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I’ve already commented elsewhere that the early American colonists, for example, saw themselves as the New Israelites in a New World, a wilderness, where they could start over again by erasing the decadence of European civilization and building a new Eden. Later on, Rousseau celebrated the “noble savage.” Later still, the outbreak of World War I was greeted on both sides (at least in public) by something like ecstasy. Many people hoped that a (short) war would restore the vigor of a peaceful and prosperous world but also a tired, effete and boring one. This intense yearning for the primeval or even the primitive was one a central tendency in the arts, notably in music and painting, during the final decades before 1914. Postmodernist deconstruction didn’t emerge suddenly, after all, out of nowhere. It had been growing in some circles since the mid-nineteenth century. FS: What’s going on in your head when you are researching these characters? Does it make you think differently about our own morality today? For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. TH: The question that haunts me, whenever I write about the Romans, is why am I so fascinated by them? When I went to Sunday school, and saw pictures of Jesus in front of Pontius Pilate, I was always on the side of Pontius Pilate. He was kind of glamorous: he had eagles, he had purple robes. By contrast, Jesus was a massive scruff. I much preferred the Romans, and I think that this speaks to something that is kind of inherent. There is a certain admiration, and a dread, and an appeal in power.
FS: The 100-odd years that you’re covering in this volume is a period of great peace and prosperity and power, and yet at each juncture, it feels like there’s this anxiety. That’s what surprised me as a reader. There’s this sense of the precariousness of the empire — maybe it’s become softer, maybe it’s decadent, or maybe it needs to rediscover how it used to be.
Tom Holland: It opens in AD 68, which is the year that Nero committed suicide: a key moment in Roman history, and a very, very obvious crisis point. Nero is the last living descendant of Augustus, and Augustus is a god. To be descended from Augustus is to have his divine blood in your veins. And there is a feeling among the Roman people that this is what qualifies you to rule as a Caesar, to rule as an emperor. And so the question that then hangs over Rome in the wake of Nero’s death is: what do we do now? We no longer have a descendant of the divine Augustus treading this mortal earth of ours. How is Rome, how is its empire, going to cohere? The narrative features many of the most celebrated episodes in Roman history: the destruction of Jerusalem and Pompeii; the building of the Colosseum and Hadrian’s Wall; the conquests of Trajan and the spread of Christianity. Holland, who co-hosts the podcast The Rest Is History, is at his best when having fun with Rome’s bloody history’ The Times Halfway up the inside of a church tower in central Italy, upside-down, is an epitaph of a ‘T. Flavius Clymenus’. A freedman of the imperial household, a former slave, his middle name indicates who had owned and freed him: one of the ‘Flavian Emperors’, Vespasian, Titus or Domitian, who ruled Rome at the end of the first century. Not far from Antrodoco, where the church of Santa Maria Extra Moenia stands, stood a villa at Cutiliae where Vespasian was in the habit of spending the summer months, and indeed both Vespasian and his elder son Titus died there. This is no doubt where T. Flavius Clymenus had been employed.
Christianity could never have become the universal religion of the Roman Empire without Paul. As a Pharisee, a member of the missionary sect of ancient Judaism, he was true to his calling, and, despite his conversion, was perhaps one of the truest of all Jews. The other Apostles were either pulled in two directions, like Peter, or perhaps too cultic-minded, like James with his reliance on the law and circumcision. It’s significant that Paul’s definition of same-sex relationships as a unity on a par with male-female occurs in his epistle to the Romans. Just as it was more likely that the word ‘homosexuality’ would be coined in the German language and no other. There are, however, people who see this wealth as evidence of Rome’s monstrosity. The greatest, most influential anti-imperial text ever written is the Book of Revelation, with its vision of the whore of Babylon. Babylon — which is Rome — is described as a city that is glutted on the wealth of the world, and its downfall is precipitated by the cutting of trade links that bring wealth into the city. So it’s very clear-eyed about the fact that the metropole is dependent on the links that it has with the outer provinces.What a tissue of slanted generalisations –“all ancient empires celebrated power”, for example – a statement so broad that it resists all enquiry. Which ones? How? When? Under what circumstances?
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