PAX ROMANA
By Adrian Goldsworthy
FICTION
True Soldier Gentlemen
Beat the Drums Slowly
Send Me Safely Back Again
All in Scarlet Uniform
Run Them Ashore
Whose Business Is to Die
NON–FICTION
The Roman Army at War, 100 BC–AD 200
Roman Warfare
The Fall of Carthage
Cannae: Hannibal’s Greatest Victory
The Complete Roman Army
The Men Who Won the Roman Empire
In the Name of Rome
Caesar: The Life of a Colossus
The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower
Antony and Cleopatra
Augustus: From Revolutionary to Emperor
Pax Romana: War, Peace and Conquest in the Roman World
PAX ROMANA
War, Peace and Conquest in the Roman World
ADRIAN GOLDSWORTHY
First published 2016 in the United States by
Yale University Press and in Great Britain by
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, an imprint of
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd.
Copyright © Adrian Goldsworthy 2016.
All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016941493
ISBN: 978-0-300-17882-1 (hardcover: alk. paper)
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
List of Maps
Preface – Living in Peace
Introduction – A Glory Greater than War
THE PAX ROMANA
PART ONE – REPUBLIC
I The Rise of Rome
ORIGINS
THE REPUBLIC
OVERSEAS
II War
MASSACRE
RICHES AND REPUTATION – THE DRIVE TO EMPIRE
FAITH AND RUTHLESSNESS
III Friends and Rivals
AMICI – THE FRIENDS OF THE ROMANS
‘ALL GAUL IS DIVIDED INTO THREE PARTS’ – CAESAR’S INTERVENTION
ALLIES AND ENEMIES
RESISTING ROME
IV Traders and Settlers
CIVIS ROMANUS SUM – ROMANS ABROAD
MARKETS AND EXCHANGE
ROMAN AND NATIVE
V ‘How much did you make?’ – Government
PROCONSULS
CILICIA
MAKING MONEY
VI Provincials and Kings
‘AT LEAST THEY THINK THEY HAVE SELF -GOVERNMENT’
DEALING WITH ROME
PEACE AND ITS PRICE
PART TWO – PRINCIPATE
VII Emperors
POWER WITHOUT LIMIT
PEACE AND WAR
LIMITS
VIII Rebellion
‘MUST EVERYONE ACCEPT SERVITUDE?’
THE QUEEN
TAXES AND ILL -TREATMENT
WINNING AND LOSING A PROVINCE
A STRONGER SENSE OF IDENTITY?
IX Resistance, Rioting and Robbery
‘PEACEFUL AND QUIET’
KINGS AND BAD NEIGHBOURS
MURDER, PLUNDER AND POLITICS
X Imperial Governors
‘FIRMNESS AND DILIGENCE’
BITHYNIA AND PONTUS – WASTE, CORRUPTION AND RIVALRIES
EVIL MEN
XI Life under Roman Rule
‘CIVILIZATION’ AND ‘ENSLAVEMENT’
SHEEP AND SHEPHERDS, ROMANS AND NATIVES
INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS
XII The Army and the Frontiers
‘A GREAT CIRCLE OF CAMPS’
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HILL
ATTACK AND DEFENCE
XIII Garrisons and Raids
‘CLANDESTINE CROSSINGS’
GARRISONS, FORTS AND WALLS
THE ANATOMY OF A RAID
FEAR, REPUTATION AND DOMINANCE
XIV Beyond the Pax Romana
OUTSIDE
TRADE AND TREATIES
CIVIL WAR AND PEACE
Conclusion – Peace and War
Chronology
Glossary
Abbreviations
Bibliography
Notes
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A book like this takes a long time to write and many others contribute to the process. As always I must express my heartfelt thanks to the family and friends who have read and commented on various drafts of the manuscript, especially Kevin Powell, Ian Hughes, Philip Matyszak, Guy de la Bédoyère and Averil Goldsworthy. Dorothy King has listened with patience and discussed many of the ideas expressed in this book. Particular thanks must go to my agent, Georgina Capel, for her enthusiasm and for creating the situation allowing me to take the time to write this book properly. Thanks must also go to my editors, Alan Samson in the UK and Steve Wasserman in the USA, and their teams for producing so handsome a volume.
