Pax Romana brought stability and prosperity to Rome’s vast empire. Yet, writes Tom Holland, behind the dazzling new cities and teeming sea lanes lay the threat of lethal, irresistible violence
In the early winter of AD 101, Caesar’s emissary arrived in Rome. Hadrian, a young man of only 25, and a relative of the emperor, Trajan, had ridden directly from the field. He bore missives for the senate. Senators, listening to Hadrian report on the great victories won by Roman arms, could feel themselves transplanted to a more distant and heroic age. Trajan, the man who only three years previously had ascended to the rule of Rome, appeared a stirringly old-fashioned figure. The qualities he put on public display – plainness and self-discipline, affability and lack of pretension – were the very markers of an antique hero.
In the Dacians, a martial people of eastern Europe whom he had spent all year breaking to the Roman yoke, Trajan had adversaries who, in a similar manner, appeared conjured up from ancient annals. They were strange and menacing and terrible: men who wielded scythes in battle as though they were cutting corn; who bore standards shaped in the form of dragons; who wrote messages on giant mushrooms. All these were the details reported by Hadrian to the senate.
As news of Trajan’s dispatches began to percolate out through the city, the Roman people were swept by a mood of excitement such as they had not known for a long while. “For under the rule of sluggish emperors, they seemed to have grown old and enfeebled; but now, under the rule of Trajan, they were stirring themselves afresh, and – contrary to every expectation – renewing their vigour as though their youth had been restored to them.”
Battle-hardened upstart
Rome was a city that had been at peace for almost a century and a half by the time that Trajan became emperor. True, back in AD 69, civil war had briefly flared in the capital’s streets. Four Caesars had ruled in succession. Blood had splashed the Forum. The temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill, the holiest in Rome, had gone up in flames.
But this sudden eruption of violence had been only a fleeting fever. The victorious emperor in the civil war, a shrewd and battle-hardened upstart by the name of Vespasian, had briskly restored order to the capital. In the centre of Rome, where the meat m
