Review : Pax

I was dismayed when reading the acknowledgements at the start of Pax by the reference to "one of the world's great cancer surgeons". Had my favourite non-fiction history author been struck down with cancer ? There's precious little about it online, but it seems that all was not as bad as it first appeared.

Tom Holland is my favourite largely for his incomparably magisterial prose. Edward Gibbon, you say ? Edward Gibbon can go suck a monkey. In book after book Holland consistently, apparently effortlessly, manages to weave narrative and analysis into a seamless chronological narrative. There are no (or the absolute minimum) of footnotes or explanations of sources as distractions, just one great continuous flow of uninterrupted, gripping narrative awash with blood and perverted sex and gripping speeches and all the great stuff about history.

It's not always the ideal way to do history, mind. And it almost certainly wouldn't work for all periods or for all authors. Some, like Francis Pryor and Marc Morris, do amazingly well with weaving the uncertainties into lively and engaging parts of the text, joining the reader in a journey of discovery and mystery, and I wouldn't want them to change a thing. But Holland in full flow is damned hard to beat.

Pax is the latest in a thus-far trilogy of the history of the Roman Empire. In Rubicon we went from the fall of the Republic to the rise of Empire, while in Dynasty he took us through the turbulent early years of the First Family of the Caesars. In Pax we follow the Empire to its apogee. In some ways this is the most difficult period for the narrative historian. It's easy enough to chart a story of change, but a period of stability is much more challenging. Holland opts to emphasise change where change occurs, such as the protracted series of civil wars and Trajan's spectacular but brief military successes. 

But the really interesting stuff, which to be honest I'd like a bit more of, is : what kept things stable while it lasted ? What was it about the Roman Empire that worked ?

It would be much too big a leap to paint Imperial Rome as any sort of socialist bloc. But despite its winner-take-all hyper-capitalism, with no concern for the poor save to prevent plague and rebellion (see Holland's magnificent Dominion) it did have streaks of modern leftism. Taxes were wealth taxes, not income-based : ancient societies didn't have the ability to monitor income well enough for this. These taxes worked, but they were understandably hugely unpopular, because taking even a little of what you've already got is quite a lot different to taking what you never received*. I add this even though Holland himself doesn't mention it; I think a lot of historians seem to take it for granted as widespread knowledge even though it really isn't.

* This is not relevant to modern wealth tax proposals, however, which are generally aimed squarely at the super rich. Perhaps the poll tax would be a fairer comparison in terms of its effects.

What Holland does mention is that in place of Universal Basic Income, there was Universal Basic Corn. Though even then, complaints were made that it would only make people lazy : "for what was a handout but a threat to Rome's moral fibre ?". And in the Emperor Galba's failure to restore the UBC after a period of economic turbulence, but lavishly spending on his own warehouses, it would be all too easy to detect some very modern hypocrisy. Perhaps most strikingly of all, Holland gives one quote from Seneca :

"No-one finds poverty – inconvenient though it may be – a heavy burden, unless he is minded to do so."

Being poor is a lifestyle choice ! Though to be fair, Seneca's stoicism, however daft and irredeemably flawed, doesn't actually intend this, but the author of the anonymous graffiti in Pompeii that wrote, "I hate the poor" is probably a better example of the general Roman attitude to the plebs. It's pretty hard to misinterpret that one.

(That's got me wondering now if Roman anti-poor attitudes had some role in fostering the bizarre ideas of certain stoics, but I digress. Still, here I think Holland is being unfair by not quoting the source, because the Stoic attitude is certainly not the same as the pantomime malevolence that is the modern Tory party.)

A final example of some very modern tensions : the Roman elite became concerned as the composition of the Senate diversified to include non-Romans, "it barely seemed to be Roman at all". They notoriously saw all non-Romans as barbarians, even the Greeks. And yet others, though by no means a majority, might instead see the possibility of the Romans being made rather than born as the very quality that was most distinctly Roman. The Romans, says Holland, "never claimed to have possessed a distinctive bloodline", with their founding myth depicting them as outlaws and fugitives, and their willingness to free their slaves seen as unique. 

This sort of cognitive dissonance feels again like a thoroughly contemporary attitude; one only has to look at the news for a few minutes to be sure of witnessing an ethnic-minority Prime Minister spouting the most deplorably racist claptrap. That the Romans might have paradoxical attitudes to racism should not be of any surprise. 

