If there was a Bronze Age, an Iron Age, a Renaissance, an Enlightenment, an Industrial Revolution, a Great Depression, or a Cold War, there was a Pax Romana.
I love Roman history but objectively think the Roman empire left a deep impression on later European states. It is a curse on which everyone in Europe tried at some point in history to be the next Roman empire. It is ultimately the glorification of Imperialism and violence which we like to glorify as the golden age of mankind.
I have had this thought for so long, thank you for finally verbalizing it…. Just like the Han empire left a huge mark on Chinese civilization, the Roman Empire left a huge mark on the various nations and civilizations that have risen in its shadow.
The alternative is not great; fractioned kingdoms in perpetual war, to be easily conquered by neighbouring continental powers, and with no resources for great technological advancements. Some of the tools of empire are distasteful to our modern values, but they did ultimately bring people together under common goals to the advancement of society, instead of bickering and fighting one another, at times when no other political tools would have done the same. We should take in what lessons we can, about the good and the bad, and avoid both glorification or villanization. Let's not judge the dead too emotionally. It is history, after all.
Well said, the prestige of Rome (itself a misnomer obviously) has often been hijacked to advance brutal causes and oppression even into the modern era. Our next video will even cover that subject in greater detail!
The last line about cultivating gardens rather than creating desserts was a perfect line to end the video. I'm happy im a member with this great content🍻
Great quote and very incisive. I wanted to include this but felt I had gone overboard in source quotations already. I'll be sure to include it in a later video.
I would really enjoy a dive into how it is Rome managed to slip into monarchy while fundamentally upholding Republican values to the extent that they did. how did this dissonance exist in the minds of the common people? did it even represent a massive change from how it had been in the Republican period?
That's a great idea for a future topic! I feel that it is very difficult t o discern the opinions of the average Roman on this because of the elite bias in our sources but I'll do a bit more digging to see what I can uncover. But there is plenty to say about Virgil and the Aeneid on this so if I can't find the perspective of the average Pleb then I'll focus on him
Well from what I've read, in the minds of most people the role of 'emperor' was never official, and was just a public office. If you messed up, then you could be removed by the people, the Senate, or the army. The emperor was still seen as accountable to the republic and the people. The reason why the Romans never developed any official succession laws for the emperors was because it would heavily lean into monarchism then. As a result, emperors came to power by popular support via the army, the Senate, or the people. This continued on into the Byzantine era, where the medieval writers referred to their state as the 'Roman politeia' (Roman republic), and their leaders were still seen as accountable to the public. The empire did go through a period from the Severans onwards where the military overshadowed the role of the people and the Senate in imperial politics, but that ended in the east by the 5th century but continued in the west until it's demise.
@@genovayork2468 No, that's not true. The East Roman empire was as politically fluid in terms of succesion as the empire of old (just look at the Twenty Years Anarchy or the aftermath of the Macedonian dynasty, where 3 different families took power after deposing one another. Or how a frickin finance minister deposed Irene) An emperor could only vouch for their own flesh and blood to be made the next emperor if they were popular enough themselves. Otherwise you had instances such as the death of Anastasius where he left no heir, which led to civil servant Justin I buying the office in an election.
This is the PROBLEM with this video. We have SO few primary sources. The question of whether or not the Pax Romana was real cannot be ascertained by merely looking the few written records we have written by elites many of whom in the early Principate were salty about transformation from oligarchic Republic to monarchy. Without looking at physical evidence we cannot make claims about reality the way this video is doing. It's doing very bad history.
@@conrad4852Its doing very bad history to use primary sources? What, should we be using written accounts made by historians that used the same sources or made things up centuries later? Or are you saying that we cant derive anything of value from what we do have? I think you just dont understand how history is done.
@@SlickMcClick no, not at all. Nor should we 100% trust Julius Caesar, or Tacitus, or Cassius Dio or other elite Roman historians without interrogating them. I'm talking about the enormous evidence of archaeology. "over the past half-century or so, it has so happened that effectively all ancient historians have had to develop a strong grasp of archaeological data; we don’t all necessarily learn to do the excavation work, of course (that’s what archaeologists do), but pretty much all ancient historians at this point are going to have to be able to read a site or artifact report as well as have a good theoretical grasp of what kinds of questions archaeology can be used to answer and how it can be used to answer those questions. This happened in ancient history in particular for two reasons: first, archaeology was a field effectively invented to better understand the classical past (which is now of course also used to understand the past in other periods and places) so it has been at work the longest there, but also because the sources for ancient history are so few. As I like to say, the problem for the modern historian is taking a sip of meaning from the fire-hose of evidence they have; but the challenge of an ancient historian is finding water in the desert. Archaeological data was a sudden, working well in that desert and much of the last two decades of ancient history has been built around it." "Even if the collapse of Roman political authority was a neutral or even potentially beneficial experience for the elite stratum at the top of society - and it is not clear that it was, mind you; those elites themselves that write to us certainly did not think so - if it was catastrophically bad for the non-elite population, their experience utterly swamps the elite experience by sheer dint of numbers. ... And... it was catastrophically bad. [W]e can start with another fairly common theory about this period - ‘perhaps the decline in exploitative cities and population causes life to get better.’ This isn’t as crazy as it seems! The Black Death, which we’ve just mentioned, is an obvious (and of course for any medievalist, readily available) analogy. The Black Death may have killed something like a third of the population of medieval Europe in the mid-1300s. Of course that is very bad! But one of the paradoxes of the Black Death is that in the aftermath of it, living conditions for the survivors clearly improved! The population growth of the previous centuries had meant bringing more marginal, less productive land under cultivation to support that population, which had reduced the per-farmer efficiency of agriculture even as total production grew, which had in turn meant that most farmers lived closer to the subsistence line and thus were poorer, their labor less valued. Killing a third of them thus made the labor of the remaining two-thirds much more valuable. Marginal land fell out of production as farmers focused on the best land, which improved production per-farmer (even as total, aggregate production fell) resulting in higher standards of living for the survivors. This is a classic ‘Malthusian’ interaction and the evidence for the period is robust enough that we can be quite sure it happened. ... Instead, to jump to the end, what the evidence - again, here mostly archaeological evidence used in a statistics-driven way - suggests is that what we are seeing is that average, per-capita production declined, resulting in a real decline in living standards including nutrition, which resulted in population decline. That population decline was thus the physical expression of a lot of real misery: starvation perhaps, but in most cases more likely heightened infant and maternal mortality as a result of malnourishment. ... In essence, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire caused the carrying capacity of the Mediterranean World, and especially western Europe, to decline, leading to the population declining to follow in step - which is to be clear, an incredibly bloodless way to describe a period of real, sharp human misery. The evidence for this decline, initially slow in coming, is now quite substantial; Willem Jongman assembles perhaps the most complete set of it in “Gibbon was Right: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Economy” in Crisis and the Roman Empire (2007). Jongman considers evidence for coin minting (through atmospheric lead records contained in ice cores), trade (via dated shipwrecks), meat consumption (via bone assemblages) and basic nutrition (via height calculated through femur length in dated human remains), inter alia and finds the same or similar patterns in each indicator. To take the most direct indicator of nutrition effect son people, mean femur length rises over the early Roman Empire, falls slightly in the late second and early third century, rises again but not quite so high over the fourth century, and then utterly collapses in the fifth." acoup.blog/2022/02/11/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-iii-things/
OK but qualitatively the borders of the Roman Empire didn't ACTUALLY change that much between 27 BCE and 180 CE, did they? Especially when compared to the two centuries prior to this? That was my sense of what the term "Pax Romana" actually indicated: the empire reached approximately its maximum realistic span during the period of the Late Republic, so that senatorial warlordism increasingly found its outlet in civil wars against the Roman state itself; kind of like how the division of the Earth among the European colonial powers in the 19th century led to the world wars of the 20th. And, like, obviously the Earth hasn't been at peace since 1945, but just as obviously if and when that hypothetical event that we call "World War III" actually happens this will turn into a completely different world very, very quickly. So I think Augustus really did solve a world-historical problem of a kind: late-Republican senatorial warlordism needed to end and it actually did end, even granted that the total failure of the Romans to work out any concept of dynastic legitimacy did guarantee the eventual emergence of a new kind of warlordism.
Its a Bit that moralist hate imperialism and hate the Roman Empire but Love the Republic that was constantly beefed with every Nation that looked at them funny
@@laisphinto6372 It's a complex affair as the Republic was empire before it became an empire, and was arguably still a republic after it became an empire.
Nah, actually, you know what, I talk myself out of it; Pax Romana was fake. It's not actually a solved problem; they only projected that problem into the shape of a single person and then literally just got lucky 5 or 6 times in a row with their total lack of a succession procedure. If any of those emperors had actually succeeded in fully burying the last embers of republicanism by implementing a real succession law, then it would have made sense to talk about Pax Romana, but they didn't. The civil wars before Augustus and those after Marcus Aurelius were fundamentally the same thing.
@@Morilore From Augustus' victory at Actium 31BCE until the assassination of Pertinax in AD193, there was a single Roman civil war in AD69. Neither the death of Marcus Aurelius nor the assassination of his son Commodus led to a civil war. It was only the assassination of Pertinax & the subsequent horrific behavior of the assassins that led to civil war for first time in 124 years. From 31BC to AD 193 that's 226 years with only a single civil war! I'd call that pretty good! It wasn't getting lucky 5 or 6 times, it was getting lucky 11 times--there were 11 peaceful transitions of power from 31BC to AD193 plus a 12th that was violent in AD69. The "total failure of the Romans to work out any concept of dynastic legitimacy did guarantee the eventual emergence of a new kind of warlordism" I'm actually less comfortable with this pronouncement because once dynastic legitimacy was far more firmly entrenched in Roman culture & institutions in the late 300s & continued to be so in the 400s, 500s, 600s, & 700s, it's not like the Romans weren't still having civil wars in the 500s & 700s.
Very interesting material. I'm impressed. ••• The main takeaway for me here is: to the Romans, "Peace" was not the absence of conflict, but rather the fact that Rome was able to stay on top in a relatively stable fashion.
@@tribunateSPQR Peace & prosperity are indeed separate concepts that can indeed be separated out analytically & sometimes do indeed break apart in real history. However, they do not with respect to the Pax Romana & your failure to look beyond elite sources to look at the material lives of millions of non-elite people across the empire is precisely why I dislike this video so much. We have more than enough material evidence to attempt answer to the question 'Was the Pax Romana real and if so, in what ways?' and yet you are focused on the writings of the elites.
To be fair, Rome before Augustus was a mess. Every generetion of romans knew or fought wars. I mean Rome got the punic wars, after that multiple wars with the Greek kingdoms, and then the social wars and then the servil wars and then the civil wars. And all those wars contributed heavily in the destruction of the republica. So from romans pov it was a mess. So when Augustus came into power, he fixed all of that and it worked until the thrid century crisis. So from a roman point of view, they lived a way better life in the empire than in the republica. The pax romana was a pax for the romans and not for others people. So we cannot use this term literally we have to take it within some context.
I think most romans of the time would have agreed with that assessment. Augustus and his successor princeps gave them order, consistency, and stability, even if it did come at the expense of political freedom (though, to be fair, the Romans of the Republic era didn't enjoy "freedom", as we would understand it, either). Most people will usually choose order over freedom, and being cared for, over caring for themselves. The Pax Romana delivered that to them for roughly two centuries.
Thanks - it's a reminder that just as the roman view of liberty was freedom to do as one pleased to anyone, peace was only viewed as the stability and security of the Roman community itself - regardless of what was happening abroad
this was a well needed video as I feel that virtually all content discussing pax romana seem to completely buy into it. your videos are always more grounded and challenge us to think differently than what the propaganda filled history books tell us. i say this as a diehard lover of rome. thank you for putting out such great content!
I have issues with this video. Yes, it wasnt some age when humanity was at its peak(such age never existed) but it is true that compered to other time periods, it was actually suprisingly peaceful and tranquil. In the 1st century, Rome did fight wars, but most of them were on the fringes of empire, in Germania, Britania or Parthia. Regions such as Italy, Spain, N. Africa(Tunis), Grerce or Egypt experienced unpressidented levels of peace and prosperity, unlike in previous centuries where they were rocked by various wars, raids, devastations and invasions. This relative stability allowed heartlands of the empire to prosper, with life standarts being shown to be much better than in previous centuries and population heavily increasing in these areas.
It's not just the heartland that prospered, even places like Britain benefited from the expanded trade network they were part of. The collapse of Rome was devastating and caused populations to collapse (and also led to a massive rise in violence as the barbarian invasions show).
@@WorthlessWinner then please do point me towards the sources that make the claim that the peasant farmers, slaves, and non-citizens that made up a sizeable portion of the Roman population had improvement in their quality of life.
@@joshuab2926 - basically any economic history of the period will show this. "The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization" is a good source. The massive decline in living standards that the end of the pax romana caused, is evidence that the pax improved living standards.
Well, I for one am more on the camp of the existence of a Pax Augusta, as the Roman political system was stabilized, various legions were disbanded and an standing regular army was established. Not having an army crossing the Rubicon every few years, or random commanders raising levies from your town every month, must have had a boost on even the lowest plebeian's quality of life. Even more after the Conquest of Egypt guaranteed the expansion of the Dole. Of course, it was peace for Romans. Not other peoples tho.
