Pax
Tom Holland’s third book on the history of Rome picks up with the end of Nero’s reign (65 CE). This is the start of four chapters labeled “War”. Now, there’s various problems, certainly including Nero himself, but there’s no war. This of course does not last long, with the Empire dissolving into political infighting, Nero commits suicide, his earlier efforts at finding a suitable heir gone well before him, all before the close of the first chapter.
The next eighteen months take two plus chapters, or perhaps 150 pages. This takes us through the infamous Year of the Four Emperors, but Holland too busy immersing us in the world as the Romans saw it to call it that. It’s a small problem if you’re wanting some modern guideposts to fit with what else you know, but he’s not here for concessions to modern periodization. While this is indeed a general audience history, the main point is to introduce you the Roman view of the world. If that introduction is still shadowy and incomplete, that is merely because of the size of the gap he is bridging, instead of any lack of effort or ability on his part.
Part two, “Peace”, starts with tales of Hercules visiting Italy. There he had defeated a race of giants and held a triumphal procession—pompe—and founded two cities. From here we start spending a fair amount of time examining contemporary (to Vespasian) local politics, and the character of the entire Bay of Naples as the resort and tourist center for the rich and famous in Rome.
Holland doesn’t need to say a word for the modern reader to realize that we are on a countdown to a detonation that will destroy Hercules’ two cities, Pompeii and Herculaneum. Of course, this conversely preserved much of those cities and is a large part of what is allowing him to go into all this detail that we aren’t given about the rest of the Roman world.
Outside of this, there is plenty of other things going on. These “peaceful” years, 70–138 CE, have plenty of their own trials, though the fact he can cover nearly seventy years in four chapters instead of five years in three does show the pace of events has slowed. Still, there is always the concern that the Roman world is in danger, and plenty of wars with death and destruction waiting in the wings. It looks very stable to us, but not only was that stability fragile, there are always the memories of the last crisis to provoke fear about the next one.
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