Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

But the real point about the Lower and Upper Moesias was that they acted as a cordon sanitaire between the dangerously aggressive kingdom of Dacia and Rome’s Mediterranean lands—Dalmatia, Thrace, and, above all, the cradle of classical culture, Greece. When Hadrian stood on the rampart at Oescus and surveyed the forests and mountains beyond the wide river, he knew that sooner or later a Roman army would be obliged to cross to the other bank and march into terra incognita. The victims of Decebalus had to be avenged.

Toward the end of September extraordinary news arrived from Rome. Domitian was dead, killed by members of his own household. The deed was done behind closed doors in the palace and no bulletin was gazetted. Different versions percolated around the Roman world, but Hadrian and his army colleagues were able to establish the broad shape of what had occurred.

In the last year or so, the emperor’s behavior had become increasingly erratic. Anxious about his future, he consulted his own and other people’s horoscopes and tried to work out the exact hour of his death. Despite the fact that he had occupied the throne for fifteen years, he still feared, or sensed, that he had not been accepted as ruler. He now unwisely began to persecute people within his circle. The most eminent of these victims was Titus Flavius Clemens, Vespasian’s nephew and the emperor’s first cousin. High in favor, Clemens served as consul ordinarius in 95 and was married to Domitian’s niece Flavia Domitilla.

Clemens stayed in office as consul until May 1. Then, soon afterward and without warning, he and his wife faced grave accusations. According to Dio Cassius, “the charge brought against them both was that of atheism, a charge on which many others who drifted into Jewish ways were condemned.” “Jewish ways” could mean that Clemens and the rest were flirting with Judaism; Domitian would have been seriously offended that a member of the imperial family was interesting himself in the religion of a people against whom the Flavians had waged a pitiless war and expelled from their native land. The term could equally mean Christian, for many Romans were unclear about the distinction between Christianity and Judaism. There has been a long tradition that Clemens and Domitilla were, in fact, Christian converts.

Whatever the nature of his spiritual life, Clemens left a poor impression on his contemporaries, who saw him as a “man of the most contemptible laziness.” He was executed, and Domitilla banished to Pandataria, a small island off the coast of Campania with a large imperial palace (today’s Ventotene), much favored by emperors who wished to hide away an inconvenient relative.

What struck the people around Domitian—the amici, the Flavian “party” in the Senate, the freedmen and the relatives—was the lack of substantive evidence against Clemens, who (they felt) had been liquidated “on the slightest of suspicions.” If even members of his inner circle could fall victim to the emperor’s paranoid whims, who was safe?

Some of them began the potentially fatal business of planning an assassination. Two leading conspirators were Stephanus, Flavia Domitilla’s procurator, or business manager, and Parthenius, the emperor’s cubicularius, master of the bedchamber or valet de chambre, with routine access to the imperial presence.

They knew better than to act alone. They did not support an opposition party (and certainly not the Stoic opposition); rather, they wanted to act on behalf of the Flavian establishment of senators and administrators by removing an increasingly unreliable ruler who was imperiling their personal security and the stability of the imperial system. Discreet contact was made with key personalities in the regime.

Of these by far the most important were the two prefects of the Praetorian Guard, Titus Petronius Secundus and Norbanus (this is his only appearance in history and his full name is unknown). The Praetorian Guard was a force of ten thousand highly trained and well-paid troops based in and around Rome. They were the imperial bodyguard, and were also powerful enough to deal with civil dissent. One cohort at a time stood guard in the imperial residence on the Palatine, carrying weapons but in civilian dress.

Gradually the Praetorian Guard came to expect a role in the transition from one emperor to another, especially when no generally accepted heir had been determined in advance. In A.D. 41 when the emperor Caligula was assassinated, the guards found his uncle Claudius hiding behind a curtain in the palace, carried him triumphantly to their camp outside the city boundary, and acclaimed him as Caligula’s successor. The cowed Senate acquiesced in their decision. This proved to be a sinister precedent, and from then onward the Praetorian Guard was only too willing to dictate its wishes when occasion arose. As we have seen, Domitian was popular with the military and the Praetorian Guard was unlikely to approve of his removal, so it was important for it to be neutralized. The two prefects agreed to pacify their men.

A successor had to be identified who would command general support. No more suitable Flavians existed, so the field was open. Doubtless there were ambitious provincial governors in the far corners of the empire who would wish to be considered for the top job, but conspiracies are meant to be secret and widespread discussion was out of the question. So a stopgap candidate was required, one who would not create a dynasty and would last only long enough for a permanent solution to be negotiated. The plotters believed they had found just the man.

He was Marcus Cocceius Nerva, and he was conveniently old, childless, and sick. He was a handsome man, but with a large nose. His health was poor; he had a habit of vomiting up his food and was a heavy drinker of wine. Born in 35 into a family of legal experts, he was descended from Republican nobility and related to the founding house of the imperial system, the Julio-Claudians. He was a poet whose slim volumes of verse had a certain reputation. Martial observed: “Whoever is familiar with the poet Nero’s verses knows that Nerva is the Tibullus [one of Rome’s finest lyric poets] of our time.” Nero was acknowledged to be the worst poet of the age, so the compliment was distinctly double-edged.

Nerva had thrived under Nero, but executed a neat switch of loyalty and became one of the Flavians’ stalwart supporters. He liked a quiet life and knew how to get on in the world without irritating people. A discreet and able balancer of conflicting interests, he was twice consul ordinarius, alongside Vespasian and then Domitian—tokens of high esteem. Nerva was an intimate of the Flavians in another sense, for he is reported to have seduced Domitian, who had been a pretty young man. The affair would appear to have advanced rather than damaged his prospects.

All the pieces on the board were now in place, and it was time to act. Parthenius removed the blade of a dagger that the emperor kept under his pillow. Stephanus, who pretended an injury and had been wearing a bandage on his arm for some days, now secreted a knife inside it.

Domitian spent the morning of September 26 judging in the law courts, and then retired to his bedroom, where he prepared to take a bath. Stephanus, claiming to have uncovered a plot, asked for an immediate audience and entered the room. A boy was also present, preparing an offering for the Lares, or household gods, statuettes in a small shrine. The freedman said, “Your great enemy, Clemens, is not dead as you suppose, but I know where he is and that he is arming himself against you.” He handed over a confirmatory document and while the emperor was reading it struck at him in the groin. Domitian shouted to the boy to get him his dagger and call the servants; but there was only a hilt and the doors were barred.

The emperor put up a fight, pulling Stephanus to the floor and struggling with him. He alternately tried to grab the dagger and pushed his lacerated fingers into his assailant’s eyes in an attempt to gouge them out. Parthenius or one of his men rushed in to lend Stephanus a hand. At last the emperor was dead, with seven wounds on his body. Some other servants entered who knew nothing of the plot, and promptly killed Stephanus before there was a chance for explanation.

Waiting on tenterhooks, presumably in another room of the palace, was the emperor-to-be. At first a rumor came in that Domitian was still alive. Nerva went pale and could hardly stand up, but Parthenius told him that he had nothing to fear.

For Hadrian the news of the fall of the ruling dynasty called for careful interpretation. Signposts pointed in different directions. The Aelii and the Ulpii had done well out of Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian. After his long march from Spain to Germany in response to Saturninus’ ill-judged revolt, Trajan was one of the regime’s most high-profile supporters—and at times like these a high profile could be unhelpful. The fact that the assassination of Domitian was a coup by the Flavian faction did not mean that the future would be as safe and prosperous as the past.

Senators in Rome might congratulate themselves on the overthrow of a despot, but the next year or so promised uncertainty. By definition, the caretaker emperor was ill placed to deliver firm government and stability, and the competition would soon open to identify the leader who would follow him. If past history was anything to go by, provincial governors at the head of their legions would soon be carefully eyeing one another and weighing their chances. How long before civil war broke out again?

From his vantage point in a faraway fortress on the Danube, Hadrian was able to see that opinion in Rome was much too sanguine. Domitian had been well liked by the rank and file, and most legionaries and probably many centurions were furious about his removal. Some units of the Danubian army, perhaps in Lower Moesia, were mutinous. But without support from the general staff, without a commander to lead them, there was little they, or the Praetorian Guard in Rome, could do. For the moment the skies were calm, but a storm threatened.

VIII

THE EMPEROR’S SON

The affable and cultivated Nerva got off to a surprisingly good start, working in partnership with the Senate and promoting reconciliation. He moved fast and with sure judgment.

The first step was to sweep away the evidence of his predecessor’s reign. The Senate withheld the compliment of deification, which they had conferred on his father and brother, and endorsed a condemnation of his memory—damnatio memoriae. Now that the tyrant was dead, this was the worst punishment they could inflict. His body was disposed of with the minimum of ceremony, buried by his nurse in the temple of the Flavian clan. Innumerable statues and arches, symbols of Domitian’s personality cult, were removed. To refill a depleted treasury, imperial possessions, from estates to clothes, were sold off.

Rome did not possess the bureaucracy to establish a police state, but Domitian had gone as far in that direction as possible through the use of denunciation and what were in effect show trials, with death or banishment the almost invariable outcomes. Now all those facing trial for treason, or maiestas, were immediately released, and all the exiles recalled. For the future, maiestas charges were outlawed, as was the accusation of “adopting the Jewish mode of life”: in other words, Flavius Clemens was rehabilitated. The emperor swore never himself to put a senator to death.

These negative, if necessary, measures underpinned a positive vision that carried signs of forethought. Nerva used the coinage as a universal means of conveying his message. An aureus, a gold coin worth one hundred sesterces, showed the head of the new emperor on one side and on the other the personification of Liberty holding a pileus and a ruler’s scepter: a pileus was a felt cap shaped like half an egg that was given to a slave on his enfranchisement. A legend read “Public Liberty.”

Other coins marked achievements, either real or wished for, that indicated fault lines about which the regime was worried. One of them celebrated the provision of grain for the capital city, underlining Nerva’s anxiety to keep the plebs on his side. They had welcomed Domitian’s departure but needed practical reassurance that the new emperor could feed them. Another numismatic image reflected hope rather than experience—beneath a pair of clasped hands a slogan read “Harmony of the armies.” It was still unclear whether or not the military would accept Domitian’s demise.

This in no way signified a return to the old days of the Republic. Even the most idealistic “noble Roman” could see that a rowdy six-hundred-strong committee, the Senate, was a defective mechanism of government. Nerva’s clever trick was to transform the Flavian despotism into something approaching a constitutional monarchy. The emperor kept his all-trumping imperium, but framed it within the rule of law and institutional convention. The days of the dominus et deus were over and the old term devised by Augustus—princeps or leading citizen, first among equals—regained its common use. Tacitus, ferocious critic of imperial misrule, offered words of warm praise:

Assuredly we have been given a signal proof of our submissiveness; and even as former generations witnessed the utmost excesses of liberty, so we have the extremes of slavery … Now at last heart is coming back to us. From the first, from the outset of this happy age, Nerva has united things long incompatible—autocracy and liberty.

In the opening weeks of the new reign, vengeful prosecutions had been brought against run-of-the-mill delatores. One of the consuls remarked that it was a bad thing to have an emperor under whom no one was allowed to do anything, but worse to have one under whom anyone was allowed to do anything. Nerva agreed, and ordered that cases of this kind should cease.

Despite the embargo, Pliny the Younger found it unjust that no senator had yet been charged. “Once Domitian was dead,” he confessed, “I decided on reflection that this was a truly splendid opportunity for attacking the guilty, avenging the injured, and making oneself known.”

His colleagues in the Senate did not agree. “Let us survivors stay alive,” one of them said. Too many of their number had compromised themselves under Domitian, and they were determined that bygones should be bygones.

Nerva appointed many onetime supporters of the Flavian dynasty to high office, and had no intention whatsoever to revisit the “bloodstained servility” of the recent past. A discreet forgetfulness veiled it from view. An exchange at a small dinner party summed up the situation well. Nerva was lying next to one of Domitian’s closest supporters, a noted delator. The conversation turned to another even more celebrated delator, the blind Lucius Valerius Catullus Messalinus, a man “whose loss of sight increased his cruel disposition.” An amicus, he was a member of Domitian’s consilium.

“I wonder what would have happened to him if he were alive today,” Nerva remarked.

“He would be dining with us,” said another guest drily, a member of the Stoic opposition who had recently returned from exile.

Nerva was able to bring together sworn enemies not only in a dining room, but also into a harmonious administration. His policy of reconciliation was generally popular. The emperor remarked with satisfaction: “I have done nothing that would prevent my laying down the imperial office and returning to private life in safety.”

The elite may have been content, but the Praetorian Guard had sharp memories. They had been reluctantly persuaded to accept the change of regime, but Domitian’s removal still rankled. In the autumn of 97 their simmering anger brimmed over.

Nerva ill-advisedly, as it turned out, appointed a new prefect of the guard, a certain Casperius Aelianus, who had held the same post late in the previous reign, to serve alongside the compliant Petronius Secundus, who had calmed the Praetorian Guard in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. Casperius sided with his soldiers and gave them the leadership they had lacked twelve months before. The Guard took over the palace, arresting the emperor and keeping him in custody. They demanded that Nerva hand over his predecessor’s murderers, especially Petronius and the freedman Parthenius, who was still in the imperial employ.

Although sick with fear, the emperor strongly resisted, baring his throat and challenging his captors to kill him. As the men were found and led out to execution, Nerva vomited and suffered an attack of diarrhea, but he went on protesting. It would be better for him to die, he said, than to befoul his imperium by colluding in the deaths of those who had given it to him. He was ignored. Petronius was dispatched with a merciful single blow, but Parthenius had his genitals torn off and stuffed into his mouth before being strangled.

Nerva was then forced to address an assembly of the people and offer public thanks to the Praetorian Guard “since they had killed the basest and most wicked of all human beings.” Casperius was paid off, but the damage had been done. The emperor’s humiliation was complete and his authority fatally undermined.

Nerva’s position was untenable, but what was to be done? Things would only be made worse if he were to abdicate or be deposed. No successor had been named and the outcome would very probably be civil strife. Yet again everyone’s mind went fearfully back to the catastrophe of 69. The solution was, in fact, obvious. The emperor had to find an acceptable heir. Bearing in mind his age and state of health, and the fact that he now moved with commendable speed and decisiveness, we can assume that Nerva had already been laying his plans.

As soon as the emperor was ready he staged a compelling piece of political theater. A laureled dispatch arrived in Rome from Pannonia, announcing a victory—presumably by Trajan over Germanic tribes. The emperor walked up the winding path from the Forum to the temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest on the Capitol and laid the laurels on the altar. When he came out of the temple he announced in a loud voice: “May good fortune attend the Senate and People of Rome and myself. I hereby adopt Marcus Ulpius Traianus.”

In theory, adoption was a private matter that brought no necessary political consequence. But the signal was clear, and a complaisant Senate awarded Trajan the cognomen of Caesar. He was also hailed as Germanicus, for his recent victory over the Suebi. In addition, the emperor endowed him with the two key mechanisms of imperial power: the first was the proconsulare imperium maius, which allowed him to give instructions to proconsuls, or provincial governors, and the second was the tribunicia potestas, the authority of a tribune of the people to propose laws, convene the Senate, and veto its decisions.

Nerva sent his adopted son, now styled Marcus Ulpius Nerva Traianus Caesar, a diamond ring with a message in which he quoted a line from Homer’s Iliad. “May the Danaans by your arrows requite my tears.” So prayed the soothsayer Calchas, when he called on the archer god Apollo to avenge his humiliations at the hands of the Greek army outside Troy. The emperor was hinting that he expected his adopted son to take measures against his Praetorian tormentors.

In the meantime, he moved Trajan from his posting in Pannonia to Germany, where he assumed overall command of the two provinces: it is not altogether clear why, but an unrecorded emergency had supervened. It may have been some unfinished business of Domitian—perhaps a recrudescence of trouble among the Germanic tribes on the far side of the Rhine, or some challenge to the new limes, the chain of forts that demarcated the limit of empire.

There was general surprise at the adoption, and general approval. Pliny noted: “All disturbances died at once.” Although the promotion appeared to come out of the blue, Trajan was a rational choice. The son of a distinguished father, he was a second-generation patrician. He had made a name for himself as an able soldier, popular with both the men and their commanders.

According to Pliny, Trajan was reluctant to accept his appointment as Nerva’s colleague in empire. “You had to be pressed. Even then you could only be persuaded because you saw your country in peril [from the Praetorian Guard] and the whole state tottering to a fall.”

There is evidence that Trajan had been informally discussed as capax imperii, worthy of rule, for some time. Tacitus states that his father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, a general who was responsible for much of the conquest of Britannia, “foretold” the principate of Trajan “in our hearing both as something to be prayed for and something that would happen.” The point here is that Agricola had died as long ago as 93, at the height of Domitian’s terror. Gossip of this kind was dangerous then not only to the speaker but to the person he was speaking about. Trajan was lucky that it did not reach the emperor’s ears.

A remark by Pliny, that not to have adopted Trajan would have indicated the “wanton tyranny of power,” suggests that Nerva’s hands were tied in advance. And a late source claims that the dexterous and unscrupulous Licinius Sura had engineered a coup d’état: in other words, the adoption had been a seizure, not a gift. So perhaps Trajan was not as retiring as he seemed.

It is impossible to be sure exactly what happened, but here is a plausible scenario that takes account of what we are told and of the changeless imperatives of political action. During the last terrifying years of the previous reign Trajan’s name began to be whispered in opposition circles as a potential princeps. As a distinguished soldier he could be counted on to adopt a more aggressive military posture than Domitian, which would please the general staff. Domestically, he held moderate views and would be likely to cooperate with rather than browbeat the Senate. If he showed no uncomely enthusiasm for the throne, that was a reassuring bonus.

The conspirators nominated Nerva to the purple rather than Trajan because the latter was physically too distant from the center of events, and the imperial system could not tolerate a vacuum, even for a few days, without risking civil war. The Praetorian Guard needed to be confronted with an immediate fait accompli if they were to tolerate Domitian’s violent removal from the stage. Trajan, marooned in his province, on security grounds surely could not have been informed of the plot to kill Domitian. He would have to wait until the next time for a chance of winning the purple. And to make sure that the next time actually arrived, Licinius Sura was on hand as his confidential “agent” in Rome (in fact, it is not known where he was at this period, but if he was looking after Trajan’s interests, as suggested, he could hardly have done so effectively unless he was in the capital).

Leaving aside his uncertain political health, Nerva knew that he was in poor shape physically, and must already have been thinking about the succession. Trajan had a number of influential friends in Rome or at court who would have spoken for him. At least five of the seven consuls suffecti for 97 had friendly or family connections with him, and some were fellow Spaniards. One of these was Titus Arrius Antoninus, a wealthy man of traditional morals: on Nerva’s accession he had famously congratulated the Senate and people of Rome, but not the emperor himself, so heavy was the burden of rule.

When news of the adoption reached the youthful military tribune in Lower Moesia, he saw at once that his life had reached a turning point. As a student of astrology, Hadrian was aware of the magical power of numbers (another word for an astrologer was mathematicus). He knew that this, his twenty-first year, was the second of his life’s climacterics, a time of great change in fortune, and alterations in body and spirit, which could bring with it danger of death. The first was held to occur in a person’s seventh year, and later ones were multiples of seven, a number believed to be of especial virtue. They culminated in the grand climacteric at the age of sixty-three. To pass that undamaged was no mean achievement, as Augustus noted with relief—once he had reached sixty-four. (It is interesting to note that the shadow of these climacterics survives in the modern convention that children attain the age of reason at seven years, and that in many countries until recently twenty-one years used to mark the onset of adulthood.)

Hadrian’s kinship to Rome’s next emperor meant that he had suddenly become a very important young man. This was more evident when it was remembered that, despite the fact that Trajan had been married to Plotina for nearly twenty years, the union had produced no offspring. They liked and were loyal to each other, but Trajan found sexual pleasure elsewhere. Everyone could see that by this stage, children were most unlikely to be forthcoming. As guardian, Trajan had treated his ward as if he were his own son, and astute men in public life took that into careful account.

Hadrian was intrigued by his prospects, but wished to make assurance doubly sure. Remembering the long-ago prediction made by his great-uncle during his visit to Spain, it was probably now that he checked its veracity with a mathematicus in Lower Moesia. The same golden story was foretold. From this moment on, Hadrian understood himself to be a marked man.

The legions in Lower Moesia asked Hadrian to present their congratulations to the new Caesar. This was an appropriate commission for a military tribune, but it must also have fitted in well with his own wishes—the sooner he joined Trajan, the better he would be able to assess and promote his personal interests and join the new governmental team. A long and arduous journey ensued, riding upriver through the wild and mountainous provinces adjoining the Danube—Upper Moesia, Pannonia, Noricum, and Raetia (in today’s terms, Hungary, Austria, and Switzerland). He reached the Rhine and Upper Germania (so-called because it was upstream of Lower Germania), through which he passed. Eventually, toward the end of November or early December, he arrived at Colonia Agrippinensis (today’s Cologne), the capital of Lower Germania, which commanded the wide flow of the Rhine. This was where Trajan had elected to spend the winter of 97–98.

It soon emerged that, for whatever reason, Trajan did not want to keep Hadrian by his side, and he sent him away to the neighboring province of Upper Germania for an unprecedented third posting as a military tribune. He joined the legion XXII Primigenia (the “First Born” of a new breed of legions, formed by Caligula for his abortive invasion of Britain in 39) at Moguntiacum (today’s Mainz). The fortress town stood on the shoulder of the dangerous re-entrant between the upper Rhine and the source of the Danube, where the Black Forest was a wedge pressing into eastern Gaul. Domitian’s limes of forts crossed the eastern, broad end of the wedge to discourage Germanic incursions. The Primigenia was to be a reserve alongside another legion based at Argentoratē (today’s Strasbourg), ready to repel any enemy forces that penetrated the limes. Hadrian was able to see for himself the new system of border defenses, and was impressed.

It is impossible to say whether Hadrian’s third military tribuneship was in recognition of his growing military skills and gave him an opportunity to further perfect them, or a penalty for poor behavior. What is certain is that he made a bad impression on the province’s governor, Lucius Julius Servilius Ursus Servianus. Born about 47, he was a leading member of Rome’s Spanish set and was the husband of Hadrian’s sister, Aelia Domitia Paulina. He may have been a widower (there is speculation that a first wife died during a putative epidemic of 90 that Dio attributed to a wave of poisoning). The couple are likely to have wed at about this time, when Servianus was in his early forties and Paulina about fifteen.

Presumably Servianus was on cordial terms with his wife, but he had little time for his brother-in-law. They got on uncomfortably at Moguntiacum and Servianus complained to Trajan about his ward. He revealed “what he was spending and the debts he had contracted.” The news angered Trajan, as was intended, and reminded him of the boy’s irresponsible goings-on in Baetica. Was he ever going to learn self-discipline?

It is not immediately obvious how easy it was to be extravagant in a frontier fortress. However, Hadrian was a dedicated huntsman and may have bought expensive dogs and horses; he could also have whiled away time by unlucky gambling. Not far away on the eastern side of the Rhine, the small military spa of Aquae Mattiacae offered the pleasures of relaxation: the water of the springs was high in calcium and piping hot, and was reputed to retain its temperature for three days. Baths are seldom far removed from the provision of sexual services, so here was another way of spending money.

Fortunately the standoff between proconsul and tribune did not last long. In early February a courier arrived at Moguntiacum with the news that Nerva had unexpectedly died. The emperor had lost his temper with a notorious delator. His voice rose in anger, he worked himself up into a sweat, and contracted a fever, which he could not shake off. He died on January 28. He was in his sixty-third year, having attained but not passed his grand climacteric.

For most of his life Nerva had subordinated principle to self-interest, but he had common sense and an intelligent understanding of what the imperial system needed if it was to last. He had the tolerance of a man without convictions—a useful quality after two decades of Domitian.

Hadrian seized the hour. If only he could be the first person to give Trajan the news eighty-odd miles downstream at Colonia Agrippinensis, he might be able to retrieve his approval. He set off quickly in a carriage, and made good progress until it broke down. This was no accident, apparently, for according to the Historia Augusta (which probably drew on Hadrian’s lost autobiography), Servianus had found out about his plan and arranged for the carriage to be sabotaged. Nothing daunted, the military tribune walked on for a while until he could find some fresh horses, and made it to Cologne before Servianus’ messenger. Just as Hadrian had hoped, the exploit delighted Trajan and their relations improved.

The years of apprenticeship were at an end. The fortunes of the young Aelian were chained indissolubly to those of the forty-four-year-old Ulpian. The Spanish immigrants had scaled the summit of power. Nothing could alter the fact that, for better or worse, Hadrian was the new emperor’s closest male relative. He was not an adopted son or an heir, Trajan was firm about that, but he was now a high personage in the res publica.

IX

“OPTIMUS PRINCEPS”

Hadrian became a favorite of the new emperor, despite the fact that he fell victim to some mysterious intrigue against him led by the tutors of Trajan’s youthful bedfellows: a gap in the text leaves it uncertain what the problem was. Presumably the people around the emperor did not relish the new arrival, who was well placed to establish a new power base.

Once again Hadrian experimented with fortune-telling. This time he used the Virgilianae Sortes, the Virgilian Lottery. In this game the player picks at random a quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid; often enough it produces suggestive or predictive results. Hadrian’s “lot” was taken from the poem’s sixth book:

Who is that in the distance, bearing the hallows, crowned with a wreath of olive? I recognize—gray hair and hoary chin—the Roman king who, called to high power from humble Curēs, a town in a poor area, shall found our system of law and thus refound our city.

Virgil’s reference is to one of Rome’s early kings, Numa Pompilius. A legendary figure, he succeeded the great Romulus. Pious and plain-living, he was a pacific ruler and the city’s first legislator.

It is not easy to judge the historicity of this anecdote. However, it is consistent with Hadrian’s recurrent dabbling in clairvoyance and his lifelong fascination with the law, and may well derive from his lost autobiography. While the gist is clear, the quotation does not have an elegantly close relevance to Hadrian’s circumstances, which tends to support its authenticity.

Hadrian’s return to favor was not simply a consequence of the ride from Moguntiacum to Colonia Agrippinensis. He also benefited from some promotion: Licinius Sura took a personal interest in him (we do not know how personal) and persuaded the emperor to advance his prospects.

The emperor presided over a household of women, all of whom had known Hadrian since he was a little boy, certainly once he became Trajan’s ward and probably before. He had a devoted friend in the empress, Plotina. He was also extremely fond of Salonina Matidia, the daughter of Trajan’s much-loved sister Ulpia Marciana. Marciana had lived with Trajan and his wife after her husband died in 78; Matidia joined her after her own widowhood, a few years into the reign. This female household was mutually affectionate, and Trajan’s well-being was its exclusive priority.

Plotina was probably in her mid-thirties at this time. She originated in Nemausus (modern Nîmes) in the province of Narbonensis (Languedoc and Provence). An interest in the ideas of Epicurus reflected her calm and constructive character. He argued that the gods were remote and ineffectual. Death marked the end of body and soul, and so a punitive afterlife was not to be feared. A happy, tranquil life could be achieved by kindness and friendship, and by moderation of appetite (although nothing was forbidden).

Matidia was about thirty, and her first marriage produced two daughters, one of whom was Vibia Sabina, now about thirteen years old and marriageable. Matidia remarried after her husband’s death and had two more daughters by successive husbands. They both also died and from then onward Matidia remained single. She often traveled with her uncle and apparently gave him political and administrative advice.

The official statues of these women are marked by a heavy, idealizing passivity, although Marciana’s likeness has a lively, inquisitive look. The conventions of coinage allowed more realistic images: Matidia appears on a silver denarius with a hawklike nose, pendulous cheeks, and a slightly recessive chin, and a sesterce reveals Plotina’s sharp, birdlike profile and similarly full cheeks.

As well as assuring his own position at court, Hadrian was well placed to observe a transformation of the political world. The new emperor gave a master class in moderation combined with firmness, and Hadrian would long remember the lessons he learned in these months.

Trajan knew that ultimately his power rested with the army, but the fact that he was a distinguished soldier meant that he won the legions’ loyalty without having to take any special measures apart from the usual bonus, or donative, that emperors gave at the outset of their reigns. By contrast, the Senate was weak, but, although he could act as he pleased, Trajan’s policy was to conciliate it. His aim was to stabilize the political class. He reported that, before assuming power, he had a dream that conveniently illustrated his careful deference: according to Dio, “he thought that an old man in a purple-bordered toga and vesture and with a crown upon his head, as the Senate is represented in pictures, impressed a seal upon him with a finger ring, first on the left side of his neck and then on the right.”

On his accession, Trajan immediately sent a letter to the Senate, written in his own hand. He promised, among other things, that “he would not kill or disenfranchise any good man; and he confirmed this by oaths not only at the time but also later.” This restated Nerva’s similar oath, and by “good man” he was guaranteeing that he would not persecute senators. It was an assertion of constitutional monarchy and the rule of law.

However, death was a fate in store for those who had humiliated the old emperor. Trajan felt strong enough to summon the Praetorian prefect Casperius Aelianus and his accomplices to attend him in Germania. Casperius duly turned up at Colonia Agrippinensis expecting a job with the new ruler, but to his surprise suffered execution instead. As requested, Nerva’s tears had been requited. A new prefect was chosen. As the emperor’s protector, he was the only person allowed to carry a weapon in his presence: at the ceremony of appointment, Trajan handed him his sword of office, famously saying, “If the public interest demands it, I have placed a weapon in the hands of my prefect for him to use against me.”

Trajan went further: he was determined to break the Praetorian Guard’s armlock over its employers once and for all. It was impractical to abolish it, as he might well have wished, but he created a counterweight by establishing a new cavalry force, the equites singulares Augusti, with a specific duty to protect the person of the emperor. Trajan recruited it from the Batavians, a Germanic tribe living on the near side of the Rhine and on a river island, encouraged by the Romans to specialize in warfare. Some believe that Batavi derives from the West Germanic beter—that is, better or superior men.

The emperor showed no eagerness to return to Rome in a hurry. He stayed for a time on the German frontier. Was he perhaps planning a campaign against the barbarians? Tacitus wrote at this time of the “ridicule that had greeted [Domitian’s] sham triumph over Germania, when he had bought slaves to have their dress and hair made up to look like prisoners-of-war.” He was not the only senior Roman who would welcome a real victory over the unruly tribes beyond the Rhine. However, the emperor moved on to the Danube frontier, where he conducted a tour of inspection. Doubtless Hadrian accompanied him, for he had recent firsthand experience of conditions in Moesia. There were signs of a Dacian resurgence and the arrangement whereby Rome paid the Dacian king, Decebalus, a large and regular subsidy was intolerable.

It was too early in the reign to launch a major campaign, but not so to begin detailed planning and organization. A Greek traveler, the orator and historian Dio Chrysostom (Dio of the Golden Tongue), passed through the area at this time and reported major military preparations at a legionary base.

One could see swords everywhere, and cuirasses, and spears, and there were so many horses, so many weapons, so many armed men … all about to contend for power against opponents who fought for freedom and their native land.

Dio had spent time in Dacia and sympathized with its cause. Trajan disagreed and, for those who could read the signs, was actively meditating invasion. It was probably during this visit that he established forts on the far side of the Danube and cut a canal to circumvent some rapids. But, first, before he could commit himself to a war, pressing business called for attention at home.

At last, in September or October of 99, nearly two years after his accession, Trajan arrived in the empire’s capital. On his journey from the frontier he behaved as if he were a private citizen. Ordinary carriages were requisitioned from the state posting system, no fuss was made about where Trajan lodged for the night, and everyone in his party ate the same rations. He walked on foot into the city. The effect was carefully judged, and well received.

The Senate en masse greeted him outside the city gates, and he met each member with an egalitarian kiss. After visiting the Capitol, where Nerva had announced his adoption, he made his way across the Forum Romanum to the twin imperial residences on the Palatine Hill, once a smart address for Rome’s grain but now expropriated as a center of government.

The first of these was the Domus Tiberiana, or House of Tiberius (Rome’s second emperor and the building’s first occupant), which overlooked, almost overshadowed, the Forum. Remodeled on a grand scale by Domitian after a fire, it was an unplanned labyrinth of accretions and annexes, loggias and peristyles, with hidden green spaces beside a sun terrace and a pavilion (now mostly covered by the Farnese Gardens). Here the imperial archives were stored.

Meanderingly splendid as the Domus Tiberiana was, it served merely as an entrance and appendix to an even more spectacular edifice, commissioned by Domitian and completed only a few years before his death. The public part of this palace, the Domus Flavia, or House of the Flavians, was dominated by a series of vast audience chambers. Columns were of polychrome marble, floors and walls were lined with marble veneer, and vaulted ceilings were painted with frescoes. A banqueting hall, spacious enough to accommodate the entire Senate, gave on to the gardens of a majestic courtyard surrounded by a covered colonnade. The adjoining Domus Augustana, or House of Augustus (not to be confused with Augustus’ modest home on another part of the hill), contained the private apartments, the façade of which towered above the Circus Maximus, the racecourse.

Trajan and Plotina walked into this marmoreal embodiment of hubris “with the same modest demeanor as if it had been a private house.” Before entering, the empress turned around to announce: “I enter here such a woman as I would wish to be when I leave.” She fulfilled her promise, living quietly and attracting little or no criticism of her lifestyle.

Although there had been a brief bloodbath of delatores in the first days of his reign, Nerva had discouraged any further persecution. Trajan took a firmer line (although apparently leaving senior personalities in the Senate alone). In his inaugural games, he replaced the public execution of convicted criminals with an unprecedented spectacle. This was a parade of informers. An observer wrote:

Nothing was so popular, nothing so fitting for our times as the opportunity we enjoyed of looking down at the

delatores

at our feet, their heads forced back and faces upturned to meet our gaze. We knew them and rejoiced.

The men were adjudged too ignoble for death by fighting in the arena or by execution. They were crowded onto ships and pushed out to sea, where it was assumed they would be wrecked and drown. Any survivors had already lost their homes and property, and, dead or alive, nobody expected to hear from them again. “Well, let them go!” was the happy verdict.

On September 1, 100, Pliny the Younger entered on a suffect consulship, and he gave a speech in the Senate, thanking the emperor for his appointment. It is probable enough that Hadrian was in the audience, but if he was he might well have dozed off, for the consul spoke at length and on a single, unvarying note of praise. Should he have missed the performance, the book was soon available. Pliny published the speech, although not before revising and massively enlarging it. In this version, the Panegyricus (as it is called) took a good six hours to deliver, enough to test the patience of the most pacific of emperors.

Pliny staged a public reading of the address. He took care not to issue formal invitations, but simply asked people to drop by if they had a moment. He had tolerant friends with a great deal of free time at their disposal, for he got a good house. After the event he proudly informed a correspondent:

The weather was … particularly bad, but for all that they turned out for two days running—and when discretion would have put an end to the reading they insisted I continue for a third.

Pliny, a kindly man but inclined to self-love, admired the “critical sense of my audience.”

For all its tedium, the Panegyricus marked a crucial turning point in the governance of the Roman empire. Pliny may have overdone the eulogy, but he was sincere. He was heralding nothing less than the end of the Stoic opposition, which now takes its leave of history. The achievement of Nerva and Trajan was to settle the quarrel between emperor and Senate, government and political class.

Pliny spoke for all when he said:

Times are different and our speeches should show this … Nowhere should we flatter [Trajan] as a god or a divine spirit. We are talking of a fellow citizen, not a tyrant, one who is our father not our overlord. He is one of us.

It is a telling phrase, “one of us,” which distills the Senate’s longing for a citizen-emperor.

In the same year as Pliny’s consulship Hadrian’s career moved forward again. In early December, a couple of months after the Panegyricus, he was appointed one of twenty quaestors, and so ex officio entered the Senate. He was approaching his twenty-fifth birthday (which fell on January 24, 101), the minimum qualifying age for the post since Augustus had reduced it from thirty years. It was a rule that emperors often broke for members of their family, but in the case of his onetime ward Trajan did not offer any major promotion. However, Hadrian did have the honor to be one of two candidati principis, nominees of the emperor, in which capacity his main duty was to read in the Senate any written communications Trajan wished to make to it. In addition, he was made curator of the acta Senatūs, the record of senatorial debates.

His first attempt at standing in for Trajan was an embarrassment. According to the Historia Augusta, when he read out an address of the emperor’s he “provoked a laugh by his somewhat provincial accent.” Stung, he immediately gave attention to the study of Latin pronunciation until he became fully fluent. Presumably what was meant was that Hadrian spoke with a Spanish accent. However, he had spent very little of his life in Baetica, and some scholars argue that he picked up un-Italian speech patterns from the centurions and other ranks during his lengthy military postings. But these had lasted only four or five years in total, and it is more likely that he picked up a Spanish accent from his family and the colony of Baeticans in Rome and Tibur, among whom he passed his childhood. Also, as a Hellenophile, he may have devoted more time to speaking Greek than Latin.

Now that he was a senator, Hadrian probably acquired two additional distinctions at about this time, which conferred prestige and set him slightly apart from his contemporaries. Both of them brought him into direct contact with Roman religious observance at its most emotionally arid—and least appealing to a nature more inclined to the ecstatic and the spiritual.

Two vacancies among the septemviri, or Seven Men, needed to be filled. They were the college of epulones, or Banqueters, one of Rome’s four great religious corporations. The senior college was that of the pontifices, or Pontiffs; headed by the emperor as pontifex maximus, it set the annual calendar of holy days, or holidays, and working days and kept the official state archive. Next came the augures, or Augurs, whose main job was to interpret the divine will by studying the flight of birds; and beneath them the quindecemviri, or Fifteen Men, who guarded the Sibylline Books, a collection of oracular sayings consulted in times of grave crisis.

The epulones were last in order of seniority, having been founded as recently as 196 B.C. They were responsible for arranging all the public banquets at the many festivals and games in the city. Catering to large numbers was no easy administrative matter, especially seeing that the work had an important political dimension. Feasts were an attractive addition to the free or heavily subsidized grain dole.

Hadrian’s second religious function was as one of the twenty-one sodales Augustales, or Companions of Augustus. These were priests responsible for the worship of the god Augustus (similar priests attended to the cults of later emperors after their deaths if the Senate agreed to their deification). Fortunately, Hadrian and his colleagues were, in effect, trustees and were not expected to conduct time-consuming sacrifices and services themselves; these seem to have been left to priestly officiants, or flamines.

Progress was made in Hadrian’s personal life as well. It was time for him to take a wife. This was a business decision, as few Romans married for love. Marriage—in the upper classes at least—was a property transaction. Wealthy clans entered into mutually profitable alliances with others, and deals, both economic and political, were sealed by an arranged union.

Hadrian, of course, had lost his father many years previously, and his guardians had exercised full patria potestas, or paternal authority, over him until he came of age. However, Roman law recognized that young adults, especially those with property, were inexperienced in the ways of the world and, to guard against fraud or extravagance, needed continued monitoring up to the age of twenty-five years. So Trajan and Attianus doubtless took on a looser role as curatores. Hadrian being only months away from full independence, they may have decided that he should be guided into a good marriage while they still had legal standing to influence the decision.

As it turned out, it was not so much the emperor but the women around him who played the key role, probably backed by Sura. Plotina did all she could to advance Hadrian’s career. Some said she was in love with him, but if there is anything in the story a physical relationship is surely out of the question, he being more interested sexually in men than women and she having a reputation for virtue that none of the sources contradict. The empress argued that Trajan’s closest male relative should marry into the Ulpian clan. The choice fell on Vibia Sabina, daughter of Hadrian’s beloved Matidia. As usual with Hadrian, Trajan was of two minds, but allowed the project to go ahead, perhaps to preserve the domestic peace.

The couple probably first entered into an engagement. Written on tablets and signed by them both, this was legally binding unless both parties agreed to cancel. Hadrian bought Sabina some presents and gave her a ring, either of gold or of iron set in gold, which she wore on what is still the ring finger today. According to Aulus Gellius, this finger had a special property in that a delicate nerve ran from it directly to its owner’s heart.

The wedding ceremony presumably took place in the imperial palace, where Matidia and Sabina lived, and was a simple statement in front of witnesses that the man and the woman intended to bind themselves to each other. An auspex, a personal family augur, examined the entrails of a sacrificed animal and ensured that the auspices were favorable. Bride and groom then exchanged vows: Ubi tu Gaius, ego Gaia. Ubi tu Gaia, ego Gaius. “Where you are Gaius, I am Gaia.” “Where you are Gaia, I am Gaius.”

In the evening, Hadrian seized Sabina, dressed in saffron with a flame-colored veil, in a pretence of kidnap. He then escorted her, surrounded by friends and family, back to his house. Flute players headed the procession, followed by torchbearers. People sang bawdy songs. Sabina was lifted over the threshold of her new home and guided to the marriage bed. Here Hadrian removed her cloak and began to undo the girdle of her tunic. At this point the wedding party withdrew.

From the bridegroom’s perspective this was a good match, and both Ulpians and Aelians must have applauded a further bonding of their two families. As for Sabina, we do not know whether she was pleased, but we can be reasonably certain on one point. For many pubescent girls the bloodstained encounter of the wedding night and continuing sexual penetration by a fully grown man was painful and distasteful. Thanks to her husband’s tastes Sabina did not have to endure much or any of this. That she did not become pregnant suggests that Hadrian left her alone. Another mariage blanc was in the making.

Sabina also benefited (or would when she grew older) from a form of marriage that became increasingly popular under the empire. In the old days, a wife would either fall under her husband’s complete authority (cum manu, or “with his hand”) or remain governed by her father’s potestas—in other words, sine manu, without the husband’s control. It was common now for women to be married sine manu, and although that meant they were theoretically accountable to their paterfamilias or an appointed guardian, in practice they could act independently and manage their own property. Augustus brought in a rule that mothers of three or more children did not need to have a tutor, and gradually the system of guardianship was discarded.

Little is known of Sabina’s personality; inscriptions found throughout the empire show that she was a wealthy woman. She owned a mansion in Rome and records of numerous freedmen are evidence of a large household. When very young, she made a generous contribution of one hundred thousand sesterces to her local youth support, or alimenta, scheme (see pages 132–34).

Plotina was a fine example of how a woman could be happily chaste and become her husband’s affectionate friend. Sabina did not follow her lead, and never warmed to Hadrian. Nor did he to her. The ancient authors do not tell us why, presumably because they did not know. But, apart from any other consideration, Hadrian’s close relationship with Sabina’s mother, Matidia, was surely a hard thing for a teenage girl to accept. From her perspective, there may have been three of them in the marriage, so, as a more recent princess remarked, “it was a bit crowded.”

X

BEYOND THE DANUBE

King Decebalus in his aerie felt completely safe—above all, safe enough to challenge the Romans with every prospect of success. So much stood in his favor.

First of all there were the mountains, impenetrable to strangers. The heartland of the Dacian kingdom was the Transylvanian basin, inside the great semicircular sweep of the Carpathian Mountains north of the Danube. They vary from about four thousand to more than eight thousand feet in height, and were heavily forested. A rich habitat for brown bears, wolves, and lynxes, even today the range hosts more than a third of all Europe’s plant species.

Second, the Dacians took care to defend themselves. Their craggy kingdom was guarded by half a dozen great fortresses, whose ramparts were constructed from the unique murus Dacicus, literally “Dacian wall.” Heavy masonry facings covered a timber-reinforced rubble core. The wood made these defenses flexible, and they resisted battering rams. The Dacians also erected rectangular projecting towers, on the Greek model, which allowed archers and missile-throwing engines, the technology acquired courtesy of Domitian, to provide flanking fire.

The greatest of the fortresses was Sarmizegetusa, perched on a crag almost four thousand feet high (its extensive remains can be seen in the Orastie Mountains of Romania). It formed a quadrilateral made of huge stone blocks and was constructed on five terraces. Nearby stood two sanctuaries, one circular and the other rectangular, consisting of rows of wooden columns, symbolic groves from which hung offerings to the gods. Civilians lived outside the fortress walls: tens of additional terraces housed dwelling compounds, craftsmen’s workshops, storehouses, warehouses, aqueducts, water tanks, and pipes. Roads were paved and there was a sewage system.

The Dacians had a civilization of which they could be proud. Their lands were rich in minerals, and they acquired great skill in metalworking. They traded with the Greek world, importing pottery, olive oil, and wine, and may have engaged in slave dealing. Compared with their neighbors they enjoyed a high standard of living as well as a rich spiritual life.

Militarily, the Dacians were less advanced. Unlike the Roman legions, they did not field a standing army, although there was a warrior class, the comati, or “long-haired ones.” Instead, they depended on annual levies after the harvest had been gathered in, thus limiting the length of time a military force was able to stay in arms. The chieftains and warriors—Dacia’s nobility—protected themselves with armor and helmets, and the rank and file wore ordinary clothes and were defended only by an oval shield. They marched into battle accompanied by the howl of boar-headed trumpets and following their standard, the draco, or “dragon,” a multicolored windsock. Their principal weapon, the falx, was a fearsome curved machete, used for slashing rather than thrusting. As intended, a Dacian horde made a terrifying audiovisual spectacle.

On March 25, 101, a group of men wearing odd-looking hats gathered together on the Capitol in Rome. They were members of an ancient club, the fratres arvales, or Brothers of the Plowed Field, and their suitably agricultural headgear consisted of a white band holding in place a garland made from ears of corn. Founded by Rome’s legendary second king, Numa Pompilius, they faded into obscurity during the later centuries of the Republic, but were reinvented by that most antiquarian of emperors, Augustus.

There were twelve Arvals, and at this time they were among the most distinguished personalities in Rome; they included former consuls, one of whom was in office when Domitian was assassinated and was probably involved in the conspiracy. All were seasoned players of the political game, exactly the kind of dinner guests favored by the late emperor Nerva.

The task of the Arvals was the worship of Dea Dia, an old rural fertility goddess, whom some thought to be the same as the Etruscan divinity Acca Larentia, Romulus’ adoptive mother. They celebrated her in May at the festival of Ambarvalia.

The society also offered thanksgiving of a more contemporary and comprehensible kind. On this occasion only half a dozen brothers were in attendance. The emperor was an Arval ex officio, and sent his apologies. This was because today he was leaving Rome to lead an expedition against the Dacians, and the brothers wordily wished him the best of fortune.

O Jupiter, Greatest and Best, we publicly beseech and entreat thee to cause in prosperity and felicity the safety, return, and victory of the emperor … and to bring him back and restore him in safety to the city of Rome at the earliest possible time.

It is highly probable that one of the first decisions of Trajan’s reign was to deal with the threat posed by Decebalus. This was why he had visited the Danube provinces before returning to Rome for his inauguration. However, an attack on Dacia was high risk, and it is no wonder that an underlying impression of unease can be detected in the Arvals’ good wishes; after all, previous campaigns had failed, with generals come to grief and legions mauled or (even) wiped out.

The new emperor had two good reasons for proceeding—one specific and the other general. First, Decebalus was an ambitious, able, and expansionist leader who threatened the stability of the imperial frontier; second, Trajan shared Augustus’ perception that an aggressive foreign policy cemented consent for the autocracy at home.

That said, a careful and well-prepared approach would be essential to success. Trajan was an admirer of the ancient world’s greatest conqueror, Alexander the Great. But although the Macedonian was justly famed for his bravery and bravura on the battlefield, Trajan understood the invisible key to his unbroken record of victory. Alexander was a master of logistics; he took great care of his supply lines and well understood the need to protect a victorious army’s rear as it advanced into enemy territory.

The Danube was an essential line of communication for the movement of troops and supplies. However, in places rapids made it impassable; so one or more navigable canals were dug alongside stretches of the river, a characteristically ambitious grand projet, traces of which have been discovered.

Trajan built two great but temporary bridges resting on tethered boats, crossing the Danube at Lederata (near the present-day village of Kostolac, east of Belgrade) and Bononia (today’s Vidin). These bridges gave the legions points of entry into the mountains of Dacia.

However, to ensure maximum security the emperor needed to provide a reliable connection between them. This was more easily said than done, for at the so-called Iron Gates of Orsova the Danube narrows to a gorge bounded by steep cliffs. At their feet on the southern, or Moesian, side the Romans cut a roadway-cum-towpath through sheer stone for a length of twelve miles. It was widened by cantilevered planks overhanging the water that were supported by wooden beams inserted into holes driven into the rock. This triumph of the legionary engineer can still be seen today.

Trajan was also justifiably proud of his achievement, as he made clear in a votive inscription of the year 100.

Imperator Caesar, son of the deified Nerva, Nerva Traianus Augustus Germanicus, pontifex maximus, holding the tribunician power for the fourth time, father of his country, consul for the third time, cut down mountains, erected the projecting arms, and constructed this road.

A year later another inscription boasted that “because of the danger of cataracts, [Trajan] drew off the stream and made the Danube’s navigation safe.”

All these preparations—not to mention the reorganization and strengthening of existing military bases north of the Danube, building accommodation for the invasion force, and increasing the capacity of ports during winter’s inclement weather—took time, perhaps as much as two or three years. As the work drew to a conclusion, a large army was assembled in Moesia—nine of the empire’s total of thirty legions. In addition, there was a roughly equal number of auxiliary troops, which included cavalry (which would face the fearsome Dacian cataphracts, or heavily armored horsemen), ten regiments of archers, and irregular forces such as the semibarbarian symmacharii—essential for warfare in rugged territory where set-piece battles were not feasible.

Soldiers were summoned from many parts of the empire—Spaniards, Britons, and a body of fierce Moorish riders commanded by the fiery Lusius Quietus, son of a tribal chieftain in Mauretania (roughly today’s Morocco), who recruited his bareheaded cavalry from the free Berber tribes of northern Africa: they rode bareback and without reins, hurling light javelins at the enemy. A brilliant commander but a notorious rogue, he had been dismissed from the service for some unnamed conduct unbecoming, but was now forgiven for his prowess. In all, the units deployed in Moesia added up to the largest army a Roman general had ever commanded. On the assumption that many units stayed in the rear to secure the Danubian provinces and protect supply lines, more than fifty thousand men were available for front-line duty. Trajan was a cautious commander, who countered the risk of marching into unknown territory by the application of overwhelming force.

We can be sure that it was not only the Arvals who turned out to mark Trajan’s departure. The Senate will have gathered to see him off, accompanied by his wife, Plotina, with crowds of ordinary citizens lining the streets. The imperial entourage included some of the best military talent of the day and most astute political minds—among them, the scion of an eastern royal house, C. Julius Quadratus Bassus from Pergamum, a splendid city in today’s western Turkey, with its citadel modeled on the Acropolis of Athens; Hadrian’s bugbear and brother-in-law, Servianus, now in his fifties; and the inevitable Licinius Sura.

The youngest comes Augusti, “companion of the Augustus,” or official associate, was a twenty-five-year-old quaestor. Although obviously a competent junior officer who had useful firsthand knowledge of Moesia and the Roman frontier troops, Hadrian owed his elevated position to being a relative of the emperor. He was rising fast, but he knew he could fall faster. He had a good friend in Sura, but Servianus was a hostile critic and Trajan sometimes listened to one and sometimes the other. Hadrian was facing his first experience of war; all eyes were on him and he would have to work hard to win his spurs. What he had gained by birth, he would maintain only on merit.

Little has survived on paper about the course of the campaign, but the full story has been told in stone. It can still be “read” in Rome to this day. A visitor who walks down the wide, dusty viale dei Fori Imperiali from the Colosseum to the Vittore Emmanuele monument (looking more like a homage to Cecil B. DeMille than a true evocation of the classical world) will see on his right the ruins of the Forum, which Trajan commissioned later in his reign. The last, largest, and most magnificent of all the imperial fora, it dwarfed those of Julius Caesar, Augustus, Vespasian, and Nerva.

The emperor’s architect was Apollodorus of Damascus, a designer and engineer of great virtuosity whose work exploited the revolutionary transition from traditional methods and materials to an architecture based on concrete, opus caementicum, a mixture of lime mortar, sand, water, and stones. Invented in the first century B.C., it was refined and developed and by the end of the following century had became the most popular building material. Thanks to concrete, the vault and the arch entered the Romans’ architectural vocabulary, and buildings could rise as high as four or five stories.

The new forum stretched all the way from those of Caesar and Augustus northward to the Campus Martius. A large segment of the Quirinal Hill was removed to make room. A high arch, topped with a statue of Trajan in a war chariot, bounded the southern end of a vast rectangular piazza. This in turn led to a basilica, or conference and shopping center, and then a great temple, between which a tall freestanding column was erected, flanked by two libraries, one for Latin literature and the other for Greek.

Trajan’s Column, the only component of this collection of massive edifices to remain intact, rises one hundred feet from the ground, as an inscription at its foot proudly claimed, to measure “how high a hill and place have been excavated for these great works.” Inside the pedestal a small room was set aside to receive one day the ashes of emperor and empress in two golden urns (it is now empty); and a circular stairway ascends to the top of the column, where a gilt-bronze statue of Trajan once stood. He was displaced during the Renaissance by Saint Peter, who remains in occupation.

The exterior surface of the column takes the form of a stone ribbon about three feet wide and 670 feet long that winds its way up the column in twenty-three spirals. On this ribbon carved reliefs recount in realistic detail Trajan’s struggle with the Dacians, rather in the manner of a modern cartoon strip. Its narrative is broadly trustworthy, although, just as ancient historians used to make up “appropriate” speeches for their protagonists, so the column’s sculptor or sculptors sometimes inserted scenes that were typical of what could or should have happened rather than of what actually did. Hard to descry from the ground, the column could be readily admired and studied from windows in the libraries’ upper floor or floors.

Winter was too much for classical armies and campaigns usually started in May, when there was enough fresh greenery to feed horses and pack animals, and the ground was firm underfoot. Fighting might be expected to start in June, or July after harvests had been brought in, and tailed out at the end of autumn.

So Trajan did not have to wait long after arriving in Moesia sometime in April 101 before launching the big push. The column picks up the tale. We see the flat riverbank across the wavy waters of the Danube and a series of blockhouses and watchtowers, the Roman limes, one and two stories respectively and surrounded by wooden palisades. In small ports on the Roman bank, stevedores are loading ships with supplies to be ferried across into Dacia. Bareheaded legionaries, their helmets hanging from their right shoulder and carrying their kit on the other, march in formation over the pontoon bridge, probably at Lederata.

On the second bridge a column of Praetorian standard-bearers is preceded by trumpeters and dismounted cavalry. At the head of the guard Trajan sets foot for the first time on Dacian territory. This emperor, it is clear, means to lead his men from the front.

The carvings pay close attention to engineering feats. Legionaries clear woodland and build camps, forts, bridges, and roads. Every advance into unknown territory is carefully secured to avert any danger of being outflanked by the enemy. Trajan is to be found everywhere, surveying terrain, confronting a Dacian prisoner, addressing respectfully attentive troops.

Decebalus avoids a full-scale encounter with the Romans and conducts a strategic withdrawal to his mountainous heartland and the royal citadel of Sarmizegetusa, but at Tapae, where years previously he had wiped out a Roman force, the king is either tempted or outmaneuvered into giving battle. This time he loses, and Trajan’s auxiliaries, whom he placed in the front line, display before him the severed heads of fallen Dacians. However, the Romans suffer heavy casualties and the emperor gives some of his clothing to be torn into bandages. Decebalus cannot be prevented from retiring in good order.

In the absence of anything better to do, much territory is pillaged and many captives are taken. Among them we see a group of Dacian women, one of whom is richly dressed with a child in her arms—almost certainly the king’s sister. The emperor is a gentleman and makes a point of treating them all generously (as Alexander did the womenfolk of the Persian king of kings). Autumn has arrived and the legions hole up in their winter quarters to await next year’s spring. The fighting season draws to a close on a faintly equivocal note; Trajan has scored a victory, but failed to win the war.

In Italy the public was on tenterhooks. Everyone wanted news, and if they had a friend in the forces they wrote for the latest information. In a state of high anxiety, Pliny promised his friend Servianus, who was evidently a dilatory correspondent, that he would pay for a special courier to carry his reply if only he would put pen to paper (or stylus to waxed tablet).

I have had no letter from you for such a long time … Please end my anxiety—I can’t bear it … I am well myself if “well” is the right word for living in such a state of worry and suspense, expecting and fearing to hear any moment that a dear friend has met with one of the accidents that can befall mankind.

Whether or not Servianus responded in writing is unknown, but Pliny did not have to wait long for an answer in person. While the emperor stayed behind on the front, Servianus and Sura returned to Rome, where their service to the state was rewarded with “ordinary” consulships. They were accompanied by Hadrian, still imperial quaestor until the end of the year; he carried with him Trajan’s dispatches, a blow-by-blow account of the campaign, which he read out to the Senate.

Hadrian had had a good war, although what exactly he did has not come down to us. An inscription has been found in the theater of Dionysus in Athens that sets out his early career and notes that he was twice awarded military decorations. There were specific awards for different classes of officer, but as a comes Augusti, Hadrian held no particular command and, strictly speaking, did not qualify for any of them; so he must have won one or more of a range of decorations that honor particular acts of valor—the corona civica, for saving the life of a Roman citizen in battle; the corona muralis, for assault on a wall; the corona vallaris, for assault on a ditch or bastion; and the corona obsidionalis, for bravery during a siege. The Dacian campaign afforded plenty of opportunities for any of these risky specialties.

Also Hadrian at last managed to get “into a position of fairly close intimacy” with the emperor. He writes in his autobiography that he made sure to “fall in with Trajan’s habits,” in particular by getting drunk with him in the evenings. For this he received “opulent rewards.” Evidently Hadrian had learned that essential aspect of the courtier’s art—always to turn up, always to be on hand. Not only did this breed familiarity, but it reduced the monopolizing access to the presence that a carper such as Servianus needed to turn the emperor’s mind against him.

As a small token of favor, Hadrian was permitted immediately to follow his quaestorship with appointment as tribunus plebis, tribune of the people, without the usual twelve months’ interval between public appointments. In fact, there was an overlap of three weeks, for tribunes assumed office on December 10, while the term of all other “elected” officials ended on December 31.

While military tribunes were, as Hadrian knew only too well, junior officers in a legion, the ten tribunes of the people dated from the early days of the Republic when the patricians were locked in a political struggle with the plebs. They were not allowed to be patricians, for their task was to protect ordinary Romans from high-handed behavior by their betters.

At the height of their power in the first century B.C., they were able to bring the business of the state to a halt by the exercise of their veto over any decision taken by any other public officeholder, including the consuls. After the emperors assumed tribunician authority, the tribunes themselves dwindled in importance, although they continued to have the right to oppose decrees of the Senate and to act on behalf of injured individuals.

Hadrian and the Aelii had not been granted patrician status, as he might have expected if his kinship to the emperor was borne in mind. Trajan must have thought that this would be interpreted as a hint that his ward was well on course to being acknowledged as his heir. This was not his intention at all; he was still in his forties and the question of the succession could wait.

Once again Hadrian claims in his autobiography that he was given a sign that one day he would assume the purple. If we are to believe the Historia Augusta,

he was given an omen that he would receive perpetual tribunician power [in other words, become emperor], in that he lost the heavy cloak, or

paenula

, which the Tribunes of the Plebs used to wear when it rained, but which emperors never wear.

There is some misunderstanding here, for it appears that everyone wore paenulae in bad weather, including emperors. But tribunes may well have worn some kind of uniform, to which Hadrian referred and which the author of the Historia confused with an ancient version of the raincoat.

On the Danube, Trajan was anxiously awaiting reinforcements. The fact that the governor of Britannia sent a small detachment from his personal bodyguard points to the emperor’s urgent need: Tapae had evidently delivered more than just a bloody nose. The army was vastly expensive and emperors since Augustus had kept its complement to a minimum; the consequence was that they had no mobile reserve to call upon during an emergency. Trajan was diverting to Moesia every last soldier that could be safely spared from other frontiers.

The Romans could expect an even tougher and bloodier campaign in 102 than the year before, for they would be attacking Decebalus’ precipitous heartland; not only were the mountains steeper, but desperation would fuel the Dacian resistance if and when the legions advanced. The plan was for Trajan to lead a frontal onslaught through the Iron Gates while, unobserved, Lusius Quietus and his Moors and a third force would launch pincer attacks from the rear.

It was hard going and much blood was shed, but the tactic worked. According to Dio Cassius, Trajan

seized some fortified mountains and on them found the arms and captured artillery and siege engines as well as the legionary standard that had been captured in the time of Fuscus [Domitian’s

amicus

, ambitious for military glory, who had lost the first battle of Tapae].

On the column we witness a large-scale engagement in which legionaries supported by artillery, archers, and slingmen drive through enemy ranks and storm a stronghold. An assault force forms a testudo, or tortoise, locking their shields above their heads to protect themselves from missiles hurled down from the ramparts.

Eventually the three divisions joined forces at the hot springs of Aquae (literally “Waters,” today’s Calan), only twenty miles from Decebalus’ citadel at Sarmizegetusa. The game was up, and the king sent a high-ranking deputation of pileati to seek terms. These were granted, but, although they were punitive, Trajan meant to tame, not destroy, Dacian power. The celebratory coins he issued referred to “Dacia Defeated,” not “Captured” or “Annexed”—victa, not capta or acquisita.

In essence, the peace treaty between Rome and Dacia undid the humiliating settlement of Domitian, but went no further. Decebalus reluctantly

agreed to surrender his weapons, artillery and artillery makers, to return Roman deserters, demolish his fortresses, withdraw from territory he had seized and furthermore to consider the same persons enemies and friends as the Romans did.

Large tracts of land north of the Danube were taken into the province of Moesia. Although he was allowed to stay on his throne, everything this able and aggressive king had achieved in his reign was now undone and Dacia returned to its former status as a minor kingdom, able to threaten nobody. Would he accept the war’s verdict?

In Rome, in the intervals between the arrival of bulletins from the front, an almost certainly underemployed tribune of the people had no alternative but to enjoy the arts of peace. Hadrian would not have repined, for, as the Historia Augusta reports disapprovingly, he was “excessively keen on poetry and literature.” He was skilled in painting and enjoyed music, too, both as a singer and as a player on the cithara, a kind of guitar.

Upper-class Romans were expected to practice the arts, write poetry, collect antiques, and generally lead a cultivated existence. Unlike Hadrian, however, a gentleman was not to be too keen, and would write verse as a relaxation rather than as a profession. The cursus honorum, or the “honors race,” determined that the usual career was an alternation between brief periods in office in Rome or the provinces and interludes of unemployment.

Poetry readings were de rigueur in the best circles and Hadrian would have been among the audiences, even perhaps performing his own effusions. The experience could, on occasion, be trying, for amateur authors expected their acquaintances and their clients to put in an appearance. And not to show enthusiasm was bad form.

Some poets, such as Martial and Juvenal, were true professionals, but they were not members of the political elite and were obliged to make a living from their art. To win patrons and money, Martial wrote flattering epigrams and indecent squibs, but for the impoverished satirist Juvenal, whom Hadrian knew and helped, “rage powers my poetry”—-facit indignatio versum.

As a rule, the noble dilettantes avoided deeply felt emotion, and explored or copied existing genres—elegies, pastorals, odes, and so forth. They agreed with the great Republican epic poet Titus Lucretius, who spoke of “the poverty of our native tongue”; to write elegantly in Greek was the highest attainment. Pliny praised the Greek epigrams and “iambic mimes” of the eminently respectable former consul Titus Arrius Antoninus (best known for commiserating with Nerva on his accession to the throne). “When you speak, the honey of Homer’s Nestor seems to flow from your lips, while the bees fill your writings with sweetness culled from flowers … Athens herself, believe me, could not be so Attic.”

Iambic mimes, or mimiambi, raise a ticklish question. They were a genre, invented in Syracuse and developed in Alexandria, that took the form of racy prose dialogues. Pliny explicitly compared Arrius with one of its most famous practitioners, Herondas, who flourished in the third century B.C. and wrote a celebrated dialogue, packed with double and single entendres, between two middle-class women about the virtues of a particular design of dildo.

At first glance it is more than a little odd for a man like Arrius to be mingling in this kind of company. However, there was a long-standing tradition that a writer’s morals should not be inferred from his writings. In some cases this may have been a convenient “cover.” Thus, Hadrian was on good terms with a poet of about the same age as he was, a certain Voconius Victor. On Voconius’ death he wrote a neat, exculpatory epitaph for his friend: lascivus versu, mente pudicus eras, “Your lines were sexy, but your mind was pure.”

Well, maybe. If, as is plausible, this Voconius is the same person as the Voconius Victor whom Martial teases on his impending marriage after an affair with a beautiful boy, it seems that, whatever might be claimed about his mind, his body was just as wanton as his verse.

In Rome, the empire’s first indubitable victory over a foreign enemy since Claudius’ invasion of Britannia half a century previously, as distinct from the blue-on-blue of civil war or the suppression of internal revolt, was received with delight.

Pliny’s letter of congratulation would have been typical of many. He prayed that Trajan would bring about a further renewal of the “glory of the empire.” Rome had returned with satisfaction to its age-old habits of aggression and territorial expansion.

Trajan returned to Rome in late 102, and was granted the title of Dacicus and held a Triumph. During the Republic this stupendous celebration had been open to any general who had scored a great victory, but it was now reserved to emperors, who were jealous of any military rival (not altogether groundlessly). The ceremony opened in the Campus Martius with speeches and the conferral of decorations for valor (perhaps this was when Hadrian received his awards). The Senate led the way into the city, followed by distinguished prisoners-of-war and floats carrying large pictures of heroic incidents in the campaign. Then came Trajan, who rode in a gilded four-horse chariot. Temporarily he was quasi-divine, with his face painted the same red as the statue of Jupiter Best and Greatest in the great temple on the Capitol; he wore an embroidered toga above a purple tunic interwoven with gold and decorated with designs of palm leaves. Behind him marched his troops in column of route. The men had immemorial license to sing scurrilous songs about their commander, and we may guess that on this occasion there was ribbing about the emperor’s taste for wine and boys. The procession ended on the Capitol, where the god for a day sacrificed white bulls to the god of gods.

The emperor staged lavish gladiatorial combats and authorized the return of pantomime shows: banned by Domitian on the grounds of their obscenity, they had been reintroduced by the easygoing Nerva, and banned again by Trajan on his accession. But now Trajan changed his mind—according to gossip, because he had fallen in love with one of the artistes, Pylades.

In 103 Hadrian held no public office and we hear nothing of his activities. But in the following year, he was elected as praetor for 105, an important post only one tier below the consuls. For the first few weeks of the year he was technically ineligible to serve, for he ought to have been in his thirtieth year—which did not open until his twenty-ninth birthday on January 25.

There were eighteen praetors, and their main duties concerned the administration of justice, in both civil and criminal law. Hadrian seems to have been made urban praetor, not only the chief magistrate of the legal system but also the official responsible for staging the prestigious Ludi Apollinares, the Games of Apollo. These were instituted during the war against Hannibal and were held every July 6 in the Circus Maximus. No expense was spared, and Trajan gave Hadrian a large budget to make sure that the celebrations were as splendid as could be.

Every year the new holder of the office would issue an edict, a body of rules, priorities, and legal interpretations he intended to apply during his year of office. Often he adopted those of his predecessor, perhaps making his own additions to reflect the needs of the time. In some ways this was a convenient means of creating legislation; if a new rule was popular a praetor’s successors would adopt it themselves, if not it would quietly be allowed to drop.

Hadrian was interested in law and would have enjoyed his praetor-ship. It is easy to imagine him presiding at court, attending to every procedural detail and unafraid to express his own self-taught legal views. However, he was not able to do so for long.

Trajan was not sure that Decebalus could be trusted, and he took sensible precautions against a return to war. Legionary fortresses north of the Danube provided an advance warning system, and Trajan’s omniskilled architect Apollodorus built a permanent bridge east of the Iron Gates—twenty piers of hewn stone supported a timber roadway. It was a remarkable engineering feat for its day and made a profound impact on public opinion.

Over the next couple of years, the Dacian king began to make attempts to escape from the box into which the Romans had locked him. He rearmed, and occupied land belonging to the Iazyges, a nomadic tribe that the Romans had settled in the province of Pannonia—without asking for Roman permission. He contacted other tribes to seek alliances, and once more welcomed Roman deserters. He even sought support from the powerful Parthian empire which lay beyond Rome’s eastern frontier; as a personal token of goodwill, Decebalus sent the Parthian king a Greek slave, a certain Callidromus, once the property of one of Trajan’s generals but captured in Moesia. Finally, he launched a preemptive strike and attacked Roman forces in southwestern Dacia, prophylactically occupied since 102.

The crisis, when it came, took Trajan by surprise, as evidenced by the fact that he left abruptly for the frontier in June 105—far too late in the year to initiate a full-scale campaign. New military appointments were posted, including a promotion to legionary commander, or legatus, for Hadrian. This meant he had to abandon his legal work in Rome and miss his costly ludi. In theory it was illegal for the urban praetor to leave the city for more than ten days at a time, but, as so often in Roman history, a rule gave way to an emergency.

Hadrian’s new legion was the I Minervia (founded by Domitian, it was named after his favorite Olympian, Minerva, goddess of warriors and wisdom), a reward for his prowess in the first Dacian conflict and a sign of imperial confidence in his usefulness in the field. It had marched down from Upper Germania as a reinforcement, probably after the bloody conflict at Tapae, and was one of the fourteen legions now readying themselves for the next round of hostilities. Hadrian presumably first came across it when he was in Germania a few years previously.

The column shows the emperor’s arrival in Moesia. Legions cross the Danube again, this time on Apollodorus’ new stone bridge, and the slow and steady process of moving forward, fortification by fortification, is set in motion. The Dacians respond by unpredictable and dangerous guerrilla raids. In one scene Trajan rides at full gallop at the head of some auxiliary cavalry to beat off an attack on a powerful Roman camp. But, although the fighting was tough, the eventual outlook was bleak for Decebalus.

The king took an eccentric measure, suggestive of growing desperation. He had heard that Trajan did little to ensure his personal safety. This was no doubt partly a tactic to maintain his posture as first citizen rather than despot, but it also reflected the emperor’s genuine popularity with the rank and file. He made himself readily accessible and allowed any soldier who wished to attend his councils of war (not meetings of his consilium where confidential plans were discussed, but briefings for officers from all units). Decebalus persuaded some deserters to make their way back to the Roman army to see if there was a way of killing the emperor at such a gathering.

Many generations were to pass before the concept of suicide terrorism was invented, but it would appear that these would-be assassins were willing to strike at the very moment their target was surrounded by hundreds, possibly thousands of loyal armed soldiers. They could not have hoped to survive. In any event, the plot failed. One of the deserters was arrested “on suspicion”—perhaps he had been recognized by former colleagues or he had been caught making some kind of advance preparation. He was put to torture, and sang.

The incident may have had a happy ending, but it starkly exposed a political reality that the presence of a healthy, fairly young princeps usually masked. In the event of his death the emperor had no named successor. There was, of course, one male relative available for the purple, young but with potential; however, Trajan had gone out of the way on numerous occasions to avoid pointing to Hadrian as his heir. He had behaved perfectly appropriately to his former ward and encouraged his career; but one has a sense that he harbored some deep, unspoken distrust of him.

It may have been about this time that a telling exchange took place, if we are to trust the Historia Augusta. Rumor had it that Trajan, as a disciple of the great Alexander, wanted to follow his example and die without an heir. When the Macedonian king, lying in his death fever, was asked to whom he left his conquests, he was said to have replied ambiguously: “To the strongest.” Although it distinctly appealed to Trajan, this was a pernicious precedent, for the consequence was internecine quarreling among Alexander’s generals, and the breakup of his hard-won empire. Other gossip at Rome had it that, when the time came, the emperor intended to write to the Senate, asking them to choose a new princeps from a short list supplied by him.

The column makes it clear that the emperor saw action. Trajan could well fall in battle and was in no position to be vague about what was to happen then, if he wished to retain the army’s confidence. After consulting his amici, he at last decided to reveal something of his intentions.

For whatever reason, he did not nominate his former ward and closest male relative, but seems to have let it be known that in the event of his death Lucius Neratius Priscus, who (it seems) was governor of Pannonia, should take his place. Apparently he told him to his face: “I commend the provinces to you if anything should happen to me.” This was a curious form of words: Trajan may have used the emperor’s direct control of the empire’s most important provinces, where much of the army was based, as a shorthand for acceding to the throne. But perhaps he only meant the Danube provinces, and so was referring to the command of the Dacian war. One way or another, the sentence betrays a continuing reluctance to be absolutely clear.

Neratius Priscus was an interesting choice, for he was essentially a nonpolitical figure. By nominating him, Trajan knew that he was not giving momentum to a serious candidate for the purple. A very capable man, Neratius worked his way through the honors race, ending up as a suffect consul in 97 and then with his governorship. But his real passion was the law, to which he devoted himself for the rest of his life after his return home from the Danube. He became a well-known jurist, a legal adviser who offered opinions on points of law and on specific court cases to private parties as well as to elected officials and the emperor himself. His textbooks, notes, and responses were much cited by later experts.

We do not know whether the legatus of the I Minervia was disappointed that he had been overlooked. His clairvoyant interest in his imperial prospects is well enough attested, but at this stage they were not taken seriously by anyone else. Perhaps he was too busy to care. So far as we can tell he did not scheme against the emperor or seek to assemble a faction to support his claim; he remained loyal and got on with his career more or less as if he were just an ordinary member of the ruling class.

Decebalus, having failed to shortcut the war by an assassination, now tried another trick. He offered to negotiate without preconditions with a Roman commander north of the Danube, the former consul Cnaeus Pompeius Longinus, who had been successfully beating the Dacians back to their rocky heartland. Longinus incautiously made his way to the king’s camp for the talks, where he and an accompanying escort of ten soldiers commanded by a centurion were immediately placed under house arrest and then interrogated in public about Trajan’s plan of campaign. Longinus kept his counsel and said nothing.

Decebalus sent an ambassador to Trajan, asking for the restoration of all his lands north of the Danube and the payment of war reparations. A careful response was prepared, calculated to create the impression that Longinus was neither very highly nor very slightly valued. Trajan wanted to prevent his being put to death, or handed back on excessive terms. He succeeded, for the Dacian king could not make up his mind what to do next and temporized.

It was Longinus who bravely broke the stalemate. He made friends with one of Decebalus’ Dacian freedmen and obtained some poison from him. He then promised the king that he would win Trajan over and in pursuit of this wrote the emperor a letter. He arranged for the freedman to deliver it in person and, in order to ensure the man’s safety, he asked the emperor to treat him well.

Longinus hoped that Decebalus would not guess his true intentions and so not keep a very strict watch over him. That was how matters fell out, and one night after the freedman had left for the Roman headquarters Longinus took the poison and died. This was a fine example of self-sacrifice: for a leading Roman statesman or commander, suicide was recognized to be a courageous, even a noble, act in the event of desperata salus, of no hope of rescue or recovery.

The king refused to admit defeat and dispatched the captured centurion to Trajan, promising to send back Longinus’ body and the escort in return for the freedman. The emperor refused, commenting that the freedman’s safety was “more important for the dignity of the empire than the burial of Longinus.” An honorable position to adopt, one might think, if one overlooks the fact that it left the escort out on a limb. The emperor evidently cared more for a dead general than ten other-rankers. History does not record their fate.

The reduction of Dacia now proceeded with little opposition from the enemy. The legions followed a direct route to Decebalus’ capital via the Vulcan Pass, more than 5,300 feet high. The Dacians lost heart: the column shows members of the Dacian court pleading with their king to come to terms. Decebalus refused and retreated into the mountains with his family and bodyguard, to form a resistance movement. Meanwhile, Sarmizegetusa, for all its impregnable appearance, fell without a fight. It was looted and burned to the ground.

Some of the nobility decided to collaborate, and one of the king’s companions revealed the secret location of Decebalus’ treasure to Trajan. According to Dio Cassius,

with the help of some captives Decebalus had diverted the course of the river [Sargetia], made an excavation in its bed, and into the cavity had thrown a large amount of silver and gold and other objects of great value that could stand a certain amount of moisture; then he had heaped stones over them and piled on earth, afterward bringing the river back into its course. He also had caused the same captives to deposit his robes and other articles of a like nature in caves, and after accomplishing this had made away with them to prevent them from disclosing anything.

Alaric, king of the Visigoths, borrowed the idea three hundred years later and was buried with his spoils beneath a river in southern Italy. But while his resting place has never been discovered, the Dacian treasure was dug up. It turned out to be of almost unbelievable value—about 500,000 pounds of gold and 1 million of silver.

And what of the king? Years afterward a proud cavalryman commissioned a gray marble inscription that recorded a long career of distinguished service in the army. A carved relief depicts the high moment of his life. We see him galloping on his horse and on the ground the prostrate trousered figure of Decebalus, a bearded man in a Dacian cap. The curved sword with which he has just cut his throat falls from his hand. The legend below reads that he captured the king, who killed himself moments before his arrest, and that he delivered his head to Trajan (it was later sent to Rome and was ceremonially thrown down the Scalae Gemoniae, a flight of steps that led up to the Capitol, where the bodies of executed criminals were exposed for a time).

The war was over. The victory was as complete as victory could be. Just as Titus in 70 had expelled the Jewish population from Judaea, so Trajan ethnically cleansed Dacia. Many thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Dacians were dispersed, some to appear as gladiators in the emperor’s postwar celebrations and others to be sold into slavery. Colonists were imported to take their place and a new capital city was built in the name of the emperor’s clan, Sarmizegetusa Ulpia. Dacia became Rome’s first new province since Claudius had annexed Britannia in 43.

Once again, Hadrian had distinguished himself. Army life suited him and the I Minervia performed well. As so often, the detail of what he did is missing, but according to the Historia Augusta, “his many remarkable deeds won great renown.”

Trajan began to blow hot again, after cold. He was so pleased with his former ward’s successes that he presented him with a diamond he himself had received from Nerva. The intention seemed obvious, at least to Hadrian, who repolished his hopes of being acknowledged the emperor’s official successor. People were reminded of the famous occasion when a seriously ill Augustus passed his signet ring, bearing the head of Alexander the Great, to his friend Marcus Agrippa to mark the transfer of authority. But the two events were not really comparable; a jewel was no official ring, and a healthy and triumphant Trajan was not transferring anything except a valuable gift. Whatever Hadrian liked to think, the diamond was a token of the emperor’s esteem rather than the talisman of his power.

XI

THE WAITING GAME

Of more practical value than a jewel was the emperor’s decision to promote Hadrian again, after only twelve months as commander of the I Minervia, to provincial governor—a clear demonstration of his usefulness in the field. As the campaign against Decebalus drew to its climax during the summer of 106, Trajan divided Pannonia into two jurisdictions, Upper and Lower. The latter was the smaller part, with only a single legion as garrison, and this he allocated to Hadrian. The wheel had come full circle, for the new province’s capital was Aquincum, the fortress town on the Danube where the young military tribune had had his first real experience of army life ten years previously.

It was not the grandest of appointments and one of its consequences was that Hadrian probably missed the culminating excitements of total victory. But it was some compensation that the post was no sinecure. Lower Pannonia looked across the Danube to the Hungarian plain, home of the fierce, unmastered Sarmatian Iazyges. This tribe adjoined the western frontier of the Dacian kingdom; they were nervous of Decebalus’ expansionist policy and unsurprisingly supported Trajan’s invasion. According to the Historia Augusta, the new governor “held back the Sarmatians.” We can take it that they had not chosen this unlikely juncture to turn on their victorious Roman friends, but were seizing the opportunity to grab or at least to raid defenseless Dacian territory. What they failed to grasp quickly enough was that Rome already regarded Dacia, no longer just victa but capta, or “taken,” as its own property and did not welcome unfriendly incursions.

Dealing with the Sarmatians, probably by negotiation (for there is no report of fighting), by no means consumed all of Hadrian’s energies and, for the first recorded occasion, his taste for intervention (or, his critics would argue, for interference or meddling) was given full rein. Archaeological evidence suggests that Hadrian had an impressive new governor’s palace built: if so, this was his first opportunity to indulge in what was to become a lifelong passion for commissioning art and architecture and investing in what the French call grands projets. Ever the autodidact, Hadrian convinced himself that he had a talent for design that made him the equal of professional practitioners.

One of the more ingenious characteristics of the imperial system was a division of powers at the provincial level. A governor, a former praetor (as in Hadrian’s case) or consul and a leading member of Rome’s political elite, was responsible for the general administration of the province and the command of its garrison army. Alongside him, one or more procurators were charged with financial management and reported directly to Rome, not to the governor; their chief task was to collect taxes and other sources of revenue and to transmit this income to the fiscus, or exchequer, in Rome or to the emperor’s privy purse (it can be presumed that these were sometimes in whole or in part paper transfers, with the actual cash being spent locally). By removing from him control over finance, this made it far more difficult for a discontented governor to mount an armed challenge to the emperor.

Although procurators enjoyed multiple opportunities for malfeasance, it was a brave governor who pried into their affairs. But, self-confident as ever, Hadrian did not hesitate to do so; no details have come down to us, but, according to the Historia Augusta, he “restrained the procurators, who were overstepping too freely the bounds of their power.” One would like to know more, but what can be understood is that he took risks by acting ultra vires—and survived them. If he was wise, he would have cleared his plans with Trajan first, and there is evidence that the emperor would have strongly backed him.

The Epitome de Caesaribus claims that during Trajan’s reign some procurators were disrupting the administration of the provinces by launching false accusations.

One was said to ask a wealthy man, “Why are you rich?”; another, “Where did you get it from?”; and a third, “Give me what you’ve got.” The empress, Plotina, tackled her husband on the subject and reproached him for being so unconcerned to protect his good name. She returned to the subject so often that he came to detest unjust exactions. He used to call the

fiscus

the spleen because, as it grew, the rest of the body, its muscles and limbs, wasted away.

The incident is undated, but when we recall how close Hadrian was to the empress, it could be that it coincides with his governorship and that Plotina was preparing her husband’s mind for the inevitable procuratorial complaints about Hadrian.

The governor was also the legatus of his legion, the II Adiutrix. He knew the men well, seeing that he had served with them as military tribune. One of the challenges facing commanders of troops on frontier duty was to find ways of keeping them at a high pitch of battle-readiness when they spent much of their time not doing anything very much apart from boring guard duty. This absorbed much of Hadrian’s attention, and the Historia Augusta reports that he “maintained military discipline.”

It is uncertain how long Hadrian stayed in his post at Aquincum, but he may still have been there when he reached the apex of a Roman’s political career. In 108, two years or less after starting his governorship, he was awarded a consulship. According to the Historia Augusta, this was in recognition of his successful record in Lower Pannonia, evidence that his interventions had been met with approval. He was only thirty-two. The general rule, dating back to the days of the Republic, fixed the minimum age for holding the state’s senior post at forty-two, but since the reign of Augustus this had been reduced to thirty-one for patricians and members of consular families.

Hadrian was neither, so the early appointment was a compliment. But, as ever, what Trajan gave with one hand he contradicted, or at least contraindicated, with the other. Instead of being one of the two consules ordinarii, who launched the year in January and gave their names to it (officially a year was referred to as “during the consulships of so-and-so and so-and-so”), Hadrian was simply a suffect or replacement consul, who probably took over in May.

Hadrian’s great friend at court, Trajan’s close adviser and companion Licinius Sura, was still putting in good words for him, to considerable effect according to the Historia Augusta.

Sura’s years of power opened with the accession of Nerva, and from that point onward he was the empire’s éminence grise. Dio Cassius claims that he acquired “great wealth and pride,” as well as numerous enemies who schemed to undermine Trajan’s confidence in his loyalty. They lost their labor.

So great was the friendship and confidence he showed toward Trajan and Trajan toward him, that, although he was often slandered, Trajan never felt any suspicion or hatred toward him. On the contrary, when those who envied Sura became very insistent, the emperor went uninvited to his house to dinner, and having dismissed his whole bodyguard, he first called Sura’s physician and caused him to anoint his eyes, and then his barber, whom he caused to shave his chin; and after doing all this, he next took a bath and had dinner. Then on the following day he said to his friends who were in the habit of constantly making disparaging remarks about Sura: “If Sura had wanted to kill me, he would have killed me yesterday.”

The private man seems to have been more agreeable than the statesman. If we can draw conclusions from two letters Pliny wrote to him, he enjoyed being asked to address abstruse conundrums. One of these concerned a spring at Pliny’s villa on the shore of Lake Comum (today’s Como), which had the curious property of intermittently filling and emptying a pool in an artificial grotto. It can still be found at the sixteenth-century Villa Pliniana near Torno and has puzzled great minds down the ages, including such disparate figures as Leonardo da Vinci and the poet Shelley. In fact, water is siphoned off variably according to atmospheric pressure, but Sura’s reply does not survive, so we cannot tell whether he proposed the correct solution.

During the year of Hadrian’s consulship Sura let his protégé know that he was to be adopted by Trajan. This information was widely leaked and led to a new friendliness on the part of onetime critics and enemies, including members of the imperial consilium. “He was no longer despised and ignored by Trajan’s amici.”

This anecdote is hard to interpret. It very probably derives from Hadrian’s autobiographical apologia, and so should be treated with caution. One indubitable fact undermines it: the emperor took no steps to implement his resolution. Did Sura or Hadrian simply make the story up? Unlikely; it would be risky to spread a false report at the time, which might well find its way to the emperor; if it was invented later, former members of the imperial entourage would have been able to deny knowledge of it.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that the reported incident took place not long before the death in about 110 of Sura, who may have been making one last attempt to reinforce Hadrian’s position before quitting the stage. His passing brought a remarkable career to a close. As we have seen, he shared Trajan’s sexual tastes. According to the Epitome de Caesaribus, it was through Sura’s “zeal that he had secured imperium.” The strong implication was that he negotiated persuasively with Nerva, or (some speculate) threateningly, on behalf of his friend, then absent in Germania. Sura was appointed suffect consul in the crucial year of 98 when Trajan inherited the throne from Nerva; and, a rare honor, twice as consul ordinarius in 102 and 107. He served in Dacia and was appointed to lead an embassy to Decebalus—a move that came to nothing because of the king’s fear for his own safety. Trajan’s regard for Sura remained undiminished until the end and after. He awarded him a state funeral and erected a statue in his honor. He also named some splendid new baths on the Aventine Hill after his friend, built near or perhaps on the site of Sura’s house; they remained in use for more than two hundred years.

An interval of peace followed the Dacian wars. After his governorship, Hadrian returned to Italy, and he did not hold further public office for some years. It is instructive that the emperor showed no interest in sharing the workload of empire with his now mature and experienced relative; Augustus had had Marcus Agrippa and Tiberius as nearly coequal partners, and Vespasian had worked very closely with his son Titus.

So far as we can tell, Hadrian betrayed no signs of disappointment or resentment. He remained loyal and patient. For a politically inexperienced aspirant to the purple, who had spent the last ten years—that is, most of his adult career—in the field rather than at Rome, he now enjoyed a front-row view of Trajan’s performance as a civilian ruler. There were lessons to be learned.

The first of these concerned the limits of absolute power. Communications were slow; nobody could travel faster than a horse and journeying by ship was extremely dangerous in the winter months. Even an urgent correspondence took weeks to conduct and complete.

The state played a far more limited role than in today’s world. Economic and social theory were little understood, and seldom translated into public policy. Military spending was by far the largest item in the imperial budget. However, the army, with its thirty legions, was hard put to guard the empire’s borders along the Rhine and the Danube, in the sands of Mesopotamia and the Sahara, and in the rocky, contested landscape of northern Britannia. Rome could afford to defend its frontiers but, with a few notable exceptions such as Judaea, not to police heavily or “occupy” its domains as well.

Another factor restricting an emperor’s freedom of action was the relatively small number of officials and bureaucrats that helped him administer the empire. In the days of the Republic a consul or other elected magistratus brought with him members of his household, usually slaves and freedmen, to help him manage his public business. Also, he depended on friends to advise him. Augustus adopted this model, if on a grander scale. He and his successors gathered around him able freedmen, usually Greek, to run an imperial secretariat. Among the most important were the ab epistulis, who handled the imperial correspondence, the a rationibus, in charge of the imperial finances, and the a libellis, who dealt with petitions.

These men accumulated great power and wealth. They were accountable only to the emperor; this meant they could operate out of the public view and, in the event of any scandal, were expendable. Unsurprisingly, they became so unpopular that emperors began to hire equites, men of standing from the business class, in their place.

The princeps, as the first among supposed equals, needed to maintain the confidence of the senatorial class, and to a growing extent the equites. With the support of the army and Rome’s masses, he was in a position to act despotically if he so wished. But if he held all the cards, he needed others willing to play the game with him. As we have seen, the history of the previous century demonstrated only too clearly that if he did not at least go through the motions of working with the Senate he ran a number of unpleasant risks: at worst, assassination or revolt; at best, lack of cooperation.

For all these reasons it was extremely difficult for the center to impose policy on the periphery or to act without consultation, but this did not mean that the center was impotent. It was a reservoir of prestige, authority, money, and law, and Trajan demonstrated how an intelligent princeps could get his way with little difficulty.

To senators he behaved with unfailing affability; the contrast with Domitian could not have been plainer. He treated them as personal friends, visiting their houses if they were ill or were celebrating feast days. In turn, he was a lavish host, entertaining them at banquets “where there was no distinction of rank.” Dio Cassius writes:

He joined others in animal hunts and in banquets, as well as in their labors and plans and jests. Often he would take three others into his carriage, and he would enter the houses of citizens, sometimes even without a guard, and enjoy himself there.

It was claimed that he “took more pleasure in being loved than being honored,” although this did not deter men like Pliny from lauding him in the most flattering terms. This easygoing social manner was very welcome, even if it was little more than intelligent public relations.

Despite all the difficulties, there was a mechanism by which Trajan was able to make his presence felt throughout the empire. Even if overarching policy interventions in provincial life were rare, Trajan was showered with petitions from all and sundry and requests for action of one kind or another. The imperial government interfered as little as possible in local politics and religion, expecting civic elites to maintain an orderly administration. Inevitably, though, disputes arose on almost every imaginable topic and Trajan was asked to adjudicate, just as his predecessors had been.

He was seldom governed by personal whim. The emperor stood at the apex of the legal system. Roman jurists wrote, “What the emperor decides has the same authority as the law of the people, because the people have made him their sovereign.” Local jurisdictions retained their validity, but Roman law was applicable throughout the empire and had something of the force that international law has today. Local authorities and individual Roman citizens could appeal to the princeps, who acted as a kind of supreme court (Saint Paul was well within his rights about A.D. 60 when he said to Porcius Festus, procurator of Judaea, “Appello Caesarem”—“I appeal to the emperor”).

Experienced jurists bore much of the heavy workload that the preparation of new laws, the promulgation of imperial edicts to clarify points of law, and the judging of particular cases entailed. Trajan was an active reformer; he ruled that defendants condemned in absentia should have the right to a retrial. Also, by banning anonymous accusations laid by delatores and the practice of torturing slaves in maiestas cases, he brought to an end the political show trials that rulers such as Domitian had used to quash suspected dissent.

Petitions did not only deal with legal matters; they also requested practical help with local building developments. As we have seen, Trajan spent vast sums of money on transforming urban spaces, not just in Rome but throughout the provinces. He made sure that his munificence was acknowledged with grateful inscriptions; even a remote bridge in Numidia proclaimed that it had been erected “with the labor of [Trajan’s] soldiers and from his own money.” So many buildings carried his name that he was nicknamed “the Wallflower.”

The imperial archives are long gone, thrown away or destroyed among all the vicissitudes that beset Rome during its long decline and through the longer centuries of the Dark Ages. But we have the next best thing. Grateful provincials engraved their correspondence with the emperors and their replies on stone or bronze memorials, many of which the modern archaeologist has recovered from the ruined sites of lost cities. Reading these documents reveals a continuity of governance from princeps to princeps, with officials evidently looking up past decisions for precedents. Even the decisions of a “bad” emperor such as Domitian were consulted for guidance.

Every now and again something truly original emerges. In 1747 some plowmen in a field near Piacenza unearthed by chance the largest known inscribed bronze tablet of antiquity, measuring four feet six inches by nine feet six inches, the celebrated tabula alimentaria. Two others were discovered in southern Italy. The tablets give detailed information about an ambitious and extremely expensive child welfare scheme, funded by Trajan, as it applied to three communities—the modest township of Veleia in the north, which vanished long ago under a landslide, and places in Tuscany and near Beneventum in the south.

The emperor had a good track record with the young. He passed far-reaching laws to protect the rights of minors and abandoned infants. The exposure of newborn children was a feature of life in the classical world; sometimes they were rescued and brought up as foundlings. Trajan restored their rights as heirs of their birth parents. He also removed the absolute power fathers held over their sons, the patria potestas, in the event of maltreatment. The laws of guardianship (a subject of which he had personal experience as a tutor) were tightened and it was made more difficult for testators to leave their estates to single heirs at the expense of others with reasonable expectations of inheritance.

Probably founded by Nerva but developed by Trajan, the alimenta scheme, as revealed by the inscription, was an ingenious measure that apparently sought to meet two different objectives at once, one economic and the other social. The first step was to set a target number of beneficiaries in a given district and to identify needy children to fill the quota. Both freeborn boys and girls were eligible for financial support—sixteen sesterces a month for the former and twelve for the latter (and less for youngsters who were illegitimate). The treasury then made a capital sum available in the form of cheap 5 percent loans to local landowners on the security of their farms or estates. The interest on the loans was sufficient to cover the dole payable to the children. So far as we can tell, the loans were in perpetuity.

It has been estimated that the entire scheme throughout Italy cost the state annually 311 million sesterces, a very large sum equivalent to three quarters of the army’s annual budget. But what exactly was it designed to achieve?

There is evidence that from the reign of Domitian Italy suffered from an agricultural crisis. Pliny, a substantial landowner, reports that his tenants were finding it hard to pay their rent and were falling into ever-larger arrears. “As a result, most of [them] have lost interest in reducing their debt because they have no hope of being able to pay off the whole.”

The alimenta scheme must surely have transformed economic expectations. The subsidy for selected offspring of citizens (all the freeborn inhabitants of the peninsula held Roman citizenship as of right) would have removed the shadow of poverty from a young generation; Pliny, who ran a similar, much smaller scheme of his own on his estate, expected the boys to grow up into soldiers and the girls to marry and procreate—and so, too, we may surmise, did the emperor.

The cheap loans themselves were probably intended to enable investment in the land and in development projects. To judge from the bronze tablets, most of the mortgagees were of a middling sort and, although this is nowhere spelled out, must have been expected to invest the money in their farms or at least to make good any losses.

Did the inflow of so much cash to the Italian countryside have a beneficial impact? Nobody tells us in so many words, but the government was moved to boast, issuing a series of alimenta coins as well as one with the proud slogan Italia restituta, Italy renewed.

These policies for youth support and rural development have a familiar ring to them, but they were merely a pragmatic response to particular problems. Rome did not invent the welfare state. That said, here was the optimus princeps at his best—generous, well intentioned, and intelligent.

After Sura’s death, Hadrian took over responsibility for writing the emperor’s speeches; this meant that he was often in his presence and as a result relations between the two men warmed. One wonders if, from time to time, he also helped out with his correspondence. In that case, he would have observed that letters poured in unrelentingly from imperial officials in every corner of the empire, each of them posing a conundrum, often of only local significance and requiring detailed knowledge of the area, and asking for a decision.

By a great stroke of luck a bundle of letters between Trajan and a high official have evaded the worst that tidy-minded clerks, barbarian invaders, and Christian monks could do. For some years the province of Bithynia-Pontus on the southern littoral of the Black Sea had been in a state of endemic financial and administrative disarray, and in 110 the emperor commissioned the experienced Pliny as his special representative, legatus Augusti, with a mission to overhaul the political and financial governance of the province. We have sixty-one letters he wrote to Trajan, seeking guidance on a wide range of topics. Despite wide-ranging powers and an imperial letter of instruction, it is remarkable how many minor matters Pliny referred to the emperor. It was probably wise for officials on foreign postings to keep their employers fully informed of what they were doing to ward off misunderstandings or suspicion.

However, important questions were discussed, with the emperor regularly adopting a conservative approach. “My own view is that we should compromise,” he remarked on one occasion, adding: “We should make no change in the situation resulting from past practice.” The basic principle to which Trajan adhered was to interfere as little as possible in the lives and customs of provincials, as when he advised on an issue concerning local-authority senates in Bithynia: “I think then that the safest course, as always, is to keep to the law of each city.”

However, the emperor’s moderation did not stem from an inability to make up his mind; rather, it was a decisive cast of mind. An instructive exchange between him and his legatus is a case in point.

The Romans did not know what to make of the Christians, a new sect less than a century old. The travels of Saint Paul as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles and his letters reveal the existence of many Christian communities in the cities of the eastern empire, especially those that lay on major trade routes, and in the imperial capital itself. To begin with they were hardly noticed and their intentions were much misunderstood. They were accused of criminal depravity and, in a distorted allusion to the Eucharist, of cannibalism.

Nevertheless, conversions mounted and, if we can judge from those named in Paul’s correspondence, believers were widely spread across social classes and in the city or nation of their origin. We have seen that a relative of Domitian was executed in the 90s, perhaps because he was a Christian convert, although at this stage in its evolution the religion did not usually appeal to ruling elites.

The apostle had tried to make his way to Bithynia-Pontus, but mysteriously failed to get there because of opposition from the “Spirit.” However, a Christian community came into being and flourished, to the unease, years later, of the imperial legatus, Pliny. He knew that he was expected to act against the sect, but was uncertain of the nature of their offense. So he wrote to Rome for guidance. Was a Christian to be convicted simply of membership in the church? Or of the crimes allegedly associated with it? And what would be appropriate punishments? It appeared, Pliny found, that coreligionists sang hymns in honor of Christ “as if he were a god” and bound themselves by oath to abstain from theft, robbery, and adultery. At the eucharist, they took food of an “ordinary, harmless kind.” No cannibalism there. What puzzled Pliny was the innocuousness of Christianity.

Typically, the emperor took a cautious line. It was impossible, he wrote, to lay down a general rule. If someone was proved to be a Christian, he should be punished (unhelpfully, Trajan failed to answer the question about penalties). But if he sacrificed to the Roman gods, he should be pardoned. He added:

Pamphlets circulated anonymously must play no part in any accusation. They create the worst sort of precedent and are quite out of keeping with the spirit of our age.

Did Hadrian read this ruling? That cannot be determined, but it is perfectly possible. The matter was of some importance and Trajan is likely to have consulted, or at least informed, his close circle. Also, the bureaucrats in Rome must have recognized that the emperor’s wishes had an empire-wide application and made sure the ruling was widely disseminated. In any event, we can safely assume that Hadrian consulted the imperial archives some years later, when he himself was obliged to take a view on Christianity.

XII

CALL OF THE EAST

For the wellborn Roman, educated as he had been to value Greek history and culture above his own, the first visit to Athens was a rite of passage. As Pliny put it to a young friend, he was going “to the pure and genuine Greece where civilization and literature, and agriculture too, are believed to have originated.”

The voyager from Rome chose from two alternative itineraries. He rode down the Appian Way and a brand-new stretch of road commissioned by Trajan, took ship at Brundisium (today’s Brindisi), then sailed across the Adriatic and down the coast of Greece into the Gulf of Corinth. There were no passenger ships as such, but places could be booked on merchant vessels: government officials or senior personalities in the imperial regime were in a position to commandeer a warship, fast although not comfortable. Landfall was made at Corinth’s western harbor, and the traveler crossed over by land to its eastern counterpart. The adventurous alternative was to sail down the coast of Italy, turning east through the Strait of Messina and rounding the windswept peninsula of the Peloponnese.

Either way, journey’s end was the port of Piraeus, with its three fine weatherproof harbors, which had once been the home of the eastern Mediterranean’s most formidable fleet. As the traveler rode the few miles to the city, he could see on either side the ruins of the Long Walls, built to link Athens securely to its ships. Along the road stood the gravestones of past generations of Athenians.

Soon a spectacular distant view of the city presented itself against a horizon of high mountains. The sun caught the spear and helmet of a colossal statue of the goddess Athena that guarded the citadel, the crag of the Acropolis. Just to one side the columns of the Parthenon, shrine of the Maiden, shone whitely.

The famous words of Pindar were as apt as when minted six centuries previously.

O glittering, violet-crowned, chanted in song,

Bulwark of Hellas, renowned Athens,

Citadel of the gods.

In 112 Hadrian made his way to Athens for an extended stay. This is his first recorded visit, although (as has been seen) it is possible that his father took him there when a young child. Also, he may have been in Athens a few years before, during the fallow period after his consulship. A man of some importance in the state, Hadrian doubtless journeyed in style with a considerable entourage; it was the done thing for elite wives to accompany husbands on their travels, so the little-loved Sabina was probably present.

Which of the two routes he took is uncertain. It is plausible that he chose the first, via Brundisium and Corinth. Although it entailed a good deal of walking or riding a mule or in a mule-drawn carriage and was slower and more tedious, it reduced the ever-present risk of shipwreck in a storm. En route, Hadrian was able to follow the example of many other Roman tourists and stop over at Nicopolis; this was the City of Victory, which Augustus founded near Actium after his victory at sea over Mark Antony and Cleopatra in 31 B.C.

The temptation was not so much Nicopolis itself, pleasant place though it was, as the fact that the philosopher Epictetus was living and lecturing there. We know that at some stage Hadrian became a friend and admirer and that he may have already met him in Rome. He would hardly have turned down the opportunity of an encounter.

At about this time an eager young man from Bithynia was studying under Epictetus, taking copious shorthand notes at his lectures. This was Lucius Flavius Arrianus Xenophon (Arrian in English), now in his mid-to late twenties. A capable and intelligent man, he had three heroes—the Greek author and adventurer Xenophon, whose name he took, most unusually, as a cognomen; Alexander the Great, about whom he wrote an influential biography; and Epictetus.

Deeply impressed by the philosopher’s thought, Arrian was aware that, like Socrates, the sage never wrote anything down, and decided to publish his lecture notes so that an accurate memory of his philosophy survived. From these an unmistakable theme emerges—a scorn for authority and, more particularly, that of the emperors. Although Hadrian’s name is not mentioned, a number of remarks in his lectures bear a certain aptness to the character of the imperial student.

At one point during a discussion in which Epictetus argues that everyone is a son of God, he remarks, “If the emperor adopts you, no one will be able to bear your conceit.” Later he inquires, “Shall kinship with the emperor or any of those who wield great power in Rome be sufficient to enable men to live securely, proof against contempt and in fear of nothing whatsoever?” Whom, we muse, did Epictetus know among Trajan’s very few politically important relatives, if not the man perhaps sitting in the lecture hall in front of him?

The philosopher pleaded for tolerance of those who chattered on about their war records in Dacia.

Some men … have excessively sharp tongues and say: “I cannot dine at this fellow’s house, when I have to put up with his telling every day how we fought in Moesia [Hadrian’s province, one recalls]. ‘I have told you, brother, how I climbed to the crest of the hill; well, now, I begin to be under siege again.’” But someone else says: “I would prefer to eat my dinner, and let him chatter on as he pleases.”

Epictetus concludes with his advice to those who cannot bear it: “Never forget that the dining room door stands open.”

It cannot be proved that the philosopher had Hadrian in mind when he made these good-humored jibes; but they do sketch a portrait of someone rather like him—bumptious, talkative, and a know-it-all.

What is more interesting is the fact that a man who had his eye on the throne should sit at the feet of a thinker who criticized the imperial system. Epictetus’ view was that the “power” of power was much exaggerated. In a brief dialogue between an imperial official called Maximus and himself, Epictetus pricks the balloon of self-aggrandizement.

M

AXIMUS:

I sit as a judge over Greeks.

E

PICTETUS

: But do you know how to be a judge? And what has given you this knowledge?

M

AXIMUS

: The emperor gave me my credentials …

E

PICTETUS:

And there is another question—that is, how did you come to be a judge? Whose hand did you kiss? In front of whose bedroom door did you sleep so as to be the first to say good morning? To whom did you send presents? …

M

AXIMUS:

Well, I can throw anyone I want into prison.

E

PICTETUS:

Just as you can throw a stone away.

M

AXIMUS

: And I can have anyone I want beaten to death with a club.

E

PICTETUS

: As you can a donkey. That is not governing men.

Govern us as rational beings by pointing out what is useful to us and we will follow you. Point out what is useless, and we will turn away from it.

Epictetus’ final remarks suggest that for him the ideal wielder of power was very much like a philosopher whose task was to guide human beings down the path of reason.

We can take it that Hadrian was aware of Epictetus’ political opinions. He may have attended a version of this lecture. Whether or not he agreed with everything he heard is immaterial; what matters is that Hadrian had an opportunity to meditate on the nature of government and to take seriously the concept of emperor as a philosopher-king.

After the short ride from Piraeus—or possibly walk, for he enjoyed exercise—Hadrian arrived at his destination. Once through the city gates, Hadrian found himself in a broad avenue, the Panathenaic Way; on either side were colonnades, with statues of famous men and women along their front, as the street passed through an industrial district, the Kerameikos, or Potters’ Quarter, and led into the Agora, or marketplace.

Originally a triangular square planted with plane trees, the Agora once had been bisected by a racetrack for athletes. For the rest of the year it had been populated with traders’ stalls. Here had been the beating heart of classical Athens. However, the Romans had arrived, with their passion for building. They constructed a new marketplace, the Roman Agora dedicated to Julius Caesar and Augustus, a large square courtyard surrounded by colonnades on all four sides, not dissimilar to a monastic cloister. And in the middle of the old Agora, Marcus Agrippa built a huge new multistory concert hall, which it completely dominated. It was a fine example of arrogance masked as generosity.

Hadrian was well aware that Athens had long lost its political importance, but it was a cultural center with a thriving intellectual life: a rough modern analogy would be Paris in the first half of the twentieth century. This was what appealed to him. Civic buildings also contained countless works of art. In the Propylaea, the grand (and still very beautiful) marble gateway up to the Acropolis, there was a picture galley. On every corner there were shrines, temples, statues, and altars. It was as if the city was a vast open-air museum celebrating the achievements of Greek civilization.

The rich and well connected did not expect to stay at the various inns and hostels that could be found in most cities. A local worthy—perhaps a friend or acquaintance—or government official would offer generous hospitality. The name of Hadrian’s host at Athens has not survived, but we can make a guess. One possibility is Gaius Julius Antiochus Epiphanes Philopappus. He was one of a breed of rootless multimillionaires in whom Greek, oriental, and Roman cultural attitudes mingled.

His name contains his history: “Gaius Julius” signifies Roman citizenship, but he was of Asiatic origin, being the grandson of Antiochus IV, the last king of Commagene, a region of ancient Armenia just to the east of Cilicia. Although one of the wealthiest of Rome’s tributary kings, Antiochus was not the most nimble of politicians. In 72 he wisely supported Vespasian when he made his bid for the purple and sent forces to help Titus during the siege of Jerusalem; but he was then found to be conspiring with Rome’s great enemy in the east, the Parthians.

The new emperor had no time for slippery loyalties and promptly deposed him. Antiochus withdrew to Sparta, once a great power and Athens’ rival but now a quiet tourist backwater. Then, presumably after mending some bridges with the Flavian regime, he settled in Rome, where he lived with his two sons and was generally regarded with great respect.

His grandson was evidently fond of him, for his cognomen Philopappus means “lover of his grandfather.” He spent most of his time in Athens, where he became an Athenian citizen and a member of the Besa deme, or district. A generous patron of the arts, he funded cultural and athletic events. Philopappus took care to keep his lines open to senior government officials; he became a Roman senator and was a suffect consul in 109.

This was a man who enjoyed living lavishly and prominently—as his other cognomen, Epiphanes, or “illustrious,” indicates. He became a celebrity in the modern sense of the word, famous for nothing in particular except for conspicuous expenditure. The Athenians nicknamed him King Philopappus. Hadrian became a good friend of his and Sabina made much of his sister, a poet and bluestocking, Balbilla. The siblings will have been of special interest to him, for magic had been a family tradition: two of their ancestors were celebrated astrologers, the onetime prefect of Egypt Tiberius Claudius Balbillus and his father, Thrasyllus of Mendes, who survived holding the dangerous post of official astrologer to the emperor Tiberius.

There had been no emergency—political, military, or personal—forcing Hadrian to take to sea during the perilous winter months, so we may assume that he traveled in late spring—say, from May onward. He was well received, for almost immediately the Athenians offered him citizenship, which he accepted without demur, and, as with Philopappus, made him a member of the Besa deme. They then awarded him their highest honor, appointing him archon, or chief magistrate: only a handful of leading Romans had been so distinguished, among them Domitian, who, with typical tactlessness, appointed himself by imperial fiat and held the post in absentia. The official year ran from summer to summer and Hadrian took office immediately.

The new archon was soon hard at work, helping to ensure that the Panathenaic Games of 112 were a success. Philopappus was doubtless on hand to offer support (we know he was interested, for at some stage in his career he was appointed agonothetes, or games producer). The games were held every four years in the year preceding an Olympiad, in the height of the summer. Both body and mind were tested to the extreme.

As well as athletic contests, competitors in poetry competitions spoke or chanted excerpts from the works of Homer. Musical contests—solo lyre and flute performances and singing to one’s own lyre or flute accompaniment—were held in one of the most curious of buildings. This was the Odeion, in the shadow of the Acropolis: a vast square structure with a roof supported by a forest of columns, it was a copy in stone and wood of the spectacular tent of the Persian king of kings, Xerxes, which he had had to abandon after his failed invasion of Greece in the early fifth century B.C.

Every year at the height of summer a great celebration, the Panathenaea, was staged in honor of the city’s tutelary goddess, Pallas Athene. Priestesses, official seamstresses, and four specially selected little girls made a new tunic, or peplos, to clothe an archaic statue of Athena, housed in the little temple on the Acropolis, the Erechtheum. A great procession gathered at the Dipylon Gate, as depicted in the Elgin or Parthenon Marbles. Charioteers, horsemen, musicians, elders, resident aliens, three sheep and a bull for sacrifice, and girls carrying bowls and jugs for libations walked through the Agora and up to the Acropolis, where the peplos was handed over. The brilliantly painted marble frieze high up on the outside walls of the temple’s sanctuary, or cella, showed the Olympian gods in benevolent attendance at the ceremony.

As archon, one of Hadrian’s first duties on taking office was to select two deputies and some administrators to plan the following March’s Great Dionysia. At this religious festival in honor of Dionysus, god of wine and ritual madness, patron of agriculture and theater, three days of drama were presented in the theater of Dionysus; built against the southern slopes of the Acropolis, this seated fifteen thousand to seventeen thousand spectators. Each day a playwright presented three tragedies, based on well-known legends, and a raucous farce, a so-called satyr play. Comedies and choric odes were also performed.

Originally all these were new works, but by Hadrian’s day audiences preferred revivals of masterpieces by authors such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Judges were elected by lot and awarded a prize of an ivy wreath to the producer of the best show, the choregos. Hadrian sat ex officio in the front row of the auditorium alongside the judges and other dignitaries.

If we may believe the Epitome de Caesaribus, he devoted every spare moment from his duties as archon to cultural pursuits (the author flatters, for Polycleitus and Euphranor were celebrated old masters).

He devoured the pursuits and customs of the Athenians, having mastered not merely rhetoric, but other disciplines too, the science of singing, of playing the harp, and of medicine: [he was] a musician, geometrician, painter, and a sculptor from bronze or marble who was next to Polycleitus and Euphranor [in artistry]. Indeed, like those things in a way, he, too, was refined, so that human affairs hardly ever seem to have experienced anything finer.

Now in his mid-thirties, Hadrian was in the prime of life. He was tall and very strongly built, but elegant in appearance, with carefully curled hair. According to Dio Cassius, he was “a pleasant man to meet and possessed a certain charm.”

His features were reasonably good-looking, with a strong nose, high cheeks, and puckered eyebrows. He looked about him with an alert, even suspicious gaze. Flatterers said that his eyes were “languishing, bright, piercing and full of light,” signs of a true Hellene and Ionian. One may suspect that this was exactly what Hadrian liked to hear (just as his revered Augustus prided himself on his clear, bright eyes). He had a way of compressing his mouth, with the lower lip projecting slightly forward. The overall impression he gave was of inquiry, decisiveness, and sharp, sometimes acid judgment. This was a self-confident man used to giving orders—but with few illusions that they would necessarily be carried out efficiently.

His face possessed one remarkable singularity. For centuries Romans of the ruling class had been clean-shaven (no painless task in the days before the invention of soap and tempered steel for razors)—that is, in civilian life, for they often let their beards grow when on military campaign, as the reliefs of Trajan’s Column clearly show. The fashion had been set at the beginning of the second century B.C. by Scipio Africanus, the charismatic young general who defeated Hannibal. The lower classes did not bother to follow suit. Romans had a way then as today of kissing each other socially, and Martial writes disgustedly of the “bristly farmer with a kiss like a billy-goat’s.” In the twilight of the Republic gilded young men sported goatees to irritate their elders; Cicero called them barbatuli (“beardy boys”), but the tradition of beardlessness persisted into the empire.

Hadrian decided to follow his own taste and grow a beard. The Historia Augusta claims that he wanted to cover some natural blemishes, but, if true, that will not have been his only motive. Doubtless he listened to Epictetus, who had something to say on the subject. He posed a question to his students: “Can anything be more useless than hairs on the chin?” and immediately replied to himself in the negative. Facial hair, he claimed, was nature’s sign for distinguishing men from women, and was more beautiful than a cock’s comb or a lion’s mane. “So we ought to preserve the signs which God has given. We ought not to throw them away. We ought not, so far as we can, confuse the sexes which have been distinguished in this way.”

By implication Epictetus was advising a Roman, not a Greek. This was because Greek adult males usually wore short, trimmed beards as a matter of course, and these were an easy means of ethnic identification. The new archon of Athens did not wish to appear as a smooth-skinned imperialist in a toga and, although we do not know when he gave up shaving, it is very plausible that he did so now—as a gesture of solidarity with the city that had given him so warm a welcome and as a visible sign of his Greekness.

These months in Athens were a high point in Hadrian’s life. He was a member of the Roman establishment and in no way did he resile from that; but, at least temporarily, he had become a leader of the culture he so greatly admired. He could imagine himself to be a true Hellene, an heir of Pericles and the great men of old.

After years of peace the thoughts of the optimus princeps were turning again to war. The enemy he had in mind was the Parthian empire. Onetime nomads from northeastern Iran, the Parthians defeated and expropriated the Seleucid empire, founded by Seleucus, one of Alexander the Great’s Macedonian officers. At its height their realm stretched from today’s Pakistan to the river Euphrates. Little is known in detail about them, for they left behind no written records, but they governed loosely, allowing a good degree of local autonomy to their vassal provinces. A coin issued by Chosroes, the present king, in about 110, hailed the ancestral founder of his dynasty as “Friend of the Greeks”; so it is evident that he had no wish to halt, reverse, or subvert the Hellenization of the Middle East.

The nobles were striking to look at. They always seemed to be on horseback, whether fighting or dining, traveling or relaxing. They wore long beards, used cosmetics, and elaborately styled their hair. Plutarch recalls how Roman soldiers were once thoroughly put out by the misleadingly effeminate appearance of an opposing Parthian commander with his “painted face and parted hair.” He was as fierce a fighter as they had ever met.

Although militarily they could be most effective, the Parthians were greatly weakened by their eccentric constitutional arrangements. The king of kings was an absolute ruler and had to be a member of the Arsacid clan; however, he was elected by two councils. One represented the nobility—in effect, the Arsacids and their cadet branches, in other words all his relatives—and the second was drawn from the Magi, or “wise men,” a priestly tribe responsible for religious and funerary arrangements. At any time, these committees could elect a new king. The succession was never undisputed and primogeniture often yielded to fratrigeniture, and a dispossessed elder son would contest his uncle’s throne.

It was hard to see, even at the time, why Trajan was meditating an expedition against the Parthians. He had demonstrated his soldierly prowess against the Dacians, but in that case had been responding to a real military threat. In general, he presented himself as a man of peace.

Arrian, a friend of Hadrian as we have seen and a competent public official and historian, was absolutely certain that Trajan, while mindful of the dignity of the empire, did all he could to avoid war with Parthia. Dio Cassius (albeit in a late summary) takes the opposite view: he is explicit that the emperor went to war on a pretext and that his true motive “was a desire to win glory.”

In the light of the fragmentary state of the surviving evidence, it is impossible to decide definitively between the two opinions, but there are enough clues to suggest that Dio was right.

In 112 the emperor celebrated fifteen years of power. On January 1 he entered on his sixth consulship and formally dedicated his magnificent new forum and basilica. Coins were issued featuring the emperor’s kindly wife, Plotina, and his much-loved sister, Marciana. For the first time each woman is named as Augusta, or “revered one.” Sadly, Marciana died in August; her brother arranged for her deification and promoted Matidia to Augusta. Sabina was now the grandaughter of a Diva and the daughter of an Augusta.

Festive coin types in the same mintage celebrate Trajan’s father, onetime holder of triumphal honors, ornamenta triumphalia, over the Parthians when he governed Syria, and deified by his son. Another shows Trajan himself with the curious legend “May fortune return him safely,” fort[una] red[ux]. This signified that the emperor was planning a profectio, an imperial expedition, of some kind; combined with a tribute to the last Roman to have beaten the Parthians, it could be interpeted by the Roman equivalent of Kremlinologists as a hint that battle was to recommence. Other coins of the period have a markedly martial flavor—with images of Mars, the god of war, of the emperor on horseback trampling on his fallen enemies, and of legionary eagles and standards.

The Historia Augusta remarks, but infuriatingly fails to date the event precisely, that Hadrian was appointed legatus to the emperor “at the time of the Parthian expedition.” Dio reports that he “had been assigned to Syria for the Parthian war.” This may mean that he traveled on from Athens sometime during 113 to Syria, the province that shares a frontier with the Parthian empire, and began to assemble an invasion army. In that case it would seem likely that he received the emperor’s confidential instructions before setting off for Greece in early 112, and made preliminary preparations during his stay there.

So such particular evidence as there is suggests a long-planned intention only awaiting an opportunity. More generally, though, there was a traditional pattern in the relations between the two powers. The Parthians were usually too preoccupied with their internecine court politics to plot aggressive war; and their statesmen must have recognized that their system of governance would not readily permit them to manage a larger territory. However, from the perspective of a Roman general ambitious for glory (for example, Crassus, Julius Caesar, and Mark Antony), they were a tempting if often indigestible prey. It is reasonable to regard Trajan as the inheritor of this tradition.

The longed-for casus belli eventually presented itself in Armenia, a bone of contention for more than a century. Both parties saw the kingdom as falling within their legitimate sphere of interest. Long ago Augustus had negotiated a face-saving arrangement, confirmed by Nero: the Parthians nominated a Parthian prince to the throne of Armenia, but the Romans confirmed the choice and conducted a coronation in Rome. By and large this double-lock system had assured an uneasy but durable stalemate.

For some years, though, Parthia had been divided by two rival kings. During the second half of 113, the leading contender for the throne, Chosroes, self-confidently deposed the Armenian ruler, a nephew of his, and replaced him with the king’s older brother, a certain Parthamasiris. Nothing particularly unusual here—except that Chosroes foolishly failed to consult Trajan. This certainly meant a loss of face for Rome, but no fundamental imperial interest was at risk. A rational response would have been to follow in Augustus’ footsteps and send out a high official (say, Hadrian) to negotiate an acceptable settlement.

Trajan made it clear, though, that negotiation was the last thing on his mind. Public opinion was enthusiastically behind him and, amici cheering crowds, he set out from Rome for the east, accompanied (according to a late source) by a “large force of soldiers and senators.” He probably chose for his departure the date of his adoption by Nerva, October 25. Chosroes panicked and sent an embassