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Cargando... Pax: War and Peace in Rome's Golden Age (2023)por Tom Holland
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. Excellent. Description of Vesuvius overwhelming Herculaneum and Pompeii is masterly. Mainly from th PoV of the 2 Plinys. Overall gives a good sens of numerous emperors of whose names are familiar enough but I didn't really know their stories ( Domitian Trajan Hadrian, even Nero who tends just to be a caricature and is mainly in the previuous volume) ( ) 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. Cutiliae was situated in the rural territory east of Rome known as the Sabina. Vespasian himself, with his rustic accent and manners, was considered a bit of a country bumpkin, and might seem an improbable emperor from an improbable source. But in the Roman imaginary the Sabina evoked tough and thrifty peasants and solid, old-fashioned values. Tom Holland’s Pax, the third instalment of his Roman trilogy, describes the collapse of the Julio-Claudian dynasty with the assassination of Nero, the civil conflict that followed, the Flavians who emerged from it, and the ‘Spanish Emperors’, Trajan and Hadrian, to whom has been attributed the settled heyday of the Roman Empire, the Pax, ‘peace’, of Holland’s title. A persistent theme is how the various contenders for power presented their credentials to the Romans. In Vespasian’s case, his origins in a part of Italy that might appear a few hundred years behind Rome, appealing in itself, also complemented the blunt, no-nonsense military manner he cultivated. ‘Woe is me, I think I’m becoming a god!’, he joked on his deathbed, while a response to his son Titus when he questioned the propriety of a new tax on toilets has resulted in the French word for a public urinal, vespasienne. But authenticity could take many forms in Rome. When Vespasian’s second son Domitian succeeded to the throne after Titus’ premature death, having hitherto acted, arguably, like the archetypal spare, his approach was to style himself as censor. This was a time-honoured role in Rome that encompassed not only morals (though he did bury alive a Vestal Virgin convicted of adultery) but also enhancement of the physical city (‘a lunatic desire to build’, as one author described it), and increasing the silver content of the coinage. As well as being an impeccably traditional office, the censorship was an ideal vehicle for an emperor whose talent was micromanagement. Domitian was also an emperor, it is fair to say, who had little time for the polite fiction, maintained since the first emperor Augustus, that any institution other than the army (the Praetorian Guard in Rome and the legions scattered around the Empire) was necessary for establishing and maintaining imperial authority. Read the rest at HistoryToday.com Llewelyn Morgan is Professor of Classics at Brasenose College, Oxford.
"Throughout his meticulous narrative, Holland demonstrates how the stability of the so-called peace was maintained through martial violence both in Rome and abroad. Roman history buffs will want to take a look." "A capably rendered history of Rome’s more-or-less golden age." "Holland’s superb storytelling takes us right into this era as viewed from every standpoint (including our own), offering fresh and vivid insights into well-worn history." "Of course, contemporaries might have seen things differently, as Tom Holland shows in this masterly and thoroughly enjoyable history of the ‘golden age’ of Rome, which carries us from the shambles that followed the revolt against Nero in AD 68–9 to the start of Hadrian’s reign." "And Holland writes about Rome with a Gibbonesque flair that both informs and entertains."
"Beginning in 69AD, the so-called Year of the Four Emperors and spanning to 138AD, the death of Hadrian, Pax presents a narrative history of Rome at the height of its power. From the gilded capital to the barbarous realms beyond the frontier, historian Tom Holland offers a tour of the most famous episodes in Roman history"-- No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)937.01History and Geography Ancient World Italian Peninsula to 476 and adjacent territories to 476 Italian Peninsula to 476 and adjacent territories to 476 Kings 753-509 B.C.Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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