I do believe that the average Roman in Italy probably benefitted from the 80 year pause in civil wars, but as you mentioned - ultimately the "peace" was built on the continued exploitation of the provincials, not to mention the continued importation and abuse of the enslaved. So while the pax romana was great for a Roman citizen, the goal of the video was to push back on the notion that it was a singular geopolitical accomplishment or something that modern states should attempt to recreate. I do like your idea of separating out the Pax Augusta as a separate construct than the more broad Pax Romana. Thanks for the feedback and support
@@tribunateSPQR yeah, I get your point, and very much agree with your argument on the application of the concept in modern day geopolitics. Pretty much any argument on geopolitical paradigms from antiquity is pure bullshitting. And while I believe that a state's primary objective must be the well-being of its citizens, that doesnt excuse the perpetuation of human suffering. Or the disenfranchisement
I like your videos but I don’t necessarily agree with this one. Especially in hindsight, Rome’s rule during the Pax Romana lead to many benefits even if it came with additional hardships at the time. These areas enjoyed new and very long lasting benefits in infrastructure, legal systems, and trade. Similar to the way Napoleon ended serfdom in many areas of Europe. It may have hurt at the time, but was beneficial in the end. Also, I don’t agree with the depiction of Jesus “running afoul of Roman administrators.” Pontius Pilate made it very clear that it was Jewish leaders who wanted Jesus killed, not himself or Rome.
I can't say it comes as a surprise that Pax Romana was mostly, if not only, referred to the Romans. Similarly, as to how a so called "Pax Americana" is coined every now and then despite the US having taken part in recent conflicts although minor. Whether a true peace or not, the Pax Romana was perhaps a much more agreeable time than that of the 3rd century. In that context, I believe it earned the name.
Pax Mongolica and Pax Anglica are two more examples that show that it's not really a term for total peace, whether global or regional, but rather one for domination and quasi-total peace for the core populations of those with the domination.
I'd argue that the 'Pax Romana' (or 'Golden Age') of Rome occured more under the Flavians and Nerva-Antonines, and was more about Rome's relative stability and created the imperial image of the Roman empire more than any other period. For all of Augustus's incredible statesmanship, his own dynasty was a dysfunctional mess that was just kind of left to experiment with their powers as the 'emperor', and ended in the bloody Year of the Four Emperors in 68-69 AD. The succeeding Flavians made great strides to reconstruct the state after this interregnum (with Domitian in particular overseeing a great fiscal policy) and then the Nerva-Antonines built upon it with the alimenta welfare system (Nerva-Trajan), wealth flowing in from Dacia (Trajan), consolidation and mass building projects (Hadrian), and then a nice spell of peace (Antoninus Pius) before the cracks began to show under Marcus Aurelius. Was it a 'peaceful' era in the sense that it was void of war or natural disasters? No. But was it, on the whole, a period of relative peace and stability compared to what came before (Late Republican civil wars) and after (3rd century crisis)? Arguably yes.
@@Giantcrabz TBF people usually date the start of the Pax Romana under Augustus as beginning in 27 BC when he actually took the titles of Augustus and Princeps. He was definitely a more bloody warlord before that point with the proscriptions than afterwards, relatively speaking (which tied into his post 27 BC propaganda campaign where he presented himself as the man who brought peace to the Republic and saved it)
@@onemoreminute0543 Glad to find a fellow appreciator of Domitian! Once we no longer take elite sources as entirely truthful or representative of the views of the whole Empire and we start to look at material culture, Domitian certainly looks ok if you're common Roman.
@@conrad4852I'd actually argue that, with the exception of the Dacian war, he was pretty great! One of the few emperors to fix the issue of inflation and prove a competent micromanager. The more I've studied Roman history, the more interesting I find some of the emperors once you read between the lines of the senatorial histories written about them. You end up realising that some of the 'tyrants' (Domitian and Gallienus) are actually ahead of the curb and many of the 'madmen' (Caligula) were actually evil geniuses.
My funniest interaction with a Rome-fanboy was when I brought up the Pax Mongolica and he tried to explain that there was no real peace as the Mongols were always warring someone. I didn't bother continuing after that, nothing was going to top that cognitive dissonance.
Well that's silly since the Pax Romana and the Pax Mongolica are the same exact thing. A superpower expands massively and as a consequense of that it ends up placing vast tracts of land extremely far away from any potential frontile. Given that they are under one power these lands experience a long period of unusual peace. Prior to the superpower they were battlegrounds. After the fall of the superpower they became that once more. As the inhabitant of a small state and a patriot who sees our independence as a good thing i say this without any special reverence for superpowers. It just is what it is.
Totally agree with all of this. One possible addition to your larger point - Rome conquered certain territories such as Gaul, Britain and Dacia for remarkably short term and personal reputation-building rationales and these territories ended up being security nightmares later on when the empire went into decline. Each of those territories were difficult if not impossible to defend and the resources and manpower spent trying to hold onto them impoverished and destabilized the rest of the empire.
I’d agree with Dacia and certainly Britannia, but Gaul was such a big area which was heavily romanised and didn’t see much combat after the time of Augustus until the 3rd century. Do you mean the Germanic provinces on the Rhine?
Thanks! I want to come back to the empire's "border" system and fortifications at a later date to discuss just how difficult it was to hold the territory and keep it all secure.
"Trying to reconstruct population levels in the ancient world is a crude business. ... Even in recent times, credible voices have spoken in favor of peak numbers for the Roman imperial population ranging from ca. 44 million to 100 million. Where there is broad agreement is around the fact that the populations within the empire grew in the 150 years after the death of Augustus (AD 14) and reached their maximal extent on the cusp of the Antonine Plague. (pg 45) Han China is in many ways an appropriate comparandum [to the Roman Empire], but even its population seems never to have matched the Roman imperial apex of ~75 million (in the east, that would wait for the full development of the rice economies and the construction of the great canal systems). There is a more telling contrast. A Chinese writer of the midsecond century lamented the press of peoples in core regions of the eastern empire. “In the central provinces and inner commanderies, cultivated land fills the borders to bursting and one cannot be alone. The population is in the millions and the land is completely used. People are numerous and land scarce.” In the Roman context, such laments are notable for their absence. In the Roman Empire, population growth appears to have been accomplished without sending society spiraling downward in a cycle of diminishing returns. Contemporaries [during the Pax Romana] sang the song of prosperity, not the dirge of grinding impoverishment. For what it is worth (which may well be limited), the articulate classes of the Roman Empire were more preoccupied by general decadence than destabilizing squalor. Maybe our urbane elite was totally insensible to the daily life of the poor. But, it is harder to stare past famine, and we ought to be struck by the broad absence of true subsistence crisis in the Roman world. Food shortages were endemic in the Mediterranean, thanks to its naturally fickle ecology. Unlike the later middle ages, when violent spasms of acute hunger wracked the population, the Romans seem not to have been haunted by the threat of outright mass starvation. The absence of evidence is never probative, but it is suggestive. More important are the various indices reflecting high levels of production, consumption, and well-being in the Roman Empire. We lack proper economic statistics such as those gathered by modern states. So historians in search of Roman growth have often turned to archaeological proxies of economic performance. Shipwrecks, iron smelting, housing stock, public buildings, and even fish salting operations have all been cited as tracers of Roman productivity. They do in sum suggest robust economic performance in the late republic and high empire. And the broad evidence for meat consumption, implied from tens of thousands of sheep, pig, and cow bones, is difficult to square with any picture of a society emaciated because the population had badly overrun its resource base. It is telling that archaeologists are usually the biggest believers in Roman economic development. Still, it can be objected that these indices are crude and less than conclusive, particularly if we are interested in per capita measures. How can we be sure that the archaeological evidence for more stuff is not merely the effect of having more people? Perhaps the most telling answer can be retrieved from the abundant scraps of papyrus preserved from Roman Egypt. The arid climate of the Nile Valley means that, from this province alone, we chance to possess an extraordinary number of public and private documents. These, in turn, afford us the only chronologically resolved series of prices, wages, and rents from the Roman world. Precisely because Egypt was a region subject to net extraction by the imperial center, we can be certain that any patterns we observe are not due to plunder or political rents. The papyri suggest that, far from succumbing to diminishing returns on a massive scale, the Roman economy more than succeeded in absorbing population expansion, to achieve real growth on a per capita basis. Wage growth for truly unskilled laborers-diggers, donkey drivers, dung haulers-outpaced slowly rising prices and rents, right down to the advent of the Antonine Plague. The copious monumental ruins of the Roman Empire’s many cities might also be considered an index of the real wealth of the societies under Roman rule. The extent and nature of ancient urbanism has been the object of spirited disagreement among modern historians. But the conclusion seems increasingly irresistible, that the Roman Empire fostered a truly exceptional level of urbanization. The empire was home to a galaxy of cities-over one thousand of them. At the top, the population of Rome probably surpassed one million residents. Its scale was artificially inflated by the political entitlements of ruling an empire, but only partly. It was also the nexus of the entire economy, a hub of useful activity. Moreover, the urban hierarchy was not overly top-heavy. Alexandria, Antioch, Carthage, and other metropoleis were surely several hundred thousand each. (pg 47-49) .... "[I]t does no discredit to the Romans to admit they had not transcended the basic mechanics of premodern economies. They were, simultaneously, precociously advanced and thoroughly preindustrial. We should not envision premodern economic development as a flat line of bleak subsistence until quickening growth from the Industrial Revolution onward. Rather, the experience of civilization has been one of consequential waves of rise and fall, consolidation and dissolution, with repercussions stretching far beyond a tiny elite squeezing rents from an underclass of indistinct peasants whose condition was more or less equally miserable from time immemorial. The Roman Empire was possibly the broadest and most powerful of these waves, prior to the everlifting crests of modernity. (pg 54)" From Kyle Harper, "The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, & the End of an Empire
@@Colddirector This is my approach as well - I find Rome endlessly intriguing but too much history at the popular level flattens contradictions within the society and equates their power and success with an intrinsic right to rule. I want to look at Romans not just as how they saw themselves but as how they would have been perceived by other societies
@@tribunateSPQR Yes, Rome IS endlessly intriguing & we absolutely should avoid ignoring "equat[ing] their power and success with an intrinsic right to rule" but that is NOT what you have done here in this video. We should neither grovel at the feet of Augustus & Trajan nor ignore the great achievements of the Empire. In this video you are moving from one extreme to another & I hope you self-correct.
I like your emphasis on what "pax" meant to the the majority of the people who lived under roman rule at that time. I think the feature of his rule that Augustus was selling as pax romana boils down to; Before the romans in these regions you have relatively low population broken up into a myriad of clans, or factions. Those factions being led by men of various motives and capabilities, but more often than not ruthless strongmen looking to raid or conquer to prove and increase their own personal power. Compared to a booming urban population with increased access to luxury goods and the latest technologies, where war is a distant concept to most people living hundreds of miles from the boarder.
Nice going into what "Pax" and "Pacify" were. Empires are made and maintained by force of arms. Look throughout history, anywhere. They're not made by being so diplomatically savvy that one's neighbors were so ecstatic that they wanted to join and become part of something larger. There's also the term *"Wars of Empire"* works with this whole thing. Often, once someone gets big enough, diplomacy starts taking more of a back seat and it becomes easier to use violence or the threat of violence to get one's way. The Romans weren't the only ones like this and they definitely are not the last.
In a private school in Brazil, when we studied the pax romana it were presented as a period of few civil wars. The books presented this period as a pacification by wars in the frontiers and by a brutal law within the empire.
Your view of the pax romana as a cope for becoming less successful at war reminds of the popular myth of peaceful Habsburg expansion through marriages. It was a narrative that mainly came to play once the Habsburgs stopped being successful at expansion.
"Even if the collapse of Roman political authority was a neutral or even potentially beneficial experience for the elite stratum at the top of society - and it is not clear that it was, mind you; those elites themselves that write to us certainly did not think so - if it was catastrophically bad for the non-elite population, their experience utterly swamps the elite experience by sheer dint of numbers. ... And... it was catastrophically bad. [W]e can start with another fairly common theory about this period - ‘perhaps the decline in exploitative cities and population causes life to get better.’ This isn’t as crazy as it seems! The Black Death, which we’ve just mentioned, is an obvious (and of course for any medievalist, readily available) analogy. The Black Death may have killed something like a third of the population of medieval Europe in the mid-1300s. Of course that is very bad! But one of the paradoxes of the Black Death is that in the aftermath of it, living conditions for the survivors clearly improved! The population growth of the previous centuries had meant bringing more marginal, less productive land under cultivation to support that population, which had reduced the per-farmer efficiency of agriculture even as total production grew, which had in turn meant that most farmers lived closer to the subsistence line and thus were poorer, their labor less valued. Killing a third of them thus made the labor of the remaining two-thirds much more valuable. Marginal land fell out of production as farmers focused on the best land, which improved production per-farmer (even as total, aggregate production fell) resulting in higher standards of living for the survivors. This is a classic ‘Malthusian’ interaction and the evidence for the period is robust enough that we can be quite sure it happened. ... Instead, to jump to the end, what the evidence - again, here mostly archaeological evidence used in a statistics-driven way - suggests is that what we are seeing is that average, per-capita production declined, resulting in a real decline in living standards including nutrition, which resulted in population decline. That population decline was thus the physical expression of a lot of real misery: starvation perhaps, but in most cases more likely heightened infant and maternal mortality as a result of malnourishment. ... In essence, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire caused the carrying capacity of the Mediterranean World, and especially western Europe, to decline, leading to the population declining to follow in step - which is to be clear, an incredibly bloodless way to describe a period of real, sharp human misery. The evidence for this decline, initially slow in coming, is now quite substantial; Willem Jongman assembles perhaps the most complete set of it in “Gibbon was Right: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Economy” in Crisis and the Roman Empire (2007). Jongman considers evidence for coin minting (through atmospheric lead records contained in ice cores), trade (via dated shipwrecks), meat consumption (via bone assemblages) and basic nutrition (via height calculated through femur length in dated human remains), inter alia and finds the same or similar patterns in each indicator. To take the most direct indicator of nutrition effect son people, mean femur length rises over the early Roman Empire, falls slightly in the late second and early third century, rises again but not quite so high over the fourth century, and then utterly collapses in the fifth." acoup.blog/2022/02/11/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-iii-things/
A great video! I concur that the Pax Romana was very deliberate freedoms taken with the word "peace". I have to correct you on one little factuality, though. Between Hannibal and Arminius, there was this battle and others in the same war, that hade far more causualties: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Arausio
some great points but equally how was ancient society meant to be ran? When your neighbours are equally as barbarous and murderous. If you put any Germanic tribe in the position of the Romans I somehow doubt they would’ve been ‘better’ so to speak. Yes Rome was brutal but at the same time Rome had a complex legal system unparalleled anywhere in the known world and was possibly the only place you had a ‘fair’ chance. I think to put modern morale parameters on an ancient empire is somewhat difficult. Yes there are objective atrocities but these same atrocities were committed everywhere. I really highly doubt any other society at the time would’ve grown in a better manner. I mean look at the various ancient chinese dynasty’s, atrocity upon atrocity. Nevertheless still thoroughly enjoyed the video 😁
The Egyptians kept to themselves, for the most part, throughout their long history. But they still had many internal traditions and ways of running their society that we would no doubt look sideways at today.
i never believed in the pax romana ever since i wrote my thesis in college on the teutoberg forest when i was younger. its almost like "duh" level to me, but people go hard about defending the pax romana lol.
