ABSTRACT
War, we are told, was ubiquitous in the ancient world (Finley 1985, 67-87). Among the rare exceptions to this rule were the interior provinces of the Roman empire in the first three centuries AD. But exceptions are important. Peace is hard enough to find in any age and the means by which even a brief respite from continual warfare was achieved are worth examining. Besides, the Roman peace raises problems for the notions that war was a structural component of ancient society, that warfare played a central role in the economies of all ancient states or that making war and guarding against it were essential in the reproduction of ancient societies. Of course, the Roman empire may simply have been exceptional; this is in practice the common view, that the empire’s unprecedented size and some near-unique institutions, such as a professional army, created a haven of peace unparalleled before or since. This paper presents a different view of the pax Romana, by placing in the centre Roman claims to have created peace as a by-product of empire, and by assessing the ideological status of those claims. Within and without
the empire, Roman peace may be seen as simply a component of wider patterns of violence, a concomitant of other structures of domination. Roman peace is far from exceptional in this respect, and a post-Gibbonian understanding of its nature and origins may help us to appreciate more fully the conditions under which peace has existed in other times and places.