LIST OF MAPS
1 The Roman Republic and its empire, c.60 BC
2 Caesar in Gaul
3 Cicero’s province of Cilicia
4 The Roman Empire in AD 60
5 The Roman Empire at the death of Septimius Severus, AD 211
6 The British tribes and the rebellion of Boudica, AD 60
7 Judaea in AD 66
8 Egypt and the Red Sea ports
9 Pliny’s province of Bithynia and Pontus
10 The Lower Rhine frontier
11 The Upper Rhine frontier
12 The Danubian frontier
13 Roman North Africa
14 The frontier in Northern Britain and Hadrian’s Wall
15 The frontier in the east and Parthia
PREFACE
LIVING IN PEACE
Pax Romana is one of those Latin expressions that journalists and cartoonists still expect their readers to understand without the need for translation, alongside tags such as mea culpa and Shakespeare’s ‘et tu Brute’. A cartoonist can depict a modern politician in toga, sandals and laurel wreath and invoke Julius Caesar or a generic Roman emperor and know that people will think of a leader betrayed by those close to him, or of one prey to pride and folly like Caligula or Nero. Few schools teach Latin or Greek, but TV documentaries about Rome are common, and dramas appear every so often, tending these days towards ever more lurid pictures of a world of treachery, sex and violence – blood and buttocks rather than the old sword and sandals. Such caricatures tell us little about the ancient past and a good deal about current tastes in entertainment, but it is striking that their makers are confident setting these stories in a Roman context because they feel that the audience will recognise that world.
The Romans continue to fascinate us even though more than fifteen centuries have passed since the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West. In language, law, ideas, place names and architecture they have had a profound inf
luence on Western culture, and much of this has passed on to regions wholly unknown to the Romans. Many leaders and states from Charlemagne onwards have done their best to invoke the spirit of Rome and the Caesars as justification for their own power. Rome often appears in debates in the USA about their country’s role in the world and its future, and is used by people of all political persuasions. The use of military force and diplomatic pressure to spread a Pax Americana across the wider world is held up as an aspiration by some and depicted as a sinister plot by others. Empires are not fashionable, and for many anything associated with empires and imperialism must be a bad thing. In this view peace, whether Roman or created by a modern power, is a veil to conceal conquest and domination. This is not a new idea. At the very end of the first century AD the Roman historian Tacitus has a Caledonian war leader tell his men that the Romans ‘create a desolation and call it peace’.1
The words come in a biography praising Tacitus’ father-in-law, Agricola, and precede a dramatic account of a battle in which this man defeats the Caledonian tribes. Both in this work and his others, it is hard to see the author as a devout critic of the Roman Empire, and the overwhelming tone of literature from the Roman period is one of celebration of power and success. Obviously this does not come as a surprise, since it is human nature to want to think well of ourselves. Like most imperial powers, the Romans felt that their domination was entirely right, divinely ordained and a good thing for the wider world. Emperors boasted that their rule brought peace to the provinces, benefiting the entire population.
Yet the Roman Empire was remarkably successful for a very long time, the Pax Romana holding sway over much of Western Europe, the Middle East and North Africa for centuries. This area was stable and apparently prosperous, with little or no trace of desolation. Roman Peace does appear to have been a reality, for rebellions and large-scale violence were extremely rare. Even critics of empires must concede this about Rome. By any standards the Roman Empire was unusual, and this – apart from its continuing fascination and appearance in current debates – makes it all the more important to understand what Roman Peace really meant. It matters if it was solely the product of bluntly wielded military power and oppression, or of subtler, more insidious methods of coercion. As important is some understanding of the cost of imperial rule to the subject population and how these felt about being part of a foreign empire. A significant proportion of the world’s inhabitants lived in the Roman Empire and that in itself is a good reason to wish to understand what this meant. It is well worth asking how complete and secure the Pax Romana actually was, but from the start we ought to think a little about just what peace means.
I was born in peacetime, the child of parents who had lived through the Second World War. My mother was a small child during the Blitz in Cardiff, and still remembers the air raid siren wailing, the fear of going into the dark and cold air raid shelter in their garden, the different sounds of bombs, land-mines and anti-aircraft guns, the patter of falling shrapnel, the stench after a raid and the houses reduced to rubble, sometimes with people buried underneath. She also speaks about she and her friends staging concerts and collecting pennies to ‘buy a Spitfire’, of uniforms everywhere and of being unable to cross the street because of the stream of trucks carrying GIs and supplies on their way to the docks to embark for Normandy. The memories are still vivid today and very immediate whenever she talks about those years. My father was an apprentice in the Merchant Navy, did the Atlantic run, and then was in the Mediterranean supporting the landings in Tunisia and Italy. His ship was in the Bay of Naples when Vesuvius erupted in 1944, and he remembered having to clean ash off the deck. Only occasionally would he speak of the constant threat of U-Boats and air attack, of ammunition ships exploding and the sea on fire from burning fuel, with men trying to swim to safety through it. He left the Merchant Navy and was soon old enough to be conscripted into the Army, and served in Palestine under the British Mandate, caught between Jewish and Arab militants and a target for both. His father had served through the First World War on the Western Front, at Gallipoli and in Egypt and Palestine. Neither were professionals. They had ‘done their bit’ like millions of their contemporaries and then happily returned to civilian life.