The Roman Empire had forms of public programs and safety nets. Cities that faced natural disasters were often exempted from taxes, received monetary assistance from the empire, and then there was the grain dole. Looking at the sophistication of the era, I really don't think most Romans were one bad harvest away from starvation. It'd just be too expensive to lose that many people, especially when other parts of the state may have been doing well at the same time. I think there are good odds that there may have been a form of the grain dole or social safety nets for other parts of the empire when they were doing more poorly than the rest of it too.
I know for a fact emperors like Vespasian made it customary to wave taxes in any areas beset by natural disasters. I don't know if they sent aid though.
I think it is clear what pax romana when compared with pax mongolica,britannica and americana. Was there peace? Relatively, mostly in Europe was there prosperity? Not really, not exceptionally so Did commerce flourish?That is probably the strongest definition, since a unified political entity controlling trade is what people mean by Pax mongolica, for example, and American might is and British might was maintained as the upholders of trade guarded by the respected county's fleet
Sounds a lot like America right now: We haven't been at 'war' since 1945, but have been in a near constant state of conflict to our present day. I look forward to the publishing of "The Rise and Fall of the American Empire". Granted, I'll be long dead by then, but it's still a small comfort.
@@DreadBirate You are correct! and Also deeply incorrect because he is ignoring the reality of what the empire meant for the masses (yes, he pretends that that is what he cares about, rather than the elites only, but he's only considering elite sources & ignoring the massive, MASSIVE amount of non-elite data we have at this point.)
It had never occurred to me in all these years as a history buff to even consider the question as to whether there really was a roman peace. But to merely see the question raised and the answer is self evident. of course not ALL empires are evil, being plunder murder and rapine. Thanks for raising a question i had never considered
Thanks! Glad you found it thought provoking, that's the goal here - to challenge assumptions about the ancient world and to help people understand the exploitation inherent in ancient societies by invoking modern parallels
@@tribunateSPQR This is indeed a noble goal. However, ignoring the truth while seeking a noble goal is neither useful toward said goal nor admirable. The case for the Pax Romana cannot be made by looking at elite sources only--whose sources can be quite biased--but by looking at the enormous wealth of material culture that archaeologists have uncovered which reveal that that Pax Romana oversaw a huge population increase of the areas within the Roman Empire with higher life-expectancy & all around better material conditions of life compared before & after it.
@@ParkerRobertson-t8m to be clear, by "within the Empire" I am not talking about the city of Rome alone or even the province of Italy alone, I am talking about southern France & central Turkey as well Greece & Morocco. I actually think your point leads to an interesting one. How many wars has the US had in the 20th century? By Congressional declarations of war, only two. By United Nations General Assembly & United Nations Security Council sanctioned use of military force, three (none of which are identical to the two Congressional declarations of war). How we define war & how we define peace are important and contested. That said, I definitely think we should think about the contrast in material terms rather than legal terms, but by any analytically useful materialist definition of peace vs war, the Pax Romana was a real phenomenon across the Imperium that meaningfully contrasts with time periods in these regions of Europe, North Africa, & western Asia before & after it as well other regions of the world at the same time.
Wasn't most judicial administration left in local hands with the exception of Roman citizens? I'm not sure brutal Roman justice applies until citizenship was extended across the empire - prior to that most people in the empire were handled with local justice, and ironically one of the perks of Roman citizenship was the ability to call upon Roman juris prudence. Or maybe I'm misremembering. I welcome clarification.
A counterpoint to all of this would be going back to a comment on a recent video; perhaps our critique of the peace of Rome in this era is only possible because we are more individualistic. Yes, life might have been precarious for the majority of individuals, but the stability of the society itself was not. One bad harvest might cause my family to starve, but it would not cause the social order I am a part of to collapse. My concern for individual justice and equity is predicated on a level of communal stability which I am conditioned to consider to be the baseline that is sometimes deviated from in times of crisis. But for those in the ancient world (and for much of the modern as well) this sort of stability was an aberration. The main trouble I have with the idea of the Pax Romana is how the era is viewed nostalgically, as if it would be desirable to return to such a social or political reality. This is, to my mind, both naive and ridiculous. But the phrase itself still has utility, though perhaps that is because to me it implies that the state of affairs is not unalloyed or unqualified peace but peace as per the Roman usage (i.e. a stability built on violent conquest and subjugation). To my mind the notion of a "Roman Peace" has somewhat sinister undertones. But that might just be a me thing.
This is a good point, and I don't take issue with the assertion that Roman society as a whole was stronger and more stable during this period than any other. However (and this feeds into your second point) we wanted to drive home that this peace was essentially bought on credit through the unsustainable looting of provinces and exploitation of slaves. Augustus stabilized the empire but didn't address the long term rot at its core. I fully agree that Pax Romana has a threatening undertone to it, its hard not to read it in any other way than the willingness of an empire to make deserts so it can claim peace.
Augustus didn't close the doors to the Temple of Janus because Rome was at peace, he closed the doors because Janus was shouting "you're a bloody liar and you know it, mate!"
In the entire history of the Republic pre-Augustus, the doors were closed for one year. No joke. The idea that the Principate from the ascension of Augustus to the ascension of Marcus Aurelius didn’t have big moments of relative peace is rather false. This video is profoundly dishonest. (That said, your joke here is great!)
The Pax Romana is just the same western chauvinism and indifference to life outside the imperial core that was central to the British Empire and the US empire.
If your analogy is correct, then you have just made the most powerful argument in favor of the Pax Americana that I have ever encountered. This video is, quite frankly, TERRIBLE historical analysis. Despite a purported concern about the masses rather than merely the elites, there is only analysis of the writings of the elites rather than a look the HUGE wealth of material evidence that we have for the Pax Romana being a reality for the masses of the empire. If the Pax Romana really is equivalent to reality of the power & chauvinism of the contemporary west, then I must confess that I have severely misunderstood & undervalued contemporary western chauvinism & the reach of the US empire.
I just want to say that, as someone who occupies something akin to the exact opposite of your stated politics, I greatly appreciate your channel for that exact reason. The insight into the mind of someone so radically different from myself, through the medium of a topic I’ve had a lifelong passion for, really is helpful in understanding the “other side”.
If Rome did not crawl, America would have never ran. The fundamentals of our republic come from Roman institutions. We, however, have enacted their Ideal that all men should participate in civic duties. Right now if you are in America or in most democratic nations you have every right to engage with your government, run for office, have fair represented, and can freely petition for change. If we didn’t have ancient people questioning their social hierarchies we would have never reached a time now where merit reigns supreme.
appreciate seeing this sentiment whenever i see it. I ended up largely left-wing after heavily subscribing to right-wing and alt-right points for a large part of my life, and nothing is more infuriating than seeing someone else (wherever they lay on the political compass) completely refuse to listen to anyone they deem to be on "the other side". could go on and on about how damaging and stupid i think this practice of glorifying political orthodoxy is, but that's not what this comment is about. thank you for restoring a little bit of my faith in humanity, hope you have a good day
@uwu_smeg Maybe that’ll be the end of my journey as well, time will tell. I’m pretty much where you once were, which is to say heavily entrenched in right wing politics, but I’m beginning to be burned out by how much they remind me of the leftists we’re supposedly against, like photo negatives of each other. We identify the same problems, ascribe different causes to those problems, and go about wishing to solve them in different ways, but the thought processes and solutions behind them are in direct opposition. It’s infinitely frustrating. Any attempt to point this out to either side gets you mocked and derided in the most smug and condescending ways possible.
M. Hudson's Book forgive them their debts goes into this. Elites so exploitative region around Rome was depopulated as people fled predatory, expropriative lending
I am not particularly interested in the history of rome. But this channel, the intro music, the narration, the images used and above all the political analysis is absolutely magnificent. Thank you so much.
Thank you - this is one of the nicest comments we've ever received! It means so much to hear this from someone who isn't super interested in history and I'm glad the narration works because even now I still second guess it (I haven't yet built up a tolerance to the natural aversion to hearing the sound of my voice)
Great video. I think a video which has something to say and not just facts to state is something properly special. While I mostly agree with this after watching the video I think that while this was a blood-soaked era that harmed Rome and it's people relatively speaking it appears golden compared to some other times before and after.
Love the detail and grounded approach in facts, while sharply critiquing the deep motivations, agenda, and contradictions of the ruling political elites, insidiously undoing the Republic and Empire of the Romans. This channel is great in exploring the historical minutiae of Roman history while clarifying the larger overarching themes of this civilization. Really humanizes the Romans without putting them on a pedestal or caricaturing in a two-dimensional manner. Loving this channel ❤️
🤓 Ha! Funny enough "Janus" or "Llanos" are almost the same Concept in different context, the Roman god of course "Janus" and "Llanos" in Spanish, meaning "Plaines" or the "Steppe" which in reality means the same, though in Geographical context, since the "Great Steppe" is related to Mongols, thus, Asia and Europe, Barbarians then Civilization, from Nomad Tribes, agricultural communities, linked by warrior horsemen, hunters and tribal, free but united, an uncivilized Civilization, connecting Civilizations, and Expanding Civilizations, from nothing to the Greatest Empire the world had ever seen that of the Mongols, territory wise that is, came out of no where to everywhere in no time, and just as it came to be it faded into history, becoming the pathfinders and trading route creators that would facilitate Russian expansion from the European edges to the Asian Pacific, now with China, the whole charade is becoming a humongous Confederation of sorts, bringing Asia to Europe and viceversa...So, the Great Steppe is like Janus, perhaps originating, or influenced by the migration of other peoples that moved from Asia to Europe, from small communities, into then making up part of the Truest Greatest Empire that it is a continuation of another Civilization, the Greek Civilization, which was perhaps how it became influential in the Roman Civilization, and what is now "Occident" and which includes Russia as a European Christian Nation, part of the same Civilization, and called "East" within "Occident" since the Far East would be Asia, and all are conceptually the same transitional points which describe "Janus" and "Llanos"...
Great video. It is similar to the narrative that the long 19th century was a peaceful time, when Europeans powers were in near constant colonial wars. Not to mention the several European wars in the period. It was relatively more peaceful in Europe specifically than during the Napoleonic or world wars, but not compared to the modern day, even with modern conflicts. How could the 19th century be an era of peace if it is the era of colonialism, the American civil war, and the Taiping rebellion (and other internal conflicts in China).
Because in the 19th century, there wasn't any "great power war." War is a byproduct of humanity. All civilizations and peoples have it. Those that are vilified for empire were just smarter and luckier than everyone else. Not more violent
The thing is that I think most people have are hard time accepting how complex and multifaceted empires truly are. Was Rome a genocidal, authoritarian, expansionist power fueled by greed and lust for conquest that often oppressed the people living under it or was it a comparatively enlightened and advanced society that spread literacy, culture, and economic growth across its territory? Yes. I think it's foolish to both dismiss the Roman achievements and Roman atrocities. Also, I think it's easier to accept the cruelty of the Romans because Ancient world was so cruel to begin with. The Romans were hardly more vicious than most civilizations of the time period; if you're looking for a clear "good guy" from early civilizations until maybe the High Middle Ages; you're not going to find many. Hell, it's hard to find any today. And, yes, you can say what I'm saying is apologia (which, to an extent, it is), but you still have to look at people as products of their place and time instead of holding them to hypothetical perfection.
The Jews didn't rebellion in Palestine. The name of the land those days was Judea. Andrianus changed its name to Syria-Palestine after the last revolt.
