Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

Hadrian was fond of the twenty-four-year-old Lucius Vibullius Hipparchus Tiberius Claudius Atticus Herodes Marathonios (Herodes Atticus, for short). He was an Athenian aristocrat, and fabulously wealthy. His grandfather was reputed to be the richest man in the Greek world. Both he and his son were generous patrons of the arts and architecture, and more than happy to cooperate with the emperor on the beautification of Athens.

Self-interest mingled with the cordiality. Both sides, Romans and Greeks, were aware that there was latent hostility among provincials to the empire. Pliny, writing earlier in the century, warned a prospective governor of Achaea (the province of Greece) that tact was essential when dealing with the locals.

Do not detract from anyone’s dignity, independence, or even pride … To rob [Athenians and Spartans] of the name and shadow of freedom, which is all that now remains to them, would be an act of cruelty, ignorance, and barbarism.

But however discreetly the Roman rulers conducted themselves, the reality of Greek subordination was clear enough to the intelligent observer. Plutarch, who admired and liked Romans, argued that anyone entering public office should recognize this, but avoid unnecessary subservience. “Those who introduce the emperor’s opinion into every decree, committee debate, act of patronage, and administrative act, force emperors to have more power than they want.”

Well, perhaps not in Hadrian’s case; it was in his nature to interfere and he loved to consume detail. But was he sensitive to the underlying Hellenic reservation? He was too intelligent not to recognize it, but he did not value it. As deeply as he respected Greek culture, he was not a sentimental naïf like Nero, who believed that he could free all the famous city-states and return to them their ancient liberties. That experiment had failed, and Hadrian had a different idea, which was not to liberate Greece from the empire but to make it equal to Rome inside the empire.

There was nothing new in appointing men such as Philopappus and Eurycles to the Senate and other high positions in the government, but it was a growing trend that the emperor happily fostered. However, he wanted to do more than promote meritocrats. His extended stay in Athens witnessed an astonishing expenditure on new buildings. The result, which gradually became apparent during the years of construction, was the transformation of an ancient, slightly dusty “university town” into a new metropolis. Where Rome remained the center of government, Athens was to be the empire’s spiritual capital.

Hadrian’s coup was to complete the enormous temple of Olympian Zeus, which stood about one third of a mile southeast of the Acropolis. The foundations had been laid as long ago as about 520 B.C., the original plan being to outdo the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the world. The project was soon abandoned and, although work on it briefly recommenced in the second century B.C., since then nothing had been done. Hadrian now brought matters to a successful, if extremely expensive, conclusion. In the temple, he installed a colossal sculpture of Olympian Zeus. The temple was enclosed by a marble-paved precinct filled with statues of Hadrian, each dedicated by a Greek city.

Other developments included an aqueduct, a pantheon, a gymnasium, and, in Pausanias’ eyes best of all, a cultural center and library, which had a “hundred columns, walls and colonnades all made of Phrygian marble; and pavilions with gilded roofwork and alabaster.”

A statue has survived, an official portrait of the emperor in ceremonial armor, which expresses in visual form Hadrian’s view of the relation between Athens and Rome. The breastplate shows in relief the goddess Athena, patron of Athens, being crowned by divine personifications of victory. She is standing on a she-wolf suckling the baby boys Romulus and Remus—the traditional symbol of Rome. It is almost as if Rome were not the conqueror, but had itself been conquered.

Hadrian cast himself as the unifier; after all, it was on his breastplate that images of the empire’s two cultures were brought together. As a boy he had incorporated in his own personality a passion for all things Hellenic and at the same time a deep admiration for the old-fashioned moral fiber of the Roman Republic. That balance he now applied, this time in political terms, to the empire of which he was the head.

Four years had passed since Hadrian had last seen Rome, and it was time to go home. He needed to meet the Senate again and check that discontent was not simmering unseen. More excitingly, the villa complex at Tibur was, if not complete, ready for habitation. In the spring of 125 the emperor left Athens and set off northward to the Adriatic port of Dyrrachium (today’s Durrës, in Albania).

En route he took the opportunity to explore central and western Greece. Once more he was the indefatigable tourist, calling in at Delphi, home of the classical world’s most celebrated oracle. The aged Plutarch served as high priest of the shrine and had dedicated a statue of the emperor; if he was still alive, Hadrian would have held discussions with him. In any case, he adjudicated a complicated dispute concerning the membership of the Amphictyonic League, an association of neighboring city-states, the aim of which was to protect and administer the temple of Apollo at Delphi, where the oracle was based.

As usual, wherever he went, Hadrian busied himself with resolving long-standing local disagreements and deciding on development projects. The town of Coronea disputed grazing rights with its neighbor Thisbe and local tax dues with Orchomenus. The emperor made his judgments, but the vendettas outlived him, and were eventually to trouble his successor on the imperial throne.

Whenever Hadrian’s emotions were captured, he wrote a poem to mark the event. His visit to Thespiae was such an occasion. This town in Boeotia was dedicated to sexual love, as personified by the boy god Eros, Aphrodite’s attractive, mischievous son. Every four years the Erotidia, a “very magnificent and splendid” festival of love, was held.

The love most admired here was that between the erastes and his eromenos, but heterosexual romance was celebrated too. In his dialogue On Love, Plutarch tells the story, ostensibly a true one, of a merry widow at Thespiae who arranged the kidnap of a handsome ephebos and then married him—much to the annoyance of his male admirers. And Heracles was remembered at a sanctuary in his honor for sleeping with forty-nine women, all daughters of the same father, during a single night. A fiftieth daughter declined the honor, and the angry demigod sentenced her to be his virgin priestess for life. Her latest successor still managed the sanctuary.

During his stay, the emperor went hunting on nearby Helicon, the most fertile mountain of Greece, writes Pausanias, where wild strawberry bushes offered delicious fruit for goats. This was the home of the Muses, and “the people who live there say that not a single herb or plant can harm human life; even the venom of snakes is weakened.”

Animals were less fortunate: the emperor downed a bear and dedicated it to Eros, accompanied by a short poem in Greek. He asked the god:

… be gracious, kindly receive

the best parts of this bear from Hadrian,

the one he killed with a blow from horseback.

You, of your own accord, in recompense let grace be

breathed soberly on him by Aphrodite Urania.

How are we to interpret this prayer? Antinous is not mentioned by name, and, if he was absent, this may simply be a lonely emperor’s plea for love. But an alternative and more plausible hypothesis may be hazarded. “Urania” means heavenly or spiritual, so Hadrian was seeking the blessing of nonphysical love. On the assumption that Antinous was with him in Greece at this time, the emperor, as a responsible erastes, was seeking relief from sexual passion and its transcendence by something more honorable—a love that, as Plutarch puts it, leads “the soul from the world below to truth and the fields of truth, where full, pure, deceitless beauty dwells.”

XXI

HOME AND ABROAD

As the darkness lightened and the stars went out, rosy-fingered dawn materialized, looking her most delightful. Although he was covered in black volcanic dust and exhausted, Hadrian’s spirits lifted as he gazed across from the summit of Mount Etna at the brightening horizon.

He had decided on a long, risky night climb so that he could see the sunrise, which, according to the Historia Augusta (quoting doubtless from the emperor’s autobiography), was “many-colored, it is said, like a rainbow.” He had done exactly the same at Mount Casius in Syria, just before his accession, and his nocturnal ascent had culminated in a storm. He had nearly been struck by lightning. This time the danger was even greater, for he was ascending a live volcano.

Etna stands about nine thousand feet above sea level, and the emperor and his party grew light-headed as they climbed and the oxygen thinned. They found their way up to the crater by torches. The mountain was restive; not long before, in 122, its entire crest had been blown off in a violent explosion. Ash, cinders, and volcanic blocks had fallen from the air for miles around and many roofs in the nearby town of Catania had collapsed.

The countryside had not yet recovered, and the beautiful sunrise revealed desolation all around. It must have been much the same scene as after the eruption of Vesuvius, about which Hadrian had learned, horrified and fascinated, as a little child, with its evocation of the end of the world.

Having sailed south from Dyrrachium, the emperor’s flotilla probably put in at the great harbor of Syracuse, which was not far from Etna. After his volcanic ascent and a brief inspection of western Sicily, he resumed his journey to Rome.

The emperor’s arrival in the capital had been heralded by public prayers for his safety. Coins were struck celebrating his impending reditus. The bloodstained events of 117 still rankled, but it was now clear that he was no Domitian. While ruling decisively, he consistently acted as a princeps, a first among equals, not as a dominus. There had been no more executions of senior senators. The settlement between the supporters of the imperial regime and the Stoic opposition that Nerva had struck was holding firm.

There was much building work for Hadrian to inspect. Best of all, the Pantheon was ready. An architectural masterpiece, it is one of the very few Roman buildings that has survived complete to the present day (in the guise of a Christian church). Approached from the front, the building has the appearance of a conventional temple, with three rows of columns supporting a pediment with a pitched roof. Visitors pass through bronze doors (the originals, although repaired in the sixteenth century) and find themselves in a round space surmounted by a great coffered dome, with a circular opening through which the sky can be seen. The exterior of the dome was covered in gold leaf.

The Pantheon retained its dedication by the man who commissioned the original structure, Augustus’ friend and partner in rule, Agrippa. Hadrian had a rule of not having his name inscribed on buildings he commissioned; but he made one exception, the newly completed majestic temple of Trajan and Plotina, which he dedicated parentibus suis, to his adoptive father and mother.

An even more tempting architectural treat awaited the emperor outside the city—the villa complex at Tibur. He intended to stay there for some time, and it cannot reasonably be doubted that Antinous was now living with him.

A senator or ambassador summoned to Tibur to enjoy the emperor’s hospitality was driven in a carriage up a long hill from the plain below. To his left he looked across gardens to a stone theater and a circular temple of Venus. The road skirted a high, colonnaded terrace about 250 yards long; supporting it was a long multistory block of tiny rooms, quarters for the service staff—the cooks, cleaners, gardeners, engineers, builders—who made the villa function. It has been estimated that as many as two thousand people—slaves, servants, officials, and guests—could occupy the villa at any one time.

The distinguished visitor stepped down from his conveyance and walked up some steps into a large vestibule where there was a shrine to Hadrian’s beloved Matidia. He was guided to his quarters, or directly to a presence chamber, through a labyrinth of halls, banqueting suites, columned porticoes, baths, peristyles and atria, covered walkways and formal gardens.

First impressions were overwhelming. The place was garishly multicolored. Public rooms were decorated with frescoes and marble of every hue, and bright mosaics covered their floors. A phrase on an inscription, which may have been Hadrian’s own words, speaks of “the Aelian villa with the colorful walls.” In niches or on plinths, indoors and out, everywhere there were groves of statues, all of them, as was the convention, painted in brilliant colors.

Another, equally ubiquitous feature of the villa was water. It spurted, fell, or flowed in monumental fountains, ran along sluices, or stood still and glassy in rectangular pools. Martial spoke approvingly of rus in urbe, or the countryside in the town. The Romans had a pronounced taste for intermingling nature with urban artifice. In Hadrian’s villa, greenery was civilized by statuary and architecture set off by a touch of nature, of the wild. As much space was given over to gardens and fields as to buildings.

The Historia Augusta reports that the emperor

built his villa at Tibur in wonderful fashion, and actually gave to parts of it names of provinces and places there, and called them, for example, the Lyceum, the Academy, Prytaneum, Canopus, Poecile, and Tempe. So that he might omit nothing, he even made a Hades.

In this memorial nomenclature, Hadrian was not original. For generations wealthy Romans had built country villas on much the same lavish principles as he applied to what he liked to call, modestly, his “house at Tibur.” They took pleasure in naming features after admired originals, usually Greek; so Cicero had his “Academy” a century and a half before Hadrian established his. The difference was one of scale and scope. Even Nero’s famous Domus Aurea, or Golden House, a luxuriant mix of town and country in the heart of Rome, occupied only between 100 and 200 acres to Hadrian’s 250 or more.

It is not known for certain which parts of the villa corresponded to which Roman province or place. Hadrian made room at Tibur for the great Greek philosophers: the Lyceum was a gymnasium outside the walls of Athens where Aristotle gave lectures and Plato’s Academy a walled olive grove. The Poecile was the Painted Stoa (Poikile Stoa) at the northern end of the Athenian marketplace, where Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, met his students. Their equivalents in the villa were not copies, but at most stylized evocations or perhaps on occasion simply the names given to a building or a piece of land. For visitors they were presumably identifiable by appropriate statues and decorations.

Presumably the Canopus canal in Egypt and the Vale of Tempe in Thessaly had personal associations for Hadrian that cannot now be recovered with any assurance; with the former (to be named some years later), an allusion to Antinous may be hazarded (see pages 283–84), and Tempe’s reputation for sorcery points to one of the emperor’s abiding interests. The Prytaneum, the town hall of Athens, seems out of place, but perhaps it was in some way connected with Hadrian’s service as archon.

Whether or not the trapezium of underground tunnels beneath open land to the south of the estate was intended as a metaphor for Hades is unsure, but possible. Such an ambitious engineering project must have had some important function. So far as can be told, the tunnels had no practicable exits except for a subterranean link to an open-air stone theater. Some scholars suggest that this may have been a cult theater, used for religious events, and that in the tunnels initiates experienced chthonic rituals, not unlike the terrifying ceremonies at Eleusis, where darkness and sudden bright light induced ecstatic visions of truth. An underworld, indeed.

The villa was both a palace and a vacation resort, accommodating on one site the public and the private. For the rituals of state the architects—among whom we assume the talented amateur, Hadrian himself—designed spaces of more than sufficient grandeur. At the same time, the emperor enjoyed the good things in life: he was “devoted to music and flute players, and was a great eater at great banquets.” At Tibur there were open-air dining rooms, leafy terraces for pleasant promenades, quiet gardens populated with rural deities in marble—Dionysus, Pan, Silenus—and, very probably, rough country for hunting. Where Domitian built a despot’s palace on the Palatine, Tibur was the home of a sociable citizen-emperor.

Hadrian wished to maintain a personal life away from the public gaze and his official duties. His most astonishing architectural innovation was a round structure at the heart of the complex. Almost exactly of the same diameter as the Pantheon in Rome, it is still substantially in place, but unroofed and ruined. Inside the external wall are a colonnade and a moat surrounding a circular island on which a building stood—an intertwining confection of stone curves and straight lines. As well as living and sleeping areas, it contained two lavatories and a small bathhouse (with access to the moat for swimming). A minivilla within the villa, it could be reached only by wooden bridges that were easily removed to give a sense of complete inaccessibility. Here was the emperor’s hideaway. Here he could relax alone, or be alone with Antinous.

A building can scarcely be cited as reliable evidence of the psychology of its maker. However, beautiful as the marble cottage is, the suspicion arises that it was the invention of a man with negative affect, with a weak fellow-feeling for others. Here we see Hadrian, solitary in his deluxe hermitage, hidden in the crowd, as a misanthropic Timon of Athens, although much too rich to be ruined by his unbefriending generosity.

The villa was an elaborate reminder of imperial power. It was no accident that its splendors matched those of the court of a Hellenistic monarch. Even though Hadrian was a civilis princeps, who walked with kings nor lost the common touch, he governed in an even more executive manner than his predecessors. In the capital, the fiction of the emperor as the first citizen of a republic was still observed and Hadrian politely followed the constitutional conventions. However, when he was in Italy, the center of government was to be found at Tibur not Rome. Also, Hadrian spent more than half his reign traveling. Consulting the Senate, attending its meetings, and seeking its advice was not possible.

Of course, an emperor seldom acted alone and when announcing a decision often indicated the many experts whom he had consulted. He increasingly depended on his amici (literally, “friends”), chosen advisers and senior officials who accompanied him wherever he happened to be. A favored amicus might be appointed a comes (or “companion,” hence the later title of count) and given a particular area of responsibility. The emperor also made use of a consilium, a council of state that could consider, even develop, policy and endorse major decisions. This was not a permanent committee but a shifting group of men of high rank. They were drawn from a pool of senators, including some with a legal background, and equites (among them, heads of government departments), and were selected for their expertise on any given topic on which the emperor needed advice.

The imperial bureaucracy was growing, but, more important, its administrative departments, previously managed by freedmen, were increasingly headed by equites, for whom the public service offered a well-paid career path. This change meant that not only senators had an opportunity to participate in government.

There was nothing new about these centralizing trends, which (as already observed) can be detected in previous reigns; the novelty was the pace with which they were moving forward under an autocrat whose benevolence was matched by his decisiveness.

Most of the women in his family were dead by now, but Hadrian had a number of male kinsfolk, some of whom he liked better than others. Servianus had married Hadrian’s eldest sister, Paulina, by thirty years her husband’s junior. He had criticized his young brother-in-law during Trajan’s reign, but he was now seventy and enjoying the twilight of a successful career.

He retained a certain political importance, for his daughter had married a man called Gnaeus Pedanius Fuscus Salinator and given birth to a son, Pedanius Fuscus. He had been born in or about 113 and was now a boy of twelve or so. His importance lay in the fact that he was Hadrian’s great-nephew and the only other male Aelian. Everyone could see that the emperor, approaching his fiftieth birthday, was most unlikely to sire offspring at this late stage, and showed no inclination to secure the succession with an adoption. Little Pedanius Fuscus could expect to be the emperor’s heir when he grew up.

A more congenial personality than Servianus was Marcus Annius Verus, a wealthy senator and a member of the Spanish set at Rome. The family came from Baetica and may have been related to the Aelii: like them, its fortune probably originated in the export of olive oil. Verus had four children, two boys and two girls, all of whom made highly advantageous matches. He was high in favor with Hadrian, who appointed him to a third consulship, for the year 126; this was an unprecedented distinction on the part of an emperor who had served as consul only three times himself.

Servianus was a friend of Verus and sent him an odd little congratulatory poem. In it a man called Ursus claims to be a leading player in the “glass-ball game,” but admits that “I myself was beaten by the thrice consul Verus, my patron, not once but often.” Sometime many years previously Servianus had adopted the name of Ursus; as he had only held the consulship twice, he was ruefully admitting defeat in the great game of politics, for which playing with a fragile glass ball was an apt metaphor.

One of Verus’ sons, also Marcus Annius Verus, married an heiress who owned a vast brickworks outside Rome (and no doubt profited from Hadrian’s many building schemes). In 121 a son arrived, yet another Marcus (confusingly, every male Verus, not simply the firstborn, shared the same given name). By the time of the emperor’s return to Italy he was a toddler of four.

The father died in the year of his praetorship, probably in 124, and the child was adopted by his grandfather. Many years later Marcus remembered the old man for “his kindly disposition and avoidance of bad temper.” Despite her exceptional wealth, his mother instilled austere habits in her son: he reported that she was god-fearing and virtuous, and lived “the simple life, far removed from the habits of the rich.”

His grandfather was not the only man to busy himself about this little boy. Lucius Catilius Severus, his maternal great-grandfather, played so active a part in his upbringing that Marcus added the names Catilius Severus to his original Marcus Annius Verus. Catilius, a Bithynian of Italian descent, was a close friend of the emperor, having given him crucial support during the first nervous days of his accession to the purple.

On his return to Italy, Hadrian met the orphan, now about four, and took a liking to him. According to the Historia Augusta, he was a “solemn child from the very beginning,” a quality that pleased the emperor. As time passed, his interest and affection grew; Marcus was brought up under the emperor’s close supervision—literally “in Hadrian’s lap,” in Hadriani gremio. Evidently, the child seldom lied, and Hadrian nicknamed him Annius Verissimus, or “most truthful”—a pun on his cognomen Verus, which means “true” in Latin.