The seventieth anniversaries of VE and VJ Days were commemorated in 2015, while I was writing this book, alongside centenaries of events in the First World War, but it still seems natural to speak of 1939–1945 as THE War – a habit picked up from my parents and their contemporaries. My brother and I are among the last to be born for whom active memory of the Second World War was just one generation away. This was not uncommon at our school, where the parents were a little older than the national average, and there were a fair few boys whose fathers had been in the Forces, and at least one Bevan Boy sent to a coal mine. The War still seemed very immediate, and most boys of our age were more or less obsessed with it. There were new dramas being broadcast, and by this time the great flurry of war films produced in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s were old enough to appear regularly on television. We watched these avidly, read books and comics about it, assembled plastic model kits of fighters, bombers, tanks and warships, and brandished toy guns in imaginary battles where one side was usually the Germans or Japanese, doing our best to mimic the sounds of machine guns and explosions. Sometimes our games instead took us to the Wild West or Outer Space – both staples of television in the 1970s – but more than anything else we relived the Second World War. It was a good war against bad enemies, and ‘we’ won, led by familiar actors on screen, the heroes of our comics and our dads. To a young boy’s mind, it seemed a lot more exciting than school – and in our games no one was hurt, apart from the odd bruise or scratch from running through brambles.
The War was won in 1945, so that I was born and grew up in peacetime. This was the era of the Cold War, the threat of a Third World War there in the background, but not real to a child, and in my memory it was only in the 1980s that the media became obsessed with the prospect of impending nuclear destruction. Then the Cold War ended, suddenly, abruptly and with little or no warning – I have heard more than one person who worked in military intelligence for NATO admit that it caught them by surprise. Politicians spoke of the ‘Peace Dividend’, which meant slashing the size of the Armed Forces and spending the money on things they thought would win votes. As a student in the early 1990s I served in the Oxford University Officer Training Corps, and there were still classes on identifying Warsaw Pact vehicles, but no longer a sense that there was a likely enemy for a future major war. Another world war was hard to imagine, and by now I was certainly old enough to appreciate how fortunate I was to live at this time. Peace reigned, at least in the sense that there were no ongoing major wars involving Western states. Yet neither then, nor at any stage in my life, has peace meant the complete absence of armed conflict involving Britain, let alone in the wider world.
A few months after I was born, the Troubles flared up in Northern Ireland. For decades, television news showed film of riots and petrol bombs, and the aftermath of explosions and other attacks. It is probably a question of semantics and political beliefs as to when a terrorist campaign becomes a war, but there can be no doubt about the loss of life. Although predominantly focused in a comparatively small geographical area, at times it spread, with PIRA and other Republican paramilitary groups launching attacks on mainland Britain, and on a few occasions in Europe, their targets civilian as well as military. For much of my lifetime there were no rubbish bins on railway stations because it was thought too easy to conceal a bomb in them. In the OUOTC we were specifically banned from wearing uniform outside Yeomanry House if we were not on exercise or parade because of the perceived risk of becoming a terrorist target. It is only comparatively recently that this policy has been reversed in the Army as a whole.
Since 1945 only one year has passed without at least one member of Britain’s Armed Forces being killed on active service. Apart from the Korean War, there were all the many conf
licts accompanying the withdrawal from empire. In my lifetime there was the Falklands, the First Gulf War and – after the era of the ‘peace dividend’ – Sierra Leone, Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention air operations in the Balkans, Libya and elsewhere, or peace-keeping commitments where the peace was not always perfect. Even when the UK is not directly involved, it is rare for newspapers or broadcasters not to be reporting from some conflict zone somewhere in the world. Like famine or earthquakes, wars can too easily be dismissed as the sort of terrible thing that happens in distant lands, while coverage tends to be patchy, as the news cycle moves on to fresh stories.
A list of conflicts since 1945 would be as long as it would be depressing. Nothing has approached the scale of devastation inflicted by the world wars, but that is unlikely to have been any consolation to those caught up in these struggles, which have varied from open wars between states to protracted campaigns of violence involving small communities, militias and other irregulars. Yet for most Westerners, even the conflicts involving their own countries have been distant affairs, prosecuted by professionals, with no direct impact on day-to-day life. Britain has not faced the danger of invasion since the Second World War, the USA for even longer. No conflict since 1945 has posed a serious threat to the very existence of these countries, or threatened to cut off food supplies or other essentials. The Cold War might have escalated to this level, but did not in spite of periods of crisis.
Today the main danger to Western countries is posed by terrorism. This dominates the media at the moment, for I am writing this preface in November 2015, just days after the savage terrorist attacks in Paris which claimed more than a hundred innocent lives and have left others critically, perhaps fatally, injured. Ghastly as this was, an atrocity of this sort will not prevent Paris from functioning as a city, a centre of commerce and government and a home to over two million people. Life will go on, even if it is hard for those who lost loved ones, just as life went on in New York, Washington DC, London, Brussels, Madrid and Sydney after terrorist attacks on them. The numbers involved, the resources and weapons available to terrorists limit the amount of damage they can inflict. During the Second World War it took sustained aerial bombing causing death, injury and destruction on a far bigger scale seriously to disrupt a town or city.