Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

A

LSO BY

A

NTHONY

E

VERITT

Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician

Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor

For the shade of

TOR DE AROZARENA

PREFACE

Hadrian lived through tempestuous and thrilling times. He ruled the Roman empire in the second century A.D. and has a good claim to have been the most successful of Rome’s leaders. An experienced soldier and a brilliant administrator, he presided over the empire at its height.

He had two very good ideas, which helped to ensure that the empire had a long and successful future. First of all, he saw that Rome could not go on expanding. The empire, which stretched from Spain to Turkey, from the Black Sea to the Maghreb, was unmanageable enough as it was and he ruled out any more wars of conquest. As a demonstration for the literal-minded, he built walls along all the frontiers, except where natural boundaries already existed in the shape of rivers and mountains. On this side was civilization and the pax Romana; on the other lay the untamed territory of barbarism, of everything that was not-Rome. In Germany the wall was a wooden palisade, long since gone, but in northern Britain, for want of trees, it was built of stone and remains today one of the most evocative symbols of Roman dominion.

Hadrian’s second idea stemmed from his love of Greece. The eastern half of the empire spoke Greek and boasted a culture that went back to Homer. Rome in the west was the superpower of the Mediterranean basin and commanded irresistible armies. Hadrian took steps to transform the empire into a joint project, where the cultural and the military, art and power, could meet on equal terms. He brought Greeks into government and through massive building projects developed Athens into the empire’s spiritual capital.

In these two ways Hadrian ushered in, as Edward Gibbon wrote, perhaps a little fulsomely, in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “the fair prospect of universal peace.” He and his successors, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, both of whom he appointed and who continued his policies, “persisted in the design of maintaining the dignity of the empire without attempting to enlarge its limits. By every honourable expedient, they invited the friendship of the barbarians; and endeavoured to convince mankind that the Roman power, raised above the temptation of conquest, was actuated only by the love of order and justice.”

This is my third Roman biography and completes a triptych. Cicero traces the fall of the old flawed Republic, and Augustus the establishment of rule by one man. Here now is the story of an emperor who brought a period of disorder and military aggression to a prosperous conclusion, and showed how monarchy could be compatible with good governance. Some of the personalities of the previous books, although long dead, put in cameo appearances, especially Augustus, whom Hadrian greatly admired and emulated.

I attempt not only the portrait of a man, but of an age, during which an unstable system of power, proceeding by fits and starts, managed to regain its balance. While the fall of the Roman Republic is a well-trodden pasture, for many readers the epoch from the end of Nero to the reign of Hadrian is terra incognita; they may find its bloodstained twists and turns all the more exciting for the personalities and the plot being novel.

Hadrian was by no means the first Roman to be extravagantly philhellene. For centuries most members of the ruling elite had been bilingual in Latin and Greek. That poetical narcissist the emperor Nero had had much the same unifying idea as Hadrian, but been incompetent to carry it out.

In Hadrian’s childhood, two unforgettable events took place: the Colosseum, that vast humanities slaughterhouse, opened its doors to the public, and the destruction of Pompeii seemed to prefigure how the world would end.

In his late teens Hadrian witnessed the emperor Domitian’s murderous culling of the ruling class. Civil strife was narrowly avoided after the emperor’s assassination, and in due course Hadrian’s cousin and onetime guardian, Trajan, a popular general, took up the reins of power. From Trajan, the young man learned the art of soldiery in two terrifying campaigns against a fierce barbarian kingdom on the far side of the Danube. The reliefs that wind their way up Trajan’s Column in Rome follow these tumultuous events. Like carved newsreels, they speak across time with the immediacy of a CNN report.

Then followed triumph and, in equal measure, disaster. In a campaign that has a sharp contemporary resonance, Trajan invaded the Parthian empire (roughly what is now Iraq). Victory was swift, for the Parthians offered little or no resistance. But then insurgencies broke out across the eastern empire. Sick at heart and in body, the emperor handed over command to his former ward, and soon afterward died on the journey back to Rome.

The legions acclaimed Hadrian as the new emperor. It had been a long, arduous, and perilous apprenticeship. But now, at the age of forty, the new master of the known world was eager to make history, and was determined that no one should stop him. An indefatigable traveler, Hadrian spent as much time as possible on the road, inspecting everything and reforming everything. The frontiers were secured, the army trained, the laws codified, infrastructure improved, the economy fostered.

There was a terrible exception to this record of benevolent success. Hadrian’s politics had a dark side. The one people that refused to be reconciled to the imperial system was the Jews. A great revolt against Rome broke out. The outcome was a catastrophe for the rebels; according to one estimate, many thousands of Jews were killed, and many others driven from the land. In an attempt to annihilate this thorny and unyielding race from memory, Hadrian renamed Jerusalem and replaced Judaea with a newly minted word, Palestine. All Jews were forbidden from entering their own capital city. It took two thousand years before they were able to return and resume their independence.

Hadrian is the most enigmatic of ancient Romans.

Why is so little said of him? Why have his achievements been so sparsely celebrated? Although he has attracted scholarly attention, the last full-dress biography in English for the general reader appeared as long ago as the 1920s. One explanation of this silence lies in the man’s prickly personality. A fine administrator, Hadrian was brave, intelligent, and, on the main political issues of the day, astute. But he was also irritable and excessively pleased with himself: like many talented amateurs, he took malicious fun in contradicting experts. Hadrian sometimes turned on his friends and threw them over without regret. That great classical historian of the nineteenth century Theodore Mommsen found him “repellent” and “venemous.”

There was an even more damaging threat to Hadrian’s posthumous reputation. Hadrian had a doomed love affair with a beautiful Bithynian boy, Antinous, who drowned mysteriously in the Nile. Victorian and early-twentieth-century commentators shied away from the embarrassing topic of same-sex relationships. One of them argued, hopefully, that Antinous was the emperor’s illegitimate son. Bastardy was bad enough, to be sure, but almost respectable when compared with the love that dared not speak its name.

The most serious problem has been the ancient literary sources, of which a mere handful survive, mangled and mutilated. We know of Hadrian’s autobiography and many other histories of his age, but only by name. The books themselves were consumed in the bonfire of the vanities over which the Church presided during the Dark Ages.

So writing a life of Hadrian promised to be a thankless task. Would there even be enough material to bulk out a book? Heaving a sigh of relief, the historian made way for the historical novelist. Not long after the Second World War, the French writer Marguerite Yourcenar published her Memoirs of Hadrian to loud applause; the book takes the form of a letter addressed by the dying emperor to the young Marcus Aurelius, his successor-but-one on the imperial throne. Poetic and melancholy, it colored in the gaps in our knowledge and offered a speaking likeness of a world-weary autocrat and connoisseur of life. It is no exaggeration to say that for a while Mme. Yourcenar supplanted the academics. Her Hadrian was received as a true image of the real thing.

Since then more than fifty years have passed. The Memoirs are a masterpiece, but (just as a fake antique, completely convincing when it first appears on the market, loses its authenticity with the passage of time) they now reveal as much about mid-twentieth-century French literary attitudes as they do of second-century Rome. Yourcenar’s Hadrian is a romantic rationalist with a taste for the exotic, a classical André Gide.

Scholarship has moved forward as well. Wherever Hadrian traveled in his endless journeying across the empire, he commissioned theaters, temples, aqueducts, arches. Inscriptions record the emperor’s decisions, speeches, and official correspondence, sometimes in great detail. They amount to a second autobiography, this time penned in marble. Archaeologists have deciphered a mass of new material, adding many insights to the literary record.

Important incidents in Hadrian’s career, we must suppose, have entirely vanished beneath the historical horizon or have survived as barely understood vestiges (for example, the British uprising at the beginning of his reign). However, just about enough is known to tell a life and describe the times. And what a remarkable life it was, and what extraordinary times! We have very little information about Hadrian’s childhood and youth, but we are well informed about the public events of the day, so it is at least possible to give an account of what he witnessed or heard about when he was a boy. I also offer a sketch of how the empire worked and trace the origins of the political world that Hadrian would be entering once he had grown up.

It turns out that the poisonous pervert of past imaginings was, in fact, a fascinating figure—full of contradictions, certainly, infuriating and charming, ruthless and well-wishing, hardworking and playful, a man of action and an aesthete, occasionally cruel, but, all in all, a richly endowed, rounded human being. Himself a poet and painter and an enthusiast for everything Hellenic, he was a good Nero.

Now for some practicalities. It is difficult to be precise about the value of money in ancient Rome. The basic unit of account was the sesterce, a small silver coin, four of which made a denarius, also of silver. Goods and services had different relative values when compared to similar ones of today. As a rule of thumb a sesterce could be exchanged for between two and four dollars. But it is more sensible to consider a range of specific instances of income and expenditure. In the first century B.C. the fortune of Rome’s richest man (reputedly), Marcus Licinius Crassus, has been reported as 200 million sesterces. One of Hadrian’s averagely wealthy contemporaries, Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, known as Pliny the Younger, was worth about 20 million sesterces. A legionary soldier’s annual pay was 1,200 sesterces. A Roman citizen could live decently on an annual income of 20,000 sesterces; this modest affluence would presuppose capital worth 400,000 sesterces (the minimum qualification for membership of the eques, or business class). Graffiti at Pompeii show that a modius of wheat (rather more than fourteen pounds) in the mid–first century A.D. cost three sesterces and a loaf of bread weighing just over one pound less than an as, or one quarter of a sesterce. A measure of wine, a plate, or a lamp could each be purchased for an as, which was also the price of admission to the public baths. The minimum wage—whether in cash, or in cash plus keep—will seldom have fallen below four sesterces a day.

As a rule I refer to people and places by their Latin names, while making a few exceptions of those best known by Anglicized versions (thus, Rome not Roma, Pliny not Plinius). I sometimes employ the term barbarian, which the Greeks and Romans applied to peoples who lived outside the empire: this is for convenience, although I recognize that its negative connotations do an injustice to some sophisticated and successful societies. As in my previous books I adopt our contemporary method of dating, which pivots around the supposed year of Jesus Christ’s birth, rather than the Roman chronology, which counted time from the traditional foundation of the city of Rome in 753 B.C. Years A.D. are usually mentioned by number alone.

Roman personal names had a complex significance. First came the praenomen, which would be used in everyday conversation. This was chosen from a limited number of names in common use, such as Gaius, Marcus, Lucius, Publius, and Sextus. An eldest son was usually given the same praenomen as his father. The clan name, or nomen gentilicium, followed. The cognomen (or cognomina, for it was possible to have more than one) may originally have indicated a personal characteristic—for example, Agricola (farmer) and Tacitus (silent). It often signified the family within the clan or a branch within a family or the name of another family into which someone had married. So with Hadrian his praenomen was Publius; to his nomen Aelius were added two cognomina—Hadrianus, referring to his town of origin in Italy, Hadria, and Afer, a Latin word for “African,” which may denote a family branch that had had some connection with the Roman province of Africa, or is possibly an acknowledgment that Carthaginian blood ran through his veins (as it very probably did). Victorious generals might be awarded a cognomen; so the emperor Trajan’s conquest of the Dacian kingdom was marked by the title Dacicus.

Women were generally known by the feminine form of their nomen, although this rule had been relaxed by Hadrian’s day; thus, his sister was not called Aelia, but was known by her mother’s names, Domitia Paulina.

Most people these days encounter ancient Rome through sword-and-sandals epics in the cinema or television miniseries. These can be entertaining, but often leave us unsatisfied. This is because they dump inappropriate contemporary viewpoints onto classical attitudes. For example, we today regard the arena as an inexplicable display of mass sadism. But, although spectators certainly took a cruel pleasure in what they saw, one purpose of gladiatorial combat was to witness courage and to be strengthened or inspirited by it. Rome was a military society and physical bravery—virtus—was at a premium.

This book will have succeeded if it introduces the reader not only to the man Hadrian, but also to his world. This means making the unfamiliar familiar; for without a sense (however tentative and provisional) of what it was like to be alive in those distant days, the reader will make little sense of the events that follow in these pages and the people who acted them out.

CONTENTS

Preface

Chronology

Maps

Introduction

I. INVADERS FROM THE WEST

II. A DANGEROUS WORLD

III. YOUNG HOPEFUL GENTLEMAN

IV. CRISIS OF EMPIRE

V. A NEW DYNASTY

VI. ON THE TOWN

VII. FALL OF THE FLAVIANS

VIII. THE EMPEROR’S SON

IX. “OPTIMUS PRINCEPS”

X. BEYOND THE DANUBE

XI. THE WAITING GAME

XII. CALL OF THE EAST

XIII. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

XIV. THE AFFAIR OF THE FOUR EX-CONSULS

XV. THE ROAD TO ROME

XVI. THE TRAVELER

XVII. EDGE OF EMPIRE

XVIII. LAST GOOD-BYES

XIX. THE BITHYNIAN BOY

XX. THE ISLES OF GREECE

XXI. HOME AND ABROAD

XXII. WHERE HAVE YOU GONE TO, MY LOVELY?

XXIII. “MAY HIS BONES ROT!”

XXIV. NO MORE JOKES

XXV. PEACE AND WAR

Acknowledgments

Notes

Sources

CHRONOLOGY

B.C

.

753

Romulus founds Rome (legendary)

509

Monarchy overthrown; Roman Republic founded

264–241

First war with Carthage

239–169

Ennius, epic poet

234–149

Cato the Censor

218–201

Second war with Carthage

185–129

Scipio Aemilianus

160–91

Caecilius Metellus Numidicus

146

Carthage destroyed

62

Pompey the Great returns from the east

49

Julius Caesar launches civil war

44

Julius Caesar assassinated

31

Octavian wins battle of Actium; end of civil wars

27

Octavian, now Augustus, establishes the imperial system

A.D.

14

Augustus dies; succeeded by Tiberius

37

Tiberius dies; succeeded by Gaius (Caligula)

41

Gaius assassinated; succeeded by Claudius

c. 46

Birth of Publius Aelius Hadrianus (Hadrian’s father)

53

September 18

Birth of Marcus Ulpius Traianus (Trajan)

54

Claudius poisoned; succeeded by Nero

c. 60

Marcus Ulpius Traianus

pater

proconsul of Baetica

66

Jewish revolt

c. 67

Marcus Ulpius Traianus

pater legatus legio

X Fretensis in Syria; under Vespasian’s command for the Jewish war

68

June 9

Nero commits suicide

69

“Year of the Four Emperors”

early July

Eastern legions declare for Vespasian

70

June

Vespasian enters Rome

September 8

Titus captures Jerusalem Defeat of Batavian revolt

71

spring

Titus returns from the east

June

Jewish Triumph

71–75

Banishment from Rome of

astrologi

and

philosophi

72

Annexation of Commagene Armenia Minor added to Cappadocia

73 or 74

Fall of Masada

74

Grant of Latin rights to Spain

c. 75

Trajan

tribunus laticlavius

with legion in Syria Birth of Domitia Paulina, Hadrian’s sister

75

Banishment of Helvidius Priscus

76

January 24

Birth of Publius Aelius Hadrianus Afer (Hadrian)

c. 77–84

Agricola governor of Britain

c. 77

Trajan transferred as

tribunus laticlavius

with legion in

Germany

c. 78

Trajan marries Pompeia Plotina

78

Death of Gaius Saloninus Matidius Patruinus, the husband of Trajan’s sister Marciana; she goes to live with Trajan and Plotina

79

June 24

Death of Vespasian Accession of Titus

August 24

Eruption of Vesuvius; destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum Fire at Rome

80

Dedication of Colosseum Destruction of temple of Capitoline Jupiter by fire Dedication of Arch of Titus

81

September 13

Death of Titus Accession of Domitian

82

December 7

Dedication of restored temple of Jupiter on the Capitol

83

Domitian’s triumph over the Chatti

83–84

Increase of legionary pay

85

Domitian

censor perpetuus

85 or 86

Hadrian’s father dies; Trajan and P. Acilius Attianus are appointed guardians

85–88

Dacian war

86

Inauguration of Capitoline games Trajan praetor

c. 87

Trajan

legatus legionis

VII Geminae

89

Rebellion of L. Antonius Saturninus

90

January

Trajan takes the VII Geminae to Moguntiacum against Saturninus

90

Edict against

astrologi

and

philosophi

Hadrian comes of age, and visits his Spanish estates

91

Trajan

consul ordinarius

93

Pliny praetor Trials of Baebius Massa, Herennius Senecio, Helvidius Priscus, Arnulenus Rusticus

93–120

Vindolanda tablets written

94

Hadrian enters public life:

decemvir stlitibus iudicandis, sevir

turmae equitum Romanorum

, and

praefectus urbi feriarum Latinarum

95

Philosophers expelled from Italy Flavius Clemens put to death Hadrian

trib. militum legionis

II Adiutrix Pia Fidelis in Pannonia

96

September 18

Domitian assassinated Accession of Nerva Trajan defeats the Suebi

October 25

Adoption of Trajan Hadrian

trib. militum legionis

V Macedonica in Lower Moesia

98

Trajan

consul

(2)

ordinarius

with Nerva

99

January 28

Death of Nerva

February

Hadrian brings news of Nerva’s death to Trajan at Colonia Agrippinensis Accession of Trajan

spring

Trajan inspects Danube frontier Hadrian

trib. militum legionis

XXII Primigeniae Piae Fidelis in Upper Germania Tacitus,

Agricola

and

Germania

99

autumn

Trajan enters Rome

100

Trajan

consul

(3)

ordinarius Alimenta

schemes initiated

September

Pliny the Younger,

Panegyricus

c. 100

Hadrian marries Vibia Sabina

101

Trajan consul (4) Hadrian

quaestor

Matidia joins imperial household

101

March 25

Trajan leaves for first Dacian war

102

Hadrian

tribunus plebis

102

December

Trajan returns to Rome; voted Dacicus Trajan holds Dacian Triumph

103

Trajan consul (5) Reconstruction of Circus Maximus

c. 104

Withdrawal from Scotland

105

Hadrian praetor

105

June 4

Trajan leaves for second Dacian war Creation of province of Dacia

after 105

Marciana, Trajan’s sister, appointed Augusta

106

Legatus

of the legion I Minervia Pia Fidelis in Lower Germania

early July

Reduction of Sarmizegetusa

September/October

Death of Decebalus

106–11

Creation of province of Arabia

107

Hadrian praetor Hadrian organizes first games celebrating Dacian victory Hadrian

legatus Augusti pro praetore Pannoniae inferioris

107–8

Dedication to Mars Ultor of monument at Adamklissi

108

Hadrian

consul (1) suffectus

c. 108

Tacitus,

Histories

c

. 109–12

Pliny governor of Bithynia-Pontus

c. 110

Death of Licinius Sura

112

January

Trajan consul (6); dedication of Forum Traiani

112–13

Hadrian archon at Athens

113

Death of Marciana, Trajan’s elder sister; deified

October 27

Trajan sets off from Rome for Parthian war Trajan’s Column completed

114

January 7

Trajan enters Antioch

summer

Trajan deposes Parthamasiris Title

Optimus

, the Best, added to Trajan’s names Annexation of Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Assyria

115

Capture of Ctesiphon

December 13

Trajan almost killed in Antioch earthquake

115–17

Revolt of Jewish diaspora

116

General revolt against Rome in the east

117

Hadrian

legatus

of Syria

July

Trajan sails for Rome

by August 9

Death of Trajan

August 11

Accession of Hadrian

118

Hadrian

consul

(2) Execution of four consuls

July 9

Hadrian enters Rome Trajan’s new provinces, except Armenia, given up

c. 118–28

Rebuilding of Pantheon

119

Hadrian

consul

(3) Matidia dies Hadrian tours Campania

120

Antoninus

consul

c. 120

Tacitus,

Annales

121–25

Hadrian’s first provincial tour

121

Hadrian visits Gallia, Germania superior, Raetia, Noricum, Germania superior

121–22

Plotina dies

122

Hadrian visits Lower Germania, Britannia (where he commissioned the wall that bears his name), Gallia, Hispania (Tarraco) Second Moorish revolt

123

Hadrian visits Mauretania (?), Africa (?), Libya, Cyrene, Crete, Syria, the Euphrates (Melitene), Pontus, Bithynia Probably meets Antinous Visits Asia

124

Hadrian visits Thrace, Asia, Athens and Eleusis, Achaea

125

Hadrian visits Achaea, Sicily, Rome

c. 126

Death of Plutarch

c. 127

Four regions in Italy established, governed by consular legates

128

Hadrian visits Africa, Rome, Athens

129

Hadrian visits Asia, Pamphylia, Phrygia, Pisidia, Cilicia, Syria, Commagene (Samosata), Cappadocia, Pontus, Syria (Antioch)

130

Hadrian visits Judaea (founding of Aelia Capitolina, to replace Jerusalem), Arabia, Egypt (Nile trip; drowning of Antinous; Alexandria)

October 30

Antinoopolis founded

131

Hadrian visits Syria, Asia, Athens

131–32

Inauguration of Panhellenion Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens completed

131–33

Jewish revolt, led by Bar Kokhba

131–37

Arrian governor of Cappadocia

132

Hadrian in Rome

134

Hadrian visits Syria, Judaea, Egypt (?), Syria (Antioch) Hadrian in Rome

135

Dedication of temple of Venus and Rome

136

Hadrian adopts L. Ceionius Commodus Deaths of Lucius Julius Servianus and Pedanius Fuscus

136 or early 137

Death of Sabina

138

February 25

Hadrian adopts T. Aurelius Fulvus Antoninus, who acts as joint emperor

July 10

Death of Hadrian

139

Dedication of Hadrian’s mausoleum

140

First consulship of Marcus Aurelius

161

Death of Antoninus Accession of Marcus Aurelius

180

Death of Marcus Aurelius; accession of his son Commodus

INTRODUCTION

This is the loveliest of places—and also among the most mysterious.

After walking half a mile uphill into countryside, you will arrive at a great but ruined wall, some thirty feet high. A wide opening gives onto a long pool beyond which lies a calm vista of hills and valleys. Cypresses abound, together with holm oaks, beeches, hornbeams, and ancient olive trees. Maritime pines spread their lofty canopies like bursts of frozen green fireworks.

The twenty-first century dissolves into the second, for everywhere among the trees stand Roman ruins—broken colonnades, collapsed apses, steps up to higher terraces, steps down to underground tunnels, stretches of water and broken fountains, the surviving columns of a circular temple, a grassed-over open-air theater.

Here is what remains of one of the wonders of European architecture, the villa of the emperor Hadrian near Tivoli, less than twenty miles from Rome. It was an inspiration to Renaissance architects seeking to learn the secrets of the ancient world, and as well as stealing its ideas they stripped the walls of their marble facings and the floors of their mosaics. Every statue they could find they removed for their brand-new palazzi. At least 250 have been identified, and there were certainly many more around every corner in the villa’s heyday.

Among the portraits of emperors and images of gods, forty or more memorial statues of the emperor’s doomed lover, a young Bithynian called Antinous, looked down from niches and plinths, an inescapable, ubiquitous presence.

The word villa is a misnomer. This was no single building, but a township or a campus: more than thirty-five structures of one kind or another have been counted over an area of at least three hundred acres. It is a mark of its scale that, after being looted for centuries as if it were a city captured by drunken soldiery, so much remains.

The emperor did not commission a rural retreat for a tired autocrat; he had in mind a working and ceremonial center of government, hence the extraordinary number of banqueting rooms and reception halls. But, if we leave aside its practical uses, the most curious feature of the complex is that it was a representation in miniature of the Roman world as Hadrian saw it—or, more precisely, those parts of it that held most meaning for him. It was his metaphor in brick and stone for the empire itself.

Greece took pride of place. Here was a version of the Painted Porch of Athens, famous for its wall paintings and its association with the Stoic philosophers; and over there the Academy, the olive grove where the great Plato taught. The real Vale of Tempe is in Thessaly, land of sorceries and enchantment: it was here that Apollo, god of the sun, came after slaying a dark chthonic power, the Python, a serpent that guarded the center of the earth at Delphi, and replaced it with his famous oracle. This luxuriant gorge was evoked at the northern end of the villa.

Elsewhere, in a dip of the grounds a long rectangle of water was flanked by colonnades and statues, and was reportedly inspired by the Canopus, a canal and popular tourist trap outside Alexandria. At one end of the pool was a monumental half-domed open-air dining room, backed by a cooling display of fountains and falling water. In the pool lurked a marble crocodile, and marble images of Egyptian gods looked down benevolently on the emperor’s summer-evening parties.

“And in order not to omit anything, Hadrian even made a Hades,” writes an ancient historian, referring to the underworld where the dead eked out a gloomy half life. We do not know where this was located. One of the villa’s most remarkable features is that beneath the grand edifices where the emperor and his guests took their leisure or held their assemblies was a subterranean network of tunnels, storerooms, and windowless sleeping areas where servants and slaves lived and labored—out of sight, out of hearing, and out of mind—to provide all the necessary services for those upstairs in the light. But these utilitarian spaces were unlikely to have been the Hades that Hadrian had in mind.

Another possibility suggests itself. Toward the far end of the imperial estate rises a high upland, with few buildings on it, where Hadrian and his companions could ride and hunt. However, below rough fields one of the villa’s most astonishing features is to be found—four uniform passages, half a mile long in all and wide enough for a chariot to clatter along, join to form a rough rectangle or trapezium. A huge amount of labor went into their creation: 26,000 cubic yards of rocks had to be cut out and removed. Vents in the ceiling let in light and air at intervals. These long, dim corridors look and feel much as they did in Hadrian’s time. The atmosphere in them is chilly even on hot days.

They present an enigma, for they can be entered only from one end, the northern side of the rectangle. So what were they for? Perhaps here we find an allusion to the afterlife, a disorienting space for religious rituals where the living were able to reencounter the shades of great ancestors, and even lost lovers.

Equally enigmatic was the man who brought this wonderland into being. His villa raises more questions than answers about the strange personality of one of Rome’s greatest rulers, and to understand him fully we must visit the scenes of his life.

I

INVADERS FROM THE WEST

This is a tale of two families and an orphaned boy.

The Aelii and the Ulpii had the usual share of irritations and friendships, marriages and estrangements, and their influence on the child lasted for his entire life. He was called Publius Aelius Hadrianus Afer, and he was born on the ninth day before the Kalends of February in the year when the consuls were the emperor Vespasian and his son Titus—that is to say, January 24, A.D. 76. Hadrian (for this is the English version of his name) first saw the light of day in Rome, but his hometown was far away, on the extreme edge of the Roman empire.

Andalusia, in southern Spain, is well sited, for it is the bridge between Europe and Africa and its coastline joins the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. For many centuries it has been among the poorest regions of Europe. Farm laborers there are still among the worst paid in the Continent.

Barren lands and snowcapped mountains alternate with fertile fields watered by the Guadalquivir River, which rolls down the wide valley it wore away from rock through prehistoric millennia and pours itself into the main. A few miles upstream of the fine city of Seville is the undistinguished little settlement of Santiponce. Here, way below tarmac, apartment buildings, and roadside cafes, below the feet of its more than seven thousand inhabitants, lie hidden from view the unexcavated remains of Roman Italica. The population then was about the same as that of today, and the Aelii were among the leading families of this provincial backwater. This was little Hadrian’s patria, his place of origin.

On an eminence overlooking Santiponce, the splendid ruins of New Italica, added on to the original town by the adult Hadrian much later in his life, bake in the sun. Wide avenues, lined with the footings of vanished shady colonnades, crisscross a vast scrubby field, once an opulent and busy urban center but now populated only by a few dusty, undecided butterflies. Along a main street are the foundations of a public baths complex and the mosaic floor, displaying the signs of the zodiac, of a rich man’s villa. Through tall trees, the visitor glimpses one of the empire’s largest amphitheaters, all of it still in place except for some fallen upper arches.

Today’s Andalusia is beginning to recover its long-vanished prosperity, thanks to a revived democracy and membership in the European Union. From a viewing platform over which a nude statue of the emperor Trajan presides, new, snaking motorways look as if they are tying a knot around the ancient monuments; and nearby yet another Italica, this time “Nueva,” is rising from the ground. Blinding white high-rises and empty streets await their first occupants.

Two thousand years ago the region was among the wealthiest of the Roman empire. The Latin name for the Guadalquivir was the Baetis, and the province was called Baetica after it. The great geographer Strabo, writing in the first quarter of the first century A.D., had little time for most of Spain, which he found rugged, inhospitable, and an “exceedingly miserable place to live.” But Baetica was a different story.

Turdetania [another name for Baetica, after its aboriginal inhabitants] is marvelously blessed by nature; and while it produces all things, and in large quantities, these blessings are doubled by the facilities for exporting goods, [including] large quantities of grain and wine, and also olive oil, not only in large quantities, but also of the best quality.

Olive oil sold exceptionally well. A staple of the ancient world, it was part of everyone’s diet as well as being used for indoor lighting, cosmetics, soap equivalents, and medicine. Demand from a large city such as Rome was huge (perhaps as many as 5 million gallons a year were consumed), and Baetican landowners sold as much as they could produce.

Evidence for this is provided by the largest rubbish dump of the classical world, Monte Testaccio in Rome—an artificial hill 165 feet high and 1,100 yards wide composed entirely of broken-up amphorae, or earthenware storage jars, perhaps 45 million in all. They were often stamped with their contents and exporters’ names; most of those from Baetica contained oil, and it has been estimated that 130,000 of them, having contained not less than 2 million gallons, were deposited on the hill every year. Among the largest oil producers of southern Spain were the Aelii.

An Aelius first came to Italica when it was founded during Rome’s second long war with the merchant city-state of Carthage; strategically located on the coast of what is now Tunisia, in northern Africa, Carthage had dominated trade in the western Mediterranean for centuries.

For a long time the struggle went very badly. Hannibal, the Carthaginian general and one of history’s great commanders, spent more than ten years marching up and down Italy, winning battle after battle. At the time southern Spain was a Carthaginian colony, and the twenty-four-year-old Publius Cornelius Scipio led an expeditionary force there. After a masterly campaign, the young commander provoked a battle a few miles from Italica. Despite being outnumbered, he won a complete victory, interrupted only by a downpour. The battered and drenched Carthaginians tried to escape, but Scipio followed after and butchered them. Only six thousand men survived from a force of more than fifty thousand.

Scipio went on to invade Carthage itself, where he routed Hannibal on his home ground. The war was over, and the triumphant general was honored with a title to add to his ordinary names—Africanus.

A large number of sick and wounded legionaries were left behind in Spain and were settled in the new town of Italica, named after Italy. This was not, or not just, a case of convenient abandonment of veterans who had become a liability; once recovered, they would make themselves useful by keeping an eye on the locals, introducing them to the Roman way of life, and, in case of unrest, using military force.

Our Aelius, whose hometown was Hadria, about ten miles from the sea on Italy’s eastern coast, was among the human detritus of the war. How happy he was to be deposited permanently in a foreign land far from home cannot be determined. However, his children and his children’s children settled into the agreeable task of making money and rising in the world.

For about 150 years we have no news of the Aelii. Baetica prospered and, attracted by economic opportunity, immigrants from Italy poured in. Then in 49 B.C. civil war broke out in Rome. This was a struggle to the death between a charming, unscrupulous, and farsighted politician and general, Gaius Julius Caesar, and the aristocratic establishment that ran the Roman Republic. Most of the leading personalities in Italica had the ill judgment or the ill luck to choose the losing side. More than ten thousand men with an Italian background joined up to serve in the Republican army. Roman legions twice fought each other on Spanish soil and twice Caesar won; the second of these campaigns won him the war, too.

At about this time Hadrian’s great-great-great-grandfather, a certain Aelius Marullinus, was the first member of the family to become a senator. He was more astute than his compatriots, for the promotion can only have been at the victorious Caesar’s behest, a reward for loyalty.

Hadrian’s father—like him, named Publius Aelius Hadrianus Afer—was born a century later and married a woman from Gades, Domitia Paulina. Gades had been founded and colonized by Phoenicians from Tyre and Sidon on the Palestinian coast, just as Carthage had been. Some passing member of the great Roman clan of the Domitii must have conferred Roman citizenship on an ancestor, but Paulina’s origins were most likely to have been Punic (a Roman term for Carthaginian). The couple had two children, Hadrian and an elder daughter.

Aelius Hadrianus was among the growing number of wealthy Baeticans who decided to pursue political ambitions in Rome. Little has come down to us about his career, but he was evidently intelligent and able. He served in the senior post of praetor, probably in the year of his son’s birth. The authorities must have thought well of him, for he was probably only about twenty-nine or thirty years old, the minimum qualifying age for the praetorship. As praetor he either acted as a judge in Rome or received a commission to command a legion. This may have been followed by a provincial governorship (possibly in Baetica itself).

The Aelii were friendly with the Ulpii, another of Italica’s leading clans. The historian Dio Cassius, writing in the third century A.D., claimed dismissively that the Ulpii were of Spanish origin; they did not even have Italian or Greek blood from southern Italy in their veins, let alone Roman. But they, too, were probably among the town’s first settlers and originated from Tuder (today’s Todi), a hill town in northern Umbria, in those days celebrated for its martial valor.

Hadrian’s paternal grandfather married an Ulpia. This was an excellent match, for her brother was Marcus Ulpius Traianus (the cognomen doubtless derived from a marriage with one of the Traii, a Baetican clan with an interest in the mass production of amphorae). Traianus had once been governor of Baetica, and at the time of Hadrian’s birth was serving as governor of Syria, one of Rome’s most senior provincial posts. He had with him on his staff his talented and affable son—in the Roman way, also Marcus Ulpius Traianus, whom we know as Trajan.

The Ulpii were rich and grand, and Traianus was not the first member of his family to enter the Senate, the necessary but not sufficient qualification for which was a fortune of at least 1 million sesterces. Access to the Senate lay in the emperor’s hands, and conferred membership of the senatorial class, or ordo senatorius, on a man’s male offspring. It has been estimated that there were only at most four hundred active senatorial families throughout the empire, so a place such as Italica that boasted several was fortunate indeed.

The Aelii and Ulpii boasted no aristocratic Roman forebears in them. They were “new men,” the condescending phrase that the great and ancient families who had governed Rome for centuries applied to unknown politicians from outside their magic circle. They had exploited the economic opportunities that fertile Baetica offered, and were now determined to make their mark in Rome itself.

The baby Hadrian was in great peril. This was because the most life-threatening period of anyone’s life in the ancient world was that from birth to seven or eight years of age. Medical science was in its infancy, and while some doctors were pragmatists who encouraged healthy lifestyles and prescribed treatments that had been seen to work, others regarded medicine as a branch of philosophy or of magic, and allowed theory, often of the most bizarre kind, to replace observation.

Having managed to survive his arrival in the world, Hadrian was not yet accepted as being completely alive. Like other Roman newborn boys, he received his praenomen, or personal name, only on the ninth day after his birth, the delay reflecting the fact that many infants perished in the first week or so of life. The most common fatal diseases were gastric disorders—diarrhea and dysentery. The latter remained a threat throughout early childhood.

One of the consequences of the high rate of infant mortality was that upper-class parents took care not to become too attached to their children until they were reasonably confident that they would live. Mothers tended to avoid breast-feeding (despite the fact that this accelerated their liability to conception), and Paulina was no exception.

So a wet nurse had to be found. It was essential to recruit the right type of woman. According to a leading gynecological textbook of the period, the Gynaecologia of Soranus, she “should be not younger than twenty and not older than forty years, who has already given birth twice or thrice, who is healthy, in good condition, of large frame of a good color. Her breasts should be of medium size, lax, soft, and unwrinkled.” In addition, she should be “self-controlled”—that is, she should abstain from sexual intercourse and alcohol.

Paulina appointed a woman called Germana to this essential task, and we may suppose that she fulfilled the job specification. Her name suggests that she was a slave who originated in northeastern Europe. She was evidently a success, for she was later given her freedom and, in the event, reached a considerable age, outliving her charge.

Little else is known for certain of Hadrian’s infancy. His father, being a senator, was obliged by law to live in or near Rome, unless on a foreign posting. No doubt the family had a town house, and also a place in the country within striking distance of the capital. A colony of well-to-do Spaniards built or occupied villas at Tibur (today’s Tivoli), and the Aelii will surely have been among them. This fashionable resort about eighteen miles east of Rome was built on the lower slopes of the Sabine Hills, at the end of a valley through which the river Anio (today’s Aniene) passes. The town stands at the point where the valley narrows to a gorge.

The river rushes past with spectacular cascades and makes a loop around the town, and eventually joins the Tiber. Tibur was noted for an abundance of water and its cool, refreshing climate. Wealthy Romans escaped there from the suffocating summer heat of the capital, and sometimes lived in or near the town all year round. Their villas were often of great splendor. The fashionable author Statius wrote a eulogy of one palatial residence, a villa Tiburtina, in its wooded park by the banks of the rushing Anio. Hadrian must have visited it and marveled.

Should I express wonder at gilded beams,

or Moorish citrus wood for all the doorposts,

or shining marble shot with colored veins,

or water piped to flow through all the bedrooms?

The poet went on to describe every appurtenance of luxury, the mosaics, the works of art in ivory and gold, the gemstones, the statuary.

Hadrian probably spent much of his childhood in this enchanted spot, for which he harbored a lifelong affection.

For his first eight years Hadrian was left in the charge of his mother. Then, in 84 or thereabouts, Hadrian became the direct responsibility of his father and his formal schooling began. It is uncertain whether he was educated by a home tutor or sent to school. The leading educationist of the day, Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (in English, Quintilian), was worried that the typical family no longer offered reliable role models. Children were corrupted by kindness and were excessively spoiled (“they grow up lying around in litters”); he recommended the “broad daylight of a respectable school” in preference to the solitariness and obscurity of a private education. The Aelii may well have taken his advice.

Elementary school classes were usually held in a rented shop with an open frontage, like a porch, in a main square. The day started at dawn or earlier and ended in the afternoon with a visit to the baths. Teaching methods were both brutal and boring, testing memory rather than intelligence. Hadrian and his fellow pupils learned the names of letters before their shapes. They sang them forward and backward from a to x (there were no y or z in the Latin alphabet) and x to a. They then memorized groups of two or three letters and finally graduated to syllables and words. The basics of practical mathematics were also taught, to enable a Roman to act confidently in the daily to-and-fro of buying and selling, and of managing his money.

The schoolmaster, or ludi magister, guided Hadrian’s hand over his tablet when learning to write. Later he gave his students sentences to copy with their styluses on waxed tablets or with a reed pen and ink on papyrus or cardboard-thin wooden sheets. They had an abacus for counting and recited their multiplication tables in chorus.

In 85 or 86, when Hadrian was about ten years old, an event took place that transformed his world. His father died unexpectedly at the age of forty. A promising career near the summit of imperial politics was cut short. The cause of death has not been recorded, but he was most likely to have succumbed to one of the numerous epidemics in the ancient world, which struck impartially at rich and poor alike.

Domitia Paulina was in a difficult, but not altogether unusual situation. Women married young, sometimes as early as thirteen years old, soon or immediately after the onset of puberty, whereas their husbands would typically be much older, in their mid-or late twenties as a rule. Despite the high rate of mortality when giving birth, women were more likely to see their children into adulthood than were their spouses; it is estimated that only one third of twenty-five-year-olds had a living father, while nearly half still had a mother.

Hadrian’s mother or her family advisers considered what was best for the boy. He was heir to a fortune, and it was agreed that masculine guidance was required to keep a watchful eye over him as he grew up and to ensure that the family estate in Baetica was well managed. So two guardians were appointed, both of whom were townsmen of Italica. One was an eques (or “knight,” a member of the business or country gentry class, one rank below that of the political, or senatorial, elite), Publius Acilius Attianus.

The second was a glamorous and impressive figure—one of the Ulpii, and the son of Hadrian’s maternal great-uncle. He was Trajan, whom we first met in his youth when he served in the army under his father. Now thirty-two, he was proving to be an able soldier. A great admirer of Alexander the Great, he was ambitious for military glory. Tall and well made, “with a noble appearance,” he had a beak of a nose and a wide mouth. He had recently been praetor and had his eye on the crowning glory of a consulship, the public office that was the apex of a Roman’s political career (unless he dangerously aspired to the purple).

Trajan followed outdoor pursuits and was a keen huntsman. He seems to have been something of a mountaineer, an unusual hobby in his day, who enjoyed “setting foot on rocky crags, with none to give a helping hand or show the way.” He was a heavy drinker, and liked having sex with young men. He was on affectionate terms with his wife, Pompeia Plotina (in full, Pompeia Plotina Claudia Phoebe Piso), whom he married in 78. The union seems to have been a mariage blanc, and there were no children.

The quality that contemporaries noted and most respected in Trajan was his fair-mindedness. He had a reputation for never allowing his private pleasures to impinge on his public duties, a little-observed quality in the governing elite.

At the time, the guardianship of a ten-year-old Spanish boy was of little interest except to those directly affected; but, as it turned out, this was the moment when the fortunes of the Aelii and the Ulpii tied themselves together in an inextricable knot, with imponderable consequences for the future of Rome.

II

A DANGEROUS WORLD

Hadrian’s two guardians were busy men and cannot have had much time to supervise their ward’s progress closely; but they shared Domitia Paulina’s ambitions for her son. Hadrian was sent to a secondary school when he was about twelve years old. It was one of the best, or at least best known, in Rome, for its grammaticus, a Latin word meaning both secondary-school teacher and grammarian, was the celebrated Quintus Terentius Scaurus. Author of a manual on grammar and books on spelling and the correct use of prepositions, he was a master of scholarly ratiocination at its driest.

Grammatical cruxes were popular talking points among educated Romans, and evidently went down well with the bright young student from Baetica; or so we infer, for the adult Hadrian made himself out to be something of an expert on linguistics. He was the author of Sermones, or “Conversations,” two volumes on grammatical topics (sadly, lost), and once engaged in scholarly debate with his former teacher. He challenged Scaurus, still alive and working, on his interpretation of the word obiter—“by the way” or “in passing”; he cited many learned authorities, including a letter Augustus wrote to Tiberius in which the emperor criticized his stepson for avoiding the word. Of course, Hadrian added bumptiously, the emperor was only an amateur.

Here we have the unmistakable tones of the precocious and competitive teenager who insists on outdoing the expert, and who will never altogether grow up. It was the authentic Hadrian.

Going to school—or, more exactly, to the grammaticus’s house—was to enter the dangerous world of grown-ups. Well-to-do parents understood this and appointed a paedogogus, a trusted slave who supervised children at home and accompanied them to the classroom. He was all the more necessary as his charges approached puberty and attracted the attentions of men in the street. Boys were more at risk than girls, if only because the latter went out in public less often and were usually educated at home. Unsavory encounters were common, and a handsome bribe could transform the home tutor into a go-between. And it did not take more than a gift or two to persuade an inquisitive child to a fumble.

It was to ward off this kind of threat that the poet Horace’s father refused to delegate accompanying his son to school.

… he preserved my chastity

(which is fundamental in forming a good character), saving me Not only from nasty behavior but from nasty imputations.

Unfortunately the trouble was not over once a pupil had walked through a grammaticus’s door. If a contemporary of Hadrian, the great poet and satirist Decimus Junius Juvenalis (his full name is uncertain; we know him as Juvenal), is to be believed, the classroom was the scene of much furtive sexual experimentation. Observing that the teacher was expected to act in loco parentis, he wrote that fathers

require that he take the father’s role in the scrum,

ensuring that they don’t play dirty games

and don’t take turns with one another.

It is no light thing to keep watch on all those boys

with their hands and eyes quivering till they come.

Covert sexual abuse was commonly accompanied by overt physical abuse. Masters routinely flogged idle or rebellious or just lively students. A mural at Pompeii reveals a typical scene: the schoolmaster stands sternly on the left, students are seated quietly at their desks, and a boy carries the almost fully stripped culprit on his shoulders. Another grabs his legs. A classroom assistant raises a cat-o’-nine-tails, ready to strike. So central was the experience of corporal punishment to the learning process that an expression for being too old for school was manum subducere ferulae—“to withdraw the hand from the cane.”

The curriculum Hadrian settled down to study was narrow. The notion of a liberal education that catered to mind and body was little valued. Mathematics and science were not on the syllabus, nor music and the arts, with the sole exception of literature. Gymnastics and athletics were left to the holidays.

There were, in essence, only two related subjects of study—literature and oratory—and two languages to be learned, Latin and Greek. Hadrian was introduced to the classics of both tongues, foremost of which were the two epics of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, composed by one or more oral poets in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. In Latin he studied masterpieces from the more recent past—the speeches of Marcus Tullius Cicero, “that genius, the only possession of Rome to rival her empire”; Horace; and Publius Vergilius Maro, or Virgil, author of the great national epic, the Aeneid, which celebrated Rome’s eternal empire, imperium sine fine.

Scaurus and his assistants were not directly concerned with literary criticism, although they did expound the “moral” of every passage. Texts were examined in great detail and their meaning explained, their meter and syntax analyzed, as well as the tonal and rhythmic aspects of the spoken word. Hadrian and his fellow students were taught to read aloud with intelligence and feeling. They broke down, or parsed, sentences into their constituent elements—subject, verb, object, and so forth—and scanned verse through a tough system of question-and-answer.

This could be dreary work, and the classes in oratory were much more fun. For centuries, the art of public speaking had been an essential skill for any upper-class Roman interested in a career as a politician and as an advocate in the courts. To get on in the world it was essential to be able to address large gatherings with confidence and to persuade listeners of the rightness of one’s point of view. Even under the empire, when election to office had largely been replaced by imperial designation, oratory was a highly valued art.

Scaurus introduced Hadrian’s class to the foundations of rhetoric. Boys learned to retell legends and stories from Rome’s past in their own words. They took epigrams from the poets and developed them into arguments. A more complex task was to compose speeches around imaginary themes. These were either controversiae, exercises based on cases in a court of law, or suasoriae, the giving of advice at a public meeting.

Pupils spoke on one side of a case or the other. The issue debated, of course, had less to do with the law than with resolving a moral dilemma. This was no accident, for the study of oratory was an essential part of a boy’s ethical molding. As Marcus Porcius Cato, called the Censor, a paradigm of Republican citizenship, observed in the second century B.C.: “An orator, son Marcus, is a good man good at speaking.”

Whatever might have been the case in his day, theory was not now borne out by practice. As an induction to virtue, oratory left much to be desired. The subjects for debate were too remote from the challenges of ordinary life to be relevant, and encouraged the use of specious and hairsplitting arguments. The unscrupulous would knowingly strive to make the worse cause seem the better. Oratory’s disjunction from the real world was reflected in the fact that it had become a highbrow entertainment. Speeches were honed to perfection and authors then read them aloud in lecture theaters. Audiences would applaud a particularly fine effect. The art of persuasion had dwindled into a work of art.

We are not told whether Hadrian liked going to school. Contemporary observers were highly critical, but we know of at least one man who looked back on his education as the “happiest days of my life.” Hadrian may not have gone that far, but he had a lively, inquiring mind and his studies certainly won his attention.

Quite suddenly he became infatuated with all things Greek. Soon after the death of his father, he immersed himself in Greek studies so enthusiastically that he was nicknamed Graeculus, “little Greek boy.” There is the slightest hint in the Historia Augusta that the two events were somehow linked; perhaps his philhellenism filled an emotional gap (especially if, as is possible, his father had taken him to Greece when on a foreign posting and introduced him in a simple way to the glories of its civilization). It is likely that his guardian’s new wife, Plotina, encouraged him. She became very fond of Hadrian and was something of an intellectual and philhellene herself.

Caution is called for. The only thing unusual in Hadrian’s passion was the length to which he took it. The Romans were a practical people who distrusted works of the imagination, unless they conferred an immediate and useful benefit. Law, architecture, engineering—these were disciplines they could understand, for they called for rigorous mental application but no flights of fancy.

However, they had little in the way of a homegrown intellectual or cultural tradition. Although they had been aware of the Greeks for all of their history, they were bowled over by what they found when they conquered the Greek world in the second century B.C. and incorporated it into their empire. The cities—Athens, Antioch, Ephesus, Alexandria (in every way Greek rather than Egyptian)—astounded with their beauty, elegance, and splendor. Greek philosophy and scientific inquiry, its poetry and drama, provoked a deep, if reluctant, admiration. Most well-educated Romans spoke Greek fluently; Latin poets copied the literary masterpieces of Athens and Italian architects modeled their buildings on its temples and pillared porches.

Horace famously wrote:

When Greece was taken she took control of her rough invader, and brought the arts to rustic Latium [the Italian region where Rome can be found].

He added, with almost tangible disgust, that the “fetid smell” of primitive Italian verse forms gave way to clear and unpolluted air.

The Greece with which Hadrian was so fascinated was no longer simply that of the mainland, of the tiny city-states that drove off two Persian invasions, among whom the most powerful had been democratic Athens and militaristic Sparta, of Socrates and Plato, of Sophocles and Aristotle. Nor was it just the larger Greece of all the many colonies that the mainland city-states had scattered around the Mediterranean along the coastlines of the Black Sea, Asia Minor, and northern Africa, in Sicily and southern Italy.

In fact, “Greece” had grown further still to include the complete eastern half of the Roman empire. This was because four centuries earlier the Macedonian king, Alexander the Great, had overthrown the Persian empire, whose territory stretched from the Ionian Sea to the Indian Ocean. After his death, his generals divided his conquests into powerful independent kingdoms, and introduced Greek ideas, Greek and Macedonian colonists, and, above all, the Greek language to these vast oriental domains.

Any natives who wanted to get on were obliged to Hellenize themselves. As Peter Green remarks:

Like Indians under the British Raj angling for the

entrée

to European club membership, they developed the taste for exercising naked, for worshipping strange gods, for patronizing the theatre; they courted municipal kudos by the lavish generosity of their benefactions.

Of course, the Greekness of many Asiatic provincials was only skin deep. Their Roman overlords thought them tricky, cowardly, greedy, and unreliable. They were venal confidence tricksters, and what could sometimes be a true talent for high-flying rhetoric was in the case of most Asiatics no more than a tiresome gift of the gab.

To many traditionally minded Romans, there was something still more threatening about the Greeks—their approach to religion. Official Roman religion was not intended to be emotionally satisfying; it entailed a web of complicated rituals in the home and in the public square, designed to preserve the pax deorum, the grace and favor of the gods. Eastern cults, by contrast, offered mysticism and their ceremonies induced out-of-body, ecstatic experiences. Initiates were often sworn to secrecy. The state, whether under the Republic or the empire, distrusted excessive excitement and was always on its guard against the coniuratio, the society bound together by a common oath and invisible except to its members. Cults were often expelled from Rome, but they were so popular that they kept creeping back.

This spiritual exoticism appealed to Hadrian’s deepest levels of feeling far more than did Rome’s traditional nit-picking superstitio, and would go on doing so for all his life. And so did two other oriental imports—magic and astrology. Magic had long been illegal, but became increasingly popular under the empire. It was employed for many purposes—healing illnesses beyond the reach of conventional medicine; hurting, even killing, one’s enemies; stimulating erotic love; ensuring the victory or defeat of a charioteer at the races.

This last was the purpose of a curse tablet in lead found by archaeologists, which still conveys a strong stench of hatred two millennia later. It demands of a powerful spirit, or daimon,

from this day, from this moment that you torture the horses of the Greens and Whites [chariot teams]. Kill them! The charioteers Glarus and Felix and Primulus and Romanus, kill them! Crash them! Leave no breath in them!

Spell books were published and “magical papyri” have been unearthed from the bone-dry sands of Egypt that reveal the lengths to which people were willing to go to unleash the powers of darkness.

One of magic’s key principles was sympatheia, or “fellow feeling.” This allowed the part to be taken for the whole, pars pro toto—hence the removal from barbershops of hair or nail clippings, which gave the spellbinder power over their owner. Alternatively, and more ambitiously, the principle of “like for like” explained the use of wax dolls which, when pierced with a needle, communicated pain, even death, to their human originals. Another version of similia similibus entailed human sacrifice, where one living person was killed either to save another or to preserve the state, or in an act of self-immolation volunteered his or her own life. But in these days such a tragic transaction was rare, and the Baetican teenager had no grounds for supposing that it would ever apply to him, or anyone he might come to love.

Hadrian was also fascinated by astrology and other arcane means of foretelling things to come. Because it depended on complicated mathematical calculations, reading the stars was felt to be more of a science than spells and incantations and, despite its inherent implausibility, was bracketed with astronomy as a legitimate form of inquiry. It gave humankind a godlike knowledge compared to which even kingship was insignificant.

It was precisely because the authorities were convinced that astrologers genuinely opened a door into the future that they frowned on their art; casting an emperor’s horoscope was high treason, for it might predict the time and manner of his death. None of this deterred Hadrian from making himself something of an expert, at least in his own eyes; he developed a habit of casting his horoscope every New Year’s Day, writing down all the things he would be doing in the coming year.

Hadrian was never frightened by contradiction. His philhellenism was essentially antiquarian and archaic: what he admired was Greece’s glorious past. At the same time, he looked back with nostalgia and respect to the heyday of the Roman Republic, long before the catastrophic first century B.C., when it broke down in a welter of bloodshed and the “free state” gave way to the rule of emperors. He did not much enjoy studying the classics of the age, Virgil and Cicero, finding their styles too polished and orotund.

He came to prefer the rougher, more muscular writing of Quintus Ennius, who flourished in the third and early second centuries and was a close friend of Scipio Africanus, Hannibal’s nemesis. Ennius was the author of the Annals, an epic poem that told the story of Rome from the fall of Troy and the arrival of the Trojan prince Aeneas on the shores of prehistoric Italy to the present day. For many years the Annals was a set text at school, although the Aeneid came to supplant it.

Ennius stood for old values. He set out his philosophy in a line that, like the best writing in Latin, requires at least twice the number of English words if a translation is to do it full justice: moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque, “the Roman state depends on the customs and morals of ancient times and on real men, who deserve the name.”

Another of Hadrian’s heroes was Marcus Porcius Cato, whom Ennius knew well personally. Cato wrote Origines (sadly, lost), which traced the rise of the Italian cities and told the story of Rome from the time of the kings—a parallel track in prose to Ennius’ epic. He loathed the noblemen of his day, whom he regarded as corrupt, self-serving, and softened by luxury. In his account of the Punic Wars (the usual name for the wars with Carthage), Cato refused to praise any of them by name, singling out for bravery only a one-tusked Carthaginian elephant called the Syrian.

At first sight Hadrian’s respect for these authors contradicts his enthusiasm for all things Hellenic. But appearances deceive. Ennius was of Greek descent and came from southern Italy, an area so dominated by Greek cities that it was named Magna Graecia, or Greater Greece. As well as the Annals, he wrote many plays in the classical Greek manner, often closely imitating works by the Athenian tragedian Euripides.

And although Cato made much of his down-to-earth Romanness, a close examination of his writings reveals a detailed knowledge of Greek literature from Homer onward. He published a textbook on public speaking, inspired by Greek rhetorical theory, and was clearly familiar with the best Greek texts.

So what are we to conclude? Cato and Ennius represented a bridge between the two cultures at their respective and distinctive bests. By Hadrian’s time it was evident that Cato’s gloomy prognostications were mistaken. Rome could safely enjoy Hellenic thought, imagination, and artistry without risking its predominance. However, the Greeks had failed militarily and politically. By contrast, soldiering, military élan, and true grit were fundamental to a Roman’s idea of himself; in the social sphere, so too was the rule of custom and law; and, in the public square, the old Republican elite had shown a talent for finding practical solutions to problems and for reasonably clean administration.

As Hadrian matured from boy to man, he understood that Rome’s future good fortune required a commitment to the mos maiorum, to the way generations of forefathers had done things—even if he remained a Graeculus in the center of his being.

On January 24, 90, Publius Aelius Hadrianus Afer celebrated his fifteenth birthday. Roman boys usually attained their majority in their mid-teens, and sometime in the months that followed, he officially came of age. The occasion, marking the onset of physical puberty rather than psychological maturity, was usually celebrated in a special ceremony on March 17, the day of the Liberalia. This was a festival of the ancient Italian fertility deities Liber (identified with Bacchus, god of wine) and Libera, to whom images of female and male genitalia were dedicated in their temple in Rome.

Hadrian put aside forever his toga praetexta, a purple-edged toga that was a boy’s uniform on formal occasions, and his bulla, a golden plate-or boss-shaped amulet that hung from the neck; he then robed himself in the all-white toga virilis that signified adulthood. He sacrificed at home to the household gods and, if he was at Rome, made his way, surrounded by relatives, friends, and family clients, to the Capitol, the citadel overlooking the Forum Romanum, where he visited the colossal temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Best and Greatest; he paid his respects to the divinity that protected the civic community of which he had become a full member.

On quitting the status of a child, Hadrian, like other Roman boys, left school. However, his education was not yet over. Wellborn young men were expected to spend time in the capital “shadowing” a senior political personality (rather as an intern does today), and to follow advanced studies in the art of rhetoric. He also undertook military training.

In Hadrian’s case, though, there was to be a variation on the general rule. Officially he was now head of the family, and this presented his kin with a serious problem. In the ordinary course of events an adolescent adult’s father would be alive and well, and empowered to exercise authority over his inexperienced son, guiding him away from the temptations that beset wealthy young men. Somehow the Aelii had to find a way of keeping their juvenile paterfamilias on the rails.

Perhaps as a holding measure, Domitia Paulina and his guardians, Trajan and Attianus, decided that Hadrian should go to Baetica to inspect the family estates in his capacity as the new master. Although he had spent most of his childhood in or near Rome, Hadrian had visited Baetica once before; we are not sure exactly when, but if, as has been suggested, his father had been posted there at some point after his praetorship, he would have taken his family with him. Hadrian was now back on home ground in his own right.

It is hard to imagine Domitia Paulina allowing her inexperienced son to travel alone, and she presumably accompanied him. She will have introduced him to relatives on her side of the family in the port of Gades. He definitely met a paternal great-uncle; the encounter was more than the fulfillment of a polite obligation, for this Aelius Hadrianus was, fascinatingly, a master of astrology. He cast the boy’s horoscope and predicted imperial power. Prophecies of this sort were perilous and must have been kept secret, only to be revealed many years later in Hadrian’s autobiography.

The young master visited his lands a few miles upstream from Italica; these were mostly devoted to the production and export of olive oil, and storage amphorae have been found stamped port. P.A.H.—“from the warehouse of Publius Aelius Hadrianus.” This does not mean that Hadrian’s father had run the estate directly himself, nor would his son be expected to do so. A senator—or for that matter a senator’s son—was not supposed to soil his hands too openly with “trade.” He took an interest in the exploitation of his assets, but often set up in business his more able slaves or freedmen and invested in their commercial activities. Bailiffs managed his estates, supervising the labor force and negotiating with tenants.

Duty done, Hadrian went on to have a thoroughly good time. He learned something of military life; this did not entail joining the army but becoming a member of a local collegium, or association, of teenage boys of good family. Iuvenes, as they were called (literally, the word means “youths”), received some training, and were also expected to do good works: we know of a collegium in the province of Africa that dedicated a basilica (a large building used for trials and as a conference and shopping center) and some storehouses for public use.

We can safely assume that they also enjoyed hunting, to which Hadrian was introduced when he was in Baetica. He cannot have known much about the sport beforehand, although Trajan, who was a keen huntsman, may have mentioned the subject, for most upper-class Italians saw it more as an amusement for slaves and freedmen, or as a spectacle in the amphitheater, than as a pursuit for gentlemen.

Hadrian had no time for such reservations, and hunting immediately engaged his impassioned attention. The animal most commonly pursued in the ancient world was the hare, often hunted on foot with the assistance of scent hounds and driven into nets. However, by the time of the empire sight hounds were in use, which were fast enough to have a good chance of catching the animal, and nets could be dispensed with. Huntsmen rode on horseback if they wanted to keep up with the chase without having to run long distances.

A larger and more alarming enemy than the hare was the wild boar, and in the eastern provinces and northern Africa, intrepid enthusiasts hunted the lion, the leopard, the lynx, the cheetah, and the bear.

One of hunting’s attractions for Hadrian was that, even if it was not yet fashionable in Rome, it was popular with Greeks, for whom it was not just a pastime but an exercise in bravery and a religious act. It promoted good health, improved sight and hearing, delayed old age, and, in particular, trained men for war. Xenophon, an Athenian who studied under Socrates in the fifth century B.C., wrote a classic text on the subject, which was still widely read. The Olympian deities themselves enjoyed hunting, according to him, and liked to watch the sport. Pious huntsmen opened proceedings with a prayer to Apollo and his sister, Artemis (goddess of the chase, equivalent to the Roman Diana), to grant them a good bag, and closed them with a short thanksgiving.

So Hadrian was able to cite respectable justification for his new craze. He needed to, for his family was showing signs of anxiety about him. Hunting was not merely time-consuming but expensive. When a friend once complained about his son’s extravagant expenditure on hounds and horses, Pliny counseled calm. “Surely everyone is liable to make mistakes,” he remarked, “and everyone has his own foibles.”

But, despite his own enjoyment of the chase, Trajan did not take such a relaxed view. His ward was getting above himself and had attracted criticism in Italica. His Hellenic posturing may also have irritated the thoroughly “Roman” Trajan; it is telling that years later he used Hadrian’s old nickname when he referred dismissively to some Hellenic provincials as “these Graeculi.” The boy needed to be taken in hand, so Trajan, then a legionary commander in northern Spain, ordered him back to Rome. From now on he treated his ward as his son, pro filio—a gesture that had as much to do with control as with affection.

Hadrian’s interlude of independence was over. He would never again be in a position to kick over the traces. This may well have rankled, but not for long. Trajan was close to the seat of power, serving as consul in 91, and was well regarded by the emperor. The sixteen-year-old Hadrian found himself at the fulcrum of great events. It was an exciting time to be in Rome.

III

YOUNG HOPEFUL GENTLEMAN

Back from Spain, Hadrian was ready to complete his education by studying public speaking under the guidance of a rhetor, or specialist in oratory. By contrast with schoolteachers, rhetors were well paid and were often hired to give speeches on public occasions; some of them were celebrities and, as on today’s lecture circuit, could command high fees.

There were plenty of these oratorical experts in Rome, and the leader in a competitive field was the educational expert Quintilian. Another Spanish import, he came from what is today Navarre. He founded a very popular school of oratory in Rome, for which he received an unprecedented state grant of 100,000 sesterces a year. The authorities saw the school as a means of creating a responsible, hardworking, and well-trained ruling class, for, in Cato’s footsteps, Quintilian’s aim was to educate the complete man rather than simply to impart a skill. He wrote:

The man who can really play his part as a citizen … the man who can guide a state by his counsel, give it a firm basis by his legislation, and purge its vices by his decisions as a judge—that man is assuredly no one else than the orator.

As consul, Trajan was an influential figure at court and would have wanted to place the boy with Quintilian. Unfortunately, about the year 90, when in his late forties or fifties, the great man retired, partially or wholly, from teaching, in order to devote himself to writing. For some years afterward, though, he was tutor to the emperor’s two grandchildren and it is perfectly possible that the consul was able to persuade Quintilian to take on another private student.

In an ancient version of the Grand Tour, many Romans in late adolescence spent some months or more topping up their oratorical training in mainland Greece or the eastern provinces. After a period studying in Rome, whether under Quintilian or some other rhetor, Hadrian may have been one of them. In that case he could have spent time in Athens. There is no direct evidence that he did so, but it is a happy speculation that the lover of Greek civilization seized the first available opportunity (as an adult at least) to linger in Plato’s Academy; to join the audience in the grand open-air theater where the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides had received their premieres; and to climb up to the Parthenon to pray before the colossal statue in ivory and gold that, more than five centuries previously, the sculptor Phidias had made of the city’s tutelary goddess, Athene Parthenos, the Maiden.

As a member of a family heavily involved in imperial politics and military affairs, Hadrian was well placed to view and learn about the world around him. As the son of a senator he was destined, as of right, to become a senator himself. He was entitled to attend meetings of the Senate as an observer. More important, by attaching himself to a leading politician and orator he gained a practical insight into the process of government. Who was chosen has not been recorded, but one likely candidate is Lucius Licinius Sura, another Spaniard (this time from the northeastern port of Tarraco, today’s Tarragona). As he was one of Trajan’s closest friends, Hadrian would already have been known to him.

By chance an ancient horoscope of Sura survives, which casts an unfriendly light on his personality. Whatever the sophisticated mathematical computations the astrologer devoted to his task, the document reflected Sura’s public image; reading the heavens is an art that hands back to the inquirer what he already knows.

The (person) who has the stars in this way (at his nativity) will be very distinguished, of very distinguished (ancestors), a person of authority and punisher of many, and very wealthy … but unjust and not brought to justice … very distinguished … And he was indifferent to female inter course and sordid toward males … The moon (in Gemini) waxing in the trigonal configuration with Saturn (in Libra) and Jupiter (in Aquarius) also effected a happy and very wealthy (theme) and a person who provided many dedications and gifts for his fatherland.

It is interesting to note here that Sura, like Trajan, is reported to have slept with men, and this may indicate the existence of a well-placed cabal of intimates who shared their sexual preferences. Sura was an able military commander, as well as a noted man of letters. According to his friend Martial, he cultivated an old-fashioned Latin—“your antiquated vocabulary evoked our grave forefathers.” He may have influenced Hadrian’s literary taste, whether encouraging him to read the older Latin authors, or at least approving his admiration of them.

Through practical study and observation, Hadrian came to understand how the empire worked. Its inhabitants formed a colossal pyramid of mutual aid. A powerful Roman was a patronus, or protector, of many hundreds or even thousands of “clients,” not just in Rome or Italy but across the Mediterranean.

A patron looked after his clients’ interests. He would help them by giving them food, money, even land, or by standing up for them if they got into trouble with the law. In return, clients were expected to support their patron in any way they could—voting as he wished at elections and doing all kinds of useful service. In Rome, clients would pay their respects at their patron’s house every morning and walk with him to the Forum.

Clientship was not legally binding, but its rules were almost always obeyed. A patron’s client list lasted from generation to generation and was handed down from father to son. If someone freed one of his slaves, the libertus would automatically become a client of his former owner. Hadrian inherited his father’s extensive client list and, when he visited Baetica, he would have made sure to assert his patronage of many citizens of Italica and beyond.

A man could have more than one patron, and a patron could, in turn, be a client. This benevolent reciprocity cut across social class and linked Romans to people in the provinces. The greatest patron of all was the emperor, and the clientship system enabled him to exact loyalty and cooperation. It was a reliable and trustworthy network of communication in an age when travel was slow, administrative regulation uneven, and legal redress difficult. International trade and banking were advanced and political stability fostered.

Most men and women were very poor, and knew and saw little outside their immediate world. They tilled the fields either as smallholders or as laborers, often slaves, on someone else’s land. Many produced little more than was needed for subsistence. Medium-size farms were more profitable and their owners often paid bailiffs to run them. Life was hard and often brutal. On one Italian farm the laborers recognized their good fortune when they paid for the gravestone of their farm manager, a slave himself, because he “gave orders respectfully.”

Life for ordinary people in towns and cities was no great improvement. Many were jobless or only partly employed. Emperors went to a great deal of trouble to ensure the supply of grain for Rome from Egypt and Sicily and prices were carefully controlled. Some citizens received a grain dole and from time to time there were free distributions of other goods and money. Those who had jobs, whether slaves or freemen, mostly worked in the service industries or in manufacturing workshops. Tombstones from the early empire convey the manifold variety of the men and women Hadrian encountered as they strolled along the Roman street or snatched a bite to eat in one of the numerous fast-food bistros.

Those endowed with intelligence and luck were secretaries, personal maids, or barbers to the wealthy and the well-to-do. A bold and lucky few aspired to the social and political heights: one of these was Tiberius Claudius Zosimus, a freedman, who was manager of food-tasters for the nervous emperor Domitian. Others, unsuited to the exotic perils of the court, ran their own small businesses: a merchant of salted fish and Moorish wine commemorated himself in his own lifetime alongside his freedmen and freedwomen. Lucius Caelius was a tanner and leather-maker who lived to the ripe age (for the period) of sixty-one. There are fewer inscriptions to women, who tended to be wet-nurses, seamstresses, midwives, and the like. But memorials to sword-makers, locksmiths, dealers in cloaks and skins, timber and marble merchants, potters, teachers of literature, interpreters for barbarian tribes, ship’s pilots, goldsmiths, and bankers evoke the teeming labor landscape of a preindustrial society.

Freedmen owned and operated banks throughout the empire, but credit was fully secured, short-term, and usually took the form of bridging loans. Letters of credit enabled travelers to obtain cash when they needed it. When it came to large sums of money, the rich arranged loans among themselves. Seneca defined a praiseworthy man as one who “has a lovely family, a beautiful house, plenty of land under cultivation, and plenty of money out on loan.”

The growing web of arrow-straight roads was primarily designed for military movements and the imperial courier service, but they were also open to traders. Nevertheless, transport by land was painfully slow and so expensive that a journey of any length would either eliminate profit margins or substantially raise prices for bulk goods. Sea travel was much cheaper, but dangerous and out of the question during the winter.

The operations of government were a technical matter that concerned few of the estimated 60 million or so men and women who lived under Roman rule. However, Hadrian, as he approached a career in public administration, needed to grasp the political realities of Rome toward the end of the first century A.D. And the lessons of the past informed an understanding of the present.

During the first six centuries since its legendary foundation in 753 B.C., Rome had devised and implemented an eccentric but surprisingly successful constitution—largely, the outcome of a long struggle between ordinary citizens (the plebs) and the nobility. Ostensibly a democracy, assemblies of adult male citizens passed laws and elected officials who doubled as civilian administrators and generals. In theory any citizen could stand for office, but in practice only candidates from a handful of old, aristocratic families had a chance of election (except for the occasional “new man”). Although senior officials held unlimited power, or imperium, their terms of office usually lasted for only one year and the Senate, once an advisory committee consisting of past and present elected officeholders, acquired overriding authority with the passage of time.

Rome was originally a monarchy, but after the kings had been expelled and a Republic established, the Romans were determined that no one man should ever again be allowed to control the state. So two consuls replaced a single head of government. Beneath the consuls, officials of different levels of seniority ranging from quaestors, who looked after treasury business at home or abroad, to praetors came in groups of various sizes. At each level, one officeholder could veto any decision taken by a colleague. In addition, ten “Tribunes of the People” were charged with the protection of citizens’ interests as against those of the state: they could veto any officeholder’s decisions. A tribune’s person was sacrosanct; he could convene the Senate and lay bills before the people’s assemblies for approval.

Every four or five years two censors were elected from among former consuls, with a duty to supervise public morals. They checked the list of Roman citizens and reviewed the membership of the Senate, expelling any who were guilty of reprehensible conduct.

For anything to get done, this complicated system of checks and balances required all those involved to cooperate. By the end of the first century B.C. the strain of running a large empire with such an incommodious constitution began to tell, and politics grew confrontational and violent. Soldiers of the victorious legions needed smallholdings so that they could earn a living as farmers when their terms of service came to an end. A mean-spirited Senate was reluctant to free up land for the veterans, and a succession of ambitious generals compelled it to do so by the use or threat of force.

These able and ruthless men made a laughingstock of the Republic, and the last of them, Julius Caesar, precipitated a series of civil wars that lasted from 49 to 31 B.C., leaving his great-nephew and adoptive son, Gaius Octavius, as the master of Rome.

Everyone was grateful to Augustus, or Revered One, the title the Senate gave him in recognition of his preeminence, for bringing peace after two decades of civil strife, but gratitude in politics is an emotion that quickly evaporates. He realized that the idea of the old, competitive commonwealth still meant a great deal to the political class. He needed to find a way of retaining power while at the same time “restoring the Republic.” Otherwise, he ran the risk of sharing his adoptive father’s fate: in the most famous assassination in history, Caesar had been struck down by fellow senators in the course of an official Senate meeting.

Augustus rose to the challenge. First, the forms of the old Republic were reinstated and nobles contended for all the offices of state, including the consulship, as they had always done. Augustus presented himself tactfully as princeps, or “leading citizen,” merely the first among equals.

Second, Augustus was awarded a megaprovince, comprising the existing provinces of Spain, Gaul, and Syria. It was no accident that these were where most of Rome’s legions were based, for in this way Augustus made sure he held an effective monopoly of military force. He appointed legates, or deputies, to run his provinces in absentia. As in the past the Senate appointed propraetors and proconsuls (that is, men who had served as praetors and consuls) to govern the empire’s remaining provinces. Augustus reserved to himself an overriding authority—imperium maius—which allowed him to give orders to the provincial governors should that ever be necessary.

Finally, Augustus was granted tribunicia potestas—that is, all the powers of a tribune without the inconvenience of having to hold the office. As with tribunes, his person was sacrosanct and to offer him physical violence would be to break a grave taboo.

This system of government was a great success and, although some traditionalists still hankered after the “real” Republic and acted as an informal opposition, it won the cooperation of most of the ruling class. Augustus’ constitutional arrangements were durable and, with some refinements, were still in place a hundred years later when the young Hadrian was becoming politically aware.

There was one major difference. The Augustan constitution depended, in the last analysis, on the threat, albeit hidden, of force. The pretense that the emperor was a senator like the rest, but just happened to be rather more powerful, was gradually abandoned. The autocracy was recognized for what it was. All that the ruling class requested was that their master did not rub their noses in their humiliation. Some emperors obliged, others did not.

A growing number of non-Italians—drawn from wealthy local elites—were invited to participate in power. The Aelii and the Ulpii were by no means the only provincial families to enjoy senatorial careers.

Men who were elected to public office in the latter days of the Republic had usually been Italians, but Julius Caesar in the 40s B.C. experimented with widening the recruiting pool. Claudius, who reigned between A.D. 41 and 54 and was the first emperor to have been born outside Italy, approved a standing policy that the Senate should include “all the flower of the colonies and municipalities everywhere.”

In practice the early emperors did comparatively little to bring this about, but in the second half of the century the position changed markedly and a number of provincials attained high positions. In 56 the first Greek was appointed to the sensitive post of prefect of Egypt: this was Tiberius Claudius Balbillus, a noted court astrologer, who wrote a book about his journeys around the country he governed. By Hadrian’s birth the complexion of the Senate was looking more representative of the empire as a whole. It has been estimated that perhaps 17 percent of its six hundred members came from outside Italy. Men from the thoroughly Romanized provinces of southern Gaul and southern Spain were recruited, among them (of course) Hadrian’s father. Most of these were ultimately of Italian origin, but for the first time two Greek senators were elected.

Just below the senatorial class were the equites, literally “horsemen.” In Rome’s early days, these had been wealthy citizens who served in the army as cavalry, but now the term embraced businessmen and country gentry. The minimum entry qualification to the ordo was capital or property worth 400,000 sesterces (less than half the 1 million sesterces required of senators). Companies of equites collected taxes on behalf of the state, although cities in the provinces were beginning to take over this task from them. The loss was compensated by gains at court. From the time of Augustus emperors had appointed former slaves to run the burgeoning imperial bureaucracy. These men did not have a political constituency on which they could call and so had no choice but to be totally loyal to their employer. Perhaps for this reason, but also because they made large fortunes that they tended to spend on conspicuous display, imperial libertini became dangerously unpopular. Eventually, emperors replaced them with equites; they, too, carried little or no political weight, but, unlike freedmen, had the signal advantage of being accepted and respected members of the Roman commonwealth.

Meanwhile civic leaders throughout the empire were rewarded for their willingness to take part in public life with the grant of Roman citizenship. The Romans had a long tradition that can be traced back to the distant times when they were conquering their neighbors, local tribes in central Italy. They recruited their victims, inviting the vanquished to join the winning side. Rome awarded some of them full citizenship with privileges and others the lesser Latin Rights.

Once the lands encircling the Mediterranean basin were in Roman hands, the same principle was applied. More and more men from the provinces with not a single Italian gene became citizens. This made the empire a shared enterprise in the success of which those who might otherwise have opposed an occupying power had a common interest. The custom was that a man took on the nomen of the distinguished Roman who had granted him citizenship. Thus a Corinthian who was the son of Laco and the grandson of Eurycles added Gaius Julius to his Greek names, implying enfranchisement by Julius Caesar or Augustus; Gaius Julius Severus was a proud “descendant of kings and tetrarchs” in the Middle East and went on to become a senior Roman official and governor of Achaea (mainland Greece). Nothing is more expressive of someone’s personal identity than how he or she is called, and the fact that throughout the empire everyone of any importance had a Latin name was a vivid assertion of Rome’s unifying authority.

The long era of peace, the pax Romana, that Augustus had introduced after his victory over Antony and Cleopatra showed no sign of coming to an end a century later. We should not allow this to mislead us. The Romans were fundamentally belligerent. Since the Republic’s earliest days they had been more or less continuously at war. As has been seen, their politicians also acted as military leaders. To be Roman was to place a high value on individual valor and state violence.

In theory the Senate condemned aggressive war, but it was usually not too difficult to devise a sufficiently plausible casus belli. And once they were in the field the legions obeyed few conventions. The remote Britannia offers a textbook example of imperial ruthlessness. The island was invaded and annexed in A.D. 43, but at the outset only England and parts of Wales fell under Roman control. Over the following decades, further campaigns led to the reduction of most of the island except for the far north. Although a patriot, Publius Cornelius Tacitus, an older contemporary of Hadrian and one of Rome’s greatest historians, could see an enemy’s point of view. In his biography of his father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, who campaigned in Britannia, he puts a passionate speech into the mouth of a Caledonian leader, Calgacus—so passionate that it must have reflected the historian’s real if not openly acknowledged feelings. It is an indictment of empire builders that rings true even today:

Robbers of the world, [the Romans] have exhausted the land by their indiscriminate devastation, and now they ransack the sea … They are unique in being as violently tempted to attack the poor as the wealthy. Robbery, butchery, rapine, the liars call empire. They make a desolation and they call it peace [in Tacitus’s unforgettable Latin,

ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant]

.

IV

CRISIS OF EMPIRE

The modern age opened for Hadrian a few years before his birth, with the emperor Nero and the catastrophe that engulfed him in A.D. 68. A revolt by provincial generals led to his suicide at the early age of thirty-two, and with that the dynasty founded by his great-great-grandfather Augustus came to an end. For most Romans Nero became a type of the bad emperor: he had murdered his mother, decimated the Senate, and been (mistakenly) accused of burning down his capital city. He displayed an unhealthy, an un-Roman obsession with poetry and the arts. Where was the austere virtus of his ancestors to be found?

Among philhellenes, though, Nero was celebrated as a martyr and his memory stayed evergreen for many years. His biographer, Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, noted, “There were people who would lay spring and summer flowers on his grave for a long time, and had statues made of him, wearing his fringed toga, which they put up on the Speaker’s Platform in the Forum.” A well-known observer of the contemporary scene remarked: “Even now everyone wishes [Nero] to be alive, and most people think he really is.” Indeed, pretenders emerged in the Greek east to cause brief trouble from time to time.

There was a straightforward explanation for this abiding popularity. Nero, who assumed the purple when he was only seventeen, had been as much of a Graeculus as Hadrian a generation later. As a boy he developed an interest in the arts, dashing off verses with facility; unusually, music was part of his childhood curriculum. The adult Nero aspired to be a great poet, musician, and performer. His aesthetic and sporting interests were essentially Hellenic: he drove a chariot at Olympia, the home of the Olympic Games, and he founded a Greek-style festival, the Neronia, in which musicians, orators, poets, and gymnasts competed for prizes. He visited Greece, where he took part in musical, literary, and dramatic contests.

Nero once remarked: “The Greeks alone are worthy of my efforts; they really listen to music.” His enthusiasm was not entirely artistic, but had a political dimension. During his first of two Hellenic tours (probably in 67) he made the astonishing decision to liberate the province of Achaea—namely, mainland Greece up to Macedonia in the north.

The emperor announced his decision in a clumsy and pretentious speech (we have its text because it was taken down verbatim and carved onto a marble stele). “Other leaders,” he said, “have liberated cities, only Nero a province.” Greek opinion was delighted, and one of his critics, praising with a faint damn, remarked that the decree earned Nero reincarnation as a singing frog rather than as a viper. However, the boasted liberation did not last, for a later emperor soon rescinded it.

We do not know Hadrian’s opinion of Nero, but, when he came to learn the history of his times, he must have been sympathetic to this attempt to rehabilitate the culture of Greece and to place the descendants of Pericles and Plato on something approaching level terms with their Roman masters. When many years later he found an opportunity to advance the same cause, he did not hesitate to seize it.

Two other significant events that took place in the years before Hadrian’s birth molded his world and had serious consequences both for him and his contemporaries. The first of these was a military crisis toward the end of Nero’s reign, which offered Hadrian food for thought as he looked back more than half a century later, with all the advantages of hindsight.

In A.D. 66 Judaea rose in revolt against Rome.

The Jews had long been the most awkward and annoyingly rebarbative of the conquered peoples, and the imperial authorities had never been certain how best to handle them, veering unpredictably between toleration and repression, ruling Judaea sometimes indirectly through a client king such as Herod the Great and sometimes directly as a province. Of an empire of about 60 million souls, a census conducted in A.D. 48 recorded some 6,944,000 Jews, not counting the many thousands still in Babylonian exile and living under Parthian rule. Perhaps 2.5 million lived in or around Judaea. Many had settled elsewhere in the empire, in Rome and especially in the eastern provinces; in an exodus in reverse, a million Jews lived in Egypt, and were a majority in two of the five districts of the city of Alexandria, second only to the imperial capital in economic importance and a learned center of Greek culture. At about 10 percent of the total subject population, they were numerous enough to create difficulties.

Although many Jews of the diaspora were willing to Hellenize themselves like everyone else in the eastern half of the empire, serious obstacles stood in the way of integration. Believing as they did in one invisible God, Jews abjured the multitude of overlapping divinities in whom both their Roman masters and their Greek-speaking neighbors confided their trust. However, respectful of their religious scruples, the emperor intermittently forgave them the duty of sacrificing to his well-being, allowed them freedom of worship, and exempted them from military service. They had the right to send an annual tax to Jerusalem for the upkeep of the Temple, splendidly rebuilt by Herod the Great, and to coin money without the emperor’s head on it, or any other image.

Toleration was not accompanied by tolerance. For most citizens of the empire monotheism was a kind of atheism. While grudgingly admiring their obduracy, both Roman and Greek despised and distrusted Jews. Tacitus exemplifies the general opinion, in which falsehood and fact, unexamined prejudice and sharp perception jostle. He knew about Moses and the escape from Egypt, noting drily that they proceeded to “seize a country [Canaan], expelling the former inhabitants,” an early case of ethnic cleansing.

Critics usually failed to specify what was wrong with the Jews. Tacitus remarks that they abstained from pork, buried rather than burned their dead, and avoided sex with non-Jews. The worst he could come up with was the (entirely fictional, so far as we know) erection in a shrine of the statue of a donkey, which “had enabled them to put an end to their wandering.”

There were, in fact, two real, underlying difficulties—one of which marked a collision with Roman imperialism and the other with Greek cultural values. Jews’ sense of themselves as the chosen people and the exclusiveness of their religious beliefs and practices led, among true believers, to an antagonistic nationalism, which prevented or at least hindered them from joining the Roman imperial enterprise.

One of the abiding symbols of being a Greek was the gymnasium and the wrestling ground, or palaestra. Here men and boys stripped naked (the Greek word for naked was gumnos, whence gymnasium) and exercised themselves. They ran, jumped, and leaped, boxed or wrestled, as well as taking part in two-person tugs-of-war or, less energetically, playing ball games in a special building or covered court. While nudity was completely acceptable to Greeks, it was taboo to reveal the tip, or glans, of the penis, and for this reason they found circumcision to be repugnant.

Gymnastics presented the Hellenizing Jew with a particular challenge. Since the beginning of their story, the Israelites stressed the importance of circumcision as a visible sign of the historic covenant with their sole and fiercely jealous God. According to the historian Josephus, Hellenizing Jews as long ago as the second century B.C. “hid the circumcision of their genitals, that even when they were naked they might appear to be Greeks. Accordingly, they left off all the customs that belonged to their own country, and imitated the practices of the other nations.”

“Hiding” circumcision may have been essential, but it was painfully difficult. A Jew whose foreskin had been cut off in the first days of life had somehow to re-create it. This could be done by surgery. What was left of the prepuce was cut round with a scalpel; then the skin of the penis was pulled down as far as its base and then stretched back to cover the glans. The probability of inflammation and infection was high, and there was a nonsurgical alternative, albeit an equally unappealing procedure: weights could be attached to the skin of the penis to extend it over the glans.

True believers remained fiercely opposed to any reform or compromise. It was said: “Cursed be the man that rears a pig and cursed be those who instruct their sons in Greek wisdom.” Paul Johnson sums up the position:

The great Jewish revolts against Roman rule should be seen not just as risings by a colonised people, inspired by religious nationalism, but as a racial and cultural conflict between Jews and Greeks. The xenophobia and anti-Hellenism which was such a characteristic of Jewish literature … was fully reciprocated.

No record exists of Hadrian’s attitude to Judaism, but we can be certain that, as a fully committed Hellenist, he felt nothing but scorn for this unruly community, the only one in the empire whose ideologues openly resented Roman rule and resisted the universal appeal of the Hellenic idea.

Jerusalem was a marvelous sight. It was larger than today’s Old Jerusalem, with a population perhaps of 100,000. From a distance travelers were known to mistake the city for a snowcapped mountain peak, for it perched on two hilltops above which towered the Temple to the one true God with its walls of gleaming white marble. Gold and silver decorations flashed in the sunlight and on a bright day forced onlookers to avert their gaze.

Built on an eminence extended by massive vaults, the Temple occupied a rectangular courtyard, thirty-five acres in area and a mile in circumference, and was lined with long, double-pillared colonnades in the Greek manner. In the center stood a tall building with turreted walls, which only Jews were allowed to enter. Here was a courtyard for women from which a flight of steps led through an arch into an area reserved for men, where they could witness sacrifices on a great altar. Beyond rose the Temple itself, a magnificent keeplike structure, one hundred feet high. Its façade was pierced by a great entranceway. Golden doors were shielded by a veil made from Babylonian tapestry of linen embroidered in blue, scarlet, and purple.

Inside was the Holy Place. This large room contained three fine works of art—a seven-branched lampstand, a table, and an altar for burning incense. The seven lamps represented the planets; twelve loaves on the table the circle of the zodiac and of the year; thirteen fragrant spices for the altar signified that all things were of God and for God. A small, lightless inner recess, measuring fifteen feet square, was screened in the same way as the outer entrance by a veil. According to Josephus,

In this stood nothing at all. Unapproachable, inviolable, invisible to all, this was called the Holy of Holy.

The original Temple had been destroyed in the sixth century B.C. when the Jews were exiled to Babylon, but was rebuilt on their return. Augustus appointed to the throne of Judaea a Hellenizing client king, Herod the Great, who commissioned a wholesale reconstruction on a much enlarged scale. This was one of the great construction projects of antiquity, and only now in the 60s A.D. was the new Temple finally approaching completion.

Judaea was an unhappy place at this time. The economy was weak and there were tensions between rich and poor. Political opinion was sharply divided and religious sects were at one another’s throats—among them the Sadducees, who monopolized the Temple management; the Pharisees, who were willing to render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s; and the ascetic Essenes, who believed that the end of the world was at hand and that Israel would be rescued from tyranny by a militant savior, or messiah.

The province was small, and Rome sent out only the incompetent or (at best) the third-rate as junior governors, or procuratores. A dispute about the civic status of the town of Caesarea led to disturbances. Heavy-handed measures in an attempt to restore order only made the situation worse. In May or June the young captain of the Temple (a post junior only to that of the high priest) persuaded the authorities to halt the then regular sacrifices for the emperor’s well-being. Gang warfare between opposing factions broke out. Leaders of those wanting to avoid war with Rome were killed. The rebels seized city and Temple and a small Roman garrison was massacred.

When the governor of the neighboring province of Syria heard the news of the revolt, he decided on a show of strength and marched down to Jerusalem with a sizable army. But after some indecisive skirmishing he saw that he did not have the resources to take the high-walled, well-defended city, and withdrew. The rebels harried his columns and a retreat became something approaching a rout.

For the first time since the Babylonian captivity, Judaea was a free state.

In Rome, Nero was nervous. The Jewish revolt had to be put down firmly, but whom should he appoint to accomplish this? He was fearful of his generals and provincial governors: the larger the number of legions they commanded and the greater the luster of their victories, the more he suspected them of designs on the throne.

Nero found just the man he needed to recapture Judaea in Titus Flavius Vespasianus, or Vespasian. He had a number of useful qualifications. Most important of all, at fifty-eight he was approaching the end of a successful but not brilliant career. His family background was reassuringly humble and he would pose no political threat if victorious.

By June 67 Vespasian was in Ptolemais (today’s Acre or Akko) at the head of three legions. One of them was commanded by his son Titus, a dashing and handsome twenty-eight-year-old. Another was led by Marcus Ulpius Traianus, the father of the man who was to become Hadrian’s guardian in twenty years’ time. Young Trajan was around fourteen at the time, and probably accompanied his father on the campaign.

Vespasian proceeded south without undue speed toward Jerusalem, methodically capturing and securing every town and strongpoint in his way. A military incident from this time throws light on why the Spanish clan of the Ulpii were doing so well in the slippery world of Roman politics. Traianus was dispatched with a thousand horse and two thousand foot to reduce the large fortified village of Japha. This was not only in a naturally strong position, but was protected by a recently erected double ring of walls.

Luckily for Traianus, some of the inhabitants came out to offer battle, and the Romans charged and routed them. The rebels fled back into the first enclosure, closely pursued by Traianus’ legionaries, who followed them inside. In order to prevent a further break-in, the defenders in the inner enclosure closed the gates, but had to shut out not only the Romans but also their own people. A swarming, desperate crowd banged on the gates and begged the sentinels by name to let them back in. Cooped up and huddled together, they were butchered to the last man. Josephus reports that, abandoned by their friends, they did not even have the heart to resist.

Traianus saw that Japha would soon fall, but instead of proceeding to an easy victory, he paused. He sent a message to Vespasian asking him to send his son to complete the siege. Titus arrived with reinforcements, and the place was captured in short order. Little wonder that father and son valued the services of a man who combined military expertise with the tact of a courtier.

The course of the campaign in Judaea was halted by the second great event that shaped Hadrian’s age. It was an upheaval that shook every part of the empire. A new civil war broke out, imperiling the stability of the entire grand enterprise.

Nero’s worst fears were eventually realized in 68. When some provincial governors rose against him, it was not merely he that was destroyed, but the dynasty too. If he had put up a fight, he might have won the day, but, too soon fearing the worst, he brought on the worst. Anathematized by the Senate and abandoned by all but a few followers, he fled. Suicide was his best option, but, although his pursuers were almost in sight, he could not bear to kill himself. He kept saying, “What an artist the world is losing!” Someone had to help Nero drive a dagger into his throat.

The four emperors after Augustus had all been his familial descendants and so, in a sense, had an entitlement to the purple. Now, with the fall of the domus Caesarum, there was no obvious candidate for the succession, simply claimants with soldiers to back them. The next eighteen months saw three men successively seize the purple—only to lose it and their lives. Roman legions fought each other in murderous battles. In Judaea, Vespasian watched the situation develop, and eventually decided to bid for the purple himself. Troops loyal to him captured Rome, and the latest imperial incumbent was put to death.

No one stood forward to challenge Vespasian, the fourth and final pretender, and, to universal relief, peace returned. The Roman world had had a bad shock. However, it would be wrong to exaggerate. The storm was mercifully brief; peasant farmers in the Apennines, boatmen on the Nile, and fishermen in Attica were not greatly disturbed. Life went on. But much treasure had been wasted and many lives lost; the capital of the empire had been ablaze and blood let in its holy places.

With the elimination of the imperial system’s founding family, it was evident that some means had to be devised not only of ensuring a reliable succession from one emperor to another, but also of identifying a competent man for the job. Rome had had enough of unbalanced despots. When the next crisis came, when in due course another dynasty crashed, Hadrian would be a young man. He and his contemporaries were to look to the decision makers of the day to avoid the errors of the past.

Meanwhile, there was the Jewish revolt to crush. Before Vespasian set sail for Rome in 70 to establish the Flavian regime, he handed over command of four legions to Titus, to which were added auxiliaries and contingents contributed by client kings—all in all between thirty thousand and forty thousand men. He also appointed a consilium, or advisory committee, of tried-and-tested generals and politicians, probably including Traianus, who was relieved of his day-to-day duties as a legionary commander. This was wise, for Titus was dashing and brave, but sometimes careless.

Four years had passed since the insurgency had begun and an independent state had proudly come into being. The Jewish authorities struck their own fine silver coins and bronze small change, some of which have been unearthed by archaeologists: one of these, a silver shekel, bears the image of three pomegranates and the words Jerusalem the holy, and the obverse shows a chalice and the inscription Shekel of Israel Year Two. Other signs of a stable state include the minutiae of public administration, such as the continuation of the law courts and municipal arrangements for pauper burials.

However, the fighting among radicals continued and opposing factions controlled different parts of Jerusalem. With the return of the Romans they joined in mutually distrustful alliance and, whatever their disagreements, resisted their besiegers with ferocity and ingenuity. When Titus rode out to reconnoiter the city’s defenses, he strayed a little too close to the walls and was nearly captured by a sudden sortie of enemy fighters.

He returned to his camp, shaken and now fully seized by the daunting challenge that awaited him. At first sight, Jerusalem appeared impregnable. The walls of the old city (what were called the Upper Town and the Lower Town) stood on the top of sheer cliffs and on the east side overlooked a valley: the Temple itself rose up like a citadel and was defended by a huge four-turreted fort, built by Herod the Great and named the Antonia in honor of his friend Mark Antony.

The weakest part of the city’s defenses was the third wall, around suburbs, and this was where Titus planned the first attack. Battering rams, protected by an artillery barrage from stone-throwing ballistae designed to clear defenders from the walls, took two weeks to create a breach. The rebels rallied and counterattacked, but gradually the Romans overturned every obstacle placed in their way.

At last Titus faced the culminating test—how to take the Antonia. The rebels tunneled out from the fort beneath Titus’ siege towers, set alight the pit props and other combustible material, and withdrew. The towers collapsed in a blaze of flames.

A quite unexpected occurrence followed. The Antonia itself suddenly collapsed, destabilized by the tunneling. For all the rebels’ efforts, the Romans slowly advanced, fighting every inch of the way through the Temple, both sides setting parts of it alight. Finally, a legionary flung a piece of burning timber through a gold-plated window into the central Temple complex. Its sacred contents were looted, and then the Holy Place and the innermost recess, the empty Holy of Holy, burned to the ground.

Titus razed what was left of the Temple and gave his soldiers leave to burn and sack the city. Tacitus estimated the Jewish body count at 600,000, which seems high; but clearly casualties were very numerous. Titus took the veil from the entrance to the Holy of Holy and hung it in his palace.

To underline the fact that the Temple no longer existed and would not be rebuilt, the tax levied on Jews everywhere for its upkeep was replaced by a poll tax payable to a new fiscus Judaicus, or Jewish Treasury, in Rome.

Awards and honors were distributed. Traianus’s services as a legionary commander and later on the general’s consilium had been exemplary, for about the time of, or shortly after, the fall of Jerusalem he was made a patrician. This was a glittering prize indeed for a provincial from Spain: patricians were Rome’s oldest nobility—descended, legend had it, from the original members of the Senate as first established in the time of the kings. Promotion to patrician status indicated very high favor with the emperor.

Resistance in Judaea did not come to an immediate end. Zealots held out in the desert fortress of Masada for some time, eventually committing mass suicide after a long Roman siege. That tragic detail aside, the war was over.

Each of the contestants offered his account of events. In Rome, a commemorative arch was erected at the top of the Via Sacra, or Sacred Way, the street that led into the Forum—where it still stands. The dedicatory inscription reads: “Following the directions and plans and under the auspices of his father, [Titus] tamed the race of the Jews and destroyed the city of Jerusalem, a thing either sought in vain by all commanders, kings, and races before him or never even attempted.”

Among the empire’s Jewish community, the extent of the catastrophe was very hard to understand. As the Babylonian Talmud put it:

Why was the First Temple destroyed? Because of three transgressions: because of idol worship, sexual immorality, and wanton bloodshed. But the Second Temple, [whose generation] studied Torah, observed the commandments, and engaged in charitable works, why was it destroyed? Because of baseless hatred—which demonstrated that baseless hatred is as weighty as three transgressions: idol worship, sexual immorality, and wanton bloodshed.

The Jews had obeyed the Lord, but, like Job, still been punished. The explanation, mysterious except to the divine mind, was that the enmity of others was potent enough to outplay virtue.

V

A NEW DYNASTY

Vespasian inherited his family’s reputation for stinginess, but this probably signified no more than financial realism. He liked to present himself as a common man, and enjoyed a dirty joke. When he decided to introduce a new tax on public latrines (these were profitable enterprises, because urine was much in demand by laundries for bleaching clothes whiter than white), his son Titus demurred. The emperor is reported to have responded that a coin did not smell (pecunia non olet).

The Flavians reintroduced competence into government. According to Tacitus, Vespasian was the first man to improve after becoming emperor. Rebellions in Germany and Britain, overhangs from the Year of the Four Emperors, were efficiently quelled. Increased taxes and the manipulation of the supply of certain commodities removed a large deficit at the treasury, the consequence of Neronian extravagance and the luxury of civil war.

The emperor and his sons, Titus Flavius Vespasianus and Titus Flavius Domitianus (known as Domitian), who succeeded him on the throne, did all they could to signal a break with the empire’s original first family, and more particularly with Nero.

Vespasian reestablished a working relationship with the ruling class, which provided trustworthy and responsible personnel to govern the provinces and command the armies. Without its backing, even if this was only tacit, experience had shown that an emperor would be unable to manage the empire. However, one dangerous continuity with the discredited past remained obstinately in place—the existence in the Senate of an opposition party, or at least a faction of critics.

Imagine a perfect human being, virtuous and wise. If he sees his child in danger of drowning, it is natural for him to do all he can to rescue it. But if, despite his best efforts, he fails, he will accept what has happened without feeling distress or pity. In this way happiness cannot be compromised.

For most of us, this scenario is both disagreeable and implausible, but it epitomizes in a single exemplum the essence of Stoicism, a philosophical tradition that Rome’s elite had long made its own. It was founded by Zeno of Citium, who lectured at the end of the fourth century B.C. in the Painted Porch in Athens, the (Poikile Stoa), whence the name of his doctrines. The stoa was a roofed colonnade on the northern side of the Agora, or marketplace, where paintings on wooden panels of great events in Athenian history were on display. It was a convenient spot where a teacher and his students could hold their classes.

For the Stoic the universe consisted of matter inspirited by a divine breath. This creative fire (or warm air) was called the Word (the Greek term is or logos, which we know from the Christian Gospel of Saint John, perhaps written about this time, when Hadrian was a young man). The logos fashioned the universe into a rational and purposive whole, of which an individual human soul formed a small part.

To lead a good life and attain happiness a man or woman had to live in harmony with this principle of energy and order. The ordinary aspirations of human life—health, wealth, friendship, family—have a real value, but they are subordinate to the imperatives of the logos, which can do no wrong. What seems like misfortunes cannot be so in the eyes of the cosmos and must be accepted with a cheerful heart. Ergo the inhuman imperturbability of the bereaved father. The universe has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.

The living embodiment of Stoicism was the philosopher Epictetus. He was born in about A.D. 55, a slave of one of Nero’s freedmen, Epaphroditus, who helped his patron Nero to kill himself, and had been lame from childhood. At a certain point he was probably handed on to a new owner, for his name is the Greek for “acquired.” It is not known when or how he won his freedom; perhaps Epaphroditus let him go in the confused and violent aftermath of the fall of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

One of Epictetus’ catchphrases was —“bear and forbear,” or more precisely, “endure and renounce.” In one of his lectures, he spoke of an appropriately calm approach to being executed.

This is what it means … to have made desire and aversion free from every hindrance and proofed them against chance. I must die. If immediately, then I die. But if a little later, I will have some lunch, for it’s lunchtime, and then I will die at the appointed time. How shall I face my end? As becomes a man who is giving back what belongs to someone else.

Epictetus held philosophy classes in Rome. Like Socrates, he wrote no books, and his thought survives thanks to verbatim notes of what he said, taken down by one of his students. He lived in the greatest simplicity and was modest about himself and his achievements. Children were only half-complete human beings, he felt, but their straightforwardness in play impressed him, and he loved to get down on his hands and knees and speak baby talk with them.

Ever since Augustus replaced the noisy, competitive, semidemocratic Republic with an efficient autocracy toward the end of the previous century, a minority of senators had kept their distance from the government and criticized successive administrations. It was never altogether clear to the emperor of the day whether or not they were a loyal opposition. Some of them cherished a long-term ambition to restore the Republic, but most intelligent observers of the political scene recognized that the past could not be recalled. What they sought was temperate rule by an intelligent and experienced emperor.

These dissidents have been named the Stoic opposition because their chief tactics—a refusal to cooperate with an unworthy government and a willingness to endure uncomplainingly the punishment of the state—could be justified in philosophical terms. They knew they were going to lose, but nonetheless proceeded on their dangerous course with stoicism—as well as with Stoicism.

Families that shared common political views intermarried over the years and one generation picked up where the previous one left off. Women played a key role and on occasion were braver and more decisive than their husbands. One of these was Arria, wife of Aulus Caecina Paetus, who supported an abortive revolt against the emperor Claudius in A.D. 42 by the governor of Illyricum, a province on the far side of the Adriatic Sea (roughly today’s Albania and Croatia).

The emperor let it be known that he expected Paetus to commit suicide (a civilized alternative to execution for the well born or well-connected). However, when the last moment came, Paetus succumbed to nerves and it looked as if he would not behave in the expected high Roman fashion. Arria took his sword from him and stabbed herself with it. She said: “Paetus, it doesn’t hurt,” and handed back the weapon. The couple were soon both dead, and the words Paete, non dolet became a catchphrase for selfless courage.

Although Vespasian and the Flavians promised better government, the Stoic opposition remained unreconciled. An able but obstinate senator, Helvidius Priscus, opposed measures aimed at pleasing Vespasian. Helvidius insisted on addressing the emperor by his original preimperial name and delivered speeches attacking Vespasian personally and the office he held.

Epictetus recalls a memorable exchange. Vespasian asked Helvidius to stay away from a meeting of the Senate. Helvidius replied:

“It is in your power not to allow me to be a member of the Senate, but so long as I am I must attend its meetings.”

“Very well then, but when you attend, hold your tongue.”

“Don’t ask for my opinion and I will hold my tongue.”

“But I am obliged to ask your opinion [as a senior senator].”

“Then I am obliged to reply and give you my opinion.”

“But if you speak, I will have you executed.”

“All right, then, but when did I ever claim that I was immortal? You play your part, and I will play mine.”

This may or may not be a verbatim account, but it epitomizes the strengths and weaknesses of the Stoic opposition—brave but to little effect, content to condemn but not to overthrow. But in one sense they posed the imperial idea a real and irresoluble threat. Although they suffered persecution from time to time, they remained an integral part of the political elite whether through friendship, family ties, or a dour underpinning philosophy of life. They could not be liquidated without risking the alienation of those on whose cooperation emperors depended.

An abiding problem with Rome’s system of imperial government was the succession. In constitutional theory the emperor was merely the senior official in a republic, and so the future could not be spelled out. However, Vespasian believed reasonably enough that with two capable sons his own bloodline would be sufficient to ensure governmental continuity.

The calculation bore fruit, at first. In 79 the emperor was struck down by a bowel complaint. His sense of humor did not betray him, even when he realized that he was not to recover. In the confident expectation that, as was customary, the Senate would vote to deify him posthumously, he remarked: “Dear me, I seem to be becoming a god!” He continued with his official duties and received embassies. His doctors complained, but he replied, “An emperor ought to die on his feet.” There is another version of this story. According to this, he made the remark when he was overtaken by a sudden and painful attack of diarrhea, and nearly fainted. He struggled to his feet and expired in the arms of those around him.

Hadrian was only an infant at the time, but as an adult he spread the word that Vespasian had in fact been poisoned at a banquet by his good-looking and able son Titus. This is an improbable claim. Such evidence as there is suggests that Titus loved and was loyal to his father; at any rate, in his brief reign he maintained Vespasian’s policies.

On August 24, two months almost to the day after Vespasian’s death, Mount Vesuvius in Campania erupted and buried the towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii beneath ash.

The event made a profound impression and talk of it may have been among Hadrian’s early memories. Dust was reported to have spread to Africa, Syria, and Egypt. At Rome it filled the air overhead and darkened the sun for several days. According to Dio Cassius, “people did not know and could not imagine what had happened, but, like those close at hand, believed that the whole world was being turned upside down, that the sun was disappearing into the earth and that the earth was being lifted to the sky.” Pliny the Younger was in Campania at the time, and was convinced that “the whole world was dying with me and I with it.”

It soon became clear that this was not the case, but the terror that the end of the world was at hand fed the millenarian anxieties of the age. It was a fearful reminder that humankind was at the mercy of uncontrollable forces, which reason alone could not vanquish.

In 81, shortly after the endless munera with which he had marked the opening of a new amphitheater, the Colosseum, and some splendid public baths, Titus sickened unexpectedly with a fever and died. Domitian succeeded Titus without challenge. According to the literary sources, he was of a solitary and suspicious disposition. As a child, his father and brother had spent much of their time at Nero’s court and during his teens had been largely absent on public business in the east. He seems to have been often left to his own devices and grew up unsupported by the day-to-day affection and supervision of his closest relatives.

Domitian was ill at ease socially and was sometimes reported to feign madness. He enjoyed the solitude of his vast villa outside Rome in the Alban Hills. According to Suetonius,

At the beginning of his reign he used to spend hours in seclusion every day, doing nothing but catch flies and stab them with a keenly sharpened stylus. Consequently, when someone once asked whether anyone was in there with [him], Vibius Crispus made the witty reply: “Not even

a fly.”

Thirty years old when he assumed power, Domitian proved to be a competent administrator, and he performed his judicial duties conscientiously. He has had a bad press, for he alienated the Senate, and the literary sources reflect its antipathy. So what was said against him needs to be treated with caution. However, the antipathy itself is telling, for the inability of an emperor to manage the political class represents a serious failure.

Like Nero, Domitian had no obvious qualifications for the job he held; his refractory nature did not inspire confidence and, although he had held public office during his father’s reign, he had not been allowed the opportunity to gain military experience.

One senses that a fear of insufficiency lay behind his bossy and decidedly autocratic manner. He appreciated it when flatterers hailed him as Dominus et deus noster, “our lord and god.” The imperial system, as invented by Augustus, depended on everyone accepting the necessary fiction that it was the old Roman Republic reborn and that the emperor was merely the first among equals. Domitian was too impatient to waste time on this, and offended senators by his lack of civilitas, or polite affability.

Evidence survives of sensible measures taken by provincial governors, usually following precedents set by previous emperors. Where Domitian himself intervened, the most notable characteristic was not any special concern for justice or efficiency, but a censorious tone of voice.

His moralizing approach to governance found its most intense expression in a revival of the Julian Laws, with the aim of “shaking the thunderbolt of purity.” The emperor sought to implement legislation dating from Augustus’ day that encouraged marriage and protected the family, and the old Scantinian law that penalized male-to-male sexual activity.

As censor perpetuus, or censor for life, Domitian gave himself oversight of public morals. He took his responsibilities with the utmost seriousness. He twice acted against Vestal Virgins, whom he charged with incestum, illicit sexual intercourse. The six Vestals were the only priestesses in the Roman religious system, and their main task was to watch over Rome’s eternal flame, or symbolic hearth. If it was allowed to go out, the well-being and prosperity of the city was put at risk.

Recruited when a little girl from the nobility, a Vestal served for thirty years and was under the care of the pontifex maximus, chief priest. She could expect a life of luxury and high prestige. But she had to be careful. If a Vestal was found to have slept with a man a terrible fate awaited her—to be buried alive. Early in the reign three Vestals, half the complement, were found guilty of incestum, but Domitian was in a forgiving mood and allowed them to choose their own form of death.

Some years later the senior Vestal, Cornelia, who had already been acquitted of the same charge, was again arraigned. Domitian tried her and, although she protested her innocence vigorously, convicted her. In his capacity as pontifex maximus he accompanied her to a stretch of rising ground just inside the city walls called the Campus Sceleratus, the “field polluted by crime.” Here a small underground chamber had been prepared, containing a couch, a lamp, and a table with food on it.

Cornelia’s dress caught as she descended a ladder into the tiny vault, and Domitian, who was standing beside her, politely offered her his hand. She drew back in disgust and pushed his arm away. She took care to lower herself onto the couch without offense to her modesty. The ladder was pulled up and the access hole filled with earth. Cornelia was left alone to meet her death, whether through eventual asphyxiation or, perhaps, a more immediate suicide with poison or knife.

The affair left a bad impression. A former praetor was persuaded to make a tardy confession of having slept with the Vestal, but many doubted her guilt.

Domitian was unfazed by the contrast with his own private life. According to Dio, “he was not only physically lazy and emotionally timorous, but also extremely promiscuous and indulged in rough sex both with women and boys.” Apparently he liked to call copulation by the Greek word for “bed-wrestling.”

Domitian spent much of his time outside Rome on campaign, no doubt to the Senate’s relief. Like all the Flavians, he recognized that military success would help to stabilize the regime. He defeated the Chatti, a Germanic tribe beyond the middle Rhine, and permanently occupied the Taunus region, in this way strengthening the frontier by eliminating an awkward re-entrant. He enclosed this new acquisition with a limes, a line of blockhouses and forts, that showed exactly where the imperial boundary was as well as demonstrating Rome’s firm intention to maintain and defend it.

Domitian made more of his immediate victory than was warranted, and it was some years before the territory was fully pacified. However, he bought popularity with the troops by raising their wages by one third—the first time there had been an increase since the days of Augustus—as well as offering them three costly congiaria, or one-off bonuses. This was the kind of emperor the rank and file appreciated.

If the Rhine frontier was more or less settled, the same could not be said for the Danube. North of the river lay the Transylvanian basin, surrounded by the rugged Carpathian Mountains. Here was the home of the Dacians, a rich and powerful people who had originated in northwestern Asia Minor. They controlled substantial mineral reserves, especially of gold and silver, which they traded with their Celtic and Germanic neighbors and the Greek cities on the coast of the Black Sea.

In the early part of the first century B.C., a certain Burebista transformed the disparate and decentralized Dacians into a unified kingdom for the first time and established alliances with adjoining tribes. A great power began to emerge that in time might challenge Rome. Julius Caesar saw the danger and was planning an expedition against Burebista before his assassination, in 44 B.C. Luckily for Rome, the king died in the same year and the threat receded.

A century or so later, however, a new, energetic, and talented ruler came to the fore, Decebalus, “shrewd in his understanding of warfare, and shrewd too in the waging of war.” His ambition was to reestablish the Dacian empire. He judged that Rome would not countenance the reappearance of an expansionist power on its frontier, and decided on a preemptive strike. In A.D. 84 a horde crossed the Danube and invaded the province of Moesia (parts of modern Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania), killing the governor.

Domitian took immediate action. He made his way to Moesia to mastermind a military response. However, he did not lead the legions himself, staying in a town well behind the front line. Instead, he gave command of the army to Cornelius Fuscus, who had helped Vespasian to the throne and was praetorian prefect. He is listed among flattering amici Caesaris in a satire by Juvenal as an incompetent warmonger,

dreaming of battle while lolling in marble villas, His guts a predestined feast for Dacia’s vultures.

The poet was not the prophet he seemed, for he wrote long after the campaign had ended in a second bad defeat and Fuscus’ death.

The emperor now faced a serious crisis. The ruling class expected the emperor to pursue a policy of imperial expansion and was liable to lose confidence in him were territory to be abandoned, legions destroyed, or a compromise peace agreed with the enemy. To deal with Decebalus the emperor assembled a new force, perhaps six legions strong, by withdrawing troops from elsewhere in the empire. A legion was ordered to the Danube from Britannia, as a result of which a successful campaign to extend the territory under Roman control had to be put into reverse. A new fortress at Inchtutil in Scotland was abandoned.

This time the Romans scored a decisive victory. Decebalus feared that they would proceed to his capital, Sarmizegetusa. Short of men, he anticipated the trick played on Macbeth at Dunsinane. Trees were cut down and dressed in military uniforms to give an impression that his forces were more numerous than in fact they were.

In the event, the maneuver proved to be unnecessary. Domitian’s attention—and his legions—was diverted to the neighboring province of Pannonia, where dangerous revolts among Germanic tribes needed urgent attention. To avoid fighting a war on two fronts, the emperor agreed to terms with the Dacians. Decebalus was awarded a substantial annual subsidy of about 8 million sesterces. In a further dangerous concession, the emperor agreed to provide military engineers and artillery to help Decebalus fortify his realm against attack.

The emperor staged victory celebrations back in Rome. Informed opinion was derisive and word spread that exhibits displayed as campaign spoils really came from the imperial furniture store. Perilous laughter circulated around the best dinner tables.

With the indestructible optimism of veteran social climbers, the Ulpii did not allow themselves to be dismayed by the emperor’s eccentricities. They remained loyal supporters of the dynasty. Just as Traianus had been close to Vespasian, so his able son Trajan was promoted by Titus and Domitian. Trajan spent much of his youth in the army as a military tribune laticlavius: every legion was allocated six tribunes, general staff officers who reported to the legionary commander, or legatus. The senior tribune was called laticlavius, or “broad-banded.” This was a reference to the red stripe senators wore on their togas, and the laticlavius was usually a young man of senatorial rank at the outset of his political career.

Trajan had the physical strength and height for effective soldiering. He spent time in the east and on the German frontier and gained the respect and affection of the legionaries under his command. He became praetor in 86 and was a colleague of Hadrian’s father. In the following year, at the age of thirty-one, he received his first legionary command. He was appointed the legatus of the VII Gemina. Founded less than twenty years previously, the legion was recruited in Spain, almost certainly from the Romanized citizenry of Baetica in the south. It was based at Legio, on a plateau beneath the mountains of Asturia and Cantabria; this is today’s León, where the outline of the army camp can still be detected. This northwest region of Spain had been the last part of the peninsula to have been conquered by Rome, as recently as the first century B.C., and the hardy and aggressive mountaineers needed watching. But Trajan’s main task was to protect the export of gold from this mineral-rich region.

It was not the most demanding of jobs, managing a backwater, but the appointment was a useful step up the military ladder. Then fate provided an unexpected opportunity that propelled Trajan to the center of events, and into the emperor’s highest favor.

News arrived that the governor of Upper Germania, Lucius Antonius Saturninus, had raised the standard of revolt on January 1, 89. When the news of this insurrection reached Trajan, he did not hesitate to spearhead a counterattack. On the emperor’s orders, he immediately led his legion on the long march across Gaul to Upper Germania to face down and fight the rebels.

The emperor himself left Rome on January 12, for the same destination. In fact, neither man was required. Saturninus had expected help from a Germanic tribe that failed to turn up, and a colleague, the governor of Lower Germania, was able to outflank and defeat him. The revolt was at an end by January 25—almost before it began.

Domitian was a conspiracy theorist, and once remarked: “Rulers find themselves in an extremely invidious position, for when they discover a conspiracy no one believes them, unless they are killed.” He was determined that there had been one on this occasion, and held an inquiry, although so far as we can judge, Saturninus acted on his own.

In 91 Trajan received the culminating reward for his services. He was appointed consul ordinarius—a high accolade that the Flavians seldom conferred outside the imperial family: the two ordinarii entered office at the beginning of the year, which was named after them, and were a cut above the suffecti, or substitute consuls, who took their places after a few weeks or months.

Our impoverished literary sources do not specify Trajan’s activities for the next few years after his consulship, but it is possible to make an informed guess. There were eleven imperial provinces, whose governors were directly chosen by the emperor (the others lying in the care of the Senate), and a former consul could expect appointment to one of them. Trajan, having been the junior of the two ordinarii, was likely to have found the German provinces open to him. A couple of years or so later he probably moved on to one of the militarily much more challenging Danube provinces, perhaps Pannonia, where Rome was engaged in a difficult conflict with a powerful Germanic tribe, the Suebi.

Hadrian had spent his entire life under Flavian rule, and by his late teens he would have absorbed the history of his times. His guardian was a rising man and this placed him close to the center of power, although too young to have arrived at mature judgments. Indeed, mature judgments came at some risk to life and limb for anyone within range of a suspicious and nervous ruler. Nevertheless, two conclusions were evident to an intelligent bystander, however inexperienced.

First, for it to run sweetly the imperial system depended on its chief executive and its senior management being on reasonably good terms. For how long could an atmosphere of distrust last without the eventual need for a painful adjustment? Second, it was a brave emperor who abandoned, whether from choice or necessity, the traditional policy of military aggression. In Augustus’ day, Virgil, the poet laureate of Roman power, had sung of an imperium sine fine. A century later he still pointed the way to an empire without end and without frontiers.

VI

ON THE TOWN

In A.D. 93 Hadrian was nineteen years old; it was time for a public career.

Senators’ sons with ambition, such as Hadrian, joined the vigintivirate, a college of twenty men who were allocated a variety of duties, some laborious and tiresome and others ceremonial. The most interesting job was usually restricted to those of patrician background; this was appointment as one of the three controllers of the mint, or tresviri monetales (only a nonpatrician, or plebeian, who commanded the most powerful political patronage could hope to capture one of these posts). The tresviri administered the production and design of the coinage—an important task, for coins were an effective and universal means of publishing state propaganda. We can infer that they worked closely with government officials.

At the other extreme, two boards were responsible for street maintenance in Rome and supervision of basic police duties (arrests, executions, and the collection of fines), and were to be avoided if at all possible.

Hadrian, being a plebeian, failed to win a post in the mint, but at least he was able to avoid the fatigue duty of civic administration. In 94 he served on the fourth and last of the vigintivirate committees, as decemvir stlitibus iudicandis, member of the Board of Ten for Civil Judgments. This demanded less onerous work than might at first appear. The decemviri chaired sessions of the Centumviral Court, which handled such noncriminal matters as disputed wills. The court enrolled 180 jurors, as a rule divided into up to four individual panels, each determining a different suit. Cases were heard in the Basilica Julia, a large conference hall in the Forum, Rome’s main square—once, before Augustus and the establishment of one-man rule, the arena of political debate and power, but now merely a legal and shopping center.

Large crowds gathered to witness legal encounters. They had no interest in the youthful presiding judges, whose task was little more than to preside. The advocates were the real attraction. Their speeches created great excitement and were popular cultural events, rather as sermons used to be in seventeenth-century England. A well-informed commentator argued that he knew oratory was not dead when he noticed that a “young patrician who had had his tunic torn off, as often happens in a crowd, stayed on in nothing but his toga to listen for seven hours.”

As a decemvir Hadrian had attendants, or viatores, at his disposal and secretaries who recorded proceedings and, it may be surmised, were able to offer legal advice on those occasions when he had to make a decision.

Hadrian was also appointed a sevir turmae equitum Romanorum, commander of one of six squadrons of young Roman “knights.” Unless a man was a member of a turma, he was excluded from holding significant public office. It was a high honor to be a sevir. Here we have the first evidence that Hadrian was being fast-tracked for future preferment, presumably because of official interest on the part of someone at the imperial court if not of the emperor himself. The discreet helping hand of Trajan can be suspected; as we have seen, at this time he may have been serving as governor of one of the two German provinces, Upper Germania and Lower Germania, but a letter to Rome would have been sufficient. Sura, too, could have put in a word.

In the same year an even more distinctive honor came the young man’s way, probably at the behest of one of the consuls for 94, who was a friend of Trajan and had served under Trajan’s father. He was appointed praefectus urbi feriarum Latinarum, city prefect for the Latin Festival. This great celebration, originally a sacred truce among the warring towns of Latium, took place on the Alban Mount, a hill overlooking the Alban lake about twenty miles southeast of Rome and not far from the emperor’s great villa. All the leading officeholders and public figures of Rome processed out of the city to sacrifice an ox at the antique shrine of Jupiter Latiaris, which stood on top of the hill. Offerings of lamb, cheese, and milk were made, and long and joyful feasting followed.

In theory, the praefectus was left in charge of the deserted city, in place of the consuls. But his duties were purely symbolic, and the post was awarded to young men with prospects. Julius Caesar appointed his great-nephew, the teenage Augustus (in those early days, called Gaius Octavius), and the emperor Claudius the youthful Nero. Hadrian was not in that league, but he was being singled out as a boy of promise.

Life was not all duty and ritual. Rome offered many opportunities for amusement and excitement. Apart from hunting, no record survives of young Hadrian’s leisure activities, but there was plenty for him to sample.

By the middle of the first century, Rome boasted more than ninety feriae, annual festivals or holidays. On these days no public business could be conducted and various forms of religious ceremony were conducted. However, no one in the Mediterranean world had yet picked up the Jewish notion of a seven-day week, and the concept of a Saturday or Sunday as a day of rest was unknown—let alone a weekend of leisure. Whether everyone laid down tools during the feriae and took time off may be doubted, but they were the only breaks in laborious routine.

Interspersed among and between the feriae were the games, or ludi. By the first century there were six sets of games at different times of the year over a total of fifty-seven days. Their purpose, at least in origin, was to reward the gods for Rome’s prosperity and success. They included the spring games in honor of the eastern goddess, the Great Mother, which took the form of a drama festival, and the licentious Ludi Florales, running from late April to early May, which featured naked actresses and prostitutes and took place partly at night. The last day of the Floral Games would have pleased Hadrian, for deer and hare were hunted in Rome’s premier racecourse, the Circus Maximus, whose grand marble stands, accommodating some 250,000 spectators, have long since gone and been replaced by today’s long, scrubby stretch of grass and dirt.

The greatest celebrations took place in the autumn, the Roman Games, or Ludi Romani, and the Plebeian Games, the Ludi Plebei. Programs of events were dominated by theatrical performances that were not universally popular; discontented audiences would shout, “We want bears!” or “We want boxers.”

Comedy and tragedy fell out of fashion under the emperors and were supplanted by the pantomimus, a dancer, usually male, who acted out all the parts in complex narratives. He was backed by flute and lute, sometimes even a full orchestra, and a singer or chorus. Plots were historical, mythological, or based on the masterpieces of Greek tragedy. A dancer’s repertoire was extensive and might even include a dialogue by Plato. What would one not pay to witness a dance performance that gave a wordless account of the philosopher’s theory of ideas?

Pantomimi had a reputation for sexual immorality, and at the same time were sought after and patronized by the upper classes. The emperor Caligula included a pantomimus among his favorites, and Nero acted as one himself. In Hadrian’s day there was an eccentric old noblewoman, Ummidia Quadratilla, who kept a troupe of pantomimi in her home; when she found herself at a loose end she used to watch them dance. Her priggish grandson Gaius Ummidius Quadratus lived with her; he disapproved and took care never to see them perform.

Pantomime should not be confused with the mime, which was a much coarser, more highly spiced kind of spectacle. It encompassed a wide range of performance styles: words, usually prose but sometimes verse, mingled with music and acrobatic displays. The titles of the shows suggest an affinity with today’s tabloid newspapers—“Millionaire on the Run,” “The Locked-Out Lover,” “From Rags to Riches.”

Sometimes condemned criminals joined the cast and were compelled to suffer, in character, real-life punishment. Apuleius, in his picaresque novel Metamorphoses, written in the second century A.D., described a typical provincial company as it planned a very singular display. As a climax of the entertainment, a murderess was to “marry” and have sex with a donkey. The donkey selected for the purpose was, in fact, the author’s hero Lucius, a young man transformed by a malevolent witch.

Lucius was led to the local theater and left to graze outside the entrance while warm-up acts were presented. Then a new stage set appeared, a bed shining with Indian tortoiseshell, piled high with a feathered mattress and covered with a flowery silk coverlet. At this point, Lucius the donkey took fright. He realized that the woman was to be fastened to him in some way, and once copulation had taken place (or was supposed to have done so) wild animals would be brought on to kill her. Lucius suspected that in the process he would lose his life as well, and seizing an unguarded moment galloped away.

Apuleius’ story is fiction, and the intended atrocity did not take place. However, it is known that a similar spectacle actually occurred in Rome, this time involving a bull: it replayed the legend of Pasiphaë, wife of King Minos of Crete, who fell in love with a bull and after copulation gave birth to the monstrous Minotaur, half bull and half man. Martial remarked approvingly on the event.

A minority of days during the games was given over to a sport that was hugely popular among all social classes—namely, chariot racing. Drivers and chariots belonged to four teams, or factions—red, white, green, and blue. In Rome these were substantial organizations that employed buyers, trainers, doctors, vets, grooms, and stablemen and were controlled by a team manager, or dominus. The factions attracted fierce, sometimes violent, loyalty among their fans.

There were two main racecourses in Rome, the Circus Maximus beneath the Palatine Hill and the smaller Circus Flaminius in the Campus Martius (the Field of Mars, a large area originally used for military training to the north of the city, but now largely covered with public buildings). Chariots were usually drawn by four horses, but on occasion up to ten; novices drove two-horse chariots. They waited in twelve starting boxes, charged down a long straight, maneuvered sharply and dangerously around a cluster of three turning posts, galloped back, turned again, and so on for seven laps. Races at the Circus Maximus, whose track was almost a quarter of a mile long, lasted about fifteen minutes.

Charioteers were hugely popular. Many of them began their careers as slaves, but bought their freedom with their prize money. They could earn giddyingly large sums: one of the most successful was a Spaniard from Lusitania, one Appuleius Diocles, who styled himself as the “most eminent of charioteers” and drove teams of chariot horses for twenty-four years. During this time he ran in more than four thousand races and came first nearly fifteen hundred times. He won a staggering total of 35,863,120 sesterces, although presumably some of this was payable to his faction management, and he earned himself a place among the superrich of ancient Rome.

Of course, few charioteers were as successful as Diocles. The twenty-two-year-old Eutyches was obviously not much good at his job. He died young, and the epitaph on his gravestone admits, touchingly, that

In this grave rest the bones of an inexperienced charioteer …

I was brave enough to drive the four-horsed chariots,

But never won promotion from the two-horse teams …

Please, traveller, lay some flowers on my grave.

—Perhaps you were a fan of mine while I lived.

Chariot racing was reserved for professionals, and young men from the upper classes were excluded from entering and driving their own chariots. The more raffish emperors might encourage an exception. Nero, predictably, allowed men and women of both the equestrian and senatorial orders to take part in the games whether as stage performers or as gladiators and charioteers. In Dio Cassius’ day, audiences were able to sit and watch members of Rome’s great families “standing down there below them [in the arena or onstage] and doing things some of which they formerly would not even watch when performed by others.”

This kind of permissiveness was not on offer under the Flavian emperors. In any event, Hadrian’s days as a tearaway were over and, even if he watched the thrills of the circus with a certain envy, his attention was now focused on climbing the lower rungs of the political ladder. While he enjoyed his distractions, from now onward he never let himself be distracted from the main business of ambition.

In A.D. 94 Hadrian was able to enjoy one of Domitian’s most extravagant innovations—the Capitoline Games, founded eight years previously to mark the rebuilding of the great temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitol and staged every four years. They were founded on the Greek model and were evidence that the Hellenizing ideas of Nero were not dead. They attracted the disapproval of old-fashioned Roman moralists, who were shocked that the city’s most sacred precinct and its divine custodian should be sullied by non-Roman rites. Not so Hadrian. Whatever else he made of the Flavian regime, these games will have pleased a young man who was more Greek than the Greeks.

Everything was done on the grandest scale. Rather as with today’s Olympic Games, vast sums of money were spent on specially designed buildings. The Stadium in the Campus Martius held seats for about fifteen thousand spectators (its arcades were soon given over to brothels) and was reserved for athletic contests. Not far away, the Odeum was erected for musical performances. For centuries these were among the city’s most admired buildings (they have since completely disappeared).

The games featured chariot racing, gymnastics, and athletics (unusually, there was even a foot race for girls); also poetry, music, singing, and oratory. The emperor himself presided, wearing a purple toga in the Greek manner, with a golden crown on his head featuring images of Jupiter, his wife, Juno, and daughter, Minerva. This first year there were fifty-two contestants for the Greek poetry prize alone.

Competition was fierce and the games soon became very popular throughout the empire. They sent a powerful message of the high value that the government accorded to Hellenic culture. It was a message with which Hadrian heartily concurred, and to which he would return later in his life.

To modern eyes, the most disgraceful aspect of Roman culture was the gladiatorial display. Fights in the arena were called munera (literally, a munus meant a service, favor, or gift), and had nothing to do with the ludi. Slaves and criminals, complemented by a few volunteers, fought one another in costly spectacles.

The origins of this bloodthirsty practice are uncertain, but what evidence we have suggests that it began with sacrificial combats at the funerals of great men. By the end of the Republic, a century before Hadrian’s day, educated Romans such as Cicero found the whole business vulgar and boring, but acknowledged that watching men trying to kill one another was a training in physical courage.

Gladiatorial shows were so expensive that even emperors had to ration the number of days devoted to them in a year. In Rome, they were usually held in March and December, but also at other times when the emperor chose to celebrate particular events. Thousands of gladiators might take part in imperial spectacles, although other promoters were restricted to no more than 120 pairs. Small teams of gladiators toured the provinces.

Fighters wore different types of armor; some were heavily armed, whereas others, such as the Thraeces, or Thracians, were provided with a light shield and sickle. The most distinctive gladiator was the retiarius; he simply wore a tunic and was equipped with a net, a trident, and a dagger.

An ingenious recent calculation allows us to estimate a total of four hundred gladiatorial venues across the empire. Perhaps on average two shows a year were staged at each of them, featuring teams of about thirty gladiators, who would each fight twice. This would have meant about twelve thousand fighters in total. Perhaps four thousand were killed annually, a death rate of one in six per show. Numbers were made up by recruitment, signifying an annual throughput of sixteen thousand men.

In the public eye, gladiators were extremely sexy; they were the ultimate in masculinity, and their charms were much enhanced by their mortality. Juvenal evokes an upper-class woman’s fondness for “her Sergius,” who had

one dud arm that held promise

of early retirement. Deformities marred his features—

a helmet scar, a great wen on his nose, an unpleasant

discharge from one constantly weeping eye. What of it?

He was a gladiator

. That makes anyone an Adonis.

The Romans liked animals, and especially liked to see them killed. With considerable difficulty, elephants, bears, crocodiles, ostriches, leopards, even polar bears and seals (another first for Nero) were caught, transported to Rome, and trained to do tricks or fight against each other. Elephants were particularly popular, being attributed with a humanlike intelligence: Pliny the Elder claims that one beast, beaten for failing to learn a trick, was discovered at night practicing what he had to do.

As well as gladiators, the program for a munus would usually include one or more of three spectacles—armed men fighting animals, animals driven to fight each other, and unarmed condemned criminals exposed to starved carnivores. The first of these was not unlike hunting in the open, and so may have interested a keen huntsman such as Hadrian. Martial, with his unerring eye for the unpleasant, describes the death of a pregnant wild sow; a bestiarius wounded her in the stomach and, as she expired, a piglet ran out of her into the arena.

The government devoted much attention to, and spent resources on, the munera and the ludi. The powers of the people to vote politicians into office had been steadily whittled away, but emperors knew that their authority lay in part with popular support in and around the capital. State provision of subsidized grain and free public entertainment helped to ensure the loyalty of the masses. Juvenal’s sharp eyes saw this with poetic clarity. He noted that citizens no longer had a vote to sell, or even the wish to have one.

Time was when their plebiscite elected

generals, heads of state, commanders of legions; but now

they’ve pulled in their horns. Only two things really concern them:

bread and the games

[panem et circenses]

.

It was not surprising, then, that the Flavians sought to secure their new dynasty by a massive building commission. Within a few years of assuming the purple in 69, Vespasian began construction of the Flavian Amphitheater, or the Colosseum as we know it, still Rome’s most striking and unforgettable monument. Its seating capacity was around fifty thousand, so only a minority of the city’s inhabitants could squeeze in at one particular time. Although tickets for all public entertainments were free, gaining entry to a major show at the Colosseum must have entailed some string pulling.

The seating was arranged hierarchically in steeply serried ranks and, when the amphitheater was full, was a representation in small of Roman society. In the front row of the lowest tier, spaces were reserved for members of the Senate and for state priestesses, the Vestal Virgins. Next came places for the equites and so on to high up in the top rows, where slaves and women were allowed to sit. For the emperor himself was reserved an imperial box, or pulvinar (originally a cushioned couch on which images of the gods were displayed).

In 80, the Colosseum was at last ready. By that time Vespasian was dead and Titus had succeeded him. The new emperor opened the building with a spectacular celebration. One hundred days were set aside for an extravagant series of combats and animal hunts. The program, if uninterrupted, would surely have been too much for the most diehard enthusiast for slaughter and must have been broken up into manageable groups of days over the year.

Hadrian was only five years old when the Flavian Amphitheater first opened its doors and would not have been taken to the more bloodthirsty events. But it was a great moment in the history of the dynasty, and, as an associate of the Ulpian clan, which was high in favor at court, he would surely have been taken to some ceremony or other over which the emperor presided, or perhaps to a comparatively “safe” spectacle, such as the horse racing. Later, as a young man he had ample opportunity to experience the complete gallery of horrors.

Another kind of horror awaited Hadrian on the public stage. Domitian’s darkening mood as his reign proceeded had serious implications for anyone in the senatorial elite. People whom the young Spaniard knew, or certainly knew of, faced exile and execution, in large part through the law courts.

The Roman state had no public prosecution service or anything resembling a modern police force, so the legal system depended on a private citizen laying an accusation that some other person had committed an offense. He was called a delator, a denouncer. Often the matter concerned him directly, and he would either prosecute the case himself or commission an experienced advocate to do so on his behalf.

As already discussed, an upper-class Roman received years of training in oratory. Many launched their political careers as young men by initiating prosecutions in the public interest—for instance, against embezzling governors at the end of their terms. The most brilliant speakers, such as Marcus Tullius Cicero in the final years of the Republic, were in great demand, whether for the prosecution or the defense.

Gradually there grew up a class of advocate who made a regular, one might say “professional,” practice of informing against and prosecuting people on serious or capital charges. They flourished, for emperors found them useful tools with which to eliminate their opponents. Denunciations were accepted from every socioeconomic class, even slaves, but the delatores who were also advocates and were capable of prosecuting as well as naming their victims usually came from leading circles. They made large fortunes from their trade: if they attached maiestas, or high treason, to the list of charges, one quarter of a convicted man’s assets went to the prosecutor. Domitian relied on men like this to terrorize the senatorial elite, and especially members of the Stoic opposition, under cover of judicial propriety. Juries, made up of senators, were likely to convict when they sensed that the emperor approved or had even provoked the prosecution.

But being a delator was not without its dangers. If a case failed, then he was subject to the same penalties as the accused. What is more, he was likely to be pursued in the courts on other charges by his victim’s vengeful relatives or friends. One such was Baebius Massa. He served as governor of Baetica (and may have been in office during Hadrian’s visit to his estates there in 90), where he acted so corruptly that the locals brought charges against him. He was arraigned in Rome before his peers in the Senate, which commissioned two of its members—Herennius Senecio, a native of Baetica himself, and the younger Pliny—to lead the prosecution. This was a great state event and, as a senator’s son, Hadrian had the right to attend; if we bear in mind the Baetican connection and his interests as a leading landowner, he very probably did.

The case seems to have been straightforward. Massa was convicted, and his assets were frozen while compensation for the Baeticans was assessed. The consuls objected and quietly unfroze them. But this contradicted a senatorial vote and, when he learned of this unusual move, Senecio, supported by Pliny, protested and the consuls swiftly revoked their decision.

At this juncture matters took a sinister turn when a furious Massa prosecuted his prosecutor for high treason. Horror omnium, wrote Pliny, to a friend, of the Senate’s reaction. “Universal horror.”

A routine corruption case had been suddenly transformed into an attack on the Stoic opposition, of which Senecio was a leading and well-known member. One may well detect here the hidden hand of Domitian. In the aftermath of the Saturninus revolt, he was uncertain of the extent and sincerity of political support for him in the Senate. To begin with, he sought to conciliate potential troublemakers, but Massa’s outburst signaled the end of this uneasy entente. The ex-governor proceeded to prosecute Senecio, who had adopted a policy of dumb insolence toward the imperial government by refusing to compete for office after having won entry to the Senate as a quaestor. The implication was that the regime did not deserve his cooperation. Unsurprisingly, this was made much of during his trial, as was a political biography he had written of Helvidius Priscus, whom Vespasian had executed.

More trials followed, including that of Arulenus Rusticus, another author of incautious panegyrics of Stoic martyrs. Plutarch, the great Greek essayist and biographer, recounts that Rusticus was among the audience for a lecture he gave at Rome. “A soldier marched in and handed him a letter from the emperor. There was a silence. I stopped speaking so he could read the letter. But he did not, nor even open it, until I finished my lecture and the audience had left.” Neither his sangfroid nor his recent consulship saved Rusticus. Another victim was also a former consul, Helvidius’ son. Warned by his father’s fate, he spent much of his time in quiet retirement, but he had the misfortune to have written a stage farce about Paris of Troy and his first lover, the wood nymph Oenone, whom he threw over for Helen. Domitian decided that the piece was a satire on his own divorce from his wife, Domitia, and thus a capital crime. From this distance it is hard to tell whether a paranoid ruler was imagining conspiracy where none existed or whether his irrational fears brought conspiracy about.

In any event, all these men were put to death, and some of their relatives sent into exile.

This chain of murderous events, with its Baetican associations, came a little too close for comfort to Rome’s Spanish aristocracy, settled in its assembly of villas at Tibur. It felt as if the situation was foundering. Pliny, like many in the Senate a friend of the executed Stoics but no rebel and a trusty servant of empire, recalled these times: “I stood among the flames of thunderbolts dropping all round me, and there were certain clear indications to make me suppose that a like fate was awaiting me.”

The Aelii and the Ulpii were protected from personal harm by Trajan’s rise to favor, but Hadrian would have been upset by the emperor’s decision in 95, following Senecio’s death, to expel philosophers from Rome. “Philosopher” was code for teachers of Stoicism. Hadrian was much impressed by the Stoic outlook and at some point in his life became an admiring friend of Epictetus, although not necessarily at this early stage. As a student he may well have attended some of his lectures in Rome, but now that Epictetus was banished the opportunity for any longer-term relationship was removed.

The philosopher took a dim view of the regime’s approach to freedom of speech. He particularly resented its policy of entrapment. Speaking from experience (either of his friends or of himself), he said:

In Rome reckless persons are entrapped by soldiers. A soldier in civilian dress sits down next to you and begins by speaking ill of Caesar, and then, as if you had received a pledge from him of trust—the fact that he began the reproaches—you also say what you’re thinking. Then come the chains and the march to prison.

The expulsions did not come as much of a surprise. Philosophy was well enough respected, and even Domitian had no particular quarrel with Stoicism in itself, which (after all) accepted the principle of monarchy—always providing that the monarch was a philosopher-king. What the regime could not endure, though, was open criticism of the government and ostentatious withdrawal into private life by members of the senatorial class. These were the sins that had led to the recent purge, and now that the political practitioners of Stoicism had been disposed of, it was time to remove the theoreticians.

This was by no means the first occasion that foreign intellectuals had been cleared out of the city; indeed Domitian had ruled against them ten years previously. However, the Roman fondness for everything Hellenic meant that it did not take long for them to creep back, and some patrons at least took care to preserve their philosophical protégés from want.

Astrologers also felt the full brunt of the emperor’s anger. Hadrian was by no means alone in consulting the heavens about the future. It was precisely because Domitian shared this belief that he profoundly disapproved of its practice. Anyone plotting against him could establish the date of his future death, and this could help them win adherents. He would also be able to compute the name of the next emperor—a serious threat, for the one man who was by definition sure to survive Domitian was his successor.

As we know, Hadrian had a fearful secret in his possession. The horoscope that his ancient great-uncle had cast years before promised him imperial power. This was a wonderful daydream for an ambitious boy, but potentially lethal if he told anyone about it. In these slippery times, he kept silent.

For a young man at the outset of a political career, the performance of the emperor gave pause for thought. A vicious circle was clearly in process. The more Domitian sensed he was losing the confidence of the ruling class, the more punitive he became; and the more punitive he became, the more he lost the confidence of the ruling class. Could a wiser ruler break out of the vortex? Was it possible to govern by consent? And, if the answers to these questions were yes, how could a transition be planned to a virtuous circle that would avoid yet another civil war, a return to the terrible Year of the Four Emperors?

VII

FALL OF THE FLAVIANS

Pannonia was as far away from the amenities of civilization as it was possible to reach within the boundaries of the empire. Now a part of Hungary, it was one of a chain of provinces running along the right bank of the wide and strong-flowing river Ister, our Danube, which rises in the Black Forest in Germany and empties itself into the Black Sea. The landscape was wooded and mountainous, with few towns. The vine and the olive did not grow there, and a local beer was brewed in place of wine. Pannonia was famous for a plant called the saliunca, which had a sweet smell and could be used to combat bad breath and “offensive exhalations of the armpits.”

The territory was new to Rome, which had conquered and annexed it only a century previously. It was of no particular interest in itself, but tribal migrations in central Asia were pushing populations west and south toward the imperial frontier. Augustus saw a threat to Macedonia and Greece unless buffer provinces to their north were established, with the Danube as a defensible frontier.

The inhabitants of Pannonia were various Celtic tribes, with a reputation for being warlike and brave, but also cruel and treacherous. They were rumored to use human skulls as drinking cups. However, after the bloody defeat of a great rebellion in A.D. 9, they settled down to foreign rule and were beginning to adopt the Roman way of life, with new urban settlements springing up.

It is a sign of Roman self-confidence that the only fortresses they built lay along the Danube, and that there was no need to garrison the province itself. One such was Aquincum (today’s Óbuda, or Old Buda, in Budapest), the headquarters of one of the province’s four legions (at least), the II Adiutrix Pia Fidelis (the Second “Reserve” Legion Loyal and True). Originally a rectangular camp on the traditional military model, it lay on the riverside with a view of barbarian lands across the water, and was well on the way to becoming a substantial town with stone buildings replacing wooden structures and civilian dwellings spreading beyond the ramparts. The streets were paved and there was a small forum or public square, an aqueduct, and water conduits.

It was in this remote but flourishing outpost that the next phase of Hadrian’s life opened. Having completed a stint with the vigintivirate, he was twenty years old and ready to move on to a new challenge. A spell of military service had once been more or less compulsory for well born young Romans, but it appears that this was no longer the case. Hadrian’s personal wishes have not been recorded, but a lively and adventurous lad would surely have welcomed the thrill of travel to strange places and the scent of danger. In any case, his own inclinations weighed less than the opinion of his guardians. Whoever made the final decision, in 95 Hadrian accepted a commission as military tribune in the army and left Rome for Pannonia.

As I have suggested, Trajan was almost certainly governor of the province at this time, campaigning against the unruly Suebic Marcomanni, a Germanic tribe in central Europe on the far side of the Danube. In his early years of soldiering he had been a tribune himself, and had learned much about the art of warfare, which, according to Pliny, he was only too happy to communicate to the next generation.

A distant look at a camp, a stroll through a short term of service was not enough for you; your time as tribune must qualify you for immediate command, with nothing left to learn when the moment came for passing on your knowledge.

So it was no surprise that Trajan found a tribuneship for his ward with the II Adiutrix.

In its upper reaches, the Roman military system was no more meritocratic than European armies up to the nineteenth century. At the II Adiutrix, as elsewhere, commissions were bought and sold, and political influence counted for more than experience. The legionary commander was a former praetor, or legatus pro praetore, and so possessed imperiutn. He was outmatched only by a former consul with proconsular rank—in practice, his immediate superior, Pannonia’s governor.

Reporting to the legatus were six military tribunes. Hadrian was to be the most senior of them, the tribunus laticlavius. Hadrian was expected to serve for between one and three years. In theory he was the legatus’s deputy, but in practice his duties were undefined. His primary task was to learn the business of soldiering. The other tribunes were equites (tribuni angusticlavi, or “narrow-banded”); they had already seen service and tended to be in their late twenties or early thirties. In essence, tribunes were equivalent to today’s young staff officers.

The II Adiutrix, like other Roman legions, consisted of 5,120 soldiers, although like other Roman legions it may not have been up to full strength, and was subdivided into ten cohorts. A cohort was large enough to be a fairly powerful unit in itself on the battlefield, but small enough to maneuver flexibly to cope with awkward terrain or to respond to the enemy’s tactics.

A legion was actually run by the centurions. These were usually men who had risen from the ranks on merit, although good connections could engineer appointment. They have no exact modern equivalent; if a legatus is similar to a colonel, who commands a regiment, then they resemble both a sergeant-major and, at the most senior levels, a major. There were six to a cohort, each of whom commanded centuries of eighty men, or five in the first cohort. A lead centurion was probably also in charge of each cohort (although our sources do not make this absolutely clear).

The fifty-nine centurions carried immense prestige, especially those in the first cohort. An ordinary private earned 1,400 sesterces a year, but even the most junior centurion received an estimated salary of 18,000 sesterces. The primus pilus, the master centurion and commander of the first cohort, who led the first file, or pilus, on the battlefield and was a valued adviser of the legatus, made as much as 72,000 sesterces annually. No wonder even affluent equites entered the army with an ambition to attain the status of centurion.

Life was tougher for the ordinary soldier. However, the army gave him security in the form of a reliable income in coin, a regular healthy diet, access to good medical treatment, and a sense of common purpose. On the debit side he had to sign up for most of his adult life, a term of twenty-five years (extensions were permitted), and was not allowed to marry, although many acquired mistresses and children with the passage of time. He was usually recruited from coloniae, or veterans’ settlements, in northern Italy, southern Gaul, and Spain. He was meant to be a Roman citizen, but when there was an urgent need for manpower he might be awarded citizenship on joining up.

Legionaries were highly skilled at multitasking. Some were principales, men with particular and highly responsible duties. Others were simply immunes, specialists who had no particular seniority. They might be clerks in the governor’s officium. Alternatively, they worked in the camp hospital, were armorers and artillerymen, trumpet and horn blowers, bridge builders, construction workers, road makers, butchers, horse trainers, medical orderlies, and so forth. A cavalry contingent of 120 riders provided scouts and messengers.

Soldiers with a record for bravery were standard-bearers for cohorts and centuries, and to be a legion’s aquilifer, the man who carried into battle its precious “eagle,” a pole topped by an eagle emblem surrounded by a laurel wreath, was a high but perilous honor. Almost the most shameful thing that could happen to a legion was to lose its eagle to the enemy.

A soldier was a member of an army, of a legion, of a cohort, and of a century. But the most important institution in his life was the contuberniutn, a fellowship of eight men who shared the same living accommodation, tent or hut, and messed together. He wore a bronze or iron helmet, a scale, mail, or segmented metal cuirass, a rectangular semi-cylindrical shield (the scutum), a heavy javelin (the pilum), a short thrusting sword (the gladius), and in all probability a dagger. In addition, when on the march he carried cooking and digging equipment, provisions for at least a fortnight, and three or four stakes for use when forming the palisade of a temporary, or “marching,” camp. In total, he carried a load weighing at least sixty-five pounds. No wonder legionaries were affectionately called (after one of Rome’s greatest generals) “Marius’ mules.”

Hadrian found Aquincum to be a busy place. In addition to the II Adiutrix, a similar number of auxiliary troops were billeted there: recruited from provincials, auxiliaries did not need to be Roman citizens and played a supporting role for the legions. If many of these soldiers had a partner and offspring, not to mention a slave or two, it is reasonable to suppose a community of fifteen thousand military personnel and family members. In addition, traders and suppliers of various commodities and services, all kinds of camp followers, will have been drawn from both sides of the Danube to do business with the Romans. All in all, Aquincum played host to as many as twenty thousand souls.

As the legate’s deputy, the young laticlavius commanded spacious and ornate accommodation. He had his own house with many rooms, and imported freedmen and slaves from his household in Rome to look after him. If he so wished he could live in grand style and pay little attention to his flock, the gregales. However, we can take it that Hadrian did not follow this course. Later in life he was well known for his unpretentious, informal manner, and was able to converse easily with every class and type of person; he won a reputation for being “an ostentatious lover of the common people.” Following Trajan’s example, he developed an uncanny memory for names, not least among ordinary legionaries and long-serving veterans, and made a point of sharing the soldiers’ simple diet. It was at Aquincum that he laid the first building blocks of this reputation.

Only 120 miles upstream the governor, Trajan (I assume), ruled from the provincial capital, Carnuntum, keeping an eye on his ward and having him visit for the conduct of army business. We hear no more complaints of excessive hunting—despite the fact that Pannonia was famous for its hunting dogs, robust enough to pursue and fight with boars and bison.

A scintilla of evidence suggests that Hadrian was making friends with at least one of the legion’s centurions. A soldier’s gravestone from Aquincum notes that his centurion bore the rare name of M. Turbo; he has been identified as Quintus Marcius Turbo, who years later himself became legate of the II Adiutrix and governor of Pannonia (probably Lower), ending up as prefect of the Praetorian Guard. It was a remarkable career from lowly beginnings, and Turbo became one of Hadrian’s close friends and advisers. It was at Aquincum that the two men must have first met.

Hadrian’s tour of duty came to an end in the summer of 96. He had been a year in Pannonia and learned a good deal. Most military tribunes were only too happy to leave at the earliest opportunity for Italy and all the amenities of city life and country retreats. Exceptionally, though, Hadrian accepted a second posting as laticlavius with one of the legions of Lower Moesia, the V Macedonica. He may have been copying his guardian’s example, for (as we have seen) Trajan had spent a number of years as a military tribune and valued the in-depth professional expertise he had acquired.

Hadrian was based at Oescus, another fortress along the Danube, at its confluence with the river Oescus (near today’s Pleven, in Bulgaria). The province was long and narrow and led to the coast of the Black Sea: hence Moesia’s alternative name of ripa Thracia, the Thracian Shore. Here at the port of Tomis a century before, the fluent and fashionable poet Ovid had dragged out long years of exile for having offended the pitiless Augustus, dying miserable and alone.