At the unusually young age of six, before he started his education proper, Marcus was enrolled as an eques, by Hadrian’s specific arrangement. A year later the emperor enrolled him among the Salii, a priestly college founded by the legendary king Numa Pompilius, Hadrian’s antique model of the just and wise ruler. These were the “leaping priests” of Mars—twelve young patricians who wore outlandish outfits originally worn by warriors in the remote past. Every March they purified the sacred trumpets that the Romans carried to war and sang the “Carmen Saliare,” a chant the function of which was to keep Rome safe in battle. Hadrian’s intervention was unusual, for the college usually elected new members itself, and was a sign of special favor.

Hadrian’s relationship with Marcus was political as well as personal. It recalls Augustus’ grooming of the two sons of Marcus Agrippa, Gaius and Lucius Caesar. The first emperor removed them to his own house and personally attended to their upbringing, as if he were a very grand paedogogus. He was thinking in the long term; he hoped that he would live long enough for the boys to become adults and enter politics. Fate dashed his plans, for they died young. The echo with Hadrian was not fortuitous. If he were allowed enough time, it made sense to train up a successor from childhood. After all, Augustus had survived to the age of seventy-seven: that would give Hadrian more than a quarter of a century; plenty of time.

The emperor was unenthusiastic about young Pedanius Fuscus. It was not simply a question of his kinship with the little-trusted Servianus, but he seems to have been a bad lot, being “erotic and fond of gladiators.” It was sensible to have more than one option at his disposal.

Even the lovely villa at Tibur could not keep Hadrian in one place for long. On March 2, 127, after no more than a year and a half since returning from his grand tour, the emperor left Rome for a tour of northern Italy.

On his return he decided to reorganize the governance of the peninsula. Augustus had divided it into eleven districts, but this appears to have been for statistical convenience when managing periodic censuses. Local authorities were largely left to themselves under the general supervision of the Senate. Hadrian disagreed with this laissez-faire approach. He arranged Italy into four administrative regions headed by ex-consuls called iuridici. The extent of their powers is unclear, but it looks as if the emperor wanted to place the homeland of the empire on a level with other provinces. This demotion paralleled the promotion of all things Greek. The reform was unpopular, and was repealed after his death.

Hadrian was back in Rome to celebrate an important moment in his life. August 11 marked the tenth anniversary of his accession. Ten days of games were held to mark the occasion and thirty Pyrrhic dances (a war dance performed by men in full armor) staged in the Circus Maximus.

The emperor then fell ill, or so the evidence strongly suggests. According to the Fasti Ostienses, the annual record of official events, the games were to promote “the emperor’s health.” A number of coins also refer to the salus Augusti; on their reverse they show the personification of health as an attractive woman, feeding a snake in a basket. Snakes were often used in healing rituals and were associated with Asclepius (Aesculapius in the Latin form), the god of healing and medicine. Patients slept in healing temples and nonvenomous snakes were encouraged to slither therapeutically around the dormitories. Another coin type of the same period shows Hope, Spes, holding up a flower.

The supposition of bad health is supported by a report in the Epitome de Caesaribus that for a long time he endured a painful “subcutaneous disease” that left him “burning and impatient with pain.” It is possible, of course, that the emperor had been incapacitated by an accident. The Historia Augusta mentions a fractured collarbone and rib sustained while hunting; no date is given, and the summer of 127 is as good a time as any for an accident to have taken place. However, the balance of the evidence suggests a bout of illness lengthy enough and grave enough to have warranted numismatic propaganda.

As to what the emperor was suffering from, retrospective diagnoses in the absence of the patient are risky. However, his symptoms are consistent with erysipelas, a streptococcus bacterial infection. This infects the underskin, or dermis, and the fatty tissue beneath, and often inflames the face or bodily extremities. A red, swollen, warm, hardened, and painful rash occurs. The patient can go on to suffer fever, tiredness, headaches, and vomiting. In the days before antibiotics erysipelas could be fatal, or, if not, quite likely to recur.

In the following year, with his tenth anniversary behind him and his health presumably having improved, the emperor judged the time right to accept the title of Pater Patriae, father of his people. Like Augustus, and probably in imitation of him, he had declined the Senate’s offer for a long time; despite the fact that it conferred no additional power and was not an official post, the honor was not to be treated lightly. The wise emperor regarded it as a reward for substantial attainment. Hadrian could feel sure that he had at last put the deaths of the four ex-consuls behind him: they had been forgotten, or at least forgiven.

Hadrian laid plans for further expeditions. His first stop was to be the provinces of northern Africa, rich, urbanized, and fertile (although then suffering from a severe drought). No princeps had ever been there before, and in 123 he himself had had to cut short a tour to deal with a sudden Parthian crisis. The visit got off to an excellent start. According to the Historia Augusta, “it rained on his arrival for the first time in the space of five years, and for this he was extremely popular with the Africans.”

The provinces received the by-now-familiar treatment. Hadrianopolises bloomed along the itinerary: even Carthage was so renamed. Great building works were announced, an aqueduct, temples, and so forth. Emperors such as Nero had confiscated many African estates to refill the treasury, so large areas were crown land, sublet to tenants-in-chief. Hadrian checked carefully that they were not oppressing the peasants who tilled the land. He introduced new regulations, giving tax breaks to those who cultivated marginal or previously unused land. An inscription recording some of the details refers to “Caesar’s untiring concern by which he assiduously keeps watch for the advantage of humankind.”

Three key features of Hadrian’s reign, its recurring melodies, were given another hearing—building the limes that marked out the edge of empire; recruiting the victims of empire to help the victors run it; and, ultimately the most essential of all, maintaining the morale and (much the same thing) the efficiency of the legions. Hadrian extended what were called Latin Rights, according to which political leaders and their families who headed town councils automatically received Roman citizenship. Although the details are not altogether clear, he now opened citizenship to ordinary town councillors.

Visitors to the predesert of Algeria and Tunisia today can see substantial stretches of wall and ditch. They are the remains of the fossatum Africae, already under construction by the time of Hadrian’s arrival. This series of border defenses had many features in common with the Britannic wall, although local materials were used—in this case mud bricks. The longest unbroken stretch ran for about forty miles, with a gateway every Roman mile and an additional watchtower equidistant from two gates. Rome had widened its zone of control under the Flavian emperors and Trajan, and the fossatum made it clear that this process of expansion had now concluded.

However, if the wall asserted a border, it was not there to exclude. Rather, its main purpose was to enable the legions to manage relations between a settled agricultural population to the north and southern nomads who needed to move their herds and flocks to and from summer and winter pastures. This entailed controlling water sources, especially in times of low rainfall.

By the end of June, Hadrian had reached the former kingdom, now province, of Numidia, where the III Augusta legion was waiting for his inspection. Its legate, Quintus Fabius Catullinus, was an intelligent officer who had obviously been warned what to expect of his demanding commander in chief. He trained his troops to the highest possible level of efficiency, and in an elegant piece of indirect flattery to Hadrian the rainmaker erected two altars, one dedicated to “Jupiter Best and Greatest, lord of the heavenly rainstorms” and the other to “Winds that have the power to bring generous rainstorms.”

The legion had just moved to a new base at Lambaesis and was busy constructing a fortress. Large parts of an inscription, on the base of a column erected to commemorate the imperial visit, have been found, which transcribe speeches the emperor made to the troops. A shorthand writer must have been in attendance, for his remarks have been taken down verbatim. It is one of the few times we have Hadrian’s own words as he spoke them, and can almost hear his voice.

Addressing legionary cavalry after they had performed in front of him, he said, “Military exercises, in a manner of speaking, have their own rules, and if anything is added to or subtracted from them, the exercise becomes too insignificant or too difficult. The more difficulties that are added, the less pleasing is the result. Of all difficult exercises the most difficult was the one you performed, throwing the javelin in full battledress … I approve of your eagerness.”

On July 1 the emperor praised a Spanish cohort for building a stone wall for the new fortress in record time. “A wall requiring much work, and one that is usually made for permanent winter quarters, you constructed in not much longer a time than it takes to build one of turf.”

The officers came in for a fair share of praise, but there was criticism of a cavalry commander whose name is lost. “I commend Catullinus, my legate, … because he directed you to this exercise, which took on the appearance of a real battle and which has trained you in such a way that I can also praise you. Your prefect Cornelianus also has performed his duties very well. However, the cavalry skirmish did not please me. [———] is the person responsible. A cavalryman should ride across from cover and pursue with caution, for if he cannot see where he’s going or if he cannot restrain his horse when he wishes, it is perfectly possible that he will be exposed to hidden traps.”

A week later the emperor congratulated some Pannonian auxiliaries for their maneuvers. “If anything had been missing, I would have noticed it, and if anything had stood out as bad, I would have pointed it out. In the entire exercise you have pleased me uniformly.”

It is easy to see why the emperor was popular. We can imagine him in the African sun in front of hundreds of sweating men. His words crackled with energy. He knew exactly what he was talking about, and had precise ideas of how things should be done. His praise was worth having, and his listeners were fearfully aware that he would not hide his disapproval.

This was how to keep an army fighting fit when there was no fighting to be done.

XXII

WHERE HAVE YOU GONE TO, MY LOVELY?

Hadrian was in a hurry. The summer of 128 was drawing to a close and he had an appointment he wanted to keep in September. The date of the Eleusinian Mysteries was approaching and he meant to attend for a second time. So he and his traveling court sailed back to Rome, where he spent a few quick weeks dealing with essential business before setting off for Greece.

He was an epoptes, a full and complete initiate, and, we may guess, so was Antinous, now about eighteen and on the verge of beards and adulthood. No account has come down to us, but one wonders if, in this Greek setting, they felt able to present themselves publicly as an honorable and traditional couple, a mature erastes with his maturing eromenos.

Having witnessed the most secret rituals, Hadrian broadcast the significance of his participation through an Asiatic coin, a tetradrachm worth six sesterces, which showed him holding a bunch of corn ears; the legend reads Hadrianus P[ater] [Patriae] Ren[atus], “Hadrian, Father of the Fatherland Reborn.” The corn ears indicate his status as an initiate of Eleusis, and renatus his spiritual rebirth. On the obverse is a head of Augustus, the first emperor to attend the Mysteries.

In the heyday of Athens in the fifth century B.C., its undisputed leader was Pericles. For many years, he was its democratically elected first citizen (its princeps, as a Roman might put it). His contemporaries nicknamed him, flatteringly, “the Olympian,” a title usually reserved for Zeus, king of the gods.

Greece was still recovering from the destruction wreaked during the Persian invasion. The Persians had been driven back, and Athens headed a league of city-states and island communities whose aim was to continue the struggle against the “barbarians.” Pericles transformed the league into a maritime empire and spent much of the wealth Athens acquired thereby by rebuilding the city as splendidly as possible; the masterpiece was the Parthenon, Athena’s temple on the Acropolis.

Plutarch writes that Pericles “introduced a bill to the effect that all Hellenes wheresoever resident in Europe or in Asia, small and large cities alike, should be invited to send deputies to a council at Athens.” The aim was to discuss matters of common interest—restoration of the temples the Persians had burned down, payment of vows to the gods for the great deliverance, and clearing the seas of pirates. The Greek colonies of Sicily and Italy were not invited, for they had not been directly involved in the war. Nothing came of the project owing to opposition from the Spartans, then the great military rival of Athens. Pericles let the idea drop.

More than half a millennium later Hadrian picked it up where it had fallen. During his previous visit, his attention had been caught by the synedrion, or council, at Delphi for the Amphictyonic League, but it did not include enough Greek cities. He decided to launch a new Panhellenion along Periclean lines. As before, a grandly refurbished Athens was to be the headquarters and Greek cities would be invited to send delegates to an inaugural assembly. Member communities had to prove their Greekness, both culturally and in genetic descent, although in practice some bogus pedigrees were accepted.

The enterprise had a somewhat antiquarian character. So far as we can tell from the fragmentary surviving evidence, Hadrian aimed at roughly the same catchment area as Pericles had done—in essence, the basin of the Ionian Sea. Italy and Sicily were excluded once again, and there was no representation of Greek settlements in Egypt, Syria, or Anatolia. The emperor made a point of visiting Sparta, presumably to ensure that it did not stay away as it had done in the fifth century.

A renaissance of old glories was reflected in the development of archaized language; so, for example, Spartan young men (epheboi) suddenly took on an antiquated Doric dialect in their dedications to Artemis Orthia, a patron goddess of the city. It seems clear that one of the purposes of Hadrian’s policy was to recruit the past to influence and to help define and improve the decadent present.

Hadrian began to call himself the “Olympian,” echoing the example of Pericles as well as reflecting the completion of the Olympieion, the vast temple to Olympian Zeus. He was soon widely known throughout the Hellenic eastern provinces as “Hadrianos Sebastos Olumpios,” Sebastos being the Greek word for Augustus, or indeed “Hadrianos Sebastos Zeus Olumpios.”

What did the Panhellenion actually do? It administered its own affairs, managed its shrine not far from the Roman Agora and offices, and promoted a quadrennial festival. It also assessed qualifications for membership. But Hadrian was careful to give it no freestanding political powers. All important decisions were referred to him for approval. Rather, the focus was cultural and religious, and a connection was forged with the Eleusinian Mysteries. In essence, the task was to build spiritual and intellectual links among the cities of the Greek world, and to foster a sense of community. The Panhellenion also furthered the careers of delegates, who were usually leading members of Greek elites (but not necessarily Roman citizens), and created an international “old-boy network” of friends who advanced one another’s interests.

A good deal of notice was required for the summoning of the new assembly, and the buildings the emperor had commissioned in 125 were probably not yet finished. But the future look of Athens was already evident. The city was being transformed and the area around the Olympieion was defined as a new district, named (not difficult to guess) Hadrianopolis. At its boundary an arch was erected, which can still be seen today. On the west side, facing the Acropolis, an inscription on its architrave reads, “This is Athens, the onetime city of Theseus,” Theseus being the city’s legendary founder. On the east side, facing the Olympieion, another reads, “This is the city of Hadrian, not of Theseus.”

It was cheek of a very high order. However warmly they welcomed the emperor’s pro-Hellenic policies, this expropriation of their city must have irritated many Athenians. But they had no alternative to biting their lips.

About March 129, with the sea lanes open again, Hadrian set sail for Ephesus. He roamed around the eastern provinces, scattering buildings, instructions, and benefactions in his wake. As usual, he refused to tolerate poor performance by public officials, punishing delinquent procurators and governors, the Historia Augusta reports, “with such severity that it was believed that he incited those who brought the accusations.”

The emperor’s main political object for this tour was a gathering of client kings along the frontier with the Parthian empire. This “durbar” was the mirror image of the Panhellenion, originally summoned as it had been to manage a continuing Persian threat. The Parthians had now assumed the role of the sinister Other. Hadrian, of course, had not the slightest intention of provoking a war. Instead, he mounted a spectacular but peaceful demonstration that the Roman empire was safe from invasion.

We do not know if the Parthian king, Chosroes, still embattled by ambitious relatives, was invited to another riverine summit meeting, but he was at least offered sweeteners for good behavior. His daughter, held as hostage in Rome for twelve years, was at last sent back to Parthia and the emperor promised to return the royal throne, which Trajan had captured during his ruinous invasion of Mesopotamia. However, before anything could be decided, Chosroes was deposed and his successor had more important matters on his mind than playing a walk-on role in Hadrian’s political theatricals.

So far as the client kings were concerned, they were a mixed bunch with uncertain loyalties. Conventional opinion disapproved of Rome’s purchasing peace with subsidies, but the emperor was proud of his achievements. According to the Epitome de Caesaribus, “after procuring peace from many kings by means of secret subventions, [Hadrian] liked to boast openly that he had won more by doing nothing than from waging war.”

Dealing with distant rulers who knew that it was impractical for the Romans to punish lack of cooperation by military action sometimes led to embarrassment. Pharasmenes was king of the Iberi, a tribe that lived between the Black and Caspian seas (today’s Georgia), and was a case in point. He haughtily declined Hadrian’s invitation to his grand assembly, despite being the recipient of generous gifts—among them an elephant and a detachment of fifty soldiers. When Pharasmenes reciprocated with some gold-embroidered cloaks, the irritated Hadrian apparently ridiculed the king’s presents by sending three hundred condemned men to be killed in the arena dressed in cloth of gold.

The emperor’s next destination was Egypt, for which he planned an extensive tour, but en route he passed through Judaea. Here he made a fateful decision.

Since the devastation that followed Titus’ capture of Jerusalem in 70, the ruined and depopulated province had hardly recovered. Jewish society became localized into villages. The high-priestly families that had dominated Judaea disappeared from history, the Sanhedrin, ancient Israel’s supreme court, ceased operations, and the old upper class vanished. As for Jerusalem, the city’s fortifications were left in ruins and the Temple remained rubble. This was typical Roman behavior: in previous ages Carthage had been razed and years passed before reoccupancy of the site was allowed. A similar fate had befallen Corinth.

The bitter uprising among Jews of the diaspora at the end of Trajan’s reign seems not to have affected Judaea, presumably because the Moorish general Lusius Quietus had been appointed its governor with a brief to stamp out any discontent. Once the uprising had been quashed, Hadrian, newly in power, had won a reputation for being sympathetic to the Jewish cause when he acted as a disinterested arbiter in disputes between Alexandrian Jews and Greeks.

The emperor’s sympathy seems to have been tactical and did not represent his real opinion. He now determined that enough time had passed to reconstitute Judaea as an ordinary province, by which he meant that it should be Hellenized. Quite a number of affluent Jews, he observed, were willing to become collaborators. It may even be that some of them actively encouraged the emperor to pursue his Hellenizing agenda.

Circumcision had been outlawed by Domitian and Nerva. Interestingly, Christians, too, disapproved of the procedure: Paul of Tarsus called it mutilation and argued that those who inflicted it should be “cut off,” or castrated. Hadrian renewed the prohibition and made the offense punishable by death.

At Jerusalem the emperor refounded the city and commissioned a temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, to be built on the ruins of Herod’s temple. He brought in settlers and seems to have established a colonia of Roman citizens, which in the course of time would produce recruits for the garrison legion that had been based nearby for sixty years, the X Fretensis.

To underline the point that Jerusalem was now a Roman city with Greek-speaking inhabitants and no longer had the slightest association with Jewry, Hadrian named it Aelia Capitolina, in honor of his own family, the Aelii, and the king of the Olympian gods whose great shrine stood on Rome’s citadel. Jehovah was banished. If we can trust the new city’s celebratory coinage, the emperor personally helped to plow a furrow around its boundary. Cities in the neighborhood also signaled his presence. Shrines in his honor were founded at Caesarea and Tiberias, and Gaza launched a Hadrianic festival.

So far as Hadrian was concerned, the Jewish question was settled.

The emperor had been greatly looking forward to touring Egypt, with its strange animal-headed gods, its lauded skill in magic, and its extraordinary temples and palaces. Here was a mysterious, age-old civilization that had largely preserved its unique character. The Macedonian dynasty of the Ptolemies, ruling from Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast, had only partly Hellenized it. A Roman province since the defeat and deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, Egypt was the emperors’ private domain, and nothing was allowed to imperil its huge strategic value as a grain producer for the capital. Senators were forbidden to visit, and few emperors bothered to go there either, despite their having the title of pharaoh. The kingdom’s governance was entrusted to a prefect, who was always a nonpolitical eques. Unless there was trouble, Egypt was largely left to its own devices.

