So upon reading about Imperial Rome in my western civ class, and thinking about contemporary generalizations about the Roman Empire, I come away with two separate ideas.
My text (Understanding Western Society, McKay et al, Second Edition) from class asserts a life of prosperity for the people of frontier territories of imperial rome.
I see from the text that Hadrian set up a defensive line and abandoned indefensible positions. After that, supposedly, trade flourished.
contemporary media presents us often with perpetual frontier warfare with barbarians.
My question is - which one is likely to be more correct?
It's overblown if you take it to literally mean that there was no warfare anywhere at any time during the Pax Romana. There were border skirmishes, rebellions in Britain and Judea, squabbles with the Parthians, etc. There were even civil wars, such as in the Year of the Four Emperors. Rome was a massive, complex polity that spanned the entirety of the Mediterranean world, so it's naive assume that there was no violence anywhere for 200 years.
However, things were "peaceful" in comparison to what came before. For example, there was nothing like the seemingly-endless cycle of war that ended the Roman Republic in the 1st century BC: the civil wars between Marius and Sulla, Caesar and Pompey, the Triumvirate and the Liberators, Antony and Octavian, etc. Likewise, there wasn't anything quite like the large-scale Mediterranean-spanning conflicts between rival powers during the height of Roman expansion in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, such as the Punic Wars, the Macedonian Wars, the Mithridatic Wars, etc.
So things were more peaceful, at least in terms of large scale conflict, especially if you lived in the hinterlands of the empire and away from the border regions. However, to steal from /u/Tiako's post here:
And here comes the real issue: what was the Roman Empire like? The thing is, it was not like a modern state at all—it did not maintain a carefully overseen bureaucracy, it did nit maintain strict population monitoring, and most relevant here, it did not maintain strict public order. Certainly, it guarded against threats of rebellion, but when tribute revenues were not threatened the lumbering mechanisms of the imperial state did not spring into action. Legionaries, by and large, were not patrolling the streets of cities looking for cutthroats, and local communities were more or less on their own. Now, the Imperial state granted local communities certain mechanisms by which they could combat social unrest, but it wasn't a general political mission (piracy excepted).
There was still small-scale violence, like brigands in the countryside, but that fell more to the jurisdiction of your local government, rather than the imperial apparatus in Rome. Violence was still much more a part of life back then than it is today (for most people, at least), but if Roman hegemony didn't bring with it absolute peace, it brought about something very near to it, especially when compared with what came before.
which one is likely to be more correct?
Why can't it be both? Because to be quite honest, no frontiers are ever the same up and down the line, nor are they static throughout time.
Roman frontiers with the Germanic world could be a combination of a zone of peaceful economic interaction and exchange, and a zone of horrific massacre depending upon if it's time for a punitive expedition by the Romans into barbarian territory or if it's time for a quick barbarian raid into Roman territory for booty, even during the Pax Romana. The Marcomannic War comes to mind for the latter.