Pax Romana Begins
The Roman world had about two hundred years without a general war inside its borders, conventionally dated from Augustus's settlement in 27 BC. The phrase is misleading if taken literally. Rome fought continuously on its frontiers throughout — in Germany, Britain, Dacia, Armenia and Parthia — and crushed provincial revolts with great violence, destroying Jerusalem in 70 and depopulating Judaea after 135. There were civil wars in 69 and again in 193. What ended was the thing that had nearly destroyed the state in the preceding century: Roman armies fighting each other for control of Rome, year after year, from the Gracchi to Actium. Augustus achieved it by taking the armies out of politics and into his own hands, paying them from his own treasury, settling veterans on land bought rather than confiscated, and reducing sixty legions to twenty-eight stationed on the frontiers rather than in Italy. What the peace produced is visible in the material record: harbours, aqueducts, roads and cities built across the empire, a single currency and a single legal framework from Britain to Syria, and shipwreck and Greenland ice-core evidence of trade and metal production at levels not reached again for a thousand years. Pliny called it the immeasurable majesty of the Roman peace. Tacitus put the other view in a British chieftain's mouth, that they make a desert and call it peace. It ended with the plague of 165, the Marcomannic wars, and the murder of Commodus in 192. The concept was revived deliberately in the twentieth century as a template — a British peace, then an American one — with the implication that a single dominant power suppresses war among the rest. What the Roman case actually shows is that it suppresses one particular kind of war and generates others at the edges.
- Category: Cultural
