Jennifer Gillispie’s Reviews > Pox Romana: The Plague That Shook the Roman World > Status Update

The peace of the Pax Romana was in fact quite narrowly conceived: it was the peace of unquestioned domination. The Roman senator Tacitus put it best: “they make a desert and they call it peace.” The defining characteristic of the period was hardly an absence of violence, but rather an absence of any meaningful limit on Rome’s ability to make violence.