68 MICHAEL DEWAR
And now of that company one, perhaps, gives laws to eastern nations,
another imposes peace upon the Iberians, another with Zeugma wards
off the Achaemenian Persian. These bridle the rich nations of Asia,
those the Pontic territories, these use the peace-bringing power of their
magistracies to correct our courts, while these hold armies in loyal sta-
tion. It is from you that their glory sprang.Arguably the most famous of the surviving Flavian monuments apart
from the Colosseum itself was the Arch of Titus, and the Arch of Ti-
tus was also very much part and parcel of all this conscious manifesta-
tion of the ideology of Flavian Peace. From its dominating position
where the Velia gently rose to meet the Clivus Capitolinus it served to
unite the composition—the war against the Jews and the despoiling of
the Temple of Herod paid for arch, amphitheatre, and temple alike;
Jewish prisoners of war carried out much of the construction; and the
Menorah and the Ark of the Covenant visible on the famous friezes in
the interior of the Arch made a link with the actual objects which were
being kept only a few hundred metres away on display as war trophies
in the Temple of Peace. What we are dealing with, then, is a specifi-
cally Flavian update on a traditional element of Roman ideology: the
end of foreign war (against the Jews) but with it also the end of tyr-
anny (that of Nero), and Rome restored to the people under the aus-
pices of the Pax Flavia. There is, however, a little more to it than that.
It was not acceptable to traditional morality to celebrate triumphs or
build monuments for victories in civil war, that is, for victories over
fellow-Romans. Perhaps no Latin poet has expressed this idea with
greater clarity and force than Claudian, who tells us that
... cum Gallica uulgo
proelia iactaret, tacuit Pharsalia Caesar.
(Claudian, De sexto consulatu Honorii Augusti 399–400)^5
Though he boasted at large of his battles against the Gauls, Caesar kept
silent on Pharsalus.Good and gentle fathers of the fatherland ought not to flaunt victories
that have cost the blood of Romans alone. Even so, it seems a fair bet
that the emphasis in Flavian ideology on just war as a prelude to the
establishment of peace with all its blessings was also intended to keep
fresh in everyone’s minds the greatest and most immediate benefit of
5 See Dewar 1996, 283–7 (on lines 392–406) and 290–1 (on line 402).