I’ve always had an issue with the idea that there was an certain period of time that can be deemed a “pax romana” but I’d say this affront is minor in comparison to the supposed existence of a “pax Mongolica”, which is need not even elaborate on if you know anything about the American education system and the reality of the Mongols
And you would be wrong: "Trying to reconstruct population levels in the ancient world is a crude business. ... Even in recent times, credible voices have spoken in favor of peak numbers for the Roman imperial population ranging from ca. 44 million to 100 million. Where there is broad agreement is around the fact that the populations within the empire grew in the 150 years after the death of Augustus (AD 14) and reached their maximal extent on the cusp of the Antonine Plague. (pg 45) Han China is in many ways an appropriate comparandum [to the Roman Empire], but even its population seems never to have matched the Roman imperial apex of ~75 million (in the east, that would wait for the full development of the rice economies and the construction of the great canal systems). There is a more telling contrast. A Chinese writer of the midsecond century lamented the press of peoples in core regions of the eastern empire. “In the central provinces and inner commanderies, cultivated land fills the borders to bursting and one cannot be alone. The population is in the millions and the land is completely used. People are numerous and land scarce.” In the Roman context, such laments are notable for their absence. In the Roman Empire, population growth appears to have been accomplished without sending society spiraling downward in a cycle of diminishing returns. Contemporaries [during the Pax Romana] sang the song of prosperity, not the dirge of grinding impoverishment. For what it is worth (which may well be limited), the articulate classes of the Roman Empire were more preoccupied by general decadence than destabilizing squalor. Maybe our urbane elite was totally insensible to the daily life of the poor. But, it is harder to stare past famine, and we ought to be struck by the broad absence of true subsistence crisis in the Roman world. Food shortages were endemic in the Mediterranean, thanks to its naturally fickle ecology. Unlike the later middle ages, when violent spasms of acute hunger wracked the population, the Romans seem not to have been haunted by the threat of outright mass starvation. The absence of evidence is never probative, but it is suggestive. More important are the various indices reflecting high levels of production, consumption, and well-being in the Roman Empire. We lack proper economic statistics such as those gathered by modern states. So historians in search of Roman growth have often turned to archaeological proxies of economic performance. Shipwrecks, iron smelting, housing stock, public buildings, and even fish salting operations have all been cited as tracers of Roman productivity. They do in sum suggest robust economic performance in the late republic and high empire. And the broad evidence for meat consumption, implied from tens of thousands of sheep, pig, and cow bones, is difficult to square with any picture of a society emaciated because the population had badly overrun its resource base. It is telling that archaeologists are usually the biggest believers in Roman economic development. Still, it can be objected that these indices are crude and less than conclusive, particularly if we are interested in per capita measures. How can we be sure that the archaeological evidence for more stuff is not merely the effect of having more people? Perhaps the most telling answer can be retrieved from the abundant scraps of papyrus preserved from Roman Egypt. The arid climate of the Nile Valley means that, from this province alone, we chance to possess an extraordinary number of public and private documents. These, in turn, afford us the only chronologically resolved series of prices, wages, and rents from the Roman world. Precisely because Egypt was a region subject to net extraction by the imperial center, we can be certain that any patterns we observe are not due to plunder or political rents. The papyri suggest that, far from succumbing to diminishing returns on a massive scale, the Roman economy more than succeeded in absorbing population expansion, to achieve real growth on a per capita basis. Wage growth for truly unskilled laborers-diggers, donkey drivers, dung haulers-outpaced slowly rising prices and rents, right down to the advent of the Antonine Plague. The copious monumental ruins of the Roman Empire’s many cities might also be considered an index of the real wealth of the societies under Roman rule. The extent and nature of ancient urbanism has been the object of spirited disagreement among modern historians. But the conclusion seems increasingly irresistible, that the Roman Empire fostered a truly exceptional level of urbanization. The empire was home to a galaxy of cities-over one thousand of them. At the top, the population of Rome probably surpassed one million residents. Its scale was artificially inflated by the political entitlements of ruling an empire, but only partly. It was also the nexus of the entire economy, a hub of useful activity. Moreover, the urban hierarchy was not overly top-heavy. Alexandria, Antioch, Carthage, and other metropoleis were surely several hundred thousand each. (pg 47-49) .... "[I]t does no discredit to the Romans to admit they had not transcended the basic mechanics of premodern economies. They were, simultaneously, precociously advanced and thoroughly preindustrial. We should not envision premodern economic development as a flat line of bleak subsistence until quickening growth from the Industrial Revolution onward. Rather, the experience of civilization has been one of consequential waves of rise and fall, consolidation and dissolution, with repercussions stretching far beyond a tiny elite squeezing rents from an underclass of indistinct peasants whose condition was more or less equally miserable from time immemorial. The Roman Empire was possibly the broadest and most powerful of these waves, prior to the everlifting crests of modernity. (pg 54)" From Kyle Harper, "The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, & the End of an Empire
Two good questions would be like : Were the lives of the conquered peoples in the annexed provinces more peaceful and prosperous before Roman administration? and Were their lives better or worse after the Pax Romana expired in the 3rd century crisis? Those questions can be answered with an analysis of each province individually. Some provinces were definitely more peaceful or prosperous than others and it can be argued that a form of Pax Romana clearly existed in several provinces but others didn't experience the benefits of Roman rule or were actively harmed by it. I don't like absolutes, since it only simplifies what is obviously a complex topic and typically, with real life history, I think the answer often lies in the middle.
@@nevisysbryd7450 Quite the opposite! The Pax Romana is a meaningful concept because it was something that existed for non-elites in a way that made their lives significantly better. This is precisely why this such a bad video. He's absolutely right that we need to look at the lives of non-elites but despite the enormous wealth of archaeological evidence we have about non-elites he's only looking the few surviving elite writings we have. I've provided some links and quotations from historians elsewhere if you're curious about why I think this video is wrongheaded.
@@conrad4852 The population of much of the rest of Europe declined massively during the expansion of the Roman empire and many of them began to start recovering only late into the Pax Romana with most never coming close to prior numbers until well into the Middle Ages. This is also notwithstanding that Rome had utterly ballooned in population size prior to this, vastly eclipsing previous population sizes (much like Macedonia did around the time of its conquest); those numbers are not representative of a natural, normal population size but the effects of a long set of relatively stable conditions for which the Romans were not entirely responsible (eg the Roman Warm Period). Economic prosperity does not equate to peace. The regular and systematic use of coercion under hegomonic emperial control is not ceased but centralized into more covert means of coercion via such means as demographic replacement or less measurable opportunity cost in population sizes outside of Rome. I suggest Brave New World for a hyperbolic example (with plenty of milder real world comparable examples) of organized violence combined with economic 'prosperity', or the modern United States. Much like the population size, the economic situation was also in part predicated on territorial expansion and wealth extraction, and, no, wages were still slightly above subsistence for the vast majority of the population at pretty much every point in the Roman Empire outside of bubbles of prosperity through conquest or welfare programs. The alleged economic prosperity was partially real and partially multiple compounding bubbles where the subsequent collapse post-bubble collapse was, in many regards, more representative of the sustainable logistical reality. The Black Death did not 'improve' conditions in Europe; it strengthened the negotiating position of a significant subset of the remaining population (hardly benefiting the 30-50%, possibly 60% through secondary effects, who died) and causing a real estate bubble and helping to set the stage for a marginal long-term increase in the skilled labor and borgeoise clusters, especially when hegomonic power was disrupted by the Reformation. This video does indeed profoundly underestimate the material reality that there was something to the Pax Romana. That something was not peace.
Sadly, this indeed the attitude of this video. Pay no attention to material reality, only pay attention to the curtain of elite writings rather than what is behind the curtain which we can & indeed have ascertained via decades & decades of archaeology. We can indeed look behind that curtain and historians have... but this video has chosen to look at the curtain only.
Personally I wouldn’t describe the pax Romona as an era of peace but as an era of Roman might and superiority and of competent great emperors . Obviously not justifying the horrible things the Romans did but just making that point in fact I see a similarity between the Pax Romana to the Pax Americana which is around 1945-1991 although I consider it to last till 2001 anyways it’s consider an era of American peace and strength when that’s far from reality there was segregation and the civil rights movement but also Americas disastrous war in Vietnam and the Korean War and in Africa ,Latin America the Cuban missile crisis . In short it wasn’t an era of peace .
Well elites where always better off than poor classes but that divide between rich and poor was even more present in the late republic. It got so bad that there where plenty of people that didn't even own the land and that is how Marius, Cesar and other leaders during the late republic would fill their army and get support. At least during the early empire there was some sort of welfare to elevate these problems and Octavian gave lot of land to Cesars veterans as a type of pension so that elevated problem a little bit more. So I would say that living standard for the average citizen improved a little compared to what it was before. As for peace witch pax romna is all about there was peace compared to previous period of civil wars or even previous period where Rome was fighting great powers of Mediteranian basen. But still ther where some wars on the edge of the empire against Germanic tribes or in the east against Parthia. Still average person in Italy probably would not have cared about that at all and they wouldn't be affected. You also talk about relative good and say that somehow debate has shifted from absolute good to relative good. That is nonsense. Even you admit that there was no one arguing that pax romana men't complete peace and stability but that it is relative to other periods. If you want an absolute good you should go to afterlife if you believe in one. There you will have absolute good but on this planet best we can do is relative good. But I doo agree with that Celtic chieftain at 7:28 He is absolutely right to say everything he said. But that is his perspective of a leader of the people who are being attacked by Romans after Romans already took over the entire island. If that didn't terrify you as a Celt on the Island then you are either a traitor or a fool. But still from the perspective of average person in Italy none of this even existed. I guess it can be compared to How average Americans see this period of time that we live in vs how someone from Syria, Lybia, Afganistan or any other country that got invaded by USA sees this period of time. So again we go back to relativism. Pax romana is just a prespective of Average person living in Italy and not all encompassing theory of the world. As such it cant be debunked with a different perspective of a person living in Britain. Both opinions are equally valid given the knowledge and self interests of people holding them. Also whoever says that conquered people benefited from being conquered is a fool. Obviously people that are being attacked had every possible reason to defend them selves from Rome. Same can be said for the countries attacked by the USA today. I guess the bottom line is what is good for one state is bad for the other one.
Do you believe there was a Pax Romana?
Rome was at peace internally and to the Roman sources that was good enough
No!!!
Your explanation of Pax, not 100% our modern definition of peace really opens my eyes. So really we should call it the Roman pacification.
For some maybe. But almost certainly not for most.
If there was a Bronze Age, an Iron Age, a Renaissance, an Enlightenment, an Industrial Revolution, a Great Depression, or a Cold War, there was a Pax Romana.
“I think you’re confusing peace with quiet”
Well said - that mindset is unfortunately still pervasive.
@@tribunateSPQRlike MLK's concept of negative and positive peace
One of my favourite movie lines from an aggressively average movie
I love Roman history but objectively think the Roman empire left a deep impression on later European states. It is a curse on which everyone in Europe tried at some point in history to be the next Roman empire. It is ultimately the glorification of Imperialism and violence which we like to glorify as the golden age of mankind.
I have had this thought for so long, thank you for finally verbalizing it…. Just like the Han empire left a huge mark on Chinese civilization, the Roman Empire left a huge mark on the various nations and civilizations that have risen in its shadow.
The alternative is not great; fractioned kingdoms in perpetual war, to be easily conquered by neighbouring continental powers, and with no resources for great technological advancements.
Some of the tools of empire are distasteful to our modern values, but they did ultimately bring people together under common goals to the advancement of society, instead of bickering and fighting one another, at times when no other political tools would have done the same.
We should take in what lessons we can, about the good and the bad, and avoid both glorification or villanization.
Let's not judge the dead too emotionally. It is history, after all.
@@BernasLL the alternative? as if there is only one...
@@AlexaSmithhuman nature doesn’t allow for Utopia. What other alternatives could exist?
Well said, the prestige of Rome (itself a misnomer obviously) has often been hijacked to advance brutal causes and oppression even into the modern era.
Our next video will even cover that subject in greater detail!
The last line about cultivating gardens rather than creating desserts was a perfect line to end the video. I'm happy im a member with this great content🍻
Thank you - and thanks for the support that makes this channel possible!
Mic drop moment
"You Romans are to blame for this; for you send as guardians of your flocks, not dogs or shepherds, but wolves."
~Bato the Daesitiate
Great quote and very incisive. I wanted to include this but felt I had gone overboard in source quotations already. I'll be sure to include it in a later video.
I would really enjoy a dive into how it is Rome managed to slip into monarchy while fundamentally upholding Republican values to the extent that they did. how did this dissonance exist in the minds of the common people? did it even represent a massive change from how it had been in the Republican period?
That's a great idea for a future topic! I feel that it is very difficult t o discern the opinions of the average Roman on this because of the elite bias in our sources but I'll do a bit more digging to see what I can uncover.
But there is plenty to say about Virgil and the Aeneid on this so if I can't find the perspective of the average Pleb then I'll focus on him
Well from what I've read, in the minds of most people the role of 'emperor' was never official, and was just a public office. If you messed up, then you could be removed by the people, the Senate, or the army. The emperor was still seen as accountable to the republic and the people.
The reason why the Romans never developed any official succession laws for the emperors was because it would heavily lean into monarchism then. As a result, emperors came to power by popular support via the army, the Senate, or the people.
This continued on into the Byzantine era, where the medieval writers referred to their state as the 'Roman politeia' (Roman republic), and their leaders were still seen as accountable to the public.
The empire did go through a period from the Severans onwards where the military overshadowed the role of the people and the Senate in imperial politics, but that ended in the east by the 5th century but continued in the west until it's demise.
@@onemoreminute0543 Byzantium was a bavkwards monarchical dictatorship. The son of the emperor became the next.
