The Pax Romana is distinguished in history as a roughly 200-year period of progress and growth separating the civil strife of the 1st century B.C. and the onset of marked decline that began with the third century A.D. Roman military power had pacified subject populations from the Euphrates River in the east to the uplands of northern Britain in the far west, while Roman law established a cohesive civilizing influence throughout the empire. The absence of strife in all parts of the empire made it possible to travel safely virtually anywhere in the known world and a highly competent and relatively benign series of emperors facilitated the spread and exchange of new ideas. The spread of Christianity proved to be the most powerful and transformative of these new ideas, a radical creed that would change the empire itself from the inside out. The Apostle Paul, who spread the Christian gospel far and wide, is a prime example of the dissemination of belief made possible by the Pax Romana. Lofty Roman ambition, expansionism and military power paved the way for a message that would specifically appeal to common people, the poor and the dispossessed in the empire’s remotest corners.
Thus, in noting that the Pax Romana enabled the full romanization of the empire’s component parts, one must also point out that it laid the groundwork for an idea that would change the empire. There is a fascinating irony in this. The Pax Romana was seen by the Romans themselves as the ultimate accomplishment of their “mission” in the world, the securing of peace, law and civilization (Perry et al 2008, xxiv). And indeed it would appear to have represented the aggrandizement of the Roman way and the justification of empire itself.
However, in a real sense it proved the eventual undoing of the imperial ethos. After the Pax Romana came to an end, the pagan establishment and the burgeoning Christian population within the empire would come to grips, violently contending for control in the third and fourth centuries A.D. In a final irony, it would fall to a Roman emperor, Constantine, to fully empower the influential Christian faction within his empire and avoid civil war.
It was this dangerous social spasm that represents the first serious repercussion of the Pax Romana, the influence of which facilitated the coming to prominence of the Christian faction. Two centuries of peace had facilitated learning, innovation and philosophical inquiry, which opened the way to the spread of Christian teaching. The Christians multiplied and infiltrated all parts of the empire, even to the highest seats of authority within Roman government. By the late third century A.D., the empire that had recently enjoyed such prosperity was coming apart at the seams, and social instability was one of the key reasons. At the Council of Nicaea in 325, Constantine made public the details of his personal conversion experience and the Roman Empire was changed forever. The pogroms of the pagan emperors had come too late to reverse the evolutionary social process that the Pax Romana had helped set in motion. The patronage of the Christian church under Constantine, the first Christian emperor, showed the promise of a Christian empire to observers like the historian Eusebius of Caesarea. Eusebius “had witnessed the sufferings of Christians during the ‘Great Persecutions’ of the pagan emperors and experienced the patronage of the Church after Constantine’s conversion. Like most Christians of his era, he preferred the latter” (Odahl 2004, 2).
In 335 A.D., Constantine established a new seat of government for a Roman Empire that would be administered in the west at Rome and in the east from the new capital of Constantinople. Some 200 years later, one of Constantine’s most notable successors would expand and aggrandize an element of governance that had been a hallmark of the Pax Romana. In 565, the Emperor Justinian would officially codify Roman law for all citizens of the empire. Just as the Pax Romana had brought the rule of law to all of the empire’s subjects, Justinian sought to formalize the administration and adjudication of a codex of laws that, in a real sense, represented the fulfillment of this aspect of the Pax Romana. Where his predecessors had established and imposed law, Justinian would refine it and make it an intrinsic part of society. “Justinian’s idea was that he could prevent difficulties of interpretation from arising. His design was to prevent difficulties of interpretation from arising. His design was to embrace in his compilations every last proposition of positive law” (Gleeson and Higgins, 118).
As such, one may observe a natural evolution at work, one made possible and set in motion by the Pax Romana. As politics and the exercise of power had once been the core concern of the empire, Justinian inherited a changed situation. This change “led to the development of a greater interest in legal matters and a significant increase in the amount of legal literature produced” (Gleeson and Higgins, 119). Clearly, Justinian and his advisors understood and appreciated the potential of an equitable and well-administered legal system, an understanding that produced one of the most influential and important expressions of the western legal tradition. Had there been no Pax Romana, no peaceful interlude allowing the concept of law to flower, it is likely that Justinian and the other Byzantine emperors would not have had an
opportunity to create such a voluminous and important work.
Another of the Pax Romana’s greatest legacies was the flow of Roman culture and civilization throughout the empire. During this 200 year epoch, the city-states that flourished under Roman patronage became transmitters of Hellenic civilization. They became inheritors of many of the core principles of the Roman Republic, itself an expression of Greek democracy and of concepts such as equality and representation. The Pax Romana might have been made possible by Roman power, but at its heart lay the spirit of a more noble and progressive concept. The cultural flowering of the Renaissance also manifested a reborn spirit, a return to Greco-Roman cultural values that the Pax Romana had introduced to disparate peoples throughout the empire. Through the Renaissance, “there would be a resurgence of Roman culturewhere it would reassert itself as the foundation of Western Civilization” (The Flow of History, 2007). Thus, one may see a cultural fulfillment of the Pax Romana in much the same way that Justinian’s codification of Roman law represented a logical evolution in the spread of Roman law, which was established by the Pax Romana.
The Renaissance and the Pax Romana were both remarkable periods of creative and artistic growth and innovation. Both witnessed advances in the fields of architecture and in various forms of artistic expression. Both followed periods of conflict and oppression and, as such, were affirmations of the best that the Roman world had to offer. The Pax Romana brought the best aspects of Roman civilization to light; the Renaissance revisited and reintroduced those virtues. Both were deeply influential periods, the ramifications of which are still felt by western
civilization.
For Christians, the Pax Romana was a kind of evolution, the realization of a promised scriptural fulfillment. From the start, Christians contended that the world was predestined and prepared for the coming of Christ and the spread of his Word. To them, this was the true reason for the Pax Romana, the reign of Augustus, a succession of progressive emperors, Constantine’s conversion and the enfranchisement of the Christian faith. This was a sequence of events that seemed preordained to the people of an empire. By 312 A.D., one in ten people were thought to have have been Christian (Latourette, 1986). It appeared to them that “no period in the history of the world was better suited to receive the infant church than the first century A.DBy the second century Christiansbegan to argue that it was a divine providence which had prepared the world for the advent of Christianity” (Green 1995, 13).
Given this mindset, it is understandable why some have proposed that Augustus himself was one of the most important figures of Christianity, whose reign coincided with the birth of Christ. As a historical phenomenon, the Pax Romana that Augustus helped to usher in did indeed make possible the circumstances that set the Roman Empire on the path to change. That this change would eventually take the form of Christianity certifies the assertion that the Pax Romana was one of the most fundamentally important periods in the development of western civilization.
References
The Pax Romana and Spread of Roman Civilization.” The Flow of History, 2007.
http://www.flowofhistory.com/units/birth/4/fc33.
Gleeson, J.T. and Higgins, R.C.A., Eds. Rediscovering Rhetoric: Law, Language, and the
Practice of Persuasion. Sydney, AU: The Federation Press.
Green, M. (1995). Evangelism in the Early Church. Guildford, UK: Eagle.
LaTourette, K.S. (1986). A History of Christianity. San Francisco: Harper.
Odal, C.M. (2004). Constantine and the Christian Empire. New York: Routledge.
Perry, M., Jacob, M. and Jacob, J. (2008). Western Civilization: Ideas, Politics, and Society –