Hadrian, ever the missionary, was determined to deepen Egypt’s conversion into a worthy member of the Greco-Roman world. What he had in mind was to found yet another Hadrianopolis, somewhere many miles south in the country’s traditional heartland.

He may have had another, more personal reason for his visit. A fourth-century church father, Epiphanius, claims that he suffered from leprosy, which none of his doctors could heal, and that he went to Egypt to find a cure. At first sight, the story is unconvincing. It is highly unlikely that he contracted leprosy, a disease which is hard to catch and often associated with poverty and a bad diet. However, the assertion may be a faulty echo of the emperor’s previously reported subcutaneous affliction. Egypt had a high reputation for medicine; the healing and magical arts were closely allied, something that would have appealed to Hadrian. A recurrence of erysipelas could well have made him abandon conventional treatment for the arcane nostrums of the Egyptian priesthood.

No later than the end of August 130, Hadrian traveled down the coast road from Gaza to Pelusium, the fortress town that guarded the entry into Egypt. It lay between the marshes of the Nile and the Mediterranean shore. It was on the beach here that in 48 B.C., at the start of Rome’s long civil war, Pompey the Great (Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus) was lured ashore from his ship and stabbed to death by a renegade legionary in Egyptian pay. He had been fleeing from Julius Caesar after his army’s decisive defeat in Pharsalus in Greece and was hoping to find sanctuary with the pharaoh. “Dead men don’t bite,” said one of the king’s advisers. Pompey’s head was cut off and presented to Caesar.

The body was buried on the shore and a small monument erected above it. With the passage of time sand blew over it and covered it from view. Never one to pass up the chance to mourn a dead celebrity, the emperor located the grave and had the sand brushed away. And, of course, he wrote a poem, which was inscribed on the monument. Referring to the fact that many shrines had been erected in Pompey’s name throughout the empire, one line reads:

How pitiful a tomb for one so rich in temples.

The high point of Hadrian’s visit was to be a journey up the Nile. The expedition had to wait until late September or October, when the river’s annual flood would abate. In the meantime the emperor spent some time in Alexandria, where there was plenty to see and do. The Greek community had long believed that the Romans always favored the Jews at their expense. Now there were hardly any Jews left in the city, following the suppression of their uprising, and Hadrian the Hellenizer made himself popular by investing in restoration projects to make good the damage that had been done.

The old palace of the Ptolemies was not a single edifice but a royal campus filled with buildings of every kind. Among them was the Mouseion, which housed the ancient world’s most distinguished scholars, intellectuals, and authors. Membership was a high privilege, and brought with it the honor of free meals. “By Mouseion,” wrote Philostratus, a third-century expert on Greek intellectuals, “I mean a dining table in Egypt to which the most distinguished men from all over the world receive invitations.”

Hadrian took a close interest in the Mouseion’s work. He is known to have appointed two members, and, as already noted, his ab epistulis, successor to the dismissed Suetonius, was a former head of the Mouseion, the Gallic scholar Julius Vestinus. The emperor was not going to miss dinner at the high table for anything. However, it is not certain that his visit was well received. Behaving as usual with uneasy uppitiness to the gathered scholars, the emperor “put forward many questions for consideration,” claims the Historia Augusta, “only to provide the answers himself.”

The emperor’s relations with intellectuals were often fraught.

Although he wrote verse and composed speeches with great facility he treated academics as though he were their intellectual superior and liked to ridicule, scorn, and humiliate them. He competed with these professors and philosophers, with both sides in turn publishing books and poems.

He was said to have been jealous of celebrated philosophers and rhetoricians, and promoted others to attack them and try to destroy their reputations. In response, a victim, Dionysius of Miletus, said acidly to one of Hadrian’s officials, who had tried to rival him in public speaking, “The emperor can give you money, but he can’t make you an orator.”

Apparently Hadrian did not publish under his own name, but under those of his freedmen with literary reputations. One of his offerings was Catachannae (presumably some sort of miscellany, for the word refers to a tree onto which several different types of fruit have been grafted). This was an “extremely obscure work” of which nothing is known except that it was a homage to Antimachus, himself an extremely obscure poet from about 400 B.C. who sought consolation for the death of his mistress by retelling stories of legendary disasters.

One of the most original academics of the age was the Sophist Favorinus of Arelate (Arles); he was described as a hermaphrodite and was beardless with a high-pitched voice. When Hadrian criticized a word he had used, he accepted the point. His friends later reproached him for giving way, to which he replied: “You are giving me bad advice. You must allow me to regard as the greatest of scholars the man who commands thirty legions.”

However much he tormented them with his cross-examinations, Hadrian lavished honors and money on anyone who professed the arts. At the beginning of his reign he conferred a series of immunities on practitioners of the liberal professions—philosophers, rhetoricians, grammarians, and doctors—that remained in force until the latter part of the second century. Although he was himself responsible for hurting people’s feelings, he took it to heart, he used to say, whenever he saw anyone upset as a result of his disputatiousness.

Hadrian allowed himself some free time with Antinous. He relaxed at the Canopic canal, which ran from Alexandria to the port of Canopus. Although it was well known for a temple of Serapis where the sick could sleep overnight and hope for healing, the place was mostly notable for its disreputable pleasures. Strabo, the Greek travel writer and geographer, observed:

Some writers go on to record the cures, and others the virtues of the oracles there. But to balance all this is the crowd of revelers who go down from Alexandria by the canal to the public festivals; for every day and every night it is crowded with people on boats who play the flute and dance without restraint and with extreme licentiousness, both men and women.

By an odd coincidence there was a village called Eleusis on the canal. But there were no mysteries there, rather rooms for hire and “commanding views for those who wish to engage in revelry.” Shameless things were done that marked the “Canopic lifestyle.”

There is no record of an imperial visit, but the fact that Hadrian gave the name Canopus to a stretch of water and a large nymphaeum, or artificial grotto, at his villa at Tibur suggests that the Egyptian resort held some special meaning for him. We can infer that he and Antinous went there—and memorably enjoyed themselves.

Hadrian would not have been Hadrian without finding time for a hunt. He and Antinous made a foray into the countryside in Cyrenaica, the province adjoining western Egypt, and went in search of lions. On a fragment of papyrus a poem, composed in the high, heroic epic manner by a certain Pancrates, describes what happened. This is, in fact, the only occasion where there is an explicit written record of the couple being together in one place.

There is also evidence in stone confirming that the pair hunted together. Eight large tondi, or circular reliefs, now displayed on the Arch of Constantine in Rome but once adorning a memorial of the emperor’s exploits, show Hadrian and his party hunting various kinds of animals including a lion, and making sacrifices. In at least one of the carvings a huntsman can be seen who strongly resembles the young Bithynian—but with a difference. What we see is no longer a boy but a short-haired young man of about twenty with sideburns and down on his cheeks, no longer gracefully feminine but strong and active.

The desert adventure nearly had an unhappy ending. Hadrian and Antinous came across a fierce lion. According to the poet,

First Hadrian with his brass-fitted spear wounded the beast, But did not kill him, for he purposely missed the mark, Wishing to test to the full the sureness of aim Of his lovely Antinous, son of the Argus slayer.

The infuriated lion charged at Antinous and gored his horse. It was then struck in the neck, evidently by Hadrian (the papyrus breaks up at this point), and fell beneath the hooves of the emperor’s horse. It was a close shave, but the lover had triumphantly rescued the beloved from the threat of serious injury, or even death.

At last Hadrian was able to set off on his journey up the Nile. We may suppose that a grand barge was prepared for him and a flotilla of boats assembled, including warships from the Alexandrian fleet, to carry the court and the guard. As usual, places warned to expect an imperial visitation had been making preparations for many months and stockpiling generous supplies of food and other necessaries. One of these was the town of Oxyrhyncus, which laid in 700 pecks of barley, 3,000 bales of hay, 372 suckling pigs, nearly 200 pecks of dates, and 2,000 sheep, together with olives and olive oil. The imperial cavalcade, locustlike, consumed everything in its path.

Pachrates (whose Hellenized name was Pancrates) was a magician and priest, as well as a poet. He looked the part of a holy ascetic—“with shaved head, clothed in white linen, speaking Greek with an accent, tall, flat-nosed, with thick lips and thin legs.”

He was based at the ghost town of Heliopolis (a Greek name meaning Sun City; the Egyptians called it Iunu, or “place of pillars”). Since time immemorial it had been a revered center of learning, but competition from Alexandria, founded in 334 B.C., removed its raison d’être. By the first century A.D. the place was deserted except for a handful of hierophants, who, according to Strabo, “performed the sacrifices and explained to strangers what pertained to the sacred rites.”

With his lifelong interest in the dark arts, Hadrian stopped off at the city for an explanation of the rites. He consulted Pachrates and, according to an ancient papyrus, received instruction in the art of a spell to “attract those who are uncontrollable … It inflicts sickness excellently and destroys powerfully, sends dreams beautifully.” The priest prepared a magic recipe, which included, among assorted ingredients, a field mouse and two moon beetles, all drowned in the Nile, the fat of a virgin goat, and the dung of a dog-faced baboon, pounded together in a mortar. A little of this unpleasant paste was burned on a charcoal fire as an offering, and a charm recited. The papyrus warned that the procedure should not be used rashly and only in the case of “dire necessity.”

Pachrates knew how to lay on a good performance. He cast the spell, which was credited with never failing: one victim fell sick in two hours and, apparently, another died in seven. Hadrian received dreams “as he thoroughly tested the whole truth of the magic.” Deeply impressed, he doubled the magician’s fee.

What was the emperor’s purpose in making this consultation? Curiosity is a likely enough motive, for Egyptian magic was an exotic mix of spells and remedies drawn from Greek and Jewish as well as indigenous religious traditions. But, one wonders, did he also have anyone in mind whom he wished to fall ill, or even die? Did he anticipate a “dire necessity”? The questions are relevant, for some days later an astonishing death did occur.

A few miles south of Heliopolis, Hadrian, Antinous, and their entourage toured Memphis, founded more than three thousand years previously and the original capital of the old kingdom of Egypt. They inspected the pyramids and the Sphinx. Then the imperial party sailed on upriver and moored at Hermopolis (Egyptian Khemennu). Situated on the border between Upper (or southern) and Lower Egypt, this was a populous and opulent city, with a famous sanctuary of Thoth, god of magic, heart and tongue of Ra, arbiter of good and evil and judge of the dead.

On October 22 the festival of the Nile was celebrated—usually a happy celebration of the renewed fertility that the river’s annual inundation brought about, but on this occasion a glum affair, one suspects, for it was the second year when there had been a disastrously poor flood. Then two days later came the anniversary of the death of Osiris and worshippers chanted for his yearly rebirth, analogous with the rise and fall of the river.

Opposite Hermopolis the riverbank curved and the current strengthened. A small, impoverished settlement of mud huts lay along the shore and close by stood a modest temple of Ramses the Great, Egypt’s most famous pharaoh (1298–1235 B.C.). One day during the last week of the month, here or hereabouts, the lifeless body of Antinous was recovered from the river. He had drowned.

Hadrian broke down. The Historia Augusta noted, disapprovingly, that he “wept for the youth like a woman.” He declared that he had seen a new star in the sky, which he took to be that of Antinous. Courtiers assured him that the star was new and had indeed come from Antinous’ spirit as it left his body and rose up into the heavens. The emperor decided that Antinous was to be deified. Dead, he was to be reborn as a god.

From the point of view of Roman convention, such a thing was unheard of. Emperors, and wives or close relatives, received divine honors by approval of the Senate—but not boyfriends of no political or social significance. Hadrian did not even trouble the Senate with the matter, for “the Greeks deified him at Hadrian’s request.” What precisely this means is unclear, but there was a long-standing tradition in the eastern Mediterranean of potentates declaring themselves gods, and in the popular mind the boundary between the human and the divine was porous.

As it happened, there was a local precedent for the conferral of divine honors. A drowning in the Nile had magical properties. When Pachrates’ spell called for a mouse and beetles to be drowned in the Nile, the actual word he used was “deified.” This was because many believed that the Nile conferred immortality on anyone it took to itself by drowning. (Importantly, suicides were excepted.) Only the priests could touch the corpses and these were buried at the public expense. Two brothers, Petesi and Paher, who drowned in Roman times even had a temple devoted to them. In the second-century tomb of a girl, Isidora, who drowned in the river, a funerary poem has her father say: “O my daughter, no longer will I bring you offerings with lamentation, now that I know that you have become a god.”

So Antinous joined the immortals—but how did he come to die in the first place? This is difficult to ascertain, for nothing is known about the exact circumstances. In his memoirs Hadrian asserted that the death was an accident, but the ancient sources were not so sure. Three texts give accounts of what happened—Dio Cassius, the Historia Augusta, and Aurelius Victor. They were written long after the event, are not altogether reliable, and (some say) betray signs of malice. According to Dio, the best of the bunch,

Antinous … had been a favorite of the emperor and had died in Egypt, either by falling into the Nile, as Hadrian writes, or, as the truth is, by being offered in sacrifice. For Hadrian, as I have stated, was always very curious and employed divinations and incantations of all kinds.

Aurelius Victor agrees, reporting that

when Hadrian wanted to prolong his life and magicians had demanded a volunteer in his place, they report that although everyone else refused, Antinous offered himself and for this reason the honors mentioned above were accorded him. We shall leave the matter unresolved, although with someone of a self-indulgent nature we are suspicious of a relationship between men far apart in age.

The Historia Augusta takes a similar line, but with less certainty.

Concerning this incident there are varying rumors; for some claim that he had devoted himself to death for Hadrian, and others—what both his beauty and Hadrian’s excessive sensuality indicate.

What is intended by this insinuation is unclear; presumably the reader is to infer that Antinous killed himself in order to escape the emperor’s sexual advances.

The first and most ordinary of explanations is that the emperor’s favorite was drowned by accident, just as Hadrian claimed. A youth, high spirits, unpredictable currents or underwater plants trapping an unwary diver or swimmer—this is a familiar and plausible concatenation of circumstances. But a personage of Antinous’ importance would seldom be alone, and if he went for a swim help would surely have been close at hand.

A second possibility is that he committed suicide, evading notice and slipping silently into the river, perhaps under cover of darkness. It is not too hard to guess at motives. He was now about twenty, and no longer the pretty lad who had first caught the emperor’s eye. If Hadrian fancied only smooth-cheeked teenagers, then indeed Antinous faced an uncertain future. What use would his patron and lover have for him once he had graduated from puer, boy, to iuvenis, young man?

There is evidence, though, that Hadrian had catholic tastes. Aurelius Victor claims that “malicious rumors spread that he debauched adult males (puberibus).” While no necessary blame attached to a youthful eromenos for having sex with his erastes and even privately allowing himself to be buggered, it was, as we have seen, shameful for an adult to accept the receptive role. Antinous, having reached manhood, may have been unwilling to go on sleeping with the emperor. In his eyes, if he allowed things to continue as before, he would be little better than a male prostitute. All too credibly, he could imagine himself aging into the superannuated gigolo of Juvenal’s satire.

Even if there was something to these fears, that one member of the pair was losing interest or that the other was feeling shame, the evidence of Hadrian’s behavior after the drowning points to the passionate sincerity of his love, and so surely mitigates them. That is to say, Antinous could count on the emperor’s continuing affection even if for one reason or another the love affair itself were to end. He had no grounds for anticipating that he would either be discarded or abused.

We are left with the opinion of the literary sources, although from a modern perspective they propose by far the most implausible of the options. However, the idea of compensatory self-sacrifice was familiar to the ancient world. Euripides’ famous tragedy Alcestis told the story of a wife volunteering to hand herself over to death in place of her husband, Admetus, whose time was due. Admetus would be permitted to survive

if he could find another

to take his place and join the dead below.

He asked in turn of all his family,

his father, and his mother; but found no one

willing to quit the world and die for him—

except his wife.

This account neatly parallels Hadrian’s alleged search for a volunteer, according to Aurelius Victor.

At some point after 130 or 131, Hadrian’s friend the historian and public official Arrian wrote a guide to part of the Black Sea coastline in the form of a long letter to the emperor. It includes a description of an island called Leuke, deserted except for a few goats. Here, legend had it, the Greek hero Achilles once lived as a boy. Visitors left votive offerings to him and his older erastes, Patroclus, for whose death Achilles had wreaked a terrible vengeance during the siege of Troy before himself being killed. Arrian concluded:

I myself believe that Achilles was a hero second to none, for his nobility, beauty, and strength of soul; for his early departure from mankind … and for the love and friendship because of which he wanted to die for his beloved.

Although Hadrian and Antinous are hardly a perfect match for the Greek couple, Arrian was surely linking two doomed eromenoi who, in different ways, put their lives on the line for their lovers. It was a delicate allusion, well judged to touch and comfort his desolate correspondent.

In sum, then, Hadrian was suffering from a serious illness of some kind; he and Antinous believed that the emperor would recover his health if he, Antinous, gave up his life in his stead. So the verdict of suicide stands, but for religious or magical reasons rather than from private unhappiness.

Another unappetizing option is that, with or without Antinous’ consent, Hadrian arranged for his sacrificial execution, as he had sacrificed the piglet during his Eleusinian initiation. This would have been very odd behavior. The Romans had outlawed human sacrifice long ago during the Republic, and the Egyptians are not known to have practiced it in remembered times. But magic may be a different matter: the Pachrates papyrus at least purports to deal in spells that cause death. The lethal power of witches was widely believed: Horace summed up the fearful fantasies of popular opinion in his little horror poem about a boy who was buried alive up to his neck and starved to death so that his marrow and liver could be used in a love potion. Whether such crimes were commonplace may be doubted, but it is conceivable that Pachrates or some other magico-religious authority was consulted about a ritual sacrifice to restore the emperor’s health, and that Antinous was, willy-nilly, cast into the river. At least that would justify Hadrian’s denial of suicide.

Any conclusion on these matters has to be guesswork. Such evidence as there is points to the offering of one life for another. Two marble busts, one of them from Tibur, and dating from about this time or later seem to offer confirmation. They show the emperor as a young man again. A new coin type shows an equally youthful Hadrian. Thanks to wishful thinking, it was supposed that the death in the Nile had worked its magic. The emperor had been aging and ill, but now, look, here was the proof—he had been rejuvenated, this time literally, not symbolically, renatus.

Within a week of the drowning the emperor decided to found a new city opposite Hermopolis where Antinous had been taken from the water. He had already had in mind the creation of a Hadrianopolis to be located at some as yet undetermined place in the center of Egypt, but now this general project was transformed into a massive memorial to the dead boy.

Plans were quickly drawn up for a splendid new city, to be called Antinoopolis after its founding divinity. Settlers, a mix of people of Greek descent and army veterans, were attracted by generous tax concessions from other Hellenized Egyptian cities. Although almost nothing remains today (thanks to the depredations of local people), three centuries ago many buildings were intact. An eighteenth-century visitor remarked: “This town was a perpetual peristyle.” Antinoopolis was arranged in a grid and two main streets with double colonnades crossed in the city center, where a large shrine was erected, dedicated (we may reasonably suppose) to the new divinity.