@@genovayork2468 No, that's not true. The East Roman empire was as politically fluid in terms of succesion as the empire of old (just look at the Twenty Years Anarchy or the aftermath of the Macedonian dynasty, where 3 different families took power after deposing one another. Or how a frickin finance minister deposed Irene)
An emperor could only vouch for their own flesh and blood to be made the next emperor if they were popular enough themselves. Otherwise you had instances such as the death of Anastasius where he left no heir, which led to civil servant Justin I buying the office in an election.
@@onemoreminute0543 Wow, so you say in a dynasty change the dynasty changes! Doesn't change the fact those were dynasties, boso.
I love the use of primary sources - even though the quotes are long they really help set the tone
yes - this is what makes the channel unique imo. Thoroughness over mass appeal
Glad to hear that - I kind of felt like I went overboard on this one but thought each was so good that I didn't want to cut any
This is the PROBLEM with this video. We have SO few primary sources. The question of whether or not the Pax Romana was real cannot be ascertained by merely looking the few written records we have written by elites many of whom in the early Principate were salty about transformation from oligarchic Republic to monarchy. Without looking at physical evidence we cannot make claims about reality the way this video is doing. It's doing very bad history.
@@conrad4852Its doing very bad history to use primary sources? What, should we be using written accounts made by historians that used the same sources or made things up centuries later? Or are you saying that we cant derive anything of value from what we do have? I think you just dont understand how history is done.
@@SlickMcClick no, not at all. Nor should we 100% trust Julius Caesar, or Tacitus, or Cassius Dio or other elite Roman historians without interrogating them.
I'm talking about the enormous evidence of archaeology.
"over the past half-century or so, it has so happened that effectively all ancient historians have had to develop a strong grasp of archaeological data; we don’t all necessarily learn to do the excavation work, of course (that’s what archaeologists do), but pretty much all ancient historians at this point are going to have to be able to read a site or artifact report as well as have a good theoretical grasp of what kinds of questions archaeology can be used to answer and how it can be used to answer those questions. This happened in ancient history in particular for two reasons: first, archaeology was a field effectively invented to better understand the classical past (which is now of course also used to understand the past in other periods and places) so it has been at work the longest there, but also because the sources for ancient history are so few. As I like to say, the problem for the modern historian is taking a sip of meaning from the fire-hose of evidence they have; but the challenge of an ancient historian is finding water in the desert. Archaeological data was a sudden, working well in that desert and much of the last two decades of ancient history has been built around it."
"Even if the collapse of Roman political authority was a neutral or even potentially beneficial experience for the elite stratum at the top of society - and it is not clear that it was, mind you; those elites themselves that write to us certainly did not think so - if it was catastrophically bad for the non-elite population, their experience utterly swamps the elite experience by sheer dint of numbers. ... And... it was catastrophically bad.
[W]e can start with another fairly common theory about this period - ‘perhaps the decline in exploitative cities and population causes life to get better.’ This isn’t as crazy as it seems! The Black Death, which we’ve just mentioned, is an obvious (and of course for any medievalist, readily available) analogy. The Black Death may have killed something like a third of the population of medieval Europe in the mid-1300s. Of course that is very bad! But one of the paradoxes of the Black Death is that in the aftermath of it, living conditions for the survivors clearly improved! The population growth of the previous centuries had meant bringing more marginal, less productive land under cultivation to support that population, which had reduced the per-farmer efficiency of agriculture even as total production grew, which had in turn meant that most farmers lived closer to the subsistence line and thus were poorer, their labor less valued. Killing a third of them thus made the labor of the remaining two-thirds much more valuable. Marginal land fell out of production as farmers focused on the best land, which improved production per-farmer (even as total, aggregate production fell) resulting in higher standards of living for the survivors. This is a classic ‘Malthusian’ interaction and the evidence for the period is robust enough that we can be quite sure it happened.
...
Instead, to jump to the end, what the evidence - again, here mostly archaeological evidence used in a statistics-driven way - suggests is that what we are seeing is that average, per-capita production declined, resulting in a real decline in living standards including nutrition, which resulted in population decline. That population decline was thus the physical expression of a lot of real misery: starvation perhaps, but in most cases more likely heightened infant and maternal mortality as a result of malnourishment. ... In essence, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire caused the carrying capacity of the Mediterranean World, and especially western Europe, to decline, leading to the population declining to follow in step - which is to be clear, an incredibly bloodless way to describe a period of real, sharp human misery.
The evidence for this decline, initially slow in coming, is now quite substantial; Willem Jongman assembles perhaps the most complete set of it in “Gibbon was Right: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Economy” in Crisis and the Roman Empire (2007). Jongman considers evidence for coin minting (through atmospheric lead records contained in ice cores), trade (via dated shipwrecks), meat consumption (via bone assemblages) and basic nutrition (via height calculated through femur length in dated human remains), inter alia and finds the same or similar patterns in each indicator. To take the most direct indicator of nutrition effect son people, mean femur length rises over the early Roman Empire, falls slightly in the late second and early third century, rises again but not quite so high over the fourth century, and then utterly collapses in the fifth."
acoup.blog/2022/02/11/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-iii-things/
OK but qualitatively the borders of the Roman Empire didn't ACTUALLY change that much between 27 BCE and 180 CE, did they? Especially when compared to the two centuries prior to this? That was my sense of what the term "Pax Romana" actually indicated: the empire reached approximately its maximum realistic span during the period of the Late Republic, so that senatorial warlordism increasingly found its outlet in civil wars against the Roman state itself; kind of like how the division of the Earth among the European colonial powers in the 19th century led to the world wars of the 20th. And, like, obviously the Earth hasn't been at peace since 1945, but just as obviously if and when that hypothetical event that we call "World War III" actually happens this will turn into a completely different world very, very quickly. So I think Augustus really did solve a world-historical problem of a kind: late-Republican senatorial warlordism needed to end and it actually did end, even granted that the total failure of the Romans to work out any concept of dynastic legitimacy did guarantee the eventual emergence of a new kind of warlordism.
Yeah, new conquered provinces like Britannia and Dacia were generally the exception, not the standard, to expansion.
Its a Bit that moralist hate imperialism and hate the Roman Empire but Love the Republic that was constantly beefed with every Nation that looked at them funny
@@laisphinto6372 It's a complex affair as the Republic was empire before it became an empire, and was arguably still a republic after it became an empire.
Nah, actually, you know what, I talk myself out of it; Pax Romana was fake. It's not actually a solved problem; they only projected that problem into the shape of a single person and then literally just got lucky 5 or 6 times in a row with their total lack of a succession procedure. If any of those emperors had actually succeeded in fully burying the last embers of republicanism by implementing a real succession law, then it would have made sense to talk about Pax Romana, but they didn't. The civil wars before Augustus and those after Marcus Aurelius were fundamentally the same thing.
@@Morilore From Augustus' victory at Actium 31BCE until the assassination of Pertinax in AD193, there was a single Roman civil war in AD69. Neither the death of Marcus Aurelius nor the assassination of his son Commodus led to a civil war. It was only the assassination of Pertinax & the subsequent horrific behavior of the assassins that led to civil war for first time in 124 years.
From 31BC to AD 193 that's 226 years with only a single civil war! I'd call that pretty good! It wasn't getting lucky 5 or 6 times, it was getting lucky 11 times--there were 11 peaceful transitions of power from 31BC to AD193 plus a 12th that was violent in AD69.
The "total failure of the Romans to work out any concept of dynastic legitimacy did guarantee the eventual emergence of a new kind of warlordism" I'm actually less comfortable with this pronouncement because once dynastic legitimacy was far more firmly entrenched in Roman culture & institutions in the late 300s & continued to be so in the 400s, 500s, 600s, & 700s, it's not like the Romans weren't still having civil wars in the 500s & 700s.
Very interesting material. I'm impressed.
•••
The main takeaway for me here is:
to the Romans, "Peace" was not the absence of conflict, but rather the fact that Rome was able to stay on top in a relatively stable fashion.
Peace for me but not for thee.
There remains a desire to conflate prosperity with peace when these two states are in reality very different
@@tribunateSPQR Peace & prosperity are indeed separate concepts that can indeed be separated out analytically & sometimes do indeed break apart in real history. However, they do not with respect to the Pax Romana & your failure to look beyond elite sources to look at the material lives of millions of non-elite people across the empire is precisely why I dislike this video so much. We have more than enough material evidence to attempt answer to the question 'Was the Pax Romana real and if so, in what ways?' and yet you are focused on the writings of the elites.
“Talk about the glory of Rome!”
*It was violent and terrible for most everyone*
“No not like that”
though I love Roman history the critique is absolutly based .. this channel ... criminally underestimated and unknown!
Thanks! Appreciate the comment not just for your kind words but because every little show of support is a boost for the algorithm
To be fair, Rome before Augustus was a mess.
Every generetion of romans knew or fought wars.
I mean Rome got the punic wars, after that multiple wars with the Greek kingdoms, and then the social wars and then the servil wars and then the civil wars. And all those wars contributed heavily in the destruction of the republica.
So from romans pov it was a mess. So when Augustus came into power, he fixed all of that and it worked until the thrid century crisis.
So from a roman point of view, they lived a way better life in the empire than in the republica.
The pax romana was a pax for the romans and not for others people.
So we cannot use this term literally we have to take it within some context.
I think most romans of the time would have agreed with that assessment. Augustus and his successor princeps gave them order, consistency, and stability, even if it did come at the expense of political freedom (though, to be fair, the Romans of the Republic era didn't enjoy "freedom", as we would understand it, either). Most people will usually choose order over freedom, and being cared for, over caring for themselves. The Pax Romana delivered that to them for roughly two centuries.
This one goes well with the caeser mass murder video. Great content as always!
Thanks - it's a reminder that just as the roman view of liberty was freedom to do as one pleased to anyone, peace was only viewed as the stability and security of the Roman community itself - regardless of what was happening abroad
this was a well needed video as I feel that virtually all content discussing pax romana seem to completely buy into it. your videos are always more grounded and challenge us to think differently than what the propaganda filled history books tell us. i say this as a diehard lover of rome. thank you for putting out such great content!
I have issues with this video. Yes, it wasnt some age when humanity was at its peak(such age never existed) but it is true that compered to other time periods, it was actually suprisingly peaceful and tranquil. In the 1st century, Rome did fight wars, but most of them were on the fringes of empire, in Germania, Britania or Parthia. Regions such as Italy, Spain, N. Africa(Tunis), Grerce or Egypt experienced unpressidented levels of peace and prosperity, unlike in previous centuries where they were rocked by various wars, raids, devastations and invasions. This relative stability allowed heartlands of the empire to prosper, with life standarts being shown to be much better than in previous centuries and population heavily increasing in these areas.
It's not just the heartland that prospered, even places like Britain benefited from the expanded trade network they were part of. The collapse of Rome was devastating and caused populations to collapse (and also led to a massive rise in violence as the barbarian invasions show).
You should probably listen to the video again.
@@joshuab2926 - you should probably read other sources on the topic and not just believe what one youtuber says
@@WorthlessWinner then please do point me towards the sources that make the claim that the peasant farmers, slaves, and non-citizens that made up a sizeable portion of the Roman population had improvement in their quality of life.
@@joshuab2926 - basically any economic history of the period will show this. "The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization" is a good source. The massive decline in living standards that the end of the pax romana caused, is evidence that the pax improved living standards.
Really great stuff - loved the references to Orwell
thanks!
Well, I for one am more on the camp of the existence of a Pax Augusta, as the Roman political system was stabilized, various legions were disbanded and an standing regular army was established.
Not having an army crossing the Rubicon every few years, or random commanders raising levies from your town every month, must have had a boost on even the lowest plebeian's quality of life. Even more after the Conquest of Egypt guaranteed the expansion of the Dole.
Of course, it was peace for Romans. Not other peoples tho.
I do believe that the average Roman in Italy probably benefitted from the 80 year pause in civil wars, but as you mentioned - ultimately the "peace" was built on the continued exploitation of the provincials, not to mention the continued importation and abuse of the enslaved. So while the pax romana was great for a Roman citizen, the goal of the video was to push back on the notion that it was a singular geopolitical accomplishment or something that modern states should attempt to recreate. I do like your idea of separating out the Pax Augusta as a separate construct than the more broad Pax Romana.
Thanks for the feedback and support
@@tribunateSPQR yeah, I get your point, and very much agree with your argument on the application of the concept in modern day geopolitics. Pretty much any argument on geopolitical paradigms from antiquity is pure bullshitting.
And while I believe that a state's primary objective must be the well-being of its citizens, that doesnt excuse the perpetuation of human suffering. Or the disenfranchisement
I like your videos but I don’t necessarily agree with this one.
Especially in hindsight, Rome’s rule during the Pax Romana lead to many benefits even if it came with additional hardships at the time. These areas enjoyed new and very long lasting benefits in infrastructure, legal systems, and trade. Similar to the way Napoleon ended serfdom in many areas of Europe. It may have hurt at the time, but was beneficial in the end.
Also, I don’t agree with the depiction of Jesus “running afoul of Roman administrators.” Pontius Pilate made it very clear that it was Jewish leaders who wanted Jesus killed, not himself or Rome.
I can't say it comes as a surprise that Pax Romana was mostly, if not only, referred to the Romans. Similarly, as to how a so called "Pax Americana" is coined every now and then despite the US having taken part in recent conflicts although minor.
Whether a true peace or not, the Pax Romana was perhaps a much more agreeable time than that of the 3rd century. In that context, I believe it earned the name.
