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In his best-known oration, the skilled rhetorician Aelius Aristides spoke of Rome as the pinnacle of civilization, defender of the righteous and bringer of peace. This is a peace that was won at great cost, defended by the emperor and his legions, and supported by the columns of Roman government. It is a prize whose worth is all but impossible to quantify. It is not just a good thing, but the defining victory of the Roman world order. In contrast, in a speech within his Agricola, Tacitus introduced us to Calgacus, leader of the Caledonians. This barbarian spoke of Rome, and of the peace the Romans brought. It was a peace won through slaughter and slavery, a manifestation of an unquenchable greed that would never be satisfied. The notion of the Roman peace is a complex topic for us to decipher, as it was for ancient contemporaries. It has both positive and negative consequences, depending on when we are looking, and what we are looking for. There is a danger here in oversimplifying what is a nuanced and shifting sense of political order. It can invite a simplistic and rather unhelpful dichotomy: that Rome was a depriver of liberty and consequently peace was achieved at the expense of...