This layout echoes that of Alexandria where the Sema, a building that housed the body of Alexander the Great, stood at the intersection of two grand avenues; here the mummified conqueror lay in a crystal coffin. It is possible that Hadrian’s first thought was to inter Antinous at the new foundation, within hailing distance of where he died. If so, he soon changed his mind and commissioned a shrine to house his remains at his villa at Tibur. Construction began almost at once in a very prominent location just by the villa’s grand entrance and proceeded with great speed.

The Antinoeion was a walled enclosure with two small temples inside it. Facing the entrance was a semicircular colonnade, or exedra, at the back of which a porch led into a sanctum, the tomb itself. In the center of the enclosure a specially commissioned obelisk was installed (now called the Barberini obelisk, it stands on the Pincian Hill in Rome). It bears four inscriptions; the first expresses good wishes to the emperor and empress, and the other three concern Antinous and his cult as the new god Antinous-Osiris. One passage reads: “Antinous rests in this tomb situated inside the garden [that is, Hadrian’s villa and its park], property of the emperor of Rome.”

Antinous had a marvelous life after death. His cult spread with great speed and his popularity grew with the years. As a god who dies and is resurrected, he even became a rival to Christianity for a while; it was claimed that “the honor paid to him falls little short of that which we render to Jesus.”

One of the characteristics of religion in the Mediterranean was that an equivalence was assumed among the gods of different religions. Antinous was associated immediately on deification with Osiris, something he may dimly have guessed at while still alive. It is likely that he died on October 24, the day of the festival of Osiris; if so, this was a date he or Hadrian very possibly chose for its spiritual resonance. Osiris was the merciful judge of the dead and, by the same token, the underworld power that gave life. He inspired the annual flooding of the Nile and the vegetable renewals of spring.

Antinous did not only overlap with Osiris, he was also linked to Hermes (the Egyptian Thoth and the Roman Mercury), patron of boundaries and the travelers who cross them. This is why Pancrates called him “son of the Argus slayer” in his poem about the hunt, which was written in the weeks following the drowning. Argus was a many-eyed monster whom Hermes killed. As well as being the messenger of the gods, he was a psychopomp, a conductor of souls to the underworld. In Athens Antinous merged with Dionysus, and the priest of his cult was allocated a best seat for the theatrical performances of the Dionysia, which the new god had originally attended, we may assume, as an ordinary member of the audience.

A coin has been found that shows Antinous as Iakchos, the minor deity who played a part in the Eleusinian Mysteries. Having first encountered the visions and secrets of Demeter as a humble initiate, he returned as a divine being.

Apart from founding Antinoopolis and establishing a cult at Mantinea, Hadrian did not insist on the worship of his lost lover. But local elites seeking his favor quickly realized that commissioning temples and statues was one sure way to obtain it. When the contemporaneous travel writer Pausanias visited Mantinea, he noticed a new temple dedicated to Antinous. “I never saw him in the flesh,” he commented, “but I have seen statues and images of him.”

This was no exaggeration. Soon Antinous was everywhere. Dio writes that Hadrian “set up statues, or rather sacred images of him, practically all over the world.” The emperor must have commissioned an artist of great ability to produce a sculptural paradigm, which was then widely copied. It is an unforgettable type of masculine beauty—melancholy, heavy-locked, large-chested, eyes modestly downcast.

Around the Mediterranean, temples, altars, priesthoods, oracles, inscriptions, and games were established in his name, all of which required images. It has been estimated that as many as 2,000 were carved, of which more than 115 still exist, and more are emerging from the ground as the years go by. A colossal seated statue recently excavated in the Peloponnese shows Antinous tying a fillet around his head as if he were a victorious athlete. The villa at Tibur was filled with Antinous; at least ten statues have been found there. At Delphi his effigy was ritually oiled for so many generations that it acquired, and even now possesses, the translucency of alabaster. Remarkably, the distant Iberi, realm of the difficult-to-please King Pharasmenes, yielded to the spell. In the grave of one of his noblemen, a very fine silver dish embossed with Antinous’ head has been unearthed. It was probably an official gift, much prized by the recipient.

The worship of Antinous long outlasted the reign of his imperial lover. Free of Hadrian he drew his own mass following, and his image can be found not only in high-status artworks but in the artifacts of daily life—lamps, plates, and bowls. Whatever the original intention behind his deification, the ageless Bithynian became a talisman by which the Greek inhabitants of the empire could simultaneously celebrate their own identity and their loyalty to Rome. He personified the reconciliation between the two dominant cultures of the Mediterranean world. He was the ideal of the Panhellenion made flesh.

Even today his is the most instantly recognizable and memorable face from the classical world. Antinous is one of the very few ancient Greeks and Romans to have his own active websites.

XXIII

“MAY HIS BONES ROT!”

The death of Antinous did not halt the imperial tour. The journey up the Nile and the sightseeing continued. The party visited the so-called singing statue of Memnon at Thebes; this was one of two seated figures of a pharaoh. It lost its top half in an earthquake; thereafter at dawn, when the sun’s rays warmed the stone, a singing sound could be heard—“very like the twanging of a broken lyre string or harp string.” This curious phenomenon was irregular, and on the first visit it failed to sing. The next day Sabina and her friend Balbilla returned and the statue performed, as it did soon afterward for Hadrian. Balbilla carved some poems on the stone, in one of which she wrote

The emperor Hadrian then himself bid welcome to Memnon and left on stone for generations to come this inscription recounting all that he saw and all that he heard. It was clear to all that the gods love him.

Hadrian spent some months in Alexandria, coming to terms with his loss and planning the construction of Antinoopolis. Pancrates produced his poem on the lion hunt, in which he suggested that the rosy lotus should be renamed antinoeus on the fictive grounds that it sprang from the blood of the lion Hadrian killed. Pleased with the conceit, the emperor enrolled the poet as a member of the Mouseion.

He left Egypt in the spring of 131 and toured the provinces of Syria and Asia. Then, for his third visit as emperor, he returned to Athens, where he spent the winter. No doubt he attended the Eleusinian Mysteries again, this time alone. His benefactions continued; in an inscription he asserts: “Know that I take every opportunity to benefit both the city publicly and individual Athenians.”

In the spring the delegates of the Panhellenion met for the first time, probably on the occasion of the dedication of the Olympieion. The first games, the Panhellenia, did not take place until 137, but with new Panathenaic games, new Olympic games, and the Hadriania, in honor of the emperor (perhaps instituted only after his death), every year in a quadrennial cycle was to see Athens host a great international celebration, with large influxes of visitors from all over the eastern Mediterranean. Athens was to become a festival city and the acknowledged center of the Greek-speaking world.

A catastrophe now befell Hadrian for which he had only himself to blame. The Jews were infuriated by the ban on circumcision and deeply offended by the rebuilding of Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina, a Jewless and Hellenic city. It looked to them very much as if the Romans intended to ethnically cleanse Judaea. Also, the diversion by Titus of the half-shekel tax levied on all Jews for the upkeep of the Temple on the Mount to the upkeep of the temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest on the Capitol in Rome still rankled half a century on.

They were reminded of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, king of the Seleucid empire in the Near East, who flourished in the second century B.C. In a number of respects he was an anticipatory echo of Hadrian. He had tried (but failed) to complete the Olympieion in Athens and promoted the cult of Zeus Olympios. At his capital, Antioch, he behaved informally with ordinary people and was very much the civilis ruler that Hadrian sought to be. He sacked Jerusalem and introduced his own cult into the Temple, erecting a statue of himself there. His aim, like Hadrian’s, was to Hellenize Jewry.

The Jewish leadership felt it had no choice but to collaborate. According to Josephus, a renegade Jew who defected to Titus in the great Jewish war of two generations previously, they told the king

they wanted to leave the laws of their country, and the Jewish way of living as they understood it, and to follow the king’s laws, and the Greek way of living … Accordingly, they left off all the customs that belonged to their own country, and imitated the practices of other nations.

A rebellion broke out, known as the Maccabean uprising, after one of its leaders, Judah Maccabee. Antiochus’ forces were incapable of coping with the guerrilla tactics of the insurgents. The Seleucid monarch was distracted by the Parthians and then unexpectedly died. The Jews had won their independence.

Almost exactly three hundred years later, history appeared to be repeating itself. Tacitus wrote in his Histories, a book that Hadrian is very likely to have read, that Antiochus “endeavored to abolish Jewish superstition and to introduce Greek civilization; the war with the Parthians, however, prevented him from improving this basest of peoples.” That was precisely Hadrian’s program, but he was sure that, in the event of any resistance, he would not have to worry about Parthian interference, now that he had renewed his entente with Rome’s most dangerous neighbor. In fact, so far as he knew, the emperor had no grounds for fearing any real trouble.

However, Jewish activists were preparing carefully for war, in the greatest secrecy. Hadrian was still in Egypt and they did not want to alarm him. They armed themselves without attracting notice, by means of an ingenious trick. Legitimate, state-regulated armorers in Judaea produced faulty weapons ordered by Roman garrisons in the region; when these were returned as substandard they were reworked and held in readiness for later use.

Those planning the rebellion well understood that it would be fruitless to challenge the Romans in the field. Just as the Maccabees had done, they adopted guerrilla tactics. Dio Cassius writes that, not unlike the tunneling Vietcong of our own day,

they occupied the advantageous positions in the country and strengthened them with mines and walls, in order that they might have places of refuge whenever they should be hard pressed, and might meet together unobserved under ground; and they pierced these subterranean passages from above at intervals to let in air and light.

Archaeologists have identified more than three hundred tunnel complexes, building on an infrastructure of cisterns, wine and oil presses, storehouses and burial caves. With ventilation shafts, water tanks, and storerooms for supplies, they were designed for long stays underground.

During the great rebellion put down by Titus the Jews paid a heavy price for being disunited. This time they had the considerable advantage of strong, self-confident, and intelligent leadership. Their commander was Shim’on ben Kosiba, who signed his letters as prince of Israel and usually traded under the name of Bar Kokhba, “Son of the Star.” The phrase alluded to a prediction made by the prophet Balaam:

I look into the future,

And I see the nation of Israel.

A king, like a bright star, will arise in that nation.

Like a comet he will come from Israel.

In other words, Bar Kokhba was casting himself as the Messiah, or “anointed one”—a leader who would rebuild Israel, cast out the wicked, and ultimately judge the whole world. Some rabbinic opinion supported the claim. A celebrated rabbi, Aqiba ben Joseph, chief teacher in the rabbinical school of Jaffa, was reported to have said when he met Bar Kokhba: “This is the Messiah.” It may have been he who proposed the stellar sobriquet. Another rabbi begged to differ, telling Aqiba: “Grass will grow on your cheeks and still he [namely, the Messiah] will not come.”

The revolt broke out in 132. An immediate cause, the last straw, may have been the collapse of the tomb of King Solomon in Jerusalem, probably caused by workers engaged in building Aelia Capitolina. A narrative account of the course of the fighting has not come down to us, but the general sequence of events is clear enough. The first phase was near-terminal defeat for the Romans.

The governor of Judaea, Quintus Tineius Rufus, had at his disposal two legions and a dozen auxiliary cavalry units. He underestimated the threat. What appeared at first sight to be a local crisis soon acquired a regional dimension. The Jewish diaspora was involved (although not in Egypt, Cyrenaica, and Cyprus, where Jewish communities had more or less vanished after the suppression of the uprising there in 116–17 at the beginning of Hadrian’s reign). There was probably fighting, or at least disorder, in the neighboring provinces of Syria and Arabia. Dio paints the scene.

At first the Romans took no account of [the rebels]. Soon, however, all Judaea had been stirred up, and the Jews everywhere were showing signs of disturbance, were gathering together, and giving evidence of great hostility to the Romans, partly by secret and partly by overt acts; many outside nations, too, were joining them through eagerness for gain, and the whole earth, one might almost say, was being stirred up over the matter.

Tineius Rufus was rapidly overwhelmed. The governor of Syria sent reinforcements down from the north. The legion XXII Deiotariana was rushed to Judaea from Egypt, but appears to have been annihilated. Roman casualties were exceptionally severe.

Usually when generals sent dispatches to the Senate they began with the phrase “If you and your children are in health, it is well; I and the legions are in health.” It is telling that when Hadrian reported on the military situation in Judaea, he omitted this introduction. The army was in dire straits.

The emperor learned of the revolt when still in Athens or perhaps having started on the journey back to Rome. He made a number of necessary decisions. Sailors or marines were hurriedly transferred to the legion X Fretensis, presumably to make up for losses, and for the first time in many years new troops were raised in Italy, an unpopular move.

According to Dio, Hadrian “sent against [the Jews] his best generals.” First among them was his highly competent governor of Britain, Sextus Julius Severus, a reliable troubleshooter, whom he ordered to make his way to Judaea, picking up reinforcements en route. It is a sign of the scale of the emergency that Severus was moved from the most remote of provinces and had to cross the complete length of the empire to reach the theater of operations. He must have spent some months on the road. But in Hadrian’s eyes merit outweighed distance and delay.

Dio’s account implies that Severus was not in overall command but that all the generals were placed on a level footing. This sounds like a very bad idea, for armies with a collective of commanders seldom thrive. It can only be assumed that the emperor himself took personal charge of the campaign, at least for a time. This is confirmed by a reference in inscriptions listing the service careers of officers and men to the expeditio Judaica, the Jewish expedition. Use of the word expeditio signifies the presence of the emperor.

It would indeed have been surprising if such a hands-on ruler stayed away from what was both the greatest military crisis of his reign and a perfect opportunity to check that his military training methods, to which he had devoted so much time and energy, were fit for the purpose.

In the flush of victory Bar Kokhba established a disciplined state, and Judaea was totally free of foreign influence or control. A good deal is known about how he governed, thanks in part to coins but most of all to astonishing discoveries in caves in the desert wadis west of the Dead Sea—legible papers and artifacts in perfect condition thanks to the arid weather conditions.

A new calendar was decreed and appeared on coins and in letters. The year 132 became “the First Year of the Redemption of Israel.” Religious ceremonies were restored and a new high priest appointed. A highly placed officer wrote to colleagues requesting ritual necessaries for a festival; subordinates of Bar Kokhba, they were commanders (apparently) at En-gedi, an oasis on the shore of the Dead Sea.

Soumaios to Ionathes, son of Baianos, and to Masabala, greetings. Since I have sent Agrippa to you, hurry up and send me stems of palms and citrons and they will be set up for the Festival of the Tabernacle of the Jews. Don’t do anything else. This was written in Greek because [a name is lost] could not be found to write it in Hebrew. Let him [i.e., Agrippa] return quickly because of the festival. Don’t do anything else. Soumaios. Farewell.

The letter, with its needless repetition of the phrase “Don’t do anything else,” speaks eloquently of the excitement, the urgency, and, implicitly, the optimism of a revolutionary moment.

A note from the prince of Israel himself reveals a ruthless touch. Its subject is a certain landowner, wealthy but uncooperative. The produce from his orchards and his livestock would be of material benefit to the rebel cause.

Shim’on Bar Kosiba to Yehonatan son of Ba’ ay an, and to Masabala, son of Shim’ on, that you will send to me Eleazar’ son of Hitta immediately, before the Sabbath.

If Eleazar was found and delivered, he would have had a distinctly uncomfortable interview. One rather hopes that he smelled trouble and made himself scarce.

Another letter suggests Yehonatan and Masabala were not altogether dependable officers. Bar Kokhba ordered them to send him reinforcements. “And if you shall not send them, let it be known to you, that you will be punished.”

Bar Kokhba’s approach to religion was rigorously exclusive and he had no time for Christians. The church fathers returned the compliment. Justin, writing contemporaneously, claimed: “In the present war it is only the Christians whom Barchochebas [i.e., Bar Kokhba], the leader of the rebellion of the Jews, commanded to be punished severely if they did not deny Jesus as the Messiah and blaspheme him.”

Jerome goes further: “Barcocheba, leader of a party of the Jews, because the Christians are not willing to help him against the Roman army, murders them with every sort of torture.” Christians regarded Bar Kokhba as a butcher, a bandit, and a con man. In order to meet a prophecy that the Messiah breathed fire, Jerome accused him of “fanning a lighted blade of straw in his mouth with puffs of breath so as to give the impression that he was spewing forth flames.”

If we can generalize from names in the discovered papyri and the location of coin finds, the new Jewish state was of limited extent. It controlled at least a territory running south of Jerusalem and along the Dead Sea and extending to within eighteen miles of the Mediterranean. There may have been pockets of insurgent activity farther north and on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea. However, Bar Kokhba failed to capture the abomination of desolation that was Aelia Capitolina. Rebel coins have been found in many other places in Judaea but none there.

Eventually the regrouped and reinforced Romans returned to the fight. Tineius Rufus wreaked vengeance for his early defeat, if we can trust hysterical Talmudic sources. Eusebius records:

When military aid had been sent him by the emperor, [Tineius Rufus] moved out against the Jews, treating their madness without mercy. He destroyed in heaps thousands of men, women, and children, and under the law of war, enslaved their land.

The hapless rabbi Aqiba fell into Roman hands. Apparently he was flayed alive. He is said to have endured the punishment with composure, but his messiah was unable to save him.

Hadrian hired the services of the architect and engineer Apollodorus of Damascus, builder of the stone bridge across the Danube and designer of many of Trajan’s buildings in Rome, despite their being reputed to be on bad terms. Apollodorus was an expert on siegecraft, and in an epistolary preface to his classic text on the subject, Poliorcetica, he addressed an emperor who needed his advice: “I am honored that you think me worthy of sharing your concern in this matter.” He writes that although he is not familiar with the terrain in question he has been invited to supply designs for siege works to be used against elevated fortified positions—heights rather than cities.

Apollodorus lists devices suitable for employing against a hill fort; these included defenses against heavy objects, such as wagons and barrels that could be rolled down a hill onto attackers; screens to protect an assault force against missiles as it made for the top; and techniques for undermining a wall, ramming a gate, or using assault ladders.

The emperor in question is most likely to have been Hadrian, for the task Apollodorus describes exactly fits the challenge facing the Romans in Judaea. When Julius Severus eventually arrived, he adopted the only rational tactic to subdue a lawless countryside speckled with guerrilla groups. As Vespasian had done before him, he proceeded slowly and methodically, taking and securing every hill and strongpoint and destroying everything he encountered before he advanced farther.

The Romans had assembled overwhelming force. It is impossible to gauge how many troops took part in the campaign, but a best estimate indicates that the number of legions, either with a complete complement or represented by sizable vexillationes, or detachments, was twelve or thirteen (albeit not necessarily present at the same time). This was a disproportionately huge deployment for tiny Judaea, but nothing was to be left to chance.

Bar Kokhba responded vigorously, if we can trust Talmudic tales. It was said that “he would catch missiles from the enemy’s catapults on one of his knees and hurl them back, killing many of the foe.” This can be interpreted as meaning that the rebels acquired some Roman artillery and put it to good use.

However, letters have been found which suggest that loyalty to the prince of Israel was beginning to wear thin. In one of them, the unsatisfactory duo Yehonatan and Masabala continued to disappoint. “In comfort you sit, eat, and drink from the property of the House of Israel,” he wrote angrily, “and care nothing for your brothers.”

The endgame approached. The civilian Jewish population, not only in Judaea but also in Arabia, grew desperate. Whether sympathetic to the rebel cause or not, everyone was caught up in the approaching catastrophe. Well-to-do families, together with their gold and silver, hid in the insurgents’ network of tunnels and in caves. That some failed to survive their ordeal is confirmed by the discovery of cooking utensils, correspondence, and human remains in caves at Wadi Murabba’ and Nahal Hever.