Pax Mongolica and Pax Anglica are two more examples that show that it's not really a term for total peace, whether global or regional, but rather one for domination and quasi-total peace for the core populations of those with the domination.
same as pax americana, never actually existed
I'd argue that the 'Pax Romana' (or 'Golden Age') of Rome occured more under the Flavians and Nerva-Antonines, and was more about Rome's relative stability and created the imperial image of the Roman empire more than any other period.
For all of Augustus's incredible statesmanship, his own dynasty was a dysfunctional mess that was just kind of left to experiment with their powers as the 'emperor', and ended in the bloody Year of the Four Emperors in 68-69 AD.
The succeeding Flavians made great strides to reconstruct the state after this interregnum (with Domitian in particular overseeing a great fiscal policy) and then the Nerva-Antonines built upon it with the alimenta welfare system (Nerva-Trajan), wealth flowing in from Dacia (Trajan),
consolidation and mass building projects (Hadrian), and then a nice spell of peace (Antoninus Pius) before the cracks began to show under Marcus Aurelius.
Was it a 'peaceful' era in the sense that it was void of war or natural disasters? No. But was it, on the whole, a period of relative peace and stability compared to what came before (Late Republican civil wars) and after (3rd century crisis)? Arguably yes.
Not to mention Augustus started his "peaceful" reign with proscriptions
@@Giantcrabz TBF people usually date the start of the Pax Romana under Augustus as beginning in 27 BC when he actually took the titles of Augustus and Princeps.
He was definitely a more bloody warlord before that point with the proscriptions than afterwards, relatively speaking (which tied into his post 27 BC propaganda campaign where he presented himself as the man who brought peace to the Republic and saved it)
@@onemoreminute0543 Glad to find a fellow appreciator of Domitian! Once we no longer take elite sources as entirely truthful or representative of the views of the whole Empire and we start to look at material culture, Domitian certainly looks ok if you're common Roman.
@@conrad4852I'd actually argue that, with the exception of the Dacian war, he was pretty great! One of the few emperors to fix the issue of inflation and prove a competent micromanager.
The more I've studied Roman history, the more interesting I find some of the emperors once you read between the lines of the senatorial histories written about them.
You end up realising that some of the 'tyrants' (Domitian and Gallienus) are actually ahead of the curb and many of the 'madmen' (Caligula) were actually evil geniuses.
Your video-essay about crucifixion was suggested to me and I love it.
This video-essay made me a subscriber.
Thank you for the kind feedback- very glad you have enjoyed our work so far
A succinct but in-depth treatment of a complex topic. Great job!
Much appreciated- there’s so much to cover here as it relates to Roman religion and political ideology that we’re going to return to the topic later.
Really great, thought provoking stuff
As a Ukrainian, Pax Romana sounds painfully similar to the 'русский мир.'
My funniest interaction with a Rome-fanboy was when I brought up the Pax Mongolica and he tried to explain that there was no real peace as the Mongols were always warring someone. I didn't bother continuing after that, nothing was going to top that cognitive dissonance.
Well that's silly since the Pax Romana and the Pax Mongolica are the same exact thing. A superpower expands massively and as a consequense of that it ends up placing vast tracts of land extremely far away from any potential frontile. Given that they are under one power these lands experience a long period of unusual peace. Prior to the superpower they were battlegrounds. After the fall of the superpower they became that once more.
As the inhabitant of a small state and a patriot who sees our independence as a good thing i say this without any special reverence for superpowers. It just is what it is.
Totally agree with all of this. One possible addition to your larger point - Rome conquered certain territories such as Gaul, Britain and Dacia for remarkably short term and personal reputation-building rationales and these territories ended up being security nightmares later on when the empire went into decline. Each of those territories were difficult if not impossible to defend and the resources and manpower spent trying to hold onto them impoverished and destabilized the rest of the empire.
I’d agree with Dacia and certainly Britannia, but Gaul was such a big area which was heavily romanised and didn’t see much combat after the time of Augustus until the 3rd century. Do you mean the Germanic provinces on the Rhine?
Thanks! I want to come back to the empire's "border" system and fortifications at a later date to discuss just how difficult it was to hold the territory and keep it all secure.
"Trying to reconstruct population levels in the ancient world is a crude business. ... Even in recent times, credible voices have spoken in favor of peak numbers for the Roman imperial population ranging from ca. 44 million to 100 million. Where there is broad agreement is around the fact that the populations within the empire grew in the 150 years after the death of Augustus (AD 14) and reached their maximal extent on the cusp of the Antonine Plague. (pg 45)
Han China is in many ways an appropriate comparandum [to the Roman Empire], but even its population seems never to have matched the Roman imperial apex of ~75 million (in the east, that would wait for the full development of the rice economies and the construction of the great canal systems). There is a more telling contrast. A Chinese writer of the midsecond century lamented the press of peoples in core regions of the eastern empire. “In the central provinces and inner commanderies, cultivated land fills the borders to bursting and one cannot be alone. The population is in the millions and the land is completely used. People are numerous and land scarce.” In the Roman context, such laments are notable for their absence. In the Roman Empire, population growth appears to have been accomplished without sending society spiraling downward in a cycle of diminishing returns. Contemporaries [during the Pax Romana] sang the song of prosperity, not the dirge of grinding impoverishment. For what it is worth (which may well be limited), the articulate classes of the Roman Empire were more preoccupied by general decadence than destabilizing squalor. Maybe our urbane elite was totally insensible to the daily life of the poor. But, it is harder to stare past famine, and we ought to be struck by the broad absence of true subsistence crisis in the Roman world. Food shortages were endemic in the Mediterranean, thanks to its naturally fickle ecology. Unlike the later middle ages, when violent spasms of acute hunger wracked the population, the Romans seem not to have been haunted by the threat of outright mass starvation. The absence of evidence is never probative, but it is suggestive.
More important are the various indices reflecting high levels of production, consumption, and well-being in the Roman Empire. We lack proper economic statistics such as those gathered by modern states. So historians in search of Roman growth have often turned to archaeological proxies of economic performance. Shipwrecks, iron smelting, housing stock, public buildings, and even fish salting operations have all been cited as tracers of Roman productivity. They do in sum suggest robust economic performance in the late republic and high empire. And the broad evidence for meat consumption, implied from tens of thousands of sheep, pig, and cow bones, is difficult to square with any picture of a society emaciated because the population had badly overrun its resource base. It is telling that archaeologists are usually the biggest believers in Roman economic development.
Still, it can be objected that these indices are crude and less than conclusive, particularly if we are interested in per capita measures. How can we be sure that the archaeological evidence for more stuff is not merely the effect of having more people? Perhaps the most telling answer can be retrieved from the abundant scraps of papyrus preserved from Roman Egypt. The arid climate of the Nile Valley means that, from this province alone, we chance to possess an extraordinary number of public and private documents. These, in turn, afford us the only chronologically resolved series of prices, wages, and rents from the Roman world. Precisely because Egypt was a region subject to net extraction by the imperial center, we can be certain that any patterns we observe are not due to plunder or political rents. The papyri suggest that, far from succumbing to diminishing returns on a massive scale, the Roman economy more than succeeded in absorbing population expansion, to achieve real growth on a per capita basis. Wage growth for truly unskilled laborers-diggers, donkey drivers, dung haulers-outpaced slowly rising prices and rents, right down to the advent of the Antonine Plague.
The copious monumental ruins of the Roman Empire’s many cities might also be considered an index of the real wealth of the societies under Roman rule. The extent and nature of ancient urbanism has been the object of spirited disagreement among modern historians. But the conclusion seems increasingly irresistible, that the Roman Empire fostered a truly exceptional level of urbanization. The empire was home to a galaxy of cities-over one thousand of them. At the top, the population of Rome probably surpassed one million residents. Its scale was artificially inflated by the political entitlements of ruling an empire, but only partly. It was also the nexus of the entire economy, a hub of useful activity. Moreover, the urban hierarchy was not overly top-heavy. Alexandria, Antioch, Carthage, and other metropoleis were surely several hundred thousand each. (pg 47-49) ....
"[I]t does no discredit to the Romans to admit they had not transcended the basic mechanics of premodern economies. They were, simultaneously, precociously advanced and thoroughly preindustrial. We should not envision premodern economic development as a flat line of bleak subsistence until quickening growth from the Industrial Revolution onward. Rather, the experience of civilization has been one of consequential waves of rise and fall, consolidation and dissolution, with repercussions stretching far beyond a tiny elite squeezing rents from an underclass of indistinct peasants whose condition was more or less equally miserable from time immemorial. The Roman Empire was possibly the broadest and most powerful of these waves, prior to the everlifting crests of modernity. (pg 54)"
From Kyle Harper, "The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, & the End of an Empire
Good to hear history based on rational scepticism rather than myth and power worship.😮
thank you!
Sadly, that is NOT what is being done here. It's irrational skepticism.
Yeah, I love Roman history, but I find the blind reverence of Rome you see everywhere so embarrassing, it makes me not want to talk about it.
@@Colddirector This is my approach as well - I find Rome endlessly intriguing but too much history at the popular level flattens contradictions within the society and equates their power and success with an intrinsic right to rule. I want to look at Romans not just as how they saw themselves but as how they would have been perceived by other societies
@@tribunateSPQR Yes, Rome IS endlessly intriguing & we absolutely should avoid ignoring "equat[ing] their power and success with an intrinsic right to rule" but that is NOT what you have done here in this video. We should neither grovel at the feet of Augustus & Trajan nor ignore the great achievements of the Empire. In this video you are moving from one extreme to another & I hope you self-correct.
the same sheet is the
PAX AMERICANA
Exactly
Or any other great civilization that contributed to history
I like your emphasis on what "pax" meant to the the majority of the people who lived under roman rule at that time. I think the feature of his rule that Augustus was selling as pax romana boils down to; Before the romans in these regions you have relatively low population broken up into a myriad of clans, or factions. Those factions being led by men of various motives and capabilities, but more often than not ruthless strongmen looking to raid or conquer to prove and increase their own personal power. Compared to a booming urban population with increased access to luxury goods and the latest technologies, where war is a distant concept to most people living hundreds of miles from the boarder.
Nice going into what "Pax" and "Pacify" were.
Empires are made and maintained by force of arms. Look throughout history, anywhere. They're not made by being so diplomatically savvy that one's neighbors were so ecstatic that they wanted to join and become part of something larger. There's also the term *"Wars of Empire"* works with this whole thing.
Often, once someone gets big enough, diplomacy starts taking more of a back seat and it becomes easier to use violence or the threat of violence to get one's way. The Romans weren't the only ones like this and they definitely are not the last.
In a private school in Brazil, when we studied the pax romana it were presented as a period of few civil wars. The books presented this period as a pacification by wars in the frontiers and by a brutal law within the empire.
Tickles me to see the points mentioned at 18:00 play out live in the comments
Ikr…the dude who’s been commenting for weeks really thinks he’s cooking
Your view of the pax romana as a cope for becoming less successful at war reminds of the popular myth of peaceful Habsburg expansion through marriages. It was a narrative that mainly came to play once the Habsburgs stopped being successful at expansion.
"Even if the collapse of Roman political authority was a neutral or even potentially beneficial experience for the elite stratum at the top of society - and it is not clear that it was, mind you; those elites themselves that write to us certainly did not think so - if it was catastrophically bad for the non-elite population, their experience utterly swamps the elite experience by sheer dint of numbers. ... And... it was catastrophically bad.
[W]e can start with another fairly common theory about this period - ‘perhaps the decline in exploitative cities and population causes life to get better.’ This isn’t as crazy as it seems! The Black Death, which we’ve just mentioned, is an obvious (and of course for any medievalist, readily available) analogy. The Black Death may have killed something like a third of the population of medieval Europe in the mid-1300s. Of course that is very bad! But one of the paradoxes of the Black Death is that in the aftermath of it, living conditions for the survivors clearly improved! The population growth of the previous centuries had meant bringing more marginal, less productive land under cultivation to support that population, which had reduced the per-farmer efficiency of agriculture even as total production grew, which had in turn meant that most farmers lived closer to the subsistence line and thus were poorer, their labor less valued. Killing a third of them thus made the labor of the remaining two-thirds much more valuable. Marginal land fell out of production as farmers focused on the best land, which improved production per-farmer (even as total, aggregate production fell) resulting in higher standards of living for the survivors. This is a classic ‘Malthusian’ interaction and the evidence for the period is robust enough that we can be quite sure it happened.
...
Instead, to jump to the end, what the evidence - again, here mostly archaeological evidence used in a statistics-driven way - suggests is that what we are seeing is that average, per-capita production declined, resulting in a real decline in living standards including nutrition, which resulted in population decline. That population decline was thus the physical expression of a lot of real misery: starvation perhaps, but in most cases more likely heightened infant and maternal mortality as a result of malnourishment. ... In essence, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire caused the carrying capacity of the Mediterranean World, and especially western Europe, to decline, leading to the population declining to follow in step - which is to be clear, an incredibly bloodless way to describe a period of real, sharp human misery.
