Pax Romana: War, Peace and Conquest in the Roman World

by Adrian Goldsworthy

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 influence 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 ...

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 Middl...

This area was stable and apparently prosperous, with little or no trace of desolation. Roman Peace does ...

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.

If the Romans really did create conditions where most of the provinces lived in peace for long periods, then it is well worth studying this achievement.

Edward Gibbon’s judgement on the Roman Empire at its height was generous and reinforced the importance of his main theme tracing its decline and fall.

Under Rome all this area had been united, sharing the same sophisticated Greco-Roman culture. It was a monarchy, lightly veiled by ‘the image of liberty’, but of universal good when the monarch was a decent, capable man.

centuries of archaeology have added greatly to their number and provided many other objects great and small. The empire was prosperous because it was peaceful, warfare banished to the frontiers which were protected by the army. This was the Pax Romana or Roman Peace, which allowed the greater part of the known world to flourish.

Many people today are still struck by the technical skill of the Romans, and the apparent modernity of their world. This image of sophistication runs alongside one of decadence, of the underlying cruelty of mass slavery and brutal gladiatorial entertainments, and the whimsical and very personal cruelty of mad and bad emperors.

Rome was the civilized world, its boundaries marked by barriers such as Hadrian’s Wall, another great monument which still snakes across the Northumbrian hills as a reminder of a lost empire. In fact Hadrian’s Wall was unusual, and such linear boundaries were rare. When Rome collapsed Europe sank into the Dark Ages, literacy and learning all but forgotten, and there was warfare and violence of every sort where once there had been peace.

empire that stretched from the Atlantic to the Euphrates, and from the Sahara desert to northern Britain.

Sicily was Rome’s first province, and remained under Roman control for more than 800 years. Britain, one of the last acquisitions, was Roman for three and half centuries. An eastern empire that considered itself Roman survived even longer, and some regions there were ‘Roman’ for one and a half millennia. Other leaders and powers, most notably Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, have expanded faster than the Romans, and a handful have controlled more territory – roughly a quarter of the globe in the case of Britain’s own empire.

As the system decayed around them, the people in the provinces still wanted to be Roman. A world without Rome was very hard to imagine and does not seem to have held much appeal.

Rome’s power lasted so long that memories of a time before Roman domination can only have been faint. Rebellions appear surprisingly rare, and nearly always occurred within a generation or two of conquest. When the empire was at its height, the greater part of the Roman army was stationed on its fringes in the frontier zones – a second-century AD Greek orator compared the soldiers to a protective wall surrounding the empire as if it were a single city.

No Roman began to write narrative history until around 200 BC. The Greeks began much earlier, but we should not forget that Herodotus did not write until after the defeat of Persia in 479 BC.

Romans of all classes appear to have identified strongly with the state, and thus the Roman army was in a very real sense the Roman people under arms, commanded by leaders it had elected.14 OVERSEAS

All of Italy was now Roman or allied, apart from the Gallic and Ligurian tribes in the north.15

Hannibal began his invasion of Italy in 218 BC, determined to restore what he felt was the proper balance of power. Within two years he had killed fully one-third of the Senate and over 100,000 Roman and allied soldiers.

In 146 BC Carthage was eradicated as a state, the city physically destroyed and its population removed. In the same year Corinth in Greece suffered a severe, if less total destruction at the hands of the legions.

How the Romans overcame the Carthaginians in the three Punic Wars features prominently in Polybius’ work. He described the Roman military system in some

Rome was one of many aggressive, imperialistic states and kingdoms, unusual not because it was uniquely bellicose but because it proved so successful. Much of this rested on its capacity to absorb other peoples and tie them permanently to the Republic as loyal, if clearly subordinate, allies.

The Romans proved capable of learning from mistakes and adapting the way they fought, but most striking was the refusal to accept that they had lost a conflict and the willingness to pour resources into the struggle until they prevailed.

The Phoenicians were the great sailors of the ancient world, and early in the last millennium BC their ships often visited Spain – the Tarshish of the Old Testament – and even went to south-west Britain for tin, which was highly prized because it permitted the making of bronze. Phoenician colonies were established in Spain and North Africa, one of the latter being Carthage, founded perhaps in the eighth century BC.

In 146 BC the Romans razed Carthage to the ground.