Bar Kokhba’s final redoubt was the fortress of Betar, six miles south-West of Jerusalem. We do not have the details, but Apollodorus’ advice on siegecraft was good. A fragmentary letter evokes the despair of total defeat: “… till the end … they have no hope … my brothers in the south … of these were lost by the sword.”

In November or December 135 Betar fell. According to Eusebius, the siege lasted a long time, but eventually “the rebels were driven to final destruction by famine and thirst and the instigator of their madness paid the penalty he deserved.” Bar Kokhba’s head was taken to Hadrian (or perhaps to Severus). Dio reports that 50 of the most important strongholds of the Jews had been captured, 985 villages razed, and 580,000 Jews killed. A hyperbolic rabbinical tradition had it that gentiles fertilized their vineyards for seven years with the blood of Israel without using manure.

The Jewish state lasted three years, before the dream of liberty was extinguished. The man whose nom de guerre was Shim’on bar Kokhba, Son of the Star, was renamed by embittered survivors as they contemplated the ruins of Judaea; he was now Shim’on bar Kozeba, Son of the Lie.

The emperor determined to root out Judaism. So many prisoners were put up for auction at Hebron and Gaza that each fetched no more than the value of a horse. Judaea was, in effect, depopulated of Jews either by death or enslavement, and any few who remained were forbidden to enter the district around Jerusalem. This was to prevent them from even seeing, let alone visiting, their ancestral capital. The teaching of Mosaic law was banned, as was the ownership of scrolls (the essential medium on which the scriptures and rabbinical commentaries were written).

The building of Aelia Capitolina proceeded apace and an equestrian statue of Hadrian, still in place more than a century later, was erected on the site of the Holy of Holy. Pagan shrines were built over Jewish places of worship. By the city gate for the Bethlehem road, a marble sow was erected, insultingly offensive to Jews and denoting their subjection to Roman power. Judaea was abolished as a territorial entity. It was added to Galilee and the enlarged and purified province was known as Syria Palaestina, the first time the term Palestine was ever employed. It was to be as if the chosen people had never existed.

Hadrian was acclaimed imperator for the first time in his reign, a title adopted by an emperor only after a signal victory, and his three chief generals, Severus and the governors of Syria and Arabia, were granted triumphal honors, ornamenta triumphalia, the highest military honor to which they could aspire. The emperor was unusually parsimonious with such titles, and his generosity on this occasion signals the shock that had rocked the empire. It had taken a huge effort to put down the revolt.

For Hadrian, his victory was in part a defeat. His policy was to attract the fullest possible consent to Roman rule, to entice provincial elites to join him in government, to recast the empire as a commonwealth of equals. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of this approach, but, for all that, the revolt had exposed its falsity. The final guarantee of the pax Romana was the brute force of the legions. This, in turn, was a reminder of the implicit fragility of the imperial system. If the army were ever to fail, what would then preserve Rome’s dominion?

When the rabbinical authors mention the name of Hadrian they often add the phrase “May his bones rot!” No wonder, for it was now clear that, after recurrent revolts at the end of Nero’s reign and then at the end of Trajan’s, the Jews would never again give Rome any trouble.

XXIV

NO MORE JOKES

In the spring of 134 Hadrian returned to Rome from the east, probably revisiting the Dacian provinces en route. The war in Judaea was by no means over, but he had made all the necessary arrangements and he had confidence in his generals. That dependably undependable client king Pharasmenes stirred up trouble for the Parthians by encouraging a neighboring people, the fierce Alani, to invade their empire as well as the Roman province of Cappadocia; the Parthian king complained to Hadrian, but luckily the governor, Arrian, was on hand. He deployed a Roman force with masterly skill to deter the incursion; being a writer as well as a man of action, he wrote a book on the subject, which is the fullest record of the Roman army in the field to have survived.

Despite these alarms, coins celebrating the emperor’s adventus breathed optimism. In one series, a galley rides on the waves with the goddess Minerva in the prow brandishing a javelin and holding a spear: underneath, a legend reads Felicitas Aug, “the emperor’s happiness.” Other coins from this time boast of Mars the Avenger and Rome holding a statuette of Victory.

The emperor’s brother-in-law, Servianus, was still vigorous in his ninth decade. After a long, resented wait, he had been appointed to serve as consul ordinarius this year for the third time (in April he handed over, as was usual, to a suffectus). This was a high honor, which, despite a history of chilly relations with the emperor, he owed to being a leading member by marriage of the imperial family. Paulina, his wife and Hadrian’s sister, had died a few years previously. Nothing is heard of his daughter and son-in-law. Servianus’ grandson Pedanius Fuscus was now in his late teens and, via his grandmother, was the only adult male linked by blood to Hadrian. For so long as the emperor did not adopt someone else, he was entitled to regard himself as the heir presumptive. He was probably in the imperial entourage, where an eye could be kept on him.

As previously noted, the only other senator to have held a third consulship was Annius Verus, and we can take it that Hadrian was looking forward warmly to seeing his loyal old friend’s grandson again. Little Marcus, his verissimus, was now thirteen years old. It was six years that the emperor had been away, a very long period in the life of a child. It would be a pleasant task to find out how he had developed.

Always serious-minded, the boy proved to be a hardworking pupil when his elementary education began at the age of seven. His maternal great-grandfather Catilius Severus was city prefect and an important man at court. However, he found time to guide the boy’s schooling; Marcus recalled gratefully in later life that he was “allowed to dispense with attendance at schools and to enjoy good teachers at home.” Two family slaves or freedmen taught him the rudiments of Greek and Latin. Specialists gave him a grounding in the arts—literature, music (mainly singing), and geometry.

A tutor looked after Marcus’ moral formation, and seems to have instilled worthy but slightly dull values in the growing teenager. He was taught “not to side with the Greens or the Blues at the chariot races, or to back Thracian [swordsmen] or Samnite [heavy-armed] gladiators; to tolerate pain and limit my needs; to work with my own hands and mind my own business and not to listen to malicious gossip.”

A year or so before Hadrian’s return to Italy, Marcus entered his secondary education under various grammatici. But his most influential teacher was his art master, Diognetus, from whom he learned not only painting but the rudiments of philosophy. He wrote dialogues in the manner first established by Plato and “set my heart on the pallet bed and coverlet of animal skins, and everything else that tallied with the Greek [philosophical] system.” In fact, according to the Historia Augusta, Marcus would have preferred to sleep on the ground, were it not for his mother’s veto.

Diognetus also imparted a subversive principle that presumably would have annoyed Hadrian had he learned about it. This was “not to give credence to the claims of miracle-mongers and magicians and such matters.”

Marcus sounds as if he was becoming rather priggish, but the emperor liked what he saw of him. This may have had something to do with the fact that he was a nice-looking boy, as a bust of him in his teens shows. More to the point, Hadrian believed he could foresee an intelligent and responsible adult in the making.

During the emperor’s absence, building work in Rome had proceeded busily. The spectacular temple of Venus and Rome was dedicated in 135. Hadrian was very proud of the result. According to Dio Cassius, he invited Apollodorus to offer his comments. Hadrian bore him a grudge, because years before he had interrupted with some smart remark a conversation between Apollodorus and Trajan about a building project. The architect had snapped back at Hadrian, who was practicing his draftsmanship at the time: “Go away, and get back to your drawing exercises. You don’t understand any of this.”

The emperor hoped that this time Apollodorus would compliment him, but he was disappointed. The architect remarked that the temple

ought to have been built on high ground and that the earth should have been excavated beneath it, so that it might have stood out more conspicuously on the Sacred Way from its higher position … Second, in regard to the statues [of Venus and Rome], he said that they had been made too tall for the height of the

cella

[the temple’s inner chamber]. “For now,” he said, “if the goddesses wish to get up and go out, they will be unable to do so.”

Dio has it that the emperor was so angry that he banished the architect and later put him to death. This is a tall story. The joke about the goddesses had already been made centuries previously against Phidias’ famous statue of Zeus at Olympia, and there is evidence that Hadrian continued to make use of Apollodorus’ services. However, the exchange is consistent with what we know of the emperor’s bossy nature. It may well be that the amateur and the professional got on badly. If they quarreled, though, the worst that can have happened was that the architect died soon after and malicious tongues made the most of the coincidence.

Rome was still a construction site. On the right bank of the river the emperor’s huge mausoleum, long planned, was rising from the ground. A bridge connecting it to the Campus Martius had already been constructed. The tomb itself was similar to that of Augustus, which was full. Nerva had been squeezed in there and Trajan’s remains lay at the foot of his column; the dynasty needed a long-term replacement. The design was a large drum rising from a square base and faced with marble. It probably supported a superstructure decorated with statues and surmounted by a colonnaded tower, on top of which stood a colossal four-horsed chariot.

The emperor was wise to plan his final resting place, for he was feeling unwell. He suffered from recurrent and increasingly copious nosebleeds. He remained in or near Rome, presumably spending most of his time at the villa complex at Tibur, where there was the construction of the temple of Antinous to superintend. The text on the obelisk there included a prayer from Osirantinous to Ra-Harachte, a union of the sun god Ra and Horus, king of the heavens, that the emperor “live eternally, like Ra, / With a prospering and newly risen age!”

Hadrian had believed that the death of Antinous would cure him of his chronic ailment. Perhaps he had benefited for a time from this most selfish of placebos, but, of course, the truth was otherwise. By the time he celebrated his sixtieth birthday, on January 24, 136, and doubtless long before, it was obvious that the magic had failed. Mumbo jumbo was mumbo jumbo and Hadrian was sicker than ever. A portrait study from sometime in the 130s from Diktynna in Crete shows a weary, disillusioned face. The loss of his beloved had been for nothing.

The emperor’s state of mind grew irritable. Some thought that the stress released an innate cruelty. He began to throw over old friends and allies for reasons that are now obscure, but do not appear to be altogether rational. He dropped Aulus Platorius Nepos, who had probably accompanied him on his visit to Britannia and who, as governor, had organized the building of the wall. He now held him “in the greatest abhorrence,” writes the Historia Augusta. “Once, when he [Platorius Nepos] went to see him when he was ill he refused him admittance.”

Saddest of all, Quintus Marcius Turbo, who had been a centurion with the legion II Adiutrix when Hadrian was a military tribune in his first army posting, fell from favor about now. Turbo had had a glittering career, quashing the Jewish uprising in 117 and serving with distinction in Dacia. One of the emperor’s closest advisers and confidants, he had been Praetorian prefect since 125. Dio Cassius reports that

he spent the entire day near the palace and often he would even go there before midnight, when other people were just going to bed.

Turbo was never to be found at home during the daytime, even when he was unwell. Hadrian once asked him to calm down and live a quiet life; he replied, adapting Vespasian’s famous last words: “The prefect ought to die on his feet.”

Turbo was removed from office and replaced. A strong link to the past was broken.

Hadrian only just survived a major hemorrhage in the villa at Tibur, perhaps another unstoppable nosebleed. He realized that he was approaching the end of his life, and that it was time to think of the succession. Among his relatives, Servianus was much too old. A quarter of a century previously Trajan had once considered him worthy of the purple, but his time had passed. Anyway, Hadrian disliked him. What, then, about Pedanius Fuscus? The young man harbored great expectations, and so presumably thought himself to be in favor with the emperor.

However, for some reason, now impossible to ascertain, Hadrian disregarded his claim. Instead, he chose as heir someone who could hardly have been less suitable for the imperial throne. The political world was amazed when during the second half of 136 the emperor unexpectedly announced that he was adopting as his son Lucius Ceionius Commodus. He was renamed Lucius Aelius Caesar (from now on the word caesar ceased being an ordinary cognomen, but became the title of the nominated successor to the throne).

The Historia Augusta asserts that “his sole recommendation was his beauty.” His pleasures were “not discreditable but somewhat unfocused”: he enjoyed sex (with women, for a change) and kept by his bedside copies of Ovid’s book of naughty poems, “My Love Affairs” (Amores). Frivolity went hand in hand with poor taste; apparently Martial was his Virgil. On the face of it, there was little to choose between him and Pedanius Fuscus. That said, Ceionius Commodus was now a man in his late thirties and was running a successful political career. This year he was consul and, although the appointment was in the emperor’s gift and could have had a personal rather than a political significance, he seems to have commanded a certain competence.

It is possible that Lucius had been Antinous’ predecessor as eromenos, albeit with a significant difference. If he was an attractive boy, he was also a freeborn Roman citizen of high status. A love affair on the traditional Greek model was feasible, but any sexual expression of affection would have necessarily been conducted with restraint. By the same token, the imperial erastes would have been expected to train his noble boyfriend for public life. Once Lucius had grown up, the relationship should have matured into philia, a deep and loyal friendship. Perhaps this was the background to his surprising promotion.

It is relevant to note that two or three years later, young Marcus Annius Verus and his tutor Marcus Cornelius Fronto exchanged letters about their love for each other. Fronto, holding back, says, “So far as I am concerned you shall be called [‘beautiful,’ usually applied to victorious athletes] and not [eromenos, or ‘beloved’].” Marcus objects: “You shall never drive me, your lover, away.” There is something artificial about the correspondence, but even if Marcus and Fronto were only playing at having an affair it does strongly suggest that Greek love was a respectable and accepted convention at court.

It is also worth observing that Ceionius Commodus had been the stepson of Avidius Nigrinus, one of Hadrian’s four consular victims in the opening weeks of his reign—the crime for which the Senate had never quite forgotten. Could it be, wondered contemporaries, that a dying emperor was seeking to make amends by this remarkable adoption?

The real problem had nothing to do with favoritism or lack of outstanding ability, but with health. The new caesar was very ill, more so indeed than his adoptive father. He was known to cough up blood and, so far as we can tell, was suffering from tuberculosis. He was too ill even to appear in the Senate to offer his thanks to the emperor for the adoption.

Nevertheless, great celebrations were held. His health improved enough to allow Aelius Caesar to preside over games in the Circus Maximus, and he handed out lavish donatives to the People (that is, citizens living in or near Rome) and to the legions. He was designated consul again for 137 and was given the tribunician power that was an essential ingredient of imperial authority. Deciding that his heir needed a military grounding, Hadrian sent him to the Danube as governor of the two Pannonian provinces.

Pedanius Fuscus nursed a grievance. His hopes of succeeding Hadrian had been dashed, and he staged a coup. A second-century horoscope of the emperor claims that he nearly died when he was sixty-one years and ten months old, namely November 137. To be technical, “the degrees of the Horoscopos and the moon in Aquarius come into quartile to Saturn, which, however, is not destructive because Venus is in aspect to it (Saturn) also the second time.” This was presumably a reference to Pedanius’ plot. It failed, and it was the great-nephew who lost his life, not the emperor.

A horoscope of Pedanius reports him as coming “of an illustrious family of the highest level—I speak of his father and mother, both of high repute.” The document continues (minus planetary data): “Having been born with great expectations and thinking he was coming into the imperial power, he was given bad advice and fell from favor about his twenty-fifth year. He was denounced to the emperor and was destroyed along with a certain old man of his own family, who was himself slandered because of him. In addition, all members of his family because of him were done away with in a lowly manner.”

The “certain old man” was Servianus. Whether or not he was implicated in the conspiracy, it was unsafe to let him live once Pedanius had been removed. He was either executed or (so the Historia Augusta says) instructed to commit suicide. The alleged offense was ambition for the throne, presumably on his grandson’s behalf rather than his own. The evidence, such that we have, smells of prosecutors making the most of little: the charge sheet noted that “he gave a feast for slaves in the royal household, sat in a royal chair placed close to his bed, and, though an old man of ninety, used to go out and meet the soldiers on guard duty [at the palace].”

Before he died, Servianus asked for fire with which to burn some incense. As he made the offering he exclaimed: “That I have done nothing wrong, you gods know very well. As for Hadrian, this is my only prayer, that he may long for death, yet be unable to die.”

Two literary sources claim that “many others” or “many from the Senate” were also put to the sword, either openly or by subterfuge. However, they name no names, and the accusation may be false—a malicious lie, an exaggeration of a purge of officials, or a simple mistake. If there is truth in it, though, the deaths were doubtless related to the Pedanius affair. To many they echoed the scandalous executions of 117, and the Senate’s old resentment against the emperor returned.

At about this time (or perhaps in the following year) another illustrious death occurred—that of the empress. A late source reports that “his wife, Sabina, while she was nearly being incapacitated by servile affronts, was driven to a voluntary death.” A forced suicide is possible, but improbable. Although the husband and wife cordially loathed each other, the emperor took great pains to ensure that Sabina was treated with respect. She accompanied him on many of his travels and received all the honors due to an empress. Hadrian immediately had his late wife deified, enabling her to join her mother, Marciana, and Plotina on Olympus. Her apotheosis was recorded on an aureus, on the reverse of which she is shown seated on a flying eagle.

However, her disappearance just when the regime was undergoing a painful succession crisis is odd. The empress was still only in her late forties or early fifties and, in the normal course of events, should have expected another ten or twenty, even thirty, years of life. If there really was a Hadrianic bloodbath, it is conceivable that Sabina would have joined the other victims, should the emperor have suspected that she would scheme against his settlement when he was gone. The Historia Augusta mentions a rumor that he poisoned her, but there is no other evidence for this. Apart from the mysterious scandal during the visit to Britannia when Suetonius lost his job as imperial secretary for lèse-majesté, Sabina had no more recorded involvement in politics than Plotina had as Trajan’s consort. The timing of her departure is most likely to have been merely a coincidence of fatalities.

Marcus Annius Verus was fifteen in April 136, by which time he had come of age and exchanged the red-striped toga praetexta of the child for the adult’s plain toga virilis. As had been the case with the teenage Hadrian, the consuls appointed him to the honorary, and highly honorific, post of prefect of the city, praefectus urbi (not to be confused with the official of the same name who was in charge of the city’s administration). The prefect, a boy from an aristocratic or imperial family, was left nominally in charge of the city of Rome when all the officeholders from the consuls down processed to the Alban Mount a few miles outside Rome and celebrated there the Feriae Latinae.

Marcus was still the apple of Hadrian’s eye. He won golden praises for his ceremonial performance as prefect, and at banquets given by the emperor. He loved boxing and wrestling, running and fowling: he was a huntsman and an excellent ball player. However, he remained a studious youth. According to the Historia Augusta,

His enthusiasm for philosophy led him away from all these pursuits and made him an earnest and serious-minded person. Yet it never completely took away a certain personal warmth … he was austere but not unreasonably so, reserved but not shy, serious but not depressive.

It was at the emperor’s express wish that Marcus had been betrothed to Ceionia Fabia, one of Ceionius Commodus’ daughters. This may provide a clue of Hadrian’s real intention when deciding on the adoption. Aware of the man’s poor health, he only wanted him to keep the seat warm for Marcus until he was old enough to assume the purple (as a matter of fact, Ceionius had a son of his own, but he was no more than seven years old and perhaps only five, young enough to be disregarded). Augustus’ efforts to plan for the long-term succession of a grandson provided a precedent, although not a happy one as things turned out. He had expected Tiberius, a capable general and administrator, to govern the empire until young Gaius Caesar was ready to hold the reins of power. Tiberius refused to play the part allotted to him, and both Gaius and his younger brother Lucius died prematurely.

Once again, the fates put an end to an emperor’s hopes. Hadrian had not originally realized just how ill Aelius Caesar was, but he came to see that the prognosis was poor. He repeatedly used to say, “We have leaned against a tottering wall and have wasted the four hundred million sesterces which we gave to the people and the soldiers on the adoption of Commodus.”