Of course while fundamental attitudes and the structures of society were important, the person of the Emperor himself mattered a great deal. Gibbon compares Nero and Augustus. Nero wanted to be an actor, to be known and admired for his acting skills. Augustus, and the other successful emperors who came after him, didn't. They were actors, but not for the sake of winning glory for their performances, but for the sake of maintaining the fiction of the Republic. By shunning naked autocracy, veiling it in a pleasant fiction in which senators could believe they still had real power, they kept the vital systems (especially the political systems) of the empire intact and functioning. By permitting them their illusions, reality was denied them. Exposing themselves as actors, as Nero did... that could not be tolerated. That would expose the whole lie for what it was.

But the Roman's own attitude to why their civilization worked seems to have been quite clear, and something altogether different : climate. 

Just as the cold weather of northern Europe bred men who were spirited but stupid, so did the enervating heat of Syria or Egypt breed men who were brilliant but soft. The happy medium, those who were simultaneously spirited and brilliant, were the people who occupied 'the middle-position geographically'. The Greeks, with their customary conceit, had identified this with their own cities. A comical error. History did not lie. The 'mid-position geographically' was patently, self-evidently Rome.

Whether the Romans saw this as literally affecting the bloodlines, actually changing racial features, or simply shaping individual characters (the Greeks refused hot baths on the dubious grounds it would make them soft), Holland doesn't say. Perhaps they viewed it as both.

One final interesting point underscores the sheer complexity of understanding why Rome worked. It's common to say that an external threat can be a powerful unifying force... and it can, but it isn't necessarily so. Holland notes that while the Roman invasions of the Middle East forced the Judeans and Samaritans to cease hostilities, it did absolutely nothing to alleviate their "mutual hatred". Which suited the Roman approach of divide and rule very well, yet, paradoxically, Rome was superb at making everyone Roman.

While the ancient Greeks have earned something of the reputation as being the brains of the Empire and the Romans usually just guilty of wholesale cultural appropriation, this isn't entirely deserved. Holland describes Pliny's indefatigable, imperial quest for ultimate knowledge :

The wonders of the world merited respect. This was the conviction to which Pliny had devoted a superhuman degree of effort. The true value of Rome's empire lay not in the opportunities it provided for profit, or for ransacking previously inaccessible reaches of the world, or for stimulating jaded palates, but in something altogether nobler : its success in pushing back, to a degree never achieved before, the frontiers of knowledge.... Knowledge was power. Such was the supreme achievement of the Roman people : to have fashioned a dominion that could reveal to humanity the fundamentals of the cosmos.

Holland is of course here, as always, trying to tell the story from the protagonist's viewpoint without actually endorsing it, lest anyone should take this too literally. And more amusingly, regarding Pliny's nephew :

An earnest and dutiful young man, he had once been told off by Pliny for walking rather than taking a litter : for by taking a litter he would have had the opportunity to read a book. 'All time is wasted which is not devoted to study.' Such was Pliny's maxim.

The Stoics would not approve of course, with Epictetus explicitly against excessive, impractical book-learning. But screw 'em, I like Pliny's approach more. If more people spent more time with their heads in books instead of doing "practical" things like cheering for sports teams or donating massive amounts of money to Taylor Swift for some reason, the world would be a happier place.

Anyway, I'm giving this one a solid 8/10. It's great stuff, rock-solid rhetoric, immensely and intensely readable. What I would have liked more of, however, is, well... Pax. The first half or so is dedicated to the turbulent wars, and while it's important to see how this eventually led to stability, I think a good deal more could be said about the institutions that made Rome work. There was plenty of politics in Rubicon and not enough of it here. 

Specifically, more of the big stuff is needed, more context-dependent generalisations : sure, Trajan overreached Rome's power with his continued expansion, but why was the cycle of, "conquer -> assimilate -> grow army -> conquer", fundamentally broken ? Trajan seemed to have just done too much all at once rather than trying anything really impossible; the flaw was in the method, not the concept. I'd like more insight in particular into Hadrian - what was he thinking with the wall ? What was the long-term plan ? And most vitally of all, what was the secret to preventing the endless rebellions that plagued other emperors ?

Perhaps all that will be in a future book; I for one would love the sequence to continue until Rome's bitter end. As it stands, a thoroughly good read.