The Pax Romana

The story

Two centuries without wars at home

Try to think what it means to live in a place where, for generations, cities are not besieged, the countryside is not devastated by armies fighting each other and travellers can move around without fearing a war every day. This was, for many inhabitants of the Roman Empire, the Pax Romana, the “Roman peace”. The name was given to it by the Romans themselves, and it appears for the first time in a writer, Seneca, in the 1st century AD.

Historians mark its beginning with Augustus, who in 27 BC became the first emperor. How long the Pax Romana lasts depends on who is telling the story: the date most often used as its end is AD 180, the year of the death of the emperor Marcus Aurelius; other reconstructions make it end earlier. In any case, we are talking about roughly two centuries.

What this peace really was

When we say “peace” we think of a world without wars. The Pax Romana was not that. It was the end of the great civil wars that had drenched the 1st century BC in blood, such as those between Caesar and Pompey and between Antony and Octavian. Rome's rule and its system of laws “pacified” many regions that had suffered from the struggles between rival leaders. Inside the empire, citizens lived more safely.

But on the borders the fighting never stopped. Rome fought against neighbouring peoples and kingdoms, above all the Germanic tribes and the empire of the Parthians. A famous episode: in AD 9, in the Teutoburg Forest, in Germany, three Roman legions, the 17th, the 18th and the 19th, under the command of Publius Quintilius Varus, fell into an ambush set by the Germanic chief Arminius. They were wiped out, and Varus died. According to Suetonius, when Augustus heard the news he cried out: “Varus, give me back my legions!” After that defeat and the campaigns that followed, the Romans gave up conquering Germany beyond the Rhine, which for about four hundred years remained the north-eastern border of the empire.

For this reason the Pax Romana also has a less bright side. The peace was guaranteed by the strength of the legions, and for the conquered peoples it meant obeying. The Roman writer Tacitus puts a very harsh phrase into the mouth of a British chief, Calgacus: where the Romans make a desert, they call it peace. It is a speech imagined by Tacitus, but it shows that even among the Romans there were people who could look at their peace with a critical eye.

The signs of peace

The Romans liked to represent peace as a goddess, Pax, often shown with an olive branch and a cornucopia, the horn of plenty. She appears on the back of many imperial coins, for example on a coin of Vespasian with the inscription PAX AUGUSTI, that is, “the peace of Augustus”. In 13 BC the Senate decided to build a great altar, the Ara Pacis, to celebrate Augustus's return from an expedition to Spain and southern Gaul; it was dedicated on 30 January 9 BC and can still be visited in Rome. In 11 BC a statue of the goddess Pax had been ordered. Later the emperor Vespasian built the Temple of Peace, inaugurated in AD 75 after the victory in the Jewish war, near the Forum of Augustus.

An easier life

When there were no wars inside the empire, people travelled more. The roads, built for soldiers, served merchants. The Mediterranean had become, for the Romans, a great inland lake, the mare nostrum (“our sea”), and ships could carry grain, oil, wine and cloth from one port to another. A common currency and Latin, spoken by many people in the provinces, made trade easier. Cities grew, with theatres, baths and aqueducts, even far from Rome.

In AD 117, under the emperor Trajan, the empire reached its greatest extent. From Britain to Syria, millions of people were governed by the same law and paid the same taxes. For many, life was safer than it had ever been, and some inhabitants of the provinces became Roman citizens, and even senators and emperors.

How it ended

The peace, however, was not eternal. From the 2nd century on, attacks on the borders became more and more frequent, and according to one reconstruction the period of the invasions begins as early as 164. When Marcus Aurelius died, in 180, problems were piling up: wars along the Danube, epidemics, economic crises. A harder period for the empire began then.