Aelius Caesar spent less than a year on the Danube, where he had by no means been a failure as a commander. Before the end of 137 he was back in Rome. He was due to deliver an important speech before the Senate on January 1, but on the preceding night he collapsed. He took an overdose of some medicine, and his condition deteriorated further. He hemorrhaged badly and lost consciousness, dying on New Year’s Day. The emperor forbade mourning, so as not to prevent the annual vow-taking ceremony for the safety of the state. The adoption had been greeted with “universal opposition,” and there was no question of deification.

It was a near-disastrous setback. Hadrian himself was failing; he was looking emaciated and suffered from dropsy. A new succession plan was urgently needed. On January 24, his sixty-second birthday, he summoned leading senators to his sickbed, from which he addressed them.

My friends, I have not been permitted by nature to have a son, but you have made it possible by legal enactment … Since Heaven has bereft us of Lucius [Aelius Caesar], I have found as emperor for you in his place the man whom I now give you, one who is noble, mild, tractable, prudent, neither young enough to do anything reckless nor old enough to neglect anything.

This time Hadrian’s choice had fallen on someone entirely unexceptionable. He confessed later: “I made my decision even when Commodus was alive.” His successor was to be Titus Aurelius Fulvius Boionius Arrius Antoninus. He was a middle-aged senator of great wealth and with impeccable antecedents. He was orphaned as a child and his grandfather Titus Arrius Antoninus had brought him up. An amiable friend of Pliny, an intimate of Nerva, and a skilled versifier in Latin and Greek, Arrius was a senator of the old school who held the consulship “with the dignity of a bygone age.”

The adoption of Arrius Antoninus’ grandson as the new Caesar was an astute move on Hadrian’s part, for it symbolized the entente between the two parts of the ruling class—those who were willing to collaborate with the emperors and traditionalists, including survivors of the Stoic opposition, still in mourning for the Republic. This entente had been Nerva’s great achievement, and Antoninus was an assurance of its continuance into the future.

Good-natured and distinguished in appearance, Antoninus was an excellent public speaker. From Hadrian’s point of view he had the overriding advantage of being a man of peace. He had no military experience of any kind and so there was little chance of a return to military aggression and imperial expansion.

The emperor had privately contacted Antoninus immediately after Aelius Caesar’s death, but the senator asked for time to consider the invitation before accepting it. Perhaps he had something of Arrius in him and feared that the attractions of power were overrated. Also, Hadrian’s offer came with conditions. Antoninus was to adopt Marcus, his verissimus, now seventeen years old, along with the dead Commodus’ little son—probably confirmation that the boy had been the emperor’s preferred choice all along. His solution was not without risk: Antoninus might disregard the adoptions after his death, or die before Marcus was old enough to take over. But if all went well, the empire would be in the hands of two competent and well-intentioned rulers for another couple of generations. It was a bet worth taking.

After due thought, Antoninus accepted the emperor’s offer. He insisted on retaining his cognomen and was known as Titus Aelius Hadrianus Antoninus. Marcus became Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus; today we call them Antoninus Pius (pius means “loyal” or “dutiful”) and Marcus Aurelius.

The end was near. The emperor suffered from bad dreams; in one of them he asked his father, fifty years dead, for a sleeping draft. On another occasion he was overcome by a lion, a distorted memory perhaps of his last hunt with Antinous in the sands of Libya. He was no longer really in a fit condition to attend to affairs of state, but he insisted on trying to do so. In practice, Antoninus, officially endowed with proconsular imperium and tribunicia potestas, very soon found himself in charge of the government machine.

The emperor still placed confidence in “charms and magic rituals” and he received temporary relief from his dropsy, but his limbs soon filled up with fluid again. It would seem that Hadrian had contracted congestive (that is, fluid-retaining) heart disease, a condition that could have lasted for a couple of years or so. As has been seen, he may also have been suffering from chronic erysipelas.

It is impossible to assign a definite cause at this distance in time, but one clear possibility is reduced blood flow to the heart through the coronary blood vessels. If reports of Hadrian’s heavy drinking with Trajan are correct and reflect a long-standing habit, this may have led to alcoholic cardiomyopathy, a weakening of the heart muscle or a change in its structure. Cardiac failure means that the heart’s function as a pump to deliver oxygen-rich blood is inadequate to meet the body’s needs. This in turn reduces the kidneys’ normal ability to excrete salt and water. As a result the body retains more fluid which descends to the legs when the sufferer is standing or sitting. Hence the symptoms of dropsy.

Hadrian would have found temporary relief by lying down, but that risked fluid gathering in the lungs and shortness of breath. Sometimes he would have awoken at night, gasping for air. He may have had to learn how to sleep seated upright. Excess fluid also prompts increased urination, especially at night, and when it accumulates in the liver and intestines causes nausea, stomach pain, and a loss of appetite.

The emperor felt as if he were dying every day, and came to long for an immediate end. He asked for poison or a sword, but nobody would give them to him even if he promised money and immunity from prosecution. The curse of Servianus had come to pass.

Finally, Hadrian sent for Mastor, the captive tribesman from the Iazyges, who had acted for years as his hunting assistant. According to Dio Cassius,

partly by threatening him and partly by making promises, he forced the man to promise to kill him. He drew a colored line about a spot beneath the nipple that had been shown him by Hermogenes, his physician, in order that he might be struck a fatal blow there and die without pain.

Antoninus was informed of what was happening and went to see Hadrian, taking the guards and city prefects with him. He begged the emperor to endure the course of his illness with equanimity. Now that Antoninus was his adopted son, he would be guilty of patricide if he allowed him to be killed. Hadrian lost his temper and ordered the whistle-blower to be put to death (Antoninus ensured that the sentence was not carried out).

He now drew up a will. Somehow he acquired a dagger, but the weapon was taken from him. He instructed his doctor to give him poison, and the doctor committed suicide to avoid having to administer it.

Two eccentric visitors called, both of them claiming to be blind. First, a woman said she had been told in a dream to coax Hadrian from suicide, for he was destined to make a full recovery. After meeting the emperor, she recovered her sight, or so he was assured. Then an old man turned up when Hadrian was suffering from a fever. He touched the patient, whereupon he saw again and the fever vanished. The emperor’s biographer, Marius Maximus, believed that these were benevolent hoaxes. The court knew its Hadrian, and his penchant for magic.

Hadrian enjoyed periods of remission, or at least quiescence, for he managed to muster the energy to write an autobiography during these last months, almost certainly in the form of a letter to Antoninus. A fragment of a copy on papyrus of its opening lines has been found at Fayum in Egypt. It reads like an indirect apology for attempting to do away with himself (at some point about now he asked those close to him to keep a suicide watch). He wrote:

I want you to know that I am being released from my life neither before my time, nor unreasonably, nor piteously, nor unexpectedly, nor with faculties impaired, even though I shall almost seem, as I have found, to do injury to you who are by my side whenever I am in need of attendance, consoling and encouraging me to rest.

His mind turned to his birth father, who, he calculated, “fell ill and passed away as a private citizen at the age of forty, so that I have lived half as long again as my father, and have reached nearly the same age as my mother.”

He also wrote a poem, a short address to his soul as it quits its body and sets out for the unknown. It is a fine piece of work, allusive, adroitly opaque—and owing more to Hadrian’s favorite, Ennius, than to fluent, smooth Virgil.

animula vagula blandula

hospes comesque corporis

quae nunc abibis? In loca

pallidula rigida nudula

nec ut soles dabis iocos

Little soul, you charming little wanderer,

my body’s guest and partner,

where are you off to now? Somewhere

without color, savage and bare;

you’ll crack no more of your jokes once you’re there.

The failing emperor retreated from Rome to an imperial villa at the seaside resort of Baiae. He abandoned his medical regimen and ate and drank whatever he liked. This precipitated a final crisis and he lost consciousness after shouting out loud: “Many doctors killed a king.”

On July 10, 138, the man who entered life as Publius Aelius Hadrianus left it as Imperator Caesar Divi Traiani filius Traianus Hadrianus Augustus. His next name was due to be Divus Hadrianus, Hadrian the God. But he very nearly failed to make the grade.

XXV

PEACE AND WAR

Although by any objective standard he had been a successful ruler, Hadrian never won over the Senate and the ruling class. He was widely believed to have been innately cruel, and to have hidden his true nature beneath an affable veneer. An opposing view came from someone who had no reason to be kind, being a cousin of one of the former consuls Hadrian had killed at the beginning of his reign. He wrote that the emperor “mixed justice with kindheartedness in accordance with the care he took when making decisions.”

Dio Cassius gives a levelheaded summary:

Hadrian was hated by the people, in spite of his generally excellent reign, on account of the murders committed by him at the beginning and end of his reign, since they had been unjustly and impiously brought about. Yet he was so far from being of a bloodthirsty disposition that even in the case of some who clashed with him he thought it sufficient to write to their native places the bare statement that they did not please him.

A generous epitaph was written near the end of the reign by the emperor’s friend, the historian, administrator, and general Arrian. Quoting Terpander on the virtues of the Spartans, he writes:

The following words, it seems to me, are better applied to the present government of which Hadrian has been the

princeps

for twenty years than to old Sparta:

When the young men’s spear prospers, so do the sweet-toned Muse and holy Justice, the defender of fine deeds

.

The army (the “spear”), the arts (the “Muse”), and holy justice can indeed be seen as the three foci of Hadrian’s life’s work.

Antoninus conveyed Hadrian’s remains to Rome and arranged his burial “in the gardens of Domitia.” This park was the location of the late emperor’s mausoleum. The building had not yet been completed, for it was dedicated the following year; perhaps a temporary interment took place nearby. We know that eventually Hadrian lay in the grandiose tomb he had built for himself and his successors, for Antoninus’ memorial stone has been found there.

The Senate, remembering its embittered relationship with Hadrian, did not wish him to deify him, but Antoninus insisted (hence perhaps the cognomen Pius). The consecration ceremony was modeled on the obsequies of Augustus. An artificial body, made from wax and wearing the costume of a triumphator, a general at a triumph, represented Hadrian and lay in state in the Forum Romanum. Here it repeated symbolically the dying of the already deceased emperor; for some days doctors examined the “patient” and issued bulletins. Then, when death had eventually been acknowledged, Antoninus delivered a eulogy after which a long procession of dignitaries headed by the Senate made its way to the Campus Martius. Here the effigy was placed on a tall, richly decorated multistory pyre. The consuls set light to it and an eagle, caged on the top tier, was released, which signified Hadrian’s spirit flying up through the flames to join the immortal gods.

What are we to make of Hadrian? The judgment of his contemporaries was much too harsh. Whatever the truth about the killings at the beginning and end of his reign, he governed humanely and equitably. He was immensely industrious and exercised good judgment. He loved the arts and was an enthusiastic and not ungraceful poet.

However, his personality puzzled people; he was gregarious and friendly in manner, but he dropped intimates easily and without apparent regret. In specialist fields such as architecture, he was that annoying person, the self-taught (if talented) amateur who insists on competing with the professional. A Christian poet, Tertullian, called him omnium curiositatum explorator, “a seeker-out of every kind of curiosity.” A hostile witness notes and overstates his faults, but cannot help sounding a note of admiration: Hadrian was

diverse, manifold, and multiform … He adroitly concealed a mind envious, melancholy, hedonistic, and excessive with respect to his own ostentation; he simulated restraint, affability, clemency, and conversely disguised the ardor for fame with which he burned. With respect to questioning and likewise to answering in earnest, in jest, or in invective, he was very skillful; he returned verse to verse, speech to speech, so you might actually believe that he had given advance thought to everything.

In his reflections many years later, in which he reviewed those to whom he owed gratitude, Marcus Aurelius surprisingly makes no affectionate mention of his adoptive grandfather. “Do not be upset,” he wrote, addressing himself as a good Stoic. “In a little while you will be no one and nowhere, as is true now even of Hadrian and Augustus.” His friend and mentor, Fronto, found it hard to warm to Hadrian, whom he compared unfavorably to his successor.

I wished to appease and propitiate [him], as I might Mars or Jupiter, rather than loved him. Why? Because love requires some confidence and intimacy. Since, in my case, confidence was lacking, I dared not love someone whom I so greatly revered. Antoninus, by contrast, I love, I cherish … and feel that I am loved by him.

Hadrian cuts a lonely figure. His moated refuge in the heart of the villa-city at Tibur suggests an emotional self-sufficiency into which few if any were allowed to intrude, except perhaps Antinous. But if it is true that the emperor agreed to the boy’s sacrificial death in the Nile, we can only conclude that here, too, self-sufficiency—and its subset, self-interest—trumped love.

It is a curious feature of Hadrian’s protracted death that no close family members or friends are recorded as having been at the patient’s bedside. They had died, or been killed or dropped. His secretary, Caninius Celer, “saw Hadrian to his grave, then went to his own grave.” Two otherwise unknown men, Chabrias and Diotimus, kept vigil by his coffin; their Greek names suggest that they were members of the emperor’s household, on a par with Trajan’s Phaedimus. Raison d’état brings cruel consequences for even the most lovable ruler, but it seems entirely appropriate that Hadrian spent his last days in the care of slaves and freedmen, and of an heir who, until recently, had only been a political colleague.

If we examine Hadrian’s political and military record, he scores very high. His emphasis on the training and disciplining of the army complemented his unpopular but wise policy of nonaggression to neighbors. He introduced no important structural reforms, but improved the efficiency and morale of the legions in an age when serious fighting was seldom required. Dio Cassius, himself an experienced public servant, observed: “Even today the methods he then introduced are the soldiers’ law of campaigning.”

In another passage earlier in his Roman History, Dio sets out his view of the ideal emperor. In a fictional debate, he has a speaker advise Augustus: “Because of your intelligence and because you have no desire to acquire more than you already possess, you should be strongly disposed toward peace, but in your preparations you should be thoroughly organized for war.” As we have seen, until the very end of his reign, Augustus was an uncompromising and bellicose imperialist. Dio’s prescription fits Hadrian much more closely, and he must surely have had his example in mind when penning these words.

It is difficult to judge the impact of Hadrian’s pan-Hellenic strategy, but he wisely maintained and developed the Roman tradition of encouraging provincial elites to take part in the governance of the empire as partners. In his day more men than previously from “old” or mainland Greece joined the Roman Senate and even governed provinces in the Latin West. In succeeding centuries there was a great flourishing of Greek culture. That the Hellenic easterners increasingly bought into the empire and regarded it as theirs is reflected in their description of themselves during late antiquity as (Romaioi), or Romans. Hadrian can claim some of the credit.

However, his attempt to forcibly Hellenize the Jews precipitated the worst crisis of his reign. The Bar Kokhba rebellion cost thousands of Roman lives, and the number of Jewish victims was many times greater. The elimination of Judaea as a national homeland meant that Jewry no longer posed a political threat—in fact it no longer had a political existence. It was a blunt reminder that, in the last resort, the Roman empire was sustained by violent force.

Roman law functioned as a kind of international law, in the sense that plaintiffs could appeal to it from local jurisdictions, and it helped bind people to the imperial system. Hadrian was very interested in the administration of law, and his judicial decisions reveal a disinterested and detailed concern for fair treatment. The codification and publication of the praetor’s annual edict into “perpetual” or definitive form was an important step in the development of European law.

Like emperors before him, Hadrian was a great builder, and architecture fascinated him. The Pantheon in Rome and the villa complex at Tibur provided a treasure-house of ideas that inspired the architects of the Renaissance and later ages.

Despite his defects of character, Hadrian meant well. He had the great good fortune to preside over an empire at its zenith and of following two well-meaning predecessors. He faced no serious external military threats or economic challenges. His genius lay in the fact that he was a consolidator. Determined not to squander the advantages he inherited, he made the empire safe, purging it of military adventurism, binding its inhabitants to the imperial idea, and embedding the rule of law.

Later in the second century Aelius Aristides, a celebrated Greek orator, addressed a personified Rome in a speech that he delivered in the presence of the emperor Antoninus. It attributes to the spirit of Rome achievements to which Hadrian made a significant contribution.

The sea is not a hindrance to becoming a citizen, nor is the mass of intervening land, nor is any distinction made here between Asia and Europe. Everything lies within reach of everyone. Nobody is a stranger who is worthy of magistracy or trust, but a free commonwealth, in which the whole world shares, has been established under one excellent ruler and director, and everyone meets as if in a common assembly, each to receive his just reward.

In the original Greek, the word the speaker used for “commonwealth” was democracy, which in this period meant a government in which the civil rights of citizens were protected.

It is telling that it was a Greek who paid these lavish compliments; the average, conservative Roman did not feel quite so warm toward an idea of empire as an equal community of peoples. This was one of the reasons Hadrian never really won their hearts, but it was through tirelessly promoting this idea that he helped to ensure the prosperous and pacific continuance of Roman rule.

Antoninus generally maintained Hadrian’s policies and preserved, in the elder Pliny’s phrase, “the immeasurable majesty of the Roman peace.” We hear of no dramas, and the reign exemplifies the truth of the maxim: Happy the country that has no history. There was occasional frontier trouble; in Britain an insurgency led to a new rampart north of Hadrian’s Wall, only for it to be abandoned twenty years later. Thereafter the Romans manned Hadrian’s Wall until the end of their occupation of Britannia.

Such disturbances attracted little attention. Aelius Aristides remarked: “Wars, if they once occurred, no longer seem real.” The empire ran smoothly, he asserted, thanks to the emperor’s watchfulness, but not to his presence. “He can stay quietly where he is and govern the whole world by letters.”

Hadrian’s succession plan worked. When Antoninus died after reigning for more than twenty years, Marcus Aurelius, the verissimus, and Lucius Commodus (later Verus, who soon succumbed to a stroke) assumed office without opposition. Foreign policy became more aggressive, again. After a successful war with Parthia the legions brought back a plague that ravaged the empire and caused a famine. Troops had been withdrawn from the Danube provinces for the campaign, allowing a mass breakthrough of tribes from the far side of the river.

The fighting continued on and off for most of the reign, and Marcus died in camp at Vindobona (today’s Vienna), still struggling to protect the empire’s northern frontier. Breaking the precedent set by his predecessors, he left the empire to his son by birth, the eighteen-year-old Commodus. He was a handsome blond whose hair shone in the sunlight as if dusted with gold powder. A lazy good-for-nothing, he devoted his time to having a good time. In 192 he was assassinated in a well-managed palace plot. In this way, a run of five good emperors came to a miserable end. Some very old men were able to recall the day when Hadrian announced his sequence of adoptions, and to regret the return of inheritance by bloodline.

Migrating tribes pressed harder and harder against the borders. From now on Rome was on the defensive. Its long endgame had begun.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am most grateful to Will Murphy, my editor, and Courtney Turco of Random House for their unstinting support, combining patience with optimism. As always, my agent, Christopher Sinclair Stevenson, has been a constant and wise adviser and guide.

Professor Robert Cape of Austin College, Texas, very kindly read a draft and offered valuable comments and corrections. Dr. Peter Chapman and the heart surgeon Philip Hayward offered most helpful medical analysis, despite the absence of a patient to inspect, but are not responsible for my speculative diagnoses of Hadrian’s illnesses. I am enormously indebted to Alessandro La Porta, Responsabile d’Area per Pierreci Soc. Coop. a.r.l., who kindly showed me around Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli and brought me up-to-date on the latest archaeological discoveries.

