The Arc of History: Tom Holland Interview

It’s been almost 20 years since you wrote Rubicon, and I was thinking about this when reading your introduction to Pax. Do you think the writing of history itself has changed during that time?

Well, it reflects the fact that over the course of the 20 years, as you say, that since I wrote Rubicon, which is the first of what is now a series of three books on the history of the Roman Empire, I’ve been on a journey. I think you should. That’s the whole point of writing in a way is you don’t want to be in the same rut all the time. When I wrote Rubicon, I pitched it to publishers as being a mirror held up to the present. So I would have used Barbara Tuckman’s evocative title, A Distant Mirror, if that had been available. This idea that in the age of the Roman Republic, this imperial republic, with all kinds of military and economic and vested interests in the Near East, there were perhaps echoes that could be found of the America of George Bush. So I was writing Rubicon during 9/11, and in the immediate aftermath. Actually, I was writing this about Mithridates, the king of Pontus, who launches a wholesale massacre of Roman and Italian businessmen on a single day when 9/11 happened. So the sense that there were echoes there was very strong with me.

And I consciously wove that into the writing of Rubicon. So one chapter title is War on Terror. Another one is Known Unknowns. So it wasn’t that I was hiding from that. But one of the things that struck me while I was writing Rubicon was that actually, that sense of a parallel, that sense of a mirror could hugely be overdone. Because the prevailing thing that I took from immersing myself in the Roman world, trying to see the world through Roman eyes, which was the first time I’d done it on a kind of concentrated way, brought home to me how a lot of things that seemed recognizable and familiar only serve to heighten all the things that weren’t. And that was an understanding of the classical past that was sharpened for me with each successive book about the period that I wrote. So when I came to write Pax, I’ve had various commissions from editors, and they say, “Yeah, we’d love to have you write a piece about the parallels between the age of Hadrian and our own world.” And actually, I don’t want to talk about the parallels, because I think the parallels are very dim and distant. I think what is fascinating, actually, is just how completely different the Romans were to us. And I think we delude ourselves. And maybe I was being a bit deluded when I began Rubicon. I hope that that was something that I kind of worked out of my system as I wrote it, but it’s definitely an understanding of the Roman past that is much sharper for me now is just how strange it was.

When I wrote Pax, I wanted to convey a sense of that I wanted people to enter a world in which the whole point is how strange it is. That’s the fascination of it. And hopefully, the book enables you to come to understand the Romans as they see themselves. Their morality is by our lights, often terrifying alien, it can often barely see moral at all. And yet, I think it is moral. And I hope that by the end, you recognise and accept that.

You’re a lover of cricket, as am I, and we’ve recently seen a great Ashes series. I wondered what the Roman view of the Bairstow dismissal at Lord’s would be and whether MCC members behaved like the audience in the Coliseum?

Well, the Coliseum is, I suppose, the closest we have to a great sports venue in Rome. And it’s built in this period, precisely in this period, supposedly, with the loot from the conquest of Judea, although I think that that is an exaggeration. I think it’s stung out of the Greeks more generally. There are rules that govern how gladiators should fight. And those who cheat probably don’t survive to tell the tale. So bearing in mind that the Bairstow incident happened at Lord’s in England, foolish, I think of the Australians had they been playing a Roman 11 to attempt something like that, because I think they would all have been horribly put to death for it. And I think the MCC members would be entirely within their rights to insist that it be particularly gruesome. But, you know, that’s a marker of how different we are to the Romans. The Romans, I think, would not have had the patience for cricket – not enough violence.

Which Roman Emperor would you most like as a guest on the Rest is History?

That’s a great question. I think, because he is so influential, because he is so hard to pin down, because he was described by Julian, the upper state emperor of the fourth century AD as a chameleon, a man who, who only had to kind of change his circumstances to take on an entirely new colour. It would have to be Augustus, but in the full knowledge that we would probably never be able to pin him down.

Why BC and AD, not BCE and CE? So why not Before Christ (BC) or Anno Domini, in the year of our Lord, AD?

So lots of scholars today are anxious that this reflects an inherent Christian take on the world. And of course, it absolutely does. There’s no way around it. It is blatantly a Christian dating from the early 18th century. It’s massively popularised and given to us by a Geordie, the Venerable Bede. So in a way, it’s a great British invention, something we should be very proud of. The previous book I wrote, Dominion, argues that so many of our assumptions are Christian, and we’ve disguised this from ourselves, and that this leads to all kinds of problems. I think I have exactly the same problem with using BCE and whatever the other one is. What is it?

