The Arc of History: Tom Holland Interview

Tom Holland joins to discuss his recent book Pax.

Tom Holland

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.