As ever, the London Library was an invaluable aid to a writer who lives in the country and required a constant supply of books.

I am grateful to Penguin Books for permitting me to quote from Juvenal: The Sixteen Satires, translated by Peter Green.

NOTES

ABBREVIATIONS

Acts

Acts of the Apostles

Ael Arist Rom

Aelius Aristides,

Ad Romam (To Rome)

Alexander

P. J. Alexander, “Letters and Speeches of the Emperor Hadrian”

Amm Marc

Ammianus Marcellinus,

Res Gestae (History of Rome)

Anth Pal

Palatine Anthology

App Civ War

Appian,

Civil Wars

App Iberica

Appian,

Wars in Spain

App Pun

Appian,

Wars with Carthage

Apul Apol

Apuleius,

Apologia

Apul Met

Apuleius,

Metamorphoses

Arafat

K. W. Arafa

t, Pausanias’s Greece

Arr Alan

Arrian,

Order of Battle with Array

Arrian Alex

Arrian,

Campaigns of Alexander

Arrian Parth

Arrian,

Parthica

Arrian Peri

Arrian,

Periplus Ponti Euxini

Arrian Tact

Arrian,

Ars Tactica

Aul Gell

Aulus Gellius,

Noctes Atticae

Aur Vic

Aurelius Victor,

De Caesaribus

Bennett

Julian Bennett,

Trajan: Optimus Princeps

Birley

Anthony Birley,

Hadrian, the Restless Emperor

Birley Vind

Anthony Birley,

Garrison Life at Vindolanda

BMC III

H. Mattingly,

Coins of the Roman Empire in the British

Museum

, vol. 3

Bowman

Alan K. Bowman,

Life and Letters on the Roman Frontier

Brunt

P. A. Brunt,

Roman Imperial Themes

Burkert

Walter Burkert,

Greek Religion

CAH

Cambridge Ancient History

, vol. XI

Camp

J. M. Camp,

The Archaeology of Athens

CCAG

Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum

Char

Charisius,

Ars Grammatica

Cic Att

Cicero,

Epistulae ad Atticum (Letters to Atticus)

Cic Fam

Cicero,

Epistulae ad familiares (Letters to His Friends)

Cic Leg

Cicero,

Leges (Laws)

Cic Tusc

Cicero,

Tusculanae Quaestiones (Tusculan Disputations)

CIL

Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum

Clem

Clement of Alexandria,

Proteptious

Col

Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard,

The Colosseum (Wonders of the World)

Colum

Columella,

De re rustica (On Farming)

Digest

Digesta

(Justinian I)

Dio

Dio Cassius,

Roman History

Dio Chrys

Dio Chrysostom,

Oratio (Discourse)

21

Diod

Diodorus Siculus Bibliotheke (Library)

Dio Laer Epicurus

Diogenes Laertius,

Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers: Epicurus

Eck

Werner Eck, “The Bar Kokhba Revolt: The Roman Point of View”

Ennius

Ennius,

Annales (Annals)

Ep de Caes

Epitome de Caesaribus (Summary of the Caesars)

Epict

Epictetus,

Discourses

Epiph

Epiphanius,

Weights and Measures

Eur Alc

Euripides,

Alcestis

Euseb Ch Hist

Eusebius,

Church History

Eutropius

Eutropius,

Historiae romanae breviarium

FIRA

Fontes Iuris Romani Antejustiniani

Florus Ep

Florus,

Epitome

Fronto Ad L Ver

Fronto,

Ad Lucium Verum (to Lucius Verus)

Fronto Ad M Caes

Fronto,

Ad Marcum Caesarem (To Marcus Caesar)

Fronto de bell Parth

Fronto,

De bello Parthico (On War with Parthia)

Fronto de fer Als

Fronto,

De feriis Alsiensibus

Fronto Princ Hist

Fronto,

Principia Historiae

Galimberti

Alessandro Galimberti,

Adriano e l’ideologia del principato

Gibbon

Edward Gibbon,

History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Goldsworthy

Adrian Goldsworthy,

In the Name of Rome

Gray

William D. Gray, “New Light from Egypt on the Early Reign of Hadrian”

Greek Horo

Hephaestio of Thebes

Green

Peter Green,

Juvenal: The Sixteen Satires

Gyn

Soranus,

Gynaecologia

HA Ant

Historia Augusta, Antoninus Pius

HA Ael

Historia Augustus, Aelius Caesar

HA Hadr

Historia Augusta, Hadrian

HA Marc

Historia Augusta, Marcus Aurelius

HA Ver

Historia Augusta, Aelius Verus

Herodian

Herodian,

History of the Empire After Marcus

Homer II

Homer,

Iliad

Hor Ep

Horace,

Epistulae (Letters)

Hor Epo

Horace,

Epodes

Hor Ser

Horace,

Sermones (Satires)

IG

Inscriptiones Graecae

ILS

Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae

Jer Chron

Jerome,

Chronicle

Jer Contra Ruf

Jerome,

Contra Rufinum (Against Rufinus)

Jer de vir ill

Jerome,

De viris illustribus (Of Famous Men)

Jer In Esaiam

Jerome,

In Esaiam (Commentary on Isaiah)

Johnson

Paul Johnson,

A History of the Jews

Jones

Brian W. Jones,

The Emperor Domitian

Jos AJ

Josephus,

Jewish Antiquities

Jos BJ

Josephus,

Jewish War

JRS

Journal of Roman Studies

Julian Caes

Julian,

The Caesars

Justin Apol App

Justin,

Apologia Appendix

Justin First Apol

Justin,

First Apologia

Juv

Juvenal,

Saturae (Satires)

Lambert

Royston Lambert,

Beloved and God

Levine

Lee I. Levine,

Jerusalem: Portrait of the City in the Second Temple Period

Livy

Livy,

Ab Urbe Condita (History of Rome)

Lucian Philospeud

Lucian,

Lover of Lies

Lucr de Rerum Nat

Lucretius,

De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things)

MacDonald

William L. MacDonald and John A. Pinto,

Hadrian’s Villa and Its Legacy

Macr

Macrobius,

Saturnalia

Malalas

John Malalas,

Chronographia

Marc Aur

Marcus Aurelius,

To Himself (Meditations)

Mart

Martial,

Epigrammata (Epigrams)

Mart Lib de Spect

Martial,

Liber de Spectaculis (Show Book)

MLP

Minor Latin Poets

, Loeb Classical Library

Mommsen

Theodor Mommsen,

A History of Rome Under the Emperors

Naor

Mordecai Naor,

City of Hope

Oliver

J. H. Oliver,

Greek Constitutions of Early Roman Emperors from Inscriptions and Papyri

Opper

Thorsten Opper,

Hadrian—Empire and Conflict

Paus

Pausanias,

Description of Greece

Petr

Petronius,

Satyricon

Phil

Saint Paul,

Letter to the Philippians

Philo Apoll

Philostratus,

Life of Apollonius of Tyana

Philo Her

Philostratus,

Heroicus

Philo v. Soph

Philostratus,

Lives of the Sophists

Pindar Dith

Pindar,

Dithyrambs

Plato Symp

Plato,

Symposium

Plaut Curc

Plautus,

Curculio

Pliny Ep

Pliny the Younger,

Epistulae (Correspondence)

Pliny NH

Pliny the Elder,

Naturalis Historia (Natural History)

Pliny Pan

Pliny the Younger,

Panegyricus

Plut Crass

Plutarch,

Life of Crassus

Plut Mor

Plutarch,

Moralia (Essays)

Plut Per

Plutarch,

Life of Pericles

Plut Pomp

Plutarch,

Life of Pompey the Great

Pol Physio

Polemon,

De Physiognomia

POxy

Oxyrhyncus Papyri

Quint

Quintilian,

Institutio Oratoria

RIC

H. Mattingly and E. A. Sydenham,

The Roman Imperial Coinage

Rossi

Lino Rossi,

Trajan’s Column and the Dacian Wars

Script Phys Vet

Scriptores Physiognomoniae Veteres

Sen Contr

Seneca,

Controversiae

Sen Ep

Seneca,

Epistulae (Correspondence)

Shakespeare, A & C

Shakespeare,

Antony and Cleopatra

Sherk

Robert K. Sherk, ed.,

The Roman Empire: Augustus to Hadrian

Smallwood

E. Mary Smallwood,

Documents Illustrating the Principates of Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian

Speidel

M. P. Speidel,

Riding for Caesar

Stat Silv

Statius,

Silvae

Strabo

Strabo,

Geographica

Suet Aug

Suetonius,

Augustus

Suet Cal

Suetonius,

Caligula

Suet Dom

Suetonius,

Domitian

Suet Nero

Suetonius,

Nero

Suet Vesp

Suetonius,

Vespasian

Syb

Sybilline Oracles

Syme Tac

Ronald Syme,

Tacitus

Syncellus Chron

Syncellus,

Chronographia

Tac Agric

Tacitus,

Agricola

Tac Ann

Tacitus,

Annals

Tac His

Tacitus,

Historiae (Histories)

Tert Apol

Tertullian,

Apologeticum (Apology)

Thuc

Thucydides,

History of the Peloponnesian War

Veg

Vegetius,

De re militari (On Military Affairs)

Virg Aen

Virgil,

Aeneid

Xen Anab

Xenophon,

Anabasis (The Persian Expedition)

Xen Hunt

Xenophon,

Hunting with Dogs

Yadin Bar-K

Yigael Yadin,

Bar-Kokhba

Yoma

Babylonian Talmud Yoma

PREFACE

“the fair prospect of universal peace”

Gibbon, p. 36.

“persisted in the design”

Ibid., p. 37.

“repellent” and “venemous”

Mommsen, p. 340.

INTRODUCTION

Full information on Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli can be found in the site guidebook and MacDonald.

“And in order not to omit anything”

HA Hadr 26 5.

I. INVADERS FROM THE WEST

Main literary source—

Historia Augusta

born on the ninth day

HA Hadr 13.

“exceedingly miserable place to live”

Strabo 312.

“Turdetania … is marvelously blessed”

Ibid., 324.

The Aelii were friendly with the Ulpii

For this paragraph and the next, see Syme Tac, p. 603.

four hundred active senatorial families

CAH, p. 222.

“should be not younger than twenty”

Gyn 2 19.

Paulina appointed a woman called Germana

See CIL 14 3721 for an inscription about her.

“Should I express wonder at gilded beams”

Stat Silv 13 35–37.

“they grow up lying around in litters” and “broad daylight of a respectable school”

Quint 127–9.

Now thirty-two

Eutropius 852 reports that Trajan died in his sixty-third year. It follows that he was born in

A.D

. 53. Other literary sources suggest different years of death, but most modern scholars follow Eutropius.

Tall and well made

For Trajan’s appearance, see statues and Pliny Pan 47.

“setting foot on rocky crags”

Pliny Pan 81 1.

liked having sex with young men

Although biographers such as Bennett write of Trajan’s bisexuality, the emperor may have been exclusively homosexual, although most Romans appear not to have specialized.

II. A DANGEROUS WORLD

Main literary sources—

Historia Augusta;

Xenophon and Arrian on hunting

the celebrated Quintus Terentius Scaurus

HA Ver 25 identifies Scaurus as “Hadrian’s

grammaticus.”

It has been argued that this simply means a

“grammaticus

of the age of Hadrian,” but the context implies that a personal teacher is meant.

obiter

Char 13 271.

“he preserved my chastity”

Hor Ser 16 82–84. Although Horace wrote in the first century

B.C

., there is no reason at all to believe that children’s safety improved under the empire.

“require that he take”

Juv 7 237–41.

manum subducere ferulae

Op. cit. 1 15.

“that genius”

Sen Contr 1 Praef 11.

“An orator, son Marcus”

Sen Contr 1 Praef 9.

“happiest days of my life”

Pliny Ep 2 18 1. This citation from Pliny and the one that follows date from the early second century, but there need be little doubt that they are equally relevant to educational attitudes in Hadrian’s youth.

the slightest hint

In HA Hadr after the sentence recording Hadrian’s father’s death, we read

“imbutusque impensius Graecis studiis”

—“and he steeped himself rather enthusiastically in …” The

que

, or “and,” could imply a connection.

his guardian’s new wife, Plotina, encouraged him

A persuasive speculation in Galimberti, pp. 21–22.

“When Greece was taken”

Hor Ep 21 156–57.

“Like Indians under the British Raj”

Green, p. 316.

“from this day, from this moment”

Sherk 168, p. 217.

casting an emperor’s horoscope was high treason

Ulpian,

De Officio Proconsulis

7.

“moribus antiquis

” Ennius 467.

singling out for bravery

Pliny NH 8 11.

celebrated his fifteenth birthday

Hadrian’s coming of age is an assumption that convincingly explains his visit later in the year to the family estates in Spain, a natural step for their new owner to take.

Hadrian had visited Baetica once before

It is argued in Birley 19 that “returned,”

rediit

, HA Hadr 21, is probably a way of saying “went back to the old plantation” without meaning that Hadrian had been there before. Possibly so; but there is no reason not to take the word literally.

a

collegium

in the province of Africa

See inscription in

L’année epigraphique

, Paris 1888ff., 1958.

We can safely assume

The following section on hunting makes use of Xenophon’s and Arrian’s monographs,

Hunting with Dogs

.

“Surely everyone is liable to make mistakes”

Pliny Ep 9 12 1.

“these Graeculi”

Ibid., 10 40 2.

III. YOUNG HOPEFUL GENTLEMAN

Main literary source—Quintilian,

Institutio Oratoria

“The man who can really play his part”

Quint 1 p. 10.

one likely candidate is Lucius Licinius Sura

A helpful speculation in Birley, p. 27.

“The (person) who has the stars”

Greek Horo pp. 79–80.

“your antiquated vocabulary”

Martial 7 47 2.

“gave orders respectfully”

Sherk 173 A.

Tombstones from the early empire

Sherk 173 B to Z.

“has a lovely family”

Sen Ep 41 7.

“all the flower of the colonies”

FIRA I 43 Col II lines 2–4.

perhaps 17 percent of its six hundred members

Lambert, p. 26.

“Robbers of the world”

Tac Agric 30 4–5.

IV. CRISIS OF EMPIRE

Chief literary sources—Suetonius on Nero, Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian; Josephus and the Talmud

“There were people”

Suet Nero 57 1.

“Even now everyone wishes [Nero] to be alive”

Dio Chrys 21

On Beauty

10.

“The Greeks alone are worthy”

Ibid., 22 3.

“Other leaders,” he said

Sherk 71.

the decree earned Nero reincarnation

Plut Mor

Delays of God’s Vengeance

567F.

of an empire of about 60 million souls

For population estimates see CAH, pp. 813—14.

Tacitus exemplifies the general opinion

The account that follows draws on Tac His 52–8.

“hid the circumcision”

Jos AJ 12 5 1.

“Cursed be the man”

Mishnah Sota 49B.

“The great Jewish revolts”

Johnson, pp. 112, 133.

a population perhaps of 100,000

Levine, p. 342.

a snowcapped mountain peak

Jos BJ 56 223. The description of the city and Temple draws on Jos BJ 5 136–8 247.

“In this stood nothing at all”

Jos BJ 6 282.

A military incident

Jos BJ 3 31 289–306.

“What an artist”

Suet Nero 49 1.

between thirty thousand and forty thousand men

Goldsworthy, p. 337.

a silver shekel

Naor, p. 55.

“Following the directions and plans”

Sherk 83 (ILS 264).

“Why was the First Temple destroyed?”

Yoma 9b.

V. A NEW DYNASTY

Chief literary sources—Suetonius, Dio Cassius, and Pliny the Younger

pecunia non olet

See Dio 65 14 5.

“This is what it means”

Epict 1 1 31–32.

verbatim notes

These are

The Discourses of Epictetus

, written by Arrian.

in the expected high Roman fashion

See Shakespeare, A & C 4 15 92. 49

Paete, non dolet

Pliny Ep 3 166.

“It is in your power”

Epict 12 19–21.

“Dear me, I seem to be becoming a god!”

Suet Vesp 23 4.

“An emperor ought to die on his feet.”

For the two versions of the story, see Suet Vesp 24 and Dio

66

17 1–3.

Vespasian had in fact been poisoned

Dio

66

17 1.

“people did not know”

Dio

66

23 5.

“the whole world was dying with me”

Pliny Ep 6 20 17.

“At the beginning of his reign”

Suet Dom 31.

“shaking the thunderbolt of purity”

Stat Silv 52 102.

the senior Vestal, Cornelia

For Cornelia’s trial and execution see Pliny Ep 4 11

passim

.

unfazed by the contrast

There is no good reason to resist the unanimity of the sources on this topic.

“he was not only physically lazy”

Dio 67 6 3.

“bed-wrestling”

Ep de Caes 11 7.

“shrewd in his understanding of warfare”

Dio 67 61.

“dreaming of battle”

Juv 4 111–12.

subsidy of about 8 million sesterces

See Jones, p. 74.

the emperor agreed to provide military engineers

Dio 67 4.

exhibits displayed as campaign spoils

Dio 67 72.

“Rulers find themselves”

Suet Dom 21.

Trajan received the culminating reward

In the ensuing brief discussion about Trajan’s career, I follow Bennett, pp. 43–45.

VI. ON THE TOWN

Chief literary sources—Suetonius, Dio Cassius, Pliny, and Epictetus

“young patrician who had had his tunic torn off”

Pliny Ep 4 16.

behest of one of the consuls for 94

A plausible speculation in Birley, p. 30, regarding the consul C. Antius A. Julius Quadratus.

“We want bears!”

Hor Ep 21 182–213.

The emperor Caligula

Suet Cal 36, 55, 57.

Nero acted as one himself

Suet Nero 16, 26.

an eccentric old noblewoman

Pliny Ep 7 24.

Apuleius, in his picaresque novel

Apul Met 10 29–35, for the following paragraphs.

a similar spectacle actually occurred

Mart Lib de Spect 6 (5).

Appuleius Diocles

For Diocles’ detailed and boastful funerary inscription, see Sherk 167 (CIL 6 1000 48; ILS 5287).

Eutyches

Sherk 168 (CIL II 4314; ILS 5299).

“standing down there below them”

Dio 62 17 4.

Cicero found the whole business vulgar

Cic Fam 713.

An ingenious recent calculation

Col pp. 91–94.

one dud arm

Juv 6 106–10.

one beast, beaten for failing to learn a trick

Pliny NH 86.

death of a pregnant wild sow

Mart Lib de Spect 14.

“Time was when their plebiscite”

Juv 10 78–81.

the complete gallery of horrors

According to the HA Hadr 19 8, Hadrian was a frequent spectator at gladiatorial shows when emperor. He presumably acquired the taste when young.

Massa … served as governor of Baetica

For Massa’s trial and its consequences, Pliny Ep 7 33.

“A soldier marched in”

Plut Mor

Curiosity

522d.

“I stood among the flames”

Pliny Ep 3 11 3.

“In Rome reckless persons”

Epict 4 13 5.

VII. FALL OF THE FLAVIANS

Chief literary sources—

Historia Augusta

, Dio Cassius, and Pliny

Pannonia was famous for a plant

Pliny NH 21 20 and 83: probably

Valeriana celtica

.

“A distant look at a camp”

Pliny Pan 15 2.

an estimated salary of 18,000 sesterces

For army pay, see Speidel

passim

and Table 7.

