Pax Romana looked different from the ground
admin observes:
One of the most successful societies of all time was...an agglomeration of wildly different cultures brought together by conquest, yes, but maintained more by economic benefits - the Pax Romana
"Pax Romana" comes to us via Tacitus from a disgruntled chief of Britain, who said of the Romans "Pillagers of the world, they have exhausted the land by their indiscriminate plunder ... The only people on Earth to whose covetousness both riches and poverty are equally tempting. To robbery, butchering, and rapine, they give the lying name of government; they create desolation and call it peace." I grant that his tame descendants a couple of centuries on looked at things differently, and
their descendants probably remembered the Pax Romana with regretful nostalgia, but the imposition of this utopia is not necessarily to be welcomed unless we wish to justify the sundry hardships and cruelties of the transition with an eye to the glorious future these will purchase in the by-and-by--and didn't a bunch of Russians just act out that shaggy dog story to its sour punchline the other century?
cordially,