The evidence for this decline, initially slow in coming, is now quite substantial; Willem Jongman assembles perhaps the most complete set of it in “Gibbon was Right: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Economy” in Crisis and the Roman Empire (2007). Jongman considers evidence for coin minting (through atmospheric lead records contained in ice cores), trade (via dated shipwrecks), meat consumption (via bone assemblages) and basic nutrition (via height calculated through femur length in dated human remains), inter alia and finds the same or similar patterns in each indicator. To take the most direct indicator of nutrition effect son people, mean femur length rises over the early Roman Empire, falls slightly in the late second and early third century, rises again but not quite so high over the fourth century, and then utterly collapses in the fifth."
acoup.blog/2022/02/11/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-iii-things/
Replace the words "Pax Romana" with "Pax Americana" and the rest of the argument stays true
A great video! I concur that the Pax Romana was very deliberate freedoms taken with the word "peace". I have to correct you on one little factuality, though. Between Hannibal and Arminius, there was this battle and others in the same war, that hade far more causualties:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Arausio
Are you talking about 21st century USA?
could very well be
Lore of Debunking the Pax Romana: War, Rebellion, and the Reality of Empire momentum 100
Pax Romana was said ironically back in my day...code word for hegemony no history teacher I ever had trumpeted good guy Romans.
some great points but equally how was ancient society meant to be ran? When your neighbours are equally as barbarous and murderous. If you put any Germanic tribe in the position of the Romans I somehow doubt they would’ve been ‘better’ so to speak. Yes Rome was brutal but at the same time Rome had a complex legal system unparalleled anywhere in the known world and was possibly the only place you had a ‘fair’ chance.
I think to put modern morale parameters on an ancient empire is somewhat difficult. Yes there are objective atrocities but these same atrocities were committed everywhere. I really highly doubt any other society at the time would’ve grown in a better manner. I mean look at the various ancient chinese dynasty’s, atrocity upon atrocity.
Nevertheless still thoroughly enjoyed the video 😁
The Egyptians kept to themselves, for the most part, throughout their long history. But they still had many internal traditions and ways of running their society that we would no doubt look sideways at today.
i never believed in the pax romana ever since i wrote my thesis in college on the teutoberg forest when i was younger. its almost like "duh" level to me, but people go hard about defending the pax romana lol.
The Roman Empire had forms of public programs and safety nets. Cities that faced natural disasters were often exempted from taxes, received monetary assistance from the empire, and then there was the grain dole. Looking at the sophistication of the era, I really don't think most Romans were one bad harvest away from starvation. It'd just be too expensive to lose that many people, especially when other parts of the state may have been doing well at the same time. I think there are good odds that there may have been a form of the grain dole or social safety nets for other parts of the empire when they were doing more poorly than the rest of it too.
I know for a fact emperors like Vespasian made it customary to wave taxes in any areas beset by natural disasters.
I don't know if they sent aid though.
+In this era slaves attained more rights and the bustling and protected trade routs resulted in a general enrichment and prosperity of the polity
@@prs_81Slaves are still slaves wether with some new fancy half-liberties or not
UA-cam actually fostering discovery go figure
I think it is clear what pax romana when compared with pax mongolica,britannica and americana.
Was there peace? Relatively, mostly in Europe
was there prosperity? Not really, not exceptionally so
Did commerce flourish?That is probably the strongest definition, since a unified political entity controlling trade is what people mean by Pax mongolica, for example, and American might is and British might was maintained as the upholders of trade guarded by the respected county's fleet
Sounds a lot like America right now: We haven't been at 'war' since 1945, but have been in a near constant state of conflict to our present day. I look forward to the publishing of "The Rise and Fall of the American Empire". Granted, I'll be long dead by then, but it's still a small comfort.
JFC what a nightmare if our country falls
Our current time is also called the long peace (since world war two) even though there are still many conflicts going on
You redefined "peace" and ignored att the negative consequences from Rome decaying.
He redefined peace as actually meaning peace
@@DreadBirate You are correct! and Also deeply incorrect because he is ignoring the reality of what the empire meant for the masses (yes, he pretends that that is what he cares about, rather than the elites only, but he's only considering elite sources & ignoring the massive, MASSIVE amount of non-elite data we have at this point.)
Pax Romana=Belle Epòque, both hoax romana.
Now I regret not calling the video “Hoax Romana”
~10:15
>Pronouncing Celtic as Seltic
How dare you, unsubscribed /j
I admit I need to take the L on this one - I know the right way to say it but must have been thinking of Celtic FC when recording. Please forgive me
It had never occurred to me in all these years as a history buff to even consider the question as to whether there really was a roman peace.
But to merely see the question raised and the answer is self evident.
of course not
ALL empires are evil, being plunder murder and rapine.
Thanks for raising a question i had never considered
Thanks! Glad you found it thought provoking, that's the goal here - to challenge assumptions about the ancient world and to help people understand the exploitation inherent in ancient societies by invoking modern parallels
@@tribunateSPQR This is indeed a noble goal. However, ignoring the truth while seeking a noble goal is neither useful toward said goal nor admirable. The case for the Pax Romana cannot be made by looking at elite sources only--whose sources can be quite biased--but by looking at the enormous wealth of material culture that archaeologists have uncovered which reveal that that Pax Romana oversaw a huge population increase of the areas within the Roman Empire with higher life-expectancy & all around better material conditions of life compared before & after it.
@@conrad4852if we’re going to define peace by stability in an empire’s interior, then the US hasn’t fought a war since 1865
@@ParkerRobertson-t8m to be clear, by "within the Empire" I am not talking about the city of Rome alone or even the province of Italy alone, I am talking about southern France & central Turkey as well Greece & Morocco.
I actually think your point leads to an interesting one.
How many wars has the US had in the 20th century? By Congressional declarations of war, only two. By United Nations General Assembly & United Nations Security Council sanctioned use of military force, three (none of which are identical to the two Congressional declarations of war).
How we define war & how we define peace are important and contested. That said, I definitely think we should think about the contrast in material terms rather than legal terms, but by any analytically useful materialist definition of peace vs war, the Pax Romana was a real phenomenon across the Imperium that meaningfully contrasts with time periods in these regions of Europe, North Africa, & western Asia before & after it as well other regions of the world at the same time.
Wasn't most judicial administration left in local hands with the exception of Roman citizens? I'm not sure brutal Roman justice applies until citizenship was extended across the empire - prior to that most people in the empire were handled with local justice, and ironically one of the perks of Roman citizenship was the ability to call upon Roman juris prudence. Or maybe I'm misremembering. I welcome clarification.
A counterpoint to all of this would be going back to a comment on a recent video; perhaps our critique of the peace of Rome in this era is only possible because we are more individualistic. Yes, life might have been precarious for the majority of individuals, but the stability of the society itself was not. One bad harvest might cause my family to starve, but it would not cause the social order I am a part of to collapse. My concern for individual justice and equity is predicated on a level of communal stability which I am conditioned to consider to be the baseline that is sometimes deviated from in times of crisis. But for those in the ancient world (and for much of the modern as well) this sort of stability was an aberration.
The main trouble I have with the idea of the Pax Romana is how the era is viewed nostalgically, as if it would be desirable to return to such a social or political reality. This is, to my mind, both naive and ridiculous. But the phrase itself still has utility, though perhaps that is because to me it implies that the state of affairs is not unalloyed or unqualified peace but peace as per the Roman usage (i.e. a stability built on violent conquest and subjugation). To my mind the notion of a "Roman Peace" has somewhat sinister undertones. But that might just be a me thing.
This is a good point, and I don't take issue with the assertion that Roman society as a whole was stronger and more stable during this period than any other. However (and this feeds into your second point) we wanted to drive home that this peace was essentially bought on credit through the unsustainable looting of provinces and exploitation of slaves. Augustus stabilized the empire but didn't address the long term rot at its core.
I fully agree that Pax Romana has a threatening undertone to it, its hard not to read it in any other way than the willingness of an empire to make deserts so it can claim peace.
Augustus didn't close the doors to the Temple of Janus because Rome was at peace, he closed the doors because Janus was shouting "you're a bloody liar and you know it, mate!"
In the entire history of the Republic pre-Augustus, the doors were closed for one year. No joke. The idea that the Principate from the ascension of Augustus to the ascension of Marcus Aurelius didn’t have big moments of relative peace is rather false. This video is profoundly dishonest. (That said, your joke here is great!)
The Pax Romana is just the same western chauvinism and indifference to life outside the imperial core that was central to the British Empire and the US empire.
If your analogy is correct, then you have just made the most powerful argument in favor of the Pax Americana that I have ever encountered. This video is, quite frankly, TERRIBLE historical analysis. Despite a purported concern about the masses rather than merely the elites, there is only analysis of the writings of the elites rather than a look the HUGE wealth of material evidence that we have for the Pax Romana being a reality for the masses of the empire. If the Pax Romana really is equivalent to reality of the power & chauvinism of the contemporary west, then I must confess that I have severely misunderstood & undervalued contemporary western chauvinism & the reach of the US empire.
I just want to say that, as someone who occupies something akin to the exact opposite of your stated politics, I greatly appreciate your channel for that exact reason. The insight into the mind of someone so radically different from myself, through the medium of a topic I’ve had a lifelong passion for, really is helpful in understanding the “other side”.
Wisedom
If Rome did not crawl, America would have never ran. The fundamentals of our republic come from Roman institutions. We, however, have enacted their Ideal that all men should participate in civic duties.
Right now if you are in America or in most democratic nations you have every right to engage with your government, run for office, have fair represented, and can freely petition for change. If we didn’t have ancient people questioning their social hierarchies we would have never reached a time now where merit reigns supreme.
That being said Rome was far from the ideal. It is clear however that they slowly developed institutions which laid the groundwork for modernity
appreciate seeing this sentiment whenever i see it.
I ended up largely left-wing after heavily subscribing to right-wing and alt-right points for a large part of my life, and nothing is more infuriating than seeing someone else (wherever they lay on the political compass) completely refuse to listen to anyone they deem to be on "the other side".
could go on and on about how damaging and stupid i think this practice of glorifying political orthodoxy is, but that's not what this comment is about.
thank you for restoring a little bit of my faith in humanity, hope you have a good day
@uwu_smeg
Maybe that’ll be the end of my journey as well, time will tell. I’m pretty much where you once were, which is to say heavily entrenched in right wing politics, but I’m beginning to be burned out by how much they remind me of the leftists we’re supposedly against, like photo negatives of each other. We identify the same problems, ascribe different causes to those problems, and go about wishing to solve them in different ways, but the thought processes and solutions behind them are in direct opposition. It’s infinitely frustrating. Any attempt to point this out to either side gets you mocked and derided in the most smug and condescending ways possible.
Awesome video!
Thanks! Really glad to see the positive reaction
great job :)
Thank you!
This makes almost too much sense
13:56 TL;DR: “I am the senate!”
M. Hudson's Book forgive them their debts goes into this. Elites so exploitative region around Rome was depopulated as people fled predatory, expropriative lending
That sounds like a book I need to read - thanks for the recommendation!
An empire of peace is an oxymoron
well said!
Now I feel I've been lied for a while xd but is not that way. Many thanks for this! Clarifying this concept that was taken as granted
Thank for the positive feedback, it means a lot to us
Great discussion, first video ive seen of yours. Subbed
Thank you and welcome aboard!
I am not particularly interested in the history of rome. But this channel, the intro music, the narration, the images used and above all the political analysis is absolutely magnificent. Thank you so much.
Thank you - this is one of the nicest comments we've ever received! It means so much to hear this from someone who isn't super interested in history and I'm glad the narration works because even now I still second guess it (I haven't yet built up a tolerance to the natural aversion to hearing the sound of my voice)
delicious finally some good fucking food
Glad you appreciate our take on Roman history - thanks for the positive comments and support
Great video. I think a video which has something to say and not just facts to state is something properly special. While I mostly agree with this after watching the video I think that while this was a blood-soaked era that harmed Rome and it's people relatively speaking it appears golden compared to some other times before and after.
More of a Pax as Romans were not fighting against other Romans or Italians.
Yes, I agree. A type of peace, and one that they felt was peace but both that meets our definition
Love the detail and grounded approach in facts, while sharply critiquing the deep motivations, agenda, and contradictions of the ruling political elites, insidiously undoing the Republic and Empire of the Romans. This channel is great in exploring the historical minutiae of Roman history while clarifying the larger overarching themes of this civilization. Really humanizes the Romans without putting them on a pedestal or caricaturing in a two-dimensional manner. Loving this channel ❤️
🤓 Ha! Funny enough "Janus" or "Llanos" are almost the same Concept in different context, the Roman god of course "Janus" and "Llanos" in Spanish, meaning "Plaines" or the "Steppe" which in reality means the same, though in Geographical context, since the "Great Steppe" is related to Mongols, thus, Asia and Europe, Barbarians then Civilization, from Nomad Tribes, agricultural communities, linked by warrior horsemen, hunters and tribal, free but united, an uncivilized Civilization, connecting Civilizations, and Expanding Civilizations, from nothing to the Greatest Empire the world had ever seen that of the Mongols, territory wise that is, came out of no where to everywhere in no time, and just as it came to be it faded into history, becoming the pathfinders and trading route creators that would facilitate Russian expansion from the European edges to the Asian Pacific, now with China, the whole charade is becoming a humongous Confederation of sorts, bringing Asia to Europe and viceversa...So, the Great Steppe is like Janus, perhaps originating, or influenced by the migration of other peoples that moved from Asia to Europe, from small communities, into then making up part of the Truest Greatest Empire that it is a continuation of another Civilization, the Greek Civilization, which was perhaps how it became influential in the Roman Civilization, and what is now "Occident" and which includes Russia as a European Christian Nation, part of the same Civilization, and called "East" within "Occident" since the Far East would be Asia, and all are conceptually the same transitional points which describe "Janus" and "Llanos"...
Great video. It is similar to the narrative that the long 19th century was a peaceful time, when Europeans powers were in near constant colonial wars. Not to mention the several European wars in the period. It was relatively more peaceful in Europe specifically than during the Napoleonic or world wars, but not compared to the modern day, even with modern conflicts. How could the 19th century be an era of peace if it is the era of colonialism, the American civil war, and the Taiping rebellion (and other internal conflicts in China).
