Pax and the Politics of Peace by Hannah Cornwell (review)

The most profitable terms to interrogate are those we barely think to query. "War," we know, takes many forms, contingent on time and place, meaningful as metaphor and in no sense conterminous with "combat." Its presumed opposite, "peace," seems simple in comparison: the cessation of willful harm, the condition of not-war. As Hannah Cornwell argues throughout this book, however, peace (whether Pax or pax) was not a monosemic concept at Rome. Rather, complicated concepts of war and peace together articulated the power of empire and described the parameters within which Romans of the late Republic and early Principate expressed and contested hegemony both at home and around the Mediterranean. The chronological and cultural target of this reexamination is the "age" of Augustus, a historical period and ideological concept that is currently subject to new, and needful, reconsideration. Although this study does not itself adopt a revisionist perspective, a major theme is the connections between Octavian's (and his contemporaries') contestation of the term pax with the manipulation of the concept "peace" by the preceding generation. While a shortage of surviving sources limits our ability to compare the use of pax in the late Republic with its invocation in, for example, the second century b.c.e., Cornwell makes a convincing case for reading the term with a new significance in the context of the shifting definitions of imperium, and of power and rule more generally, which characterized the final decades of the Republic at Rome and in other centers of populations and imperial discourse. This valuable book thus contributes to important debates about the nature of politics and ideology in the late Republic, the transition from Republic to Empire, and the roles of Romans and non-Roman residents of the provinces in articulating the terms in which that transition took place. It is fundamentally about Augustus, however, despite its arguments and conclusions having wider implications. Cornwell employs textual, architectural, and numismatic evidence from throughout the Republican and Imperial periods and brings to bear parallels and contrasts from the first half of the first century. But, the norm against which late-first-century developments are to be understood remains, perhaps inevitably, somewhat elusive.

The book's arguments are efficiently presented and amply documented. A succinct introduction provides the "state of the question" and previews the chapters that follow, the first of which ("The Meaning of Pax"), through its philological and iconographic surveys of the role of pax in the Republic, introduces the subject proper. The literary survey is a case in which the conclusion, that pax is "at root a bilateral agreement" (33) contingent upon negotiation (however unequal the parties may be), is valuable, but the evidence upon which it is based—primarily Plautus and Livy—raises more questions than the brief historical contextualization offered here can forestall. The arguments from material evidence, and in particular the introduction of the personification Pax, however, make a convincing case for attributing new developments to the 40s and 30s b.c.e.

Chapter 2, "Peace in Civil War," examines "how pax moved from being a concept that expressed Rome's relation to external (and conceived of as inferior) opponents to its application in defining an ostensibly equal relationship between two Romans" (53). The question of "ostensible" equality among Romans may be a red herring, insofar as it requires the simplification of Roman ideas about their enemies and about their senatorial peers. The arguments here look forward rather than back, however, and Cornwell avoids the perils of hindsight, offering an insightful analysis of rhetoric and its limits in the age of Cicero and Caesar (the juxtaposition of Cicero's correspondence with related texts is particularly successful). While she leaves to one side methodological questions about the audiences for the evidence we have, its intended circulation, and the extent to which we can posit conversations between different media, the analyses developed in this chapter do important work on two levels. They illustrate...