Tom Holland (1)Recensioni

Durante mucho tiempo, la Pax Romana se ha venerado como una edad de oro. En su apogeo, el Imperio romano se extendía desde Escocia hasta Arabia, y en él vivía en torno a una cuarta parte de la humanidad. Era el Estado más rico y formidable que el mundo había visto hasta entonces.

Pax narra la deslumbrante historia de una Roma en la cúspide de su poder, historia que comienza en el 69 d.?C., cuando cuatro césares gobernaron el imperio en fugaz sucesión, y termina siete décadas más tarde, con la muerte de Adriano. Desde el brillo de la capital hasta los reinos allende las fronteras romanas, el célebre historiador Tom Holland retrata el imperio en todo su esplendor. Asistiremos absortos a un desfile de espectaculares e impactantes escenas, como la destrucción de Jerusalén y Pompeya, la construcción del Coliseo o las conquistas de Trajano. Holland hace que los romanos cobren vida ante nuestros ojos, desde el más humilde esclavo hasta el emperador, y muestra cómo la prosperidad de la paz romana se construyó también gracias al poder sin precedentes de las legiones.

Christianity, from the outset, has been reformed by new adherents. So Christ's message was altered by his disciples and radically altered by Paul. There were reformations throughout the ancient years as e.g. Constantine establishing the Council of Nicea and discarding various views as heresy. A major reformationb was made by Gregory VII who established the power of the papacy over empire and set standards for priests of education and behaviour including celibacy. There was the Reformation of Luther, the counter-reformation and a long list of protestant reformations e.g. Calvinism and the Puritans. At every step, Holland argues, the reformation establishes a Christian value, or series of values, as over-riding what has become the norm; but the reformation could not occur in the absence of that norm because Christian values inform both.

This horror novel is based on the mechanism of the supposed contents of the lost memoirs of Byron, which in reality were burned on his death with their contents unrevealed. Here they reveal Byron's transformation into a vampire, before he becomes world famous, the first real celebrity in the modern sense. There is a framework narrative set in the present day but the main story is Byron recounting his vampiric life and adventures around Greek and the near East; this is a very well written and atmospheric Gothic narrative, by an author better known as a historian of the ancient world. Inevitably there are some very disturbing and repellent incidents (frankly also true in Byron's real world biography), and by the end, I definitely felt my next read should be something "cleansing". But this is an excellent traditional horror story.

A fun read. As someone else pointed out, reminds me very much of the old Uncle John's Bathroom Readers. It's a good book to pick up when you have a minute (aka: bathroom) and just want a quick story or laugh. It's a bit disorganized, jumps from place to place with no real sense of purpose. But, like I said, it's a fun read.

Excellent. Description of Vesuvius overwhelming Herculaneum and Pompeii is masterly. Mainly from th PoV of the 2 Plinys. Overall gives a good sens of numerous emperors of whose names are familiar enough but I didn't really know their stories ( Domitian Trajan Hadrian, even Nero who tends just to be a caricature and is mainly in the previuous volume)½

Spændende skrevet, sjusket korrektur. Svært at fastholde interessen over 411 sider. Når ikke i dybde og informationsmættethed Mary Beard til sokkeholderne og derfor ikke af blivende interesse. Læst og kasseret. Jeg vil købe SPQR i stedet.

Reason read; shared read, war room challenge, I would like to know more about ancient history as it relates to the Bible. This book is set in the middle east and looks at the first world empire in the fifth century. It is a clash between Greeks and Persians.

The Persian Wars were sparked when Athens and Eretria sent aid to the Ionians in their revolt against Persia in 498 BCE. Persian anger was further stoked when Persian envoys demanding Greek submission to Persia were murdered by Athens and Sparta. The Ionian Revolt ended in 493 BCE.

Assuming that Ahasuerus is indeed Xerxes I, the events described in Esther began around the years 483–482 BCE, and concluded in March 473 BCE.

These 12 Achaemenid Rulers Led an Empire;
Cyrus; He famously allowed the Jewish people to return to Judea, thus ending the Babylonian captivity, and issued a general proclamation of freedom of worship and religious tolerance.
Cambyses II: took on Egypt
Bardiya: Cyrus made Bardiya satrap of the eastern provinces, while Cambyses II became king. According to later sources, shortly before his own death Cambyses II had Bardiya executed out of jealousy but kept it secret.
Darius I The Great: became king after his horse neighed first. He divided the empire into twenty satrapies and appointed governors with wide powers to oversee them, created a bureau of royal inspectors, set up a chancery with many branches, established a universal currency, built a system of royal roads and canals, instituted a new tax system, and built numerous temples and palaces throughout the empire. Darius I is also the first King of Persia known to have been a firm believer in Ahura Mazda, the supreme deity of Zoroastrianism.
Xerxes I: probably the king that married Esther
Artaxerxes I
Darius II
Artaxerxes II
Artaxerxes III
Artaxerxes IV
Darius III
Artaxerxes V

As Kings of Persia, they ruled over the largest empire the ancient world has ever seen, which stretched from the Indus River in the east to the Balkan Peninsula in the west. The Kings of Persia were able to draw on enormous resources from all across this vast empire and exert influence far beyond their borders.