Oh man this is a great point! I feel like a complete idiot now for not referencing this idea as it is such a great parallel
Because in the 19th century, there wasn't any "great power war." War is a byproduct of humanity. All civilizations and peoples have it. Those that are vilified for empire were just smarter and luckier than everyone else. Not more violent
Great history. New sub
Thanks for the sub!
The alternative Rome could’ve taken was to uhhhh just be heccin nice and let people freaking enjoy things!
The thing is that I think most people have are hard time accepting how complex and multifaceted empires truly are.
Was Rome a genocidal, authoritarian, expansionist power fueled by greed and lust for conquest that often oppressed the people living under it or was it a comparatively enlightened and advanced society that spread literacy, culture, and economic growth across its territory?
Yes.
I think it's foolish to both dismiss the Roman achievements and Roman atrocities.
Also, I think it's easier to accept the cruelty of the Romans because Ancient world was so cruel to begin with. The Romans were hardly more vicious than most civilizations of the time period; if you're looking for a clear "good guy" from early civilizations until maybe the High Middle Ages; you're not going to find many. Hell, it's hard to find any today.
And, yes, you can say what I'm saying is apologia (which, to an extent, it is), but you still have to look at people as products of their place and time instead of holding them to hypothetical perfection.
What are the many good guys that appear in the High Middle Ages?
Considering what came after Rome, this is similar to talking about the evils of the Aztec empire without mentioning European colonization.
My new favorite channel
Thank you!!!
The Jews didn't rebellion in Palestine. The name of the land those days was Judea. Andrianus changed its name to Syria-Palestine after the last revolt.
Enjoyed thorughly, may the mighty UA-cam algorithm shine down upon you 😊
I’ve always had an issue with the idea that there was an certain period of time that can be deemed a “pax romana” but I’d say this affront is minor in comparison to the supposed existence of a “pax Mongolica”, which is need not even elaborate on if you know anything about the American education system and the reality of the Mongols
Highly interesting 🤔 read Tacitus and Suetonius. Thank you for your video so enjoyable 😉
I would argue that living conditions of the majority of population didn't improve.
This is certainly true when we consider how many were enslaved and give them a voice.
And you would be wrong:
"Trying to reconstruct population levels in the ancient world is a crude business. ... Even in recent times, credible voices have spoken in favor of peak numbers for the Roman imperial population ranging from ca. 44 million to 100 million. Where there is broad agreement is around the fact that the populations within the empire grew in the 150 years after the death of Augustus (AD 14) and reached their maximal extent on the cusp of the Antonine Plague. (pg 45)
Han China is in many ways an appropriate comparandum [to the Roman Empire], but even its population seems never to have matched the Roman imperial apex of ~75 million (in the east, that would wait for the full development of the rice economies and the construction of the great canal systems). There is a more telling contrast. A Chinese writer of the midsecond century lamented the press of peoples in core regions of the eastern empire. “In the central provinces and inner commanderies, cultivated land fills the borders to bursting and one cannot be alone. The population is in the millions and the land is completely used. People are numerous and land scarce.” In the Roman context, such laments are notable for their absence. In the Roman Empire, population growth appears to have been accomplished without sending society spiraling downward in a cycle of diminishing returns. Contemporaries [during the Pax Romana] sang the song of prosperity, not the dirge of grinding impoverishment. For what it is worth (which may well be limited), the articulate classes of the Roman Empire were more preoccupied by general decadence than destabilizing squalor. Maybe our urbane elite was totally insensible to the daily life of the poor. But, it is harder to stare past famine, and we ought to be struck by the broad absence of true subsistence crisis in the Roman world. Food shortages were endemic in the Mediterranean, thanks to its naturally fickle ecology. Unlike the later middle ages, when violent spasms of acute hunger wracked the population, the Romans seem not to have been haunted by the threat of outright mass starvation. The absence of evidence is never probative, but it is suggestive.
More important are the various indices reflecting high levels of production, consumption, and well-being in the Roman Empire. We lack proper economic statistics such as those gathered by modern states. So historians in search of Roman growth have often turned to archaeological proxies of economic performance. Shipwrecks, iron smelting, housing stock, public buildings, and even fish salting operations have all been cited as tracers of Roman productivity. They do in sum suggest robust economic performance in the late republic and high empire. And the broad evidence for meat consumption, implied from tens of thousands of sheep, pig, and cow bones, is difficult to square with any picture of a society emaciated because the population had badly overrun its resource base. It is telling that archaeologists are usually the biggest believers in Roman economic development.
Still, it can be objected that these indices are crude and less than conclusive, particularly if we are interested in per capita measures. How can we be sure that the archaeological evidence for more stuff is not merely the effect of having more people? Perhaps the most telling answer can be retrieved from the abundant scraps of papyrus preserved from Roman Egypt. The arid climate of the Nile Valley means that, from this province alone, we chance to possess an extraordinary number of public and private documents. These, in turn, afford us the only chronologically resolved series of prices, wages, and rents from the Roman world. Precisely because Egypt was a region subject to net extraction by the imperial center, we can be certain that any patterns we observe are not due to plunder or political rents. The papyri suggest that, far from succumbing to diminishing returns on a massive scale, the Roman economy more than succeeded in absorbing population expansion, to achieve real growth on a per capita basis. Wage growth for truly unskilled laborers-diggers, donkey drivers, dung haulers-outpaced slowly rising prices and rents, right down to the advent of the Antonine Plague.
The copious monumental ruins of the Roman Empire’s many cities might also be considered an index of the real wealth of the societies under Roman rule. The extent and nature of ancient urbanism has been the object of spirited disagreement among modern historians. But the conclusion seems increasingly irresistible, that the Roman Empire fostered a truly exceptional level of urbanization. The empire was home to a galaxy of cities-over one thousand of them. At the top, the population of Rome probably surpassed one million residents. Its scale was artificially inflated by the political entitlements of ruling an empire, but only partly. It was also the nexus of the entire economy, a hub of useful activity. Moreover, the urban hierarchy was not overly top-heavy. Alexandria, Antioch, Carthage, and other metropoleis were surely several hundred thousand each. (pg 47-49) ....
"[I]t does no discredit to the Romans to admit they had not transcended the basic mechanics of premodern economies. They were, simultaneously, precociously advanced and thoroughly preindustrial. We should not envision premodern economic development as a flat line of bleak subsistence until quickening growth from the Industrial Revolution onward. Rather, the experience of civilization has been one of consequential waves of rise and fall, consolidation and dissolution, with repercussions stretching far beyond a tiny elite squeezing rents from an underclass of indistinct peasants whose condition was more or less equally miserable from time immemorial. The Roman Empire was possibly the broadest and most powerful of these waves, prior to the everlifting crests of modernity. (pg 54)"
From Kyle Harper, "The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, & the End of an Empire
It’s called the Roman peace bc it’s a peace for Romans, not because it was peaceful. Peace for Romans necessitated crushing threats.
Two good questions would be like : Were the lives of the conquered peoples in the annexed provinces more peaceful and prosperous before Roman administration? and Were their lives better or worse after the Pax Romana expired in the 3rd century crisis?
Those questions can be answered with an analysis of each province individually. Some provinces were definitely more peaceful or prosperous than others and it can be argued that a form of Pax Romana clearly existed in several provinces but others didn't experience the benefits of Roman rule or were actively harmed by it.
I don't like absolutes, since it only simplifies what is obviously a complex topic and typically, with real life history, I think the answer often lies in the middle.
This is a more appropriate remark than the silly oversimplification of tis video.
Pax Romana = Peace for the Romans and hell for everybody else.
And only really peace for subsets of the elite classes for the Romans, too.
@@nevisysbryd7450 Quite the opposite! The Pax Romana is a meaningful concept because it was something that existed for non-elites in a way that made their lives significantly better. This is precisely why this such a bad video. He's absolutely right that we need to look at the lives of non-elites but despite the enormous wealth of archaeological evidence we have about non-elites he's only looking the few surviving elite writings we have.
I've provided some links and quotations from historians elsewhere if you're curious about why I think this video is wrongheaded.
@@conrad4852 The population of much of the rest of Europe declined massively during the expansion of the Roman empire and many of them began to start recovering only late into the Pax Romana with most never coming close to prior numbers until well into the Middle Ages. This is also notwithstanding that Rome had utterly ballooned in population size prior to this, vastly eclipsing previous population sizes (much like Macedonia did around the time of its conquest); those numbers are not representative of a natural, normal population size but the effects of a long set of relatively stable conditions for which the Romans were not entirely responsible (eg the Roman Warm Period).
Economic prosperity does not equate to peace. The regular and systematic use of coercion under hegomonic emperial control is not ceased but centralized into more covert means of coercion via such means as demographic replacement or less measurable opportunity cost in population sizes outside of Rome. I suggest Brave New World for a hyperbolic example (with plenty of milder real world comparable examples) of organized violence combined with economic 'prosperity', or the modern United States.
Much like the population size, the economic situation was also in part predicated on territorial expansion and wealth extraction, and, no, wages were still slightly above subsistence for the vast majority of the population at pretty much every point in the Roman Empire outside of bubbles of prosperity through conquest or welfare programs. The alleged economic prosperity was partially real and partially multiple compounding bubbles where the subsequent collapse post-bubble collapse was, in many regards, more representative of the sustainable logistical reality.
The Black Death did not 'improve' conditions in Europe; it strengthened the negotiating position of a significant subset of the remaining population (hardly benefiting the 30-50%, possibly 60% through secondary effects, who died) and causing a real estate bubble and helping to set the stage for a marginal long-term increase in the skilled labor and borgeoise clusters, especially when hegomonic power was disrupted by the Reformation.
This video does indeed profoundly underestimate the material reality that there was something to the Pax Romana. That something was not peace.
“And pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”
Sadly, this indeed the attitude of this video. Pay no attention to material reality, only pay attention to the curtain of elite writings rather than what is behind the curtain which we can & indeed have ascertained via decades & decades of archaeology. We can indeed look behind that curtain and historians have... but this video has chosen to look at the curtain only.
'ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant'. 'They create a desert and call it peace'. -Calgacus
Personally I wouldn’t describe the pax Romona as an era of peace but as an era of Roman might and superiority and of competent great emperors . Obviously not justifying the horrible things the Romans did but just making that point in fact I see a similarity between the Pax Romana to the Pax Americana which is around 1945-1991 although I consider it to last till 2001 anyways it’s consider an era of American peace and strength when that’s far from reality there was segregation and the civil rights movement but also Americas disastrous war in Vietnam and the Korean War and in Africa ,Latin America the Cuban missile crisis . In short it wasn’t an era of peace .
Relative peace not absolute peace as there were still small wars and civil wars
The romans brought peace to palestine! That is quite an achievement! But I guess, some people are simply never satisfied with any achievement ever!
This is a silly argument
Hearing Seneca talk, all I can think is how I thought Cato was a dick rider…
“Seltic”
I will be performing penance for this the next several weeks
Thanks!
Thanks so much!! All the extra support is super appreciated
"The Pax Romana? That's right. This one goes in the square hole."
Boost!
much appreciated!
Well elites where always better off than poor classes but that divide between rich and poor was even more present in the late republic. It got so bad that there where plenty of people that didn't even own the land and that is how Marius, Cesar and other leaders during the late republic would fill their army and get support. At least during the early empire there was some sort of welfare to elevate these problems and Octavian gave lot of land to Cesars veterans as a type of pension so that elevated problem a little bit more. So I would say that living standard for the average citizen improved a little compared to what it was before.
As for peace witch pax romna is all about there was peace compared to previous period of civil wars or even previous period where Rome was fighting great powers of Mediteranian basen. But still ther where some wars on the edge of the empire against Germanic tribes or in the east against Parthia. Still average person in Italy probably would not have cared about that at all and they wouldn't be affected.
You also talk about relative good and say that somehow debate has shifted from absolute good to relative good. That is nonsense. Even you admit that there was no one arguing that pax romana men't complete peace and stability but that it is relative to other periods. If you want an absolute good you should go to afterlife if you believe in one. There you will have absolute good but on this planet best we can do is relative good.
But I doo agree with that Celtic chieftain at 7:28 He is absolutely right to say everything he said. But that is his perspective of a leader of the people who are being attacked by Romans after Romans already took over the entire island. If that didn't terrify you as a Celt on the Island then you are either a traitor or a fool. But still from the perspective of average person in Italy none of this even existed. I guess it can be compared to How average Americans see this period of time that we live in vs how someone from Syria, Lybia, Afganistan or any other country that got invaded by USA sees this period of time. So again we go back to relativism. Pax romana is just a prespective of Average person living in Italy and not all encompassing theory of the world. As such it cant be debunked with a different perspective of a person living in Britain. Both opinions are equally valid given the knowledge and self interests of people holding them.
Also whoever says that conquered people benefited from being conquered is a fool. Obviously people that are being attacked had every possible reason to defend them selves from Rome. Same can be said for the countries attacked by the USA today. I guess the bottom line is what is good for one state is bad for the other one.
But all in all a good video.
Great to hear more perspective. The more perspectives, the closer to true.
Never heard of bellum iustum, have you?
Best video yet imo
Thank you so much - we hope to continue raising the bar with each video
Excellent essay … truly excellent.
Thank you!!
Why are you leaving out the fact that the Jews are the ones who pushed Pilate to crucify Jesus?
Because it’s immaterial