It’s the same.

Yes, CE. So is it Christian Era or Common Era? I mean, if it’s Christian Era, then why not just use Anno Domini? I mean, you’re still saying it’s Christian. If it’s Common Era, then isn’t that…it seems even worse than saying it’s Christian. You’re implying that the Christian Era is the Common Era. It isn’t a common era. It’s the Christian Era. So I think that we should use a dating system that acknowledges our inherent Christian prejudices. You know, there are other dating systems if you want. You could use the Muslim one if you want, the Muslim calendar, or you could date it from the fall of Rome or whatever. There are other dating systems available. I think that it is best to be upfront about where our dating system comes from and to try and avoid the conceit that has been a feature of the West for basically two centuries since it became globally hegemonic that Christian civilization and global civilization can be elided. So that’s why I’m very against it, very opposed to it. I would rather boil my head than use BCE or CE.

Good stuff. Now, do we take history too seriously? I think one for the success of Rest is History is that often there are subjects that are serious, but it’s generally a relaxed view of history, and that’s why it’s so enjoyable. There are many historians one sees on social media who are hugely serious about things. Historians are not in the life-saving business here.

I think this actually relates to previous question, which is that one of the things that has really marked my span of life has been the retreat of overt Christian perspectives in public life. When I was a child at school, it wasn’t Religious Education. It was Scripture. We would study the Bible. Christianity was what you studied. And so the stock of lessons of moral lessons of stories that you got from that was part of the common stock of how people understood moral issues. That’s no longer the case, and so therefore people are reluctant to draw on specifically Christian stories, because it might seem a bit offensive to people of other religions or no religions.

So therefore, there needs to be a new supply of moral lessons. The moral lessons still seem to me absolutely Christian. But they’re looking around for other stories that can disguise that fact. History has become the stockroom for these kinds of stories. That means you have to treat it seriously. If you’re trying to use history to teach moral lessons, then you can’t view it as a very, very dark comedy, which I think in essence, it is – a comedy in the sense that Dante used the word comedy, i.e. containing scope for multitudes of horrors. But ultimately, I don’t think that history sees a sense of moral progress. I don’t think that there are right sides of history. I don’t think that the arc of history bends towards justice. I think that all of those are moral presumptions that are culturally contingent. And that therefore, looking for moral lessons from history is itself faintly, darkly comic. You’re doomed to disappointment. No one is going to be the moral exemplar that you need them to be.

Well, I guess this leads me on to my final set of questions, actually, which I know you’ve discussed in the past how, if we are looking for a period of history that has echoes today, rather than the Roman world, perhaps the Reformation is the clearest example.

Right. So, yes, I do think that the closest approximation to what we’re going through in the West at the moment, which seems to me an enormous moral and ethical upheaval, is a kind of remaking a Reformation of our moral hinterland, and is the 1520s. The 1520s was powered by the revolutionary use by Luther and others of the Printing Press. So our moral reformation is being powered by the opportunities provided by the Internet. And I think it will take us time to calibrate and work out exactly what the processes that we’ve been going through, just as it took people in the 16th century about 100 years to work out that they had been living through something that could be described as the Reformation. So what subsequent generations will describe what we’ve been going through I don’t know, but a reformation of some kind, I think, is certainly what we’re living through.

Do you think something like the war in Ukraine is an important marker in this new world in that we in the West live? For the last 30 years we haven’t really been fighting for democracy and basic principles like that. This war, which is good versus evil, an aggressive Russian invasion against an independent state allows us to sit back and say, “This is where we have a clear set of values that we should all adhere to?”

I think it has enabled the idea of military prowess to seem heroic in a way that hasn’t been the case for a good while, and to be broadly accepted across the entire political spectrum as such – how enduring that impact will be, I don’t know, because it’s not us who are doing the fighting. I think as with so many things, it’s too early to tell. But I think it is interesting. If in the sense that if you want things, you have to defend them, but the arch of history isn’t necessarily bending towards justice, that things that you value can go into retreat, as well as expand and be popular across the world. I think that it is interesting, but what full impact it will have, it’s too early to tell.

Tom Holland is a historian, author and podcaster. His latest book is Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age.

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