In his Agricola, published in AD 98, and with his customary flair for leaving out parts of sentences whose presence future students would have really appreciated when they read him in college, the Roman historian Tacitus placed the following words in the mouth of the Caledonian chieftain Calgacus, who was defeated by the aforementioned Gnaeus Julius Agricola at the Battle of Mons Graupius fifteen years earlier:
Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium, atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
For those of you who can’t read the regina linguarum—or those of you who can, a little, but are wondering where the damn verbs are—that translates to the following, which you might recognize:
To steal, slaughter, and plunder, they call with their false names empire, and where they make a wasteland, they call that peace.
I did not choose to start with this famous quote because it is real. Even the existence of Calgacus is disputed: Tacitus was writing the unending hymn of his father-in-law Agricola’s glory, not a strictly factual history, after all. Besides, after centuries where scholars mostly took him at his word (probably due to the noticeable lack of surviving classical history written in Caledonian or Germanic) archaeological and sociological discoveries have reassured us that Tacitus was not above simply conjecturing entire cultural landscapes into existence when he needed to fill out his word count. It will not surprise you that it is Tacitus who introduced the concept of the noble savage into historical literature to describe the Germans he never met and into whose lands he never traveled, but whom he nonetheless insisted were perfect examples of the virtues the Romans had once had.
Instead, I chose to start with it because, whether he did it on purpose or not, in letting Calgacus say those words, Tacitus gave him what we now call “bars.”
The Romans sometimes flattered themselves that they were fairer, less destructive, more honorable conquerors than their neighbors. Very rarely, they were even right to do so—their treatment and incorporation of the socii is a notable point in their favor—though that is more a function of what a low bar that was to clear. In general, however, we have permitted all those pure white marble statues and impressive temples to distract us from the fact that the Romans, like every other empire that has ever existed, were a rapacious machine that warred and enslaved and destroyed to maintain the security and wealth of . . . well, frankly, a very small part of its population. Was it a larger percentage than most other Mediterranean powers? Maybe, depending on how you reckon for the landless and slaves, but even at its most expansive, the Roman franchise is impressive mostly in a relative sense, compared to the much more misogynistic Greek city-states or the Carthaginian and Persian empires that extracted quotas of resources, rather than military assistance, from their subjects.
You need no better example than Julius Caesar, whose historical reputation is of a tactical genius and deft politician who nonetheless managed to get himself stabbed forty-four times in broad daylight, and whose Gallic conquests brought him and his political circle the kind of obscene wealth you only get by exterminating entire tribes of people, which is exactly what that political circle did to thousands of Gauls. Heck, the reason the Caledonians had to fight at Mons Graupius was simple: the Romans were about to torch (or plunder) their recently-filled granaries, right before the winter. They either had to fight or starve, and while the ancient world had no concept of war crimes, the intervening thousands of years of philosophy have taught us that destroying food supplies and agricultural infrastructure should generally be considered beyond the pale.
Tacitus lived during that exalted period called the Pax Romana, during which the average Roman citizen could pretend that everything was hunky-dory, the roads were safe, they were kept safe by burly men in well-crafted armor, and the “infinite empire” that Jupiter had given them seemed stable—so long as you ignored that each successive emperor had to find some unconquered territory whose acquisition would justify his deification, because the imperial throne wasn’t meant for nerds; that the Roman upper classes maintained an iron grip on the levers of power; that tax farmers and local governors fantastically enriched themselves at the expense of non-Roman citizens in the provinces abroad, using tactics, including physical violence, that most modern countries would consider breathtakingly corrupt. Oh, right, and then there is the fact that the Roman economy could not function without pervasive slave labor, and that contrary to the picture history books often paint of the Roman slave system, it was every bit as abusive and disgraceful as its American descendant.
In short, it was a peace soaked in blood, observed only by its victors, in the comfortable, silent wastelands that their violence had vouchsafed them, where there were no Calgaci to disagree with them.
It is no different from the peace the Spaniards felt once they had murdered, with their guns and germs, the vast majority of the Taínos on the island where I was born (to a family, I should add, that as far as I know has nothing but northern Spanish ancestry), or the peace the settlers in Massachusetts extracted from the indigenous residents who were the only reason they had managed to make it through a New England winter.
It is no different from the peace that I fear many people, especially among us who are to some degree comfortable, desire as antidote to a world that seems to grow more chaotically labile by the minute. A desire with which I sympathize, but which I think a real society cannot countenance.
That is because, in fact, it is not peace at all.
It is normalcy, which is really the wasteland of which Calgacus spoke: a sort of triple-paned window of the soul through which the world cannot penetrate, so you can convince yourself, like many Romans did millennia ago, that everything is okay out there.
Of course, there is one important difference you will already have realized, because you are very intelligent: those Romans did not have access to things like newspapers, television around the clock, social media, a million apps beaming video from around the world constantly at our eyes and ears and into our hearts. When I was younger, I used to think that such unprecedented connection would allow us to bridge the gaps between the different facets of our identities: faith, nationality, gender, age, stance on The Dress, whatever you want.
What I did not expect is that so many people would have the exactly opposite reaction: a need to cocoon themselves away from the world they could now see in full relief, so that they could continue to live their own private Pax Romana. That as long as you don’t have to see the poverty this country, supposedly the richest in the history of humanity, continues to allow; as long as you don’t have to hear the pained screams of your fellow human beings or be confused by languages you don’t know at the grocery store; as long as you can rest assured that others stand ready to do violence on your behalf, then life is fine. Peaceful, even.
As a Catholic, but really just as a human being, I would like to think we are called to a higher understanding of what “peace” even is: just as indifference, not hatred, is the opposite of love, peace is not the absence of hostility, but the common realization of harmony. Peace is achieved not by closing ourselves off to the world around us, but by allowing it to flow through us and affect us and remind us of our own humanity. Peace is what happens when we are curious enough to extend our hand to our neighbors, rather than have them carted away out of our sight, or targeted and lanced like an undesirable boil. Peace grows not from conquest and ruin and plunder, but from mutual love and joy in each other. From Pope Leo XIV himself, in his apostolic exhortation Dilexi te (“I Have Loved You”):
Love for our neighbor is tangible proof of the authenticity of our love for God, as the Apostle John attests: “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us… God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them” (1 Jn 4:12,16). The two loves are distinct yet inseparable. Even in cases where there is no explicit reference to God, the Lord himself teaches that every act of love for one’s neighbor is in some way a reflection of divine charity: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Mt 25:40).
Let us love authentically and expansively.
Let us live so that, if Calgacus really did exist, and we ever come face to face with him, he cannot speak of us in the same way he spoke of the Romans.
Let us seek real peace, not the silent one of the wasteland and the grave.