“an ostentatious lover of the common people”

HA Hadr 17 8.

an uncanny memory for names

Pliny Pan 155.

identified as Quintus Marcius Turbo

Birley, p. 32, but see Syme, “The Wrong Marcius Turbo,” p. 91, for an opposing view.

“the charge brought against them”

Dio 67 14 1–2.

“man of the most contemptible laziness”

Suet Dom 15 1.

“on the slightest of suspicions”

Ibid., 15 1.

He was a handsome man

For Nerva’s appearance see Julian Caes 311A, his coins. His vomiting is recorded in Dio 68 13, and drinking in Aur Vic 13 10.

“Whoever is familiar with the poet Nero’s verses”

Mart 8 70 7–8.

reported to have seduced Domitian

Suet Dom 11.

“Your great enemy, Clemens”

Phil Apoll 8 25 1. The usually unreliable Philostratus seems to be reporting a credible account.

VIII. THE EMPEROR’S SON

Chief literary sources—Dio Cassius, Pliny, and

Historia Augusta

personification of Liberty

BMC III p. 3 16.

provision of grain for the capital city

Ibid., p. 21 115.

“Harmony of the armies”

Ibid., p. 4,

25

ff.

“Assuredly we have been given a signal proof”

Tac Agric 23, 31.

Despite the embargo

For this episode and quotations, Pliny Ep 9 13.

“bloodstained servility”

Pliny Ep 9 13 16.

“whose loss of sight”

Ibid., 4 22 5.

“I wonder what would have happened”

Ibid., 4 22 4–5.

“I have done nothing”

Dio 68 3 1.

The Guard took over the palace

For this episode, see Dio 68 33–4, Ep de Caes 12 7–8.

A laureled dispatch

If I am wrong, and Trajan was governing one of the Germanys, then the victory must have been someone else’s. However, this would render Pliny’s reference Pan 7–82 rather odd; he says that the Pannonian victory marked “the rise of a ruler [i.e., Trajan] who would never be defeated.” That makes little sense if it was not for Trajan’s success on the battlefield.

“May good fortune attend”

Dio 68 3 4.

“May the Danaans”

Homer Il 1 42.

he moved Trajan from his posting in Pannonia

For Trajan’s postings and movements I follow Bennett, pp. 44–50.

“All disturbances died at once”

Pliny Pan 85.

“You had to be pressed”

Ibid., 56.

“foretold” the principate of Trajan

Tac Agric 44 5.

“wanton tyranny of power”

Pliny Pan 76.

he had famously congratulated

Ep de Caes 12 3.

an unprecedented third posting

Only one case is attested: see Birley, p. 37.

and was impressed

An inference drawn from Hadrian’s later development of the

limes

principle.

revealed “what he was spending”

HA Hadr 26.

The news angered Trajan, as was intended

The Latin has

“odium in eum movit”

(“he stirred anger against him”). The

“movit”

implies intention.

Aquae Mattiacae

Pliny NH 31 17.

Hadrian seized the hour

HA Hadr 26, for the race to Colonia Agrippinensis.

IX. “OPTIMUS PRINCEPS”

Chief literary sources—Pliny and Dio Cassius

“Who is that in the distance”

Virg Aen 6 808–12.

Plotina was probably in her mid-thirties

I follow Bennett, p. 24, in supposing that Trajan married Plotina about

A

.

D

. 78, and that, like most Roman girls, she was between thirteen and fifteen at the time of the union.

“he thought that an old man”

Dio 68 51.

“he would not kill or disenfranchise”

Dio 68 52.

“If the public interest demands it”

Pliny Pan 67 8.

“ridicule that had greeted”

Tac Agric 39 1.

“One could see swords everywhere”

Dio Chrys 12 16–20.

“I enter here such a woman”

Dio 68 55.

“Nothing was so popular”

Pliny Pan 34 3–4.

“Well, let them go!”

Ibid., 34 5.

“The weather was … particularly bad”

Pliny Ep 3 18 4.

“critical sense of my audience”

Ibid., 18 8.

“Times are different”

Pliny Pan 23–4.

“provoked a laugh”

HA Hadr 31.

he picked up un-Italian speech patterns

Birley, p. 46.

Some said she was in love with him

Dio 69 12.

more interested sexually in men than women

This is an assumption, but everything in the records of Hadrian’s life points to this conclusion. I discuss his sexuality on pp. 239—44.

According to Aulus Gellius

Aul Gell 10 10.

she was a wealthy woman

Opper, p. 204.

“it was a bit crowded”

BBC

Panorama

interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, November 21, 1995.

X. BEYOND THE DANUBE

Chief literary sources—Dio Cassius, Pliny, and

Historia Augusta

. Trajan’s Column is an important “document.”

“O Jupiter, Greatest and Best”

Smallwood II 1 24–37.

“Imperator Caesar, son of the deified Nerva”

L’Année Épigraphique

1973, 473.

“because of the danger of cataracts”

JRS 63 (1973) pp. 80–81.

a notorious rogue

Dio 68 32 4–5.

“how high a hill and place have been excavated”

Smallwood 378.

The column picks up the tale

The interpretation of the reliefs on Trajan’s Column in the following paragraphs is indebted to Rossi, pp. 130–212.

“I have had no letter from you”

Pliny Ep 3 17 1–3. It is highly probable, though not certain, that this letter was sent to Servianus during the first Dacian war.

Servianus and Sura returned to Rome

In the ordinary course of things, they should have served or at least opened their consulships in Rome. They may have stayed with Trajan, but I follow Bennett, p. 93.

An inscription … sets out his early career

Smallwood 109. The reference to

donis militaribus

is associated with Hadrian’s quaestorship and appointment as

comes

during the Dacian expedition.

military decorations

See Rossi, pp. 79–80.

“into a position of fairly close intimacy”

HA Hadr 32–3; and the next quotation.

“opulent rewards”

Ibid., 33.

appointment as

tribunus plebes

The

Historia Augusta

confuses the dates, placing the tribuneship in

A

.

D

. 105, later than the praetorship, which it must have preceded. See discussion in Birley, p. 47.

“he was given an omen”

HA Hadr 35.

There is some misunderstanding

Birley, p. 48.

“seized some fortified mountains”

Dio 68 93.

The celebratory coins he issued

BMC III 191, 236, and 242.

“agreed to surrender his weapons”

Dio 68 95–6.

“excessively keen on poetry”

HA Hadr 14 8.

would write verse as a relaxation

Pliny Ep 7 9 9.

“rage powers my poetry”

Juv 1 79.

“the poverty of our native tongue”

Lucr de Rerum Nat 1 139.

“When you speak, the honey”

Pliny Ep 4 3 3. See also Homer

Iliad

1 249.

lascivus versu

Apul Apol 11.

“glory of the empire”

Pliny Ep 10 14.

seems to have been made urban praetor

The sources are not explicit, but this must be the assumption, for only the urban praetor held games. Confusion in the

Historia Augusta

has left the date of the praetorship uncertain. I agree with Birley, p. 47.

arrested “on suspicion”

Dio 68 11 3.

about this time that a telling exchange took place

I follow the plausible speculation in Birley, p. 50ff.

“To the strongest”

Arrian Alex 7 26.

it distinctly appealed to Trajan

In the event (as the reader will discover), Trajan did seek to follow Alexander’s precedent, except perhaps in his very last hours.

“I commend the provinces”

HA Hadr 48. By its location in the text, this story (if true) took place near the end of Trajan’s life. The Dacian wars seem a more likely date, seeing that Trajan would be naming a nearby general; Priscus could take over in the event of his being killed or incapacitated.

offered to negotiate without preconditions

For Longinus’ story see Dio 68 12 1–5.

the freedman’s safety

Ibid., 68 12 5.

“with the help of some captives”

Ibid., 68 14 4–5.

about 500,000 pounds of gold

Sherk 118 (Joannes Lydus De Mag 2 28). Lydus’ numbers are fantastic because of a transmission fault in the text, but this can be easily corrected to produce a rational result.

gray marble inscription

Sherk 117. For a photograph see Rossi, p. 228.

“his many remarkable deeds”

HA Hadr 3 6.

XI. THE WAITING GAME

Chief literary sources—

Historia Augusta

, Dio Cassius, and Pliny. Also the

alimenta

tablets.

“held back the Sarmatians”

HA Hadr 39.

“restrained the procurators”

Ibid., 39.

“One was said to ask a wealthy man”

Ep de Caes 42 21.

“maintained military discipline”

HA Hadr 39.

in recognition of his successful record

HA Hadr 3 10.

“So great was the friendship”

Dio 68 15 4–6.

One of these concerned a spring

Pliny Ep 4 30.

“He was no longer despised”

HA Hadr 3 10.

“zeal that he had secured

imperium”

Epit de Caes 13 6.

with its thirty legions

This was the legionary strength after Trajan raised two additional legions, probably during the Dacian wars.

He treated them as personal friends

Eutropius 84.

“He joined others in animal hunts”

Dio 68 73; and the next quotation, “took more pleasure …”

“what the emperor decides”

Digest 14 1Pr.

“Appello Caesarem”

Acts 25 11.

defendants condemned in absentia

Digest 48 19 5.

a remote bridge in Numidia

Smallwood 98.

he was nicknamed “the Wallflower”

Amm Marc 27 3 7.

Even the decisions of a “bad” emperor

For example, see Pliny Ep 10

66

.

the celebrated

tabula alimentaria

Now in the National Archaeological Museum of Parma.

The tablets give detailed information

CIL 1455 and 11.1147.

identify needy children

CAH, vol. XI, p. 115, argues against poverty as a criterion. While Roman citizenship in the provinces was selective and indicative of membership in an affluent local elite, in Italy it was universal; so many citizens there must have been poor. What would the point have been of an

alimenta

system that did not target their offspring?

Epitome de Caesaribus

12 4 claims the chosen children were those in greatest need.

cost the state annually 311 million sesterces

Bennett, p. 83.

“As a result, most of [them] have lost interest”

Pliny Ep 937.

one with the proud slogan

Italia restituta

RIC II 278 no. 470.

writing the emperor’s speeches

HA Hadr 3 11.

“My own view is that we should compromise”

Pliny Ep 10 115.

“I think then that the safest course”

Ibid., 10 113.

So he wrote to Rome for guidance

Ibid., 10 96.

It was impossible, he wrote

Ibid., 10 97.

XII. CALL OF THE EAST

Chief literary sources—Dio Cassius,

Historia Augusta

, and Epictetus. Also Camp for background on Roman Athens.

“to the pure and genuine Greece”

Pliny Ep 8 24 2.

“O glittering, violet-crowned”

Pindar Dith 76 (46).

In 112 Hadrian made his way to Athens

The dating is supported by Hadrian’s year as archon, known to be 112. Because the Athenian official year ran from summer to summer, this could mean either 111–112 or 112– 113. That Panathenaic Games were held in 112 makes it very likely that Hadrian chose 112–113 for his stay in Athens.

became a friend and admirer

HA Hadr 16 10.

a number of remarks in his lectures

I am indebted to Birley, pp. 60– 61, for this happy speculation.

“If the emperor adopts you”

Epict 132.

“Shall kinship with the emperor”

Ibid., 197.

“Some men … have excessively sharp tongues”

Ibid., 125 15–16.

“Maximus: I sit as a judge over Greeks”

Ibid., 37 30–33.

They then awarded him their highest honor

The

Constitution of Athens

55 makes clear that archons entered office immediately after election. I assume that the antiquarian Athens of the first century

A

.

D

. maintained the old tradition.

“He devoured the pursuits and customs”

Ep de Caes 14 2.

“Euphranor”

The Latin has “Euphranoras,” but Euphranor must be meant.

He was tall and … elegant in appearance

For Hadrian’s appearance see HA Hadr 26 1–2. I have also used the evidence of statues.

“a pleasant man to meet”

Dio 69 2 6

²

.

“languishing, bright, piercing”

Script Phys Vet 2 51f (Adamantius).

Augustus prided himself

Suet Aug 79 2.

“bristly farmer with a kiss like a billy-goat’s”

Martial 12 59 4–5. 146

Cicero called them

barbatuli

Cic Att 1 16 11.

cover some natural blemishes

HA Hadr 26 1.

“Can anything be more useless than hairs”

Epict 1 16 9.

“So we ought to preserve the signs”

Ibid., 1 16 14.

very plausible that he did so now

See Birley, p. 61, for this notion.

“Friend of the Greeks”

Smallwood 44a.

Plutarch recalls how Roman soldiers

Plut Crass 24 2.

Trajan, while mindful of the dignity

See Arrian Parth frag. 33.

“was a desire to win glory”

Dio 68 17 1.

Coins were issued

BMC III p. 108 531; p. 106 525; p. 101 500; p. 112 569ff.

legatus

to the emperor

HA Hadr 41.

“assigned to Syria for the Parthian war”

Dio 69 1.

“large force of soldiers and senators”

Malalas 11 3–4.

“satisfactory neither to the Romans”

Dio 68 17 2–3.

“Friendship is decided by actions”

Ibid.

Hadrian waited in Antioch

Hadrian’s movements and whereabouts during this period are uncertain. Malalas (11 3–4) says that he accompanied the emperor on his journey east, presumably after Athens. But Dio (69 1) and HA (Hadr 4 1) seem to indicate a preparatory role; it follows that he preceded Trajan to Syria.

the legions he had assembled

Little detail has come down to us of Hadrian’s responsibilities, but it can be inferred that preparing an army for the Parthian campaign was one of them.

the superstitious Hadrian

Amm Marc 22 12 8. The reference is undated, and could have taken place during Hadrian’s brief governorship of Syria in 117.

The imperial pair presented

Arrian Parth frag. 36.

“To Zeus Kasios has Trajan”

Anth Pal 6 332.

XIII. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

Chief literary sources—Dio Cassius,

Historia Augusta

, and Arrian’s

Parthica

“At this same time [Hadrian] enjoyed”

HA Hadr 42.

cocommander of the Guard

Attianus’ partner was Servius Sulpicius Similis. He stayed in Rome while Attianus accompanied Trajan on his

profectio

.

owner of twin boys

Martial 9 103.

“He displayed neither effeminacy”

Dio 69 18 1.

“always his enemies”

HA Hadr 43.

distinction of public statues

Dio 68 16 2.

arrived toward the end of May

Bennett, p. 192.

Abgarus, king of Osrhoene

Dio 68 21 1.

“Afraid of Trajan and the Parthians alike”

Ibid., 68 18 1.

Parthamasiris turned up late

Arrian Parth frags. 38–40.

laid his diadem

Dio 68 19 2–20 3.

coin issues that depict the

rex Parthus

BMC III 103, 106.

Armenia was soon reduced

The timing and order of events in the Armenian and Parthian campaigns are hard to determine from our sketchy sources. Dio seems to conflate the fighting in 114 and 115, and I follow Bennett in placing the Mesopotamian campaign in 115; the earthquake at Antioch in late 115 or early 116; and the capture of Ctesiphon in 116. Certainty cannot be had.

“became Trajan’s friend”

Dio 68 21 3.

“Sometimes he even made his scouts”

Ibid., 68 23 1–2.

“laureled letter”

See fasti Ostienses

, Smallwood 23.

Early one morning in January

Malalas 11 275 3–8. Malalas can be unreliable. Birley, p. 71, believes that because the

ordinarius

consul Pedo had given way to a suffect long before December, the earthquake must have taken place in January 115. But there is no need to disturb Malalas’ precision; he very probably called Pedo consul because as

ordinarius

he gave his name to the year.

“able neither to live any longer”

Dio 68 24 6.

the emperor “hurried” back

Ibid., 68 26 1.

civil strife had removed Parthia’s capacity

Ibid., 68 26 4

²

.

a military trophy … with two captives

For example, BMC III 606.

raising the ferry charges

Fronto Princ Hist 16.

a third new province, Assyria

The location of the Roman

provincia

Assyria is disputed. It may be that historic Assyria was mislabeled Mesopotamia, the year before the capture of Ctesiphon in the south, and that Mesopotamia was called Assyria later, when the name Mesopotamia had already been used for the northern reaches of the Euphrates and Tigris. Strabo seems to have thought that Assyria was located in the lands we take to be Mesopotamia. Other scholars now argue that the new province lay along the eastern bank of the Tigris.

down the Tigris

Arrian Parth frag. 67.

“four of them carried the royal flags”

Ibid.

“I would certainly have crossed over”

Dio 68 29 1.

“Because of the large number of peoples”

Ibid., 68 29 2.

“would eat the flesh”

Ibid., 68 32 1–2.

“The one hope”

Sherk 129 E.

“Not only because of my long absence”

Ibid., F.

“clean them out”

Euseb Ch Hist 425.

“in grandiloquent language”

Dio 68 303.

emperor crowning Parthemaspates

BMC III p. 223 no. 1045.

“So great and so boundless”

Malalas 11 274 11–13.

XIV. THE AFFAIR OF THE FOUR EX-CONSULS

Chief literary sources—Dio Cassius and

Historia Augusta

“sharing his daily life”

Dio 69 11. Although the phrase is undated, it is placed in a passage referring to this time.

related to one of those onetime royal families

Sherk 128.

Well known for his promiscuity

Aur Vic 14 9, 10.

“Widespread rumor asserted”

HA Hadr 45.

“The blood, which descends”

Dio 68 33 2.

In modern terms

I owe this analysis to Bennett, p. 201.

sure … he had been poisoned

. Dio 68 33 2.

Apparently Trajan at dinner

Ibid., 69 17 3. One epitome mistakenly attributes the incident to Hadrian.

“My father, Apronianus”

Ibid., 69 13.

A gold piece showed Trajan

BMC III, p. 124. Galimberti, p. 19, sees this coin as evidence that the story of a deathbed and/or fake adoption is false, and that in fact Trajan adopted Hadrian earlier in the year 117, before he was approaching death. But while the literary sources may have been hostile to Hadrian they would hardly have made up a story that many eyewitnesses would have known to be false. Also, Dio’s citation of his father’s account has the ring of truth. However, the coin is awkward and calls for a convincing explanation, which I seek to provide.

the

cognomina

“Augustus” and “Caesar”

Aur Vic 13 21.

He climbed Mount Casius

Dio 69 21; and HA Hadr 14 3. Dio refers to a dream, but HA more convincingly writes of an actual event. This is one incident in different versions, not two.

“To [the memory of] Marcus Ulpius Phaedimus”

Smallwood 176.

Hadrian drafted a polite, carefully worded letter

HA Hadr 61–2.

Trajan handing a globe to Hadrian

BMC III, p. 236 1.

image of the phoenix

Ibid., p. 245, 48 and 49.

the “Golden Age”

Ibid., p. 278 312.

The dowager empress

Ibid., p. 246.

a coin with two obverses

Ibid., p. 124.

“advised him by letter”

HA Hadr 55.

“he swore that he would do nothing”

Dio 69 24.

boarded ship

An assumption on my part. A cortege could have made its way to Antioch by land, but it would have been a journey through uncomfortable terrain and taken a week or more.

“Noting from your letter”

Oliver, pp. 154–56.

blocked up with a huge mass of stone

Amm Marc 22 12 8.

“The nations that Trajan had conquered”

HA Hadr 52.

“The Romans have aimed to preserve their empire”

App Civ War pref. 7.

“all catalogued by Augustus”

Tac Ann 1 11.

he must have known of the policy

HA Hadr 51.

“Because it is impossible to keep them under our care”

Ibid., 53. This translation paraphrases the compressed Latin.

Rome was to abjure military expansion