Tom Holland is a phenomenon. X (formerly Twitter), podcasts, lectures, books, and he graces the local cricket field, too. With the energy levels of Emperor Hadrian, he is a tremendous writer with a signature. Amidst all the history he relays, there is always an arresting thesis that sits uncomfortably with you.

His previous best-seller, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, made the surprising argument that wokeness is a Christian phenomenon. Just the latest in a series of social movements fueled by the Christian demand for equality and inclusion—values, as Holland pointed out, that are decidedly not ancient. The Greeks and Romans were preoccupied with glory, and if shining brightly meant stomping on others, so be it.

Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age opens with Hadrian looking across Northumbria towards Scotland and deciding to seal off those lands with a wall. What did the wall against the Scots safeguard? Civilization. The arresting thesis of his latest bestseller is that “people visiting Hadrian’s Wall rarely identify with the natives.” Holland wants us to dwell on the disturbing thought that impressed as we are with the order and sophistication of Roman civilization, we take the side of “the most terrifying state that had ever existed.” “Universal though the Pax Romana reigned, no one ever doubted what it was founded upon. Peace was the fruit of victory—eternal victory.” Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age is the story of when legions ruled. 

“The capacity of the legions to exercise extreme violence was the necessary precondition for the Pax Romana,” Holland writes. Western power today is the heir of Rome’s power, yet we are not the Romans. Ours remains a sensibility shaped by Christianity and so the Romans in matters of sex, morality, identity, violence, and law are “radically strange and unsettling.” The Institutes of Gaius—a famed manual of Roman law—makes plain the root of Roman order: “The primary distinction in the law of persons is this: that all men are either free or slaves.” People like us can only gawp.

Prestige and Humiliation

For the Roman, “the judgment of fellow citizens was the only standard by which a man could truly measure himself. … Prosperity and glory were nothing without the reflection provided them by poverty and shame.” The Romans delighted in humiliating others. Having defeated the Judaeans, Titus, the talented son of Vespasian, “obliged his prisoners to act out their own defeat for spectators.” Baroque refinements of the dynamic of prestige and shame at the core of Roman civilization led four generals to contest primacy in 69 AD when the line of Augustus ended with the suicide of Nero.

It also supported the fashion for delictati. The height of Roman prestige was for a man to own a pretty boy, to shine amidst another’s shame. As Holland points out, this phenomenon was not about affirming dignity through gender affirmation, it was about taking a man and utterly ruining him by changing him into something lesser, a woman. The Romans are not us, as Holland writes, “The absolute cutting-edge was a boy as beautiful as the most beautiful of girls.” No snob could be without a delicatus and Nero had possessed the absolute best, Sporus. On the death of his wife, Poppaea, Nero had Sporus castrated and transformed into the living mirage of his beautiful dead wife. He even offered an enormous reward to any wiseman who could implant a womb into Sporus. Sporus himself committed suicide before one of the emperors of 69 AD could get him on stage to be publicly gang raped. Though advertised to the masses, the event had to be canceled.

69 AD was “the catastrophe of the year of the four emperors.” With Nero dead, rival military talents took to the field, with Vespasian and Titus emerging victorious from the civil war. “The army stood at the very centre of what it meant to be a Roman.” While Holland’s scholarship is conveyed with a light touch and relatively few footnotes, the writing is so good that in the sections on military action, you turn the pages faster than you would following a John Grisham plot.

The head of the first contender for primacy ended up on a spike, Servius Sulpicius Galba who represented old Rome. Scion of an ancient senatorial family, he was a throwback, “an antique hero sprung from the pages of a history book.” He was lured to his destruction at the hands of the Pretorians by his ally, Marcus Salvius Otho. Though a one-time governor of Lusitania and a pal of Nero’s, Otho’s pedigree was no match for Galba’s. For his run at the crown, he needed the cover of an establishment man like Galba. After parading Galba’s head about Rome, he managed three months as emperor before being defeated by the army of Vitellius.

Aulus Vitellius had been a Consul of Rome, a one-time governor of Africa, and he had the common touch with his troops in Germany. He moved on the upstart Otho and defeated him in a battle outside of Cremona but with a loss of legionaries on both sides that shocked. The slaughter of Romans shook Otho, and he committed suicide. Such was the loyalty of his men that some self-immolated on his pyre.

Commanding the legions in the Balkans and Near East, Titus Flavius Vespasian was watching. After the slaughter of Cremona, he made his move. Vespasian was a veteran of campaigns in Britain and was blessed with a capable lieutenant in Titus, the scourge of Judaea. Galba might have lost his head, but poor Vitellius was butchered in the streets of Rome, his flesh literally cut from his bones and tossed in the Tiber. Vespasian’s rule began not with the elimination of Vitellius, but with the annihilation and humiliation of the defeated.

Vespasian’s reign saw a massive influx of wealth into Rome from the plunder of the East’s many ancient cities and civilizations. Boosts in property often meant slaves. Most slaves worked in agriculture though intelligence could mean working in Rome’s administration, even staffing the center of power itself. For the truly rich, however, some slaves were status symbols. In the richest houses, the division of labor was in full swing. “Expecting the young man appointed to direct a drunken senator’s penis over a chamber pot also to clean his teeth, or a masseuse to double as a hairdresser, was the height of vulgarity.” It was a case of interior decorating. “An attractive attendant served as a status symbol much as a racehorse or an antique statue might. … There was nothing like physical perfection in an attendant to inspire what every connoisseur, every snob, every trendsetter most dreamed of inspiring: the jealousy of his peers.”

Philosopher King

The book opens with Hadrian standing on the bank of the River Tyne in Northumbria looking north in 122 AD. “He had studied with philosophers and ridden to war against headhunters; lived both in Athens and on an island in the Danube.” No emperor had gone so far north, and his visit to Britain would enact a policy that marked his reign and set a benchmark for later rulers.

Publius Aelius Hadrianus married into the emperor Trajan’s family. Inspired by Alexander the Great, Trajan had pushed Rome to its high-water mark of conquests. A soldier’s soldier, a real hard man born of long campaigning, his magnificent victories and hauls of wealth saw the legions in Dacia, Parthia, and standing on the Euphrates. Trajan’s legions thrilled Rome. “War, to the Roman people, had always been a dimension of wonder, of terror, of epic, of legend. And now it was so again. … Not since Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul had there been a feat of arms quite so glorious, so gore-sodden, so lucrative.” When Hadrian succeeded Trajan, he saw strategic vulnerability in the late emperor’s conquests. He feared the empire might buckle and pulled the legions back to more defensible positions. He would deepen Roman power in its zones of control, rather than waste resources in regions tenuously held.

Hadrian’s strategic insight was to see that Roman power could grow not by being cast far and wide but by reaching ever deeper into the peoples already occupied. Hadrian studied philosophy with Epictetus and was “a man punctilious in his dealings with the supernatural.” Christians were starting to be noticed. Tacitus railed against them, thinking them utterly singular and sinister. Pliny was horrified to find them not merely in the cities, but in the villages and fields throughout the empire, “infecting with their wretched superstition.” When he was governor in Turkey, Pliny the Younger had them executed for refusing to make offerings to Jupiter and Caesar. Hadrian followed suit, since “sacrilege, it went without saying, was beyond the pale.” Rebelling against the tightening grip of Roman belief and practice, Judaea lashed out. Hadrian did not hesitate in calling in his best general. Battle-tested in counterinsurgency in Britain, Julius Severus split the legions into roving hit squads and the carnage was immense. “What was once Judaea had become, by imperial decree, the province of Syria Palaestina. Meanwhile, in the city once called Jerusalem, on the very site of the demolished Temple, a giant statue was raised of Hadrian.”

Hadrian’s rule of consolidation brought something to the fore that he even embodied in his person. Hadrian was no patrician; he came from Spain. Power in Rome was becoming truly cosmopolitan with provincials able to dream of holding court in Rome itself. Under Hadrian, it even happened that a provincial from Anatolia entered the pantheon of the gods. To the consternation of Rome, Hadrian made Antinous, his delicatus, a god. His beloved drowned in the Nile under mysterious circumstances. Some rumored he was taking on a more manly cast and committed suicide, others that Hadrian’s wife bumped him off. “Perhaps the truth is destined never to be known. One thing, however, was certain, the titanic scale of Hadrian’s grief. Whatever the cause of Antinous’ death, he appeared, in the days and weeks that followed, broken by it.” As Holland points out, the lives of slaves in Rome were abject and the fate of the delictati consigned to permanent rape horrendous, but boundaries did sometimes blur. Hadrian never really bounced back. He became morose and his rule increasingly arbitrary, staff avoiding him as much as they could lest he lethally lash out at them.

Anxiety Rising

Atop Hadrian’s Wall, we side with Hardrian because he represents civilization. “Temples and theatres, baths and libraries, paving stones and central heating: all constitute ready markers of the Pax Romana. To this day, whether in films, cartoons, or computer games, they serve as shorthand, not just for the heyday of the Roman Empire, but for civilization itself.” A theme of Pax is that order is better than chaos. It is noteworthy that Holland is making this point at the same moment that it has become prominent in one of America’s most important geopolitical writers, Robert Kaplan. Interestingly, both speak of the centrality of order when discussing Edward Gibbon and his classic, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Most commentators agree that ours is in an era of renewed great power competition. Order wobbling, anxiety is rising. The possibility of chaos is causing anxiety but so is the memory of the legions. When legions ruled, they knew no limits. Holland observes this cannot satisfy us. “No one watching Gladiator sides with the emperor. In our instinctive sympathy for the victims of Roman bloodsports, we show ourselves the heirs not of the Caesars but of the early church.” Unrestrained power irks.

Holland points to The Book of Revelations, “the most vivid, the most coruscating, the most influential attack on imperialism ever written.” Dating to late first century AD, John sees Rome “drunk with the blood of the saints,” a woman dressed in purple, loaded with jewelry, scene of “the world’s depravities and abominations.” Today, the place John described as “the great city which has domination over the kings of the earth” is home to Roman imperial monuments topped by Christ, a carpenter, and Saint Peter, a fisherman. We admire the Romans, but only with reservations. We are anxious for order to prevail, but that order cannot be Roman: exercises of power must defer to our fuller ancestral tradition, Roman ideals leavened with the restraining humility of Christian humanism.