, lived in a villa as a sort of Flavian Virgil while he wrote The Judaean War.
That Vespasian’s seizure of power had come at the cost of razing a historic Italian city, Cremona, was camouflaged in the grand style by the staging of an imperial triumph over the capture of Jerusalem, which had actually been Roman for years and which in booty did little to justify the pageantry. In the ensuing years, Holland chronicles not only the destruction, but the rhetorical and political othering and “outsidering,” of the Judaeans, a group who had hitherto worked with both Greek and Roman rulers but, when handled with increasing political tactlessness, rose up in the Bar Kochba revolt during Hadrian’s reign. Holland declines to call them “Jews” as yet; likewise, “Christians” appear, in my edition, for the first time on page 352 of 360, and Holland quietly omits any mention of them, for example, in connection with Nero. This is a deliberate choice on Holland’s part: an argument that Jewish and Christian identities both were created by these events rather than acted as the sole cause of them, and both Jews and Christians were defining themselves in relation to the amorphous, shape-shifting colossus of Roman imperial power.
Like marble busts carved and recut again, the emperors crafted their political identities in imitation of and in opposition to one another: Galba aiming for a bygone republican severity, Otto role-playing Nero, Vespasian channeling Augustus amid the rubble of Nero’s Golden House, Trajan posing as the anti-Domitian even as he furthered his legacy, Hadrian reenacting Augustus again. Grandiose behavior and sexual proclivities of all kinds had a political as well as a psycho-sexual role to play in this hall of mirrors, which, often as not, tended to overwhelm the emperors.
What Holland describes in Pax is the political world before Christianity, not so much the world of Christ as the world of Paul and the gospel-writers engaging with the wider Mediterranean. The effect is to remind the reader that the Apocalypse, for example, is not a futuristic sci-fi dystopia but a meditation on the immediate political context. If that is strange to us, Holland argues, then the Roman Empire was, indeed, an irreducibly strange place to anyone looking at it from the present vantage point of Christendom. But whatever your political sympathies, it seems likely that most of us will be fated to hear, and perhaps to give, sermons on the relationship between church and empire in the next four months. Almost certainly, the language will be heated and highly colored, polarized and polarizing, and most, if I know my church, will advocate for a vision in which there can and should be no common ground between Rome and Jerusalem, church and empire. Inevitably, Constantine will come up as A Bad Thing.
In his efforts to describe the Roman world on its own terms, I believe that Holland’s Pax can potentially help us to nuance this debate somewhat: to understand not only the reasons for the ferocity of Christian polemic directed against Roman society by Paul and the gospel writers, but also to appreciate the sheer extent of the transformation of that society by Christians in compromised positions of power over the centuries, in ways which we all, Christian or no, continue to inherit today.