I listened to an audio version and it would have been helpful to have also had a hard copy. I have to say that my knowledge of ancient history could you more work.

The title is somewhat misleading. Persian Empire serves more of a backdrop to a narrative about the heroic struggle and legendary civilization of Ancient Greece. The story is wonderful in its own right, but this is not what I counted on. There're many good books on the Greek-Persian war. I expected a more thorough investigation of this world's first superpower, to which that conflict amounted to something more than a border skirmish. Too bad yet again we only scratched surface and seen just a tip of an iceberg. I know there are scholarly tomes, but I wanted something more easy-going...alas, not this time.

I haven't read a vampire novel in a long time. Was very glad this one was mostly a flashback to ancient times rather than something modern. Pretty cool story with some new "vampire rules". The ending wasn't great, but overall I liked it.

Un repaso a la influencia del cristianismo en el desarrollo de las ideas en la humanidad. bueno interesante, algunas conclusiones algo forzadas.

Halfway up the inside of a church tower in central Italy, upside-down, is an epitaph of a ‘T. Flavius Clymenus’. A freedman of the imperial household, a former slave, his middle name indicates who had owned and freed him: one of the ‘Flavian Emperors’, Vespasian, Titus or Domitian, who ruled Rome at the end of the first century. Not far from Antrodoco, where the church of Santa Maria Extra Moenia stands, stood a villa at Cutiliae where Vespasian was in the habit of spending the summer months, and indeed both Vespasian and his elder son Titus died there. This is no doubt where T. Flavius Clymenus had been employed.

Cutiliae was situated in the rural territory east of Rome known as the Sabina. Vespasian himself, with his rustic accent and manners, was considered a bit of a country bumpkin, and might seem an improbable emperor from an improbable source. But in the Roman imaginary the Sabina evoked tough and thrifty peasants and solid, old-fashioned values. Tom Holland’s Pax, the third instalment of his Roman trilogy, describes the collapse of the Julio-Claudian dynasty with the assassination of Nero, the civil conflict that followed, the Flavians who emerged from it, and the ‘Spanish Emperors’, Trajan and Hadrian, to whom has been attributed the settled heyday of the Roman Empire, the Pax, ‘peace’, of Holland’s title. A persistent theme is how the various contenders for power presented their credentials to the Romans. In Vespasian’s case, his origins in a part of Italy that might appear a few hundred years behind Rome, appealing in itself, also complemented the blunt, no-nonsense military manner he cultivated. ‘Woe is me, I think I’m becoming a god!’, he joked on his deathbed, while a response to his son Titus when he questioned the propriety of a new tax on toilets has resulted in the French word for a public urinal, vespasienne.

But authenticity could take many forms in Rome. When Vespasian’s second son Domitian succeeded to the throne after Titus’ premature death, having hitherto acted, arguably, like the archetypal spare, his approach was to style himself as censor. This was a time-honoured role in Rome that encompassed not only morals (though he did bury alive a Vestal Virgin convicted of adultery) but also enhancement of the physical city (‘a lunatic desire to build’, as one author described it), and increasing the silver content of the coinage. As well as being an impeccably traditional office, the censorship was an ideal vehicle for an emperor whose talent was micromanagement. Domitian was also an emperor, it is fair to say, who had little time for the polite fiction, maintained since the first emperor Augustus, that any institution other than the army (the Praetorian Guard in Rome and the legions scattered around the Empire) was necessary for establishing and maintaining imperial authority.

Read the rest at HistoryToday.com

Llewelyn Morgan is Professor of Classics at Brasenose College, Oxford.

I just finished this historian's thesis and I must say, its intriguing! Its premise is that Western culture has been in a "fishbowl" of Christian thought for nearly two thousand years, regardless of our traditional or belief. From civil rights, equality, to ideas of justice, according to Holland, it can theoretically be traced back to the writings of the Gospels and Paul's letters. Holland goes from the pre-Christian lives of the Romans/Greeks, to the present day. It is enlightening. If you are a student of history, its a page-turner in my opinion.

Didn't really seem to have a unifying point or a strong conclusion.

excellent

My favorite part was when leonidas yelled “this is Sparta” and kicked the Persian ambassador down the hole. Would recomment

Christian values permeate the western world

Holland brilliantly demonstrates that westerners overwhelmingly hold to, or assume values as universal that are historically rooted in Christianity. This is true for the atheist as much as the Christian.

