Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age

If achieving peace requires taking a million lives, can it still be called peace? The general answer from historians is “yes.” Even the people who lived through that era testified as much. During the age of the Five Good Emperors, the most glorious period of the Roman Empire, the empire was said to be at peace, yet in truth it rested on a destructive instability.

The emperor commanded the entire empire, reigning as the one and only absolute ruler and arbiter. The legions guarded the empire’s borders, separating civilization from barbarism. The imperial provinces prospered as never before, and Rome’s elite were content with the privileges granted to them. Commoners, too, took pride in their work. Even slaves could dream of emancipation and rising in status.

Yet the other side of this peace was precarious and brutal. Slaves were nothing more than talking livestock. Commoners had no respite from the struggle for survival itself. Any imperial province that sought to act beyond the limits Rome had set could not escape a fate of destruction and slaughter. The privileges of the imperial elite rested solely on the emperor’s mercy; purges and executions were endless. Even the emperor, who appeared to be the absolute ruler, would be torn apart and left without so much as a corpse if he failed to win the favor of the legions.

So what, then, was the peace of this age? It could be maintained only by endlessly projecting across the entire world the legions’ ostentatious power, said to protect the empire and civilization. As Tacitus said, they destroyed everything and called it peace.

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