Holland presents a view of history that emphasizes the impact that has been made by Christianity. The result is a history that sees a Christian influence in culture that goes beyond its impact on morals and ethics.

Inspiration to read: NYTBR Nov 22 2015. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/books/review/mary-beards-spqr-and-tom-holla...

The first half of this book is superb and meticulously researched. It sets the stage for the emergence of Christianity in the Roman/Judean world and makes the case that the teachings of Jesus Christ and his disciples were a moral and philosophical revolution. It tracks the development of the church and the writings that eventually became biblical canon and reveals how the peculiarities of that process, combined with Christian morality created the intellectual framework for much of what we take for granted in the West: secularism, humanism, philanthropy, communism, even atheism, and western science. All of that is argued very well and has changed how I see the world.

Somewhere around the middle of the book things start to go wrong. Instead of framing medieval Catholicism's devolution into inquisitions, witch hunts, genocide, etc... as a degradation of the Christian moral concepts he has worked so hard to lay out, they are presented as part of that tradition. So are the Church's internal reform efforts and the Protestant reformation. That starts a pattern of pointing to both sides of every historical development (capitalism and communism, humanism and fascism, slavery and abolitionism, etc...) and showing how each exists within Christianity's unique moral framework. Some cases are stronger than others and, after hundreds of pages, the line between unique Christian morality and old fashioned human nature blurs. Worse, with each new chapter, less scholarly effort goes into the assertions. The 'Great Game' colonization of Africa gets a paragraph and then a retouch later. He attributes monogamous marriage to Christianity by just declaring it, certainly news to Jews who've been practicing it since 1,000 BC.

Then it gets weird. The Beatles and 'Live-Aid' concerts get a whole chapter. He conveys World War II through the lens of the Lord of The Rings. Mercifully, Mr. Holland spares us his take on Marvel's Cinematic Universe... Then you realize that the book was published in 2020 and so... there has to be Harvey Weinstein, Victor Orban, etc... What started as a fantastic scholarly work, a classic, ends up taking about Trump's Access Hollywood tape.

The author's core premise is a fascinating one: that the rise of Islam and the Koran should be seen as the last great development of the Classical world, rooted very much in the broader politics and cultural clash between Byzantine Rome and Persia rather than a movement that arose almost independently in the wilds of the Arabian desert.

This may not be the book for absolute beginners to the period in question, as while the book is engagingly written it is academically rigorous and presupposes some basic knowledge about the late Classical world. The episodes bounce around a little in the middle stages of the book, meaning I had to make frequent references to the list of people and concepts at the back of the book to keep track of developments. There is more emphasis on the period of and after Justinian's reign rather than on Mohammed, and I found it fascinating to retrace the steps through the Byzantine world of Syria and the Holy Land.

"Too much liberty leads both men and nations to slavery. More laws, less justice. Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude." - Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes About Liberty (link) link. I had always wondered why names such as Cicero are familiar to me, and that lead me to read.

Interesting book, about the decline and fall of the Roman Republic. The Roman Republic lasted a long time, no question about it. Eventually, it deteriorated into factionalism, civil war and later, reconstituted as the Roman Empire. In its 378 pages, the book surveys a rather lengthy period of time, and suffers somewhat from a lack of focus. That being said, I do recommend it to serious history buffs.

Once again, my kind of book. A sweeping and thought-provoking history that could lead to further reading. For example, after a lifetime of reading, I was familiar with most of the episodes and - shall we say - 'characters'. However, I was unaware of the importance and centrality of St. Paul. So, there you go. Recommend.

Buen repaso de la historia alrededor del Mediterraneo (y un poquito más allá) en los dos siglos alrededor del milenio. Bien escrito con ese humor irónico propio de los ingleses

The author makes the time of the fall of the Roman Republic feel very contemporary. It was both refreshing, confusing, and off-putting, all at once.

A well written, informative narrative with more names and characters than you can keep track of, so kudos to Mr. Holland for compiling and detailing this massive history into one volume. It means, of course, that it will likely have to be re-read numerous times to fully grasp the entire scope of the material, which for a dullard like me probably means never. Still, four stars for Mr. Holland and a the longest, historically incestuous soap opera ever written. And kudos to the ancient Romans for having documented the Republic's rise and fall in such intimate detail.

The story of Persia attempt to conquer the Greek city states: Athens, Sparta and lesser known cities. A lot of detail about things from long ago. The battle of Thermopylae is a highlight. Amazing detail about Persia crossing off the Hellespont. A map would have been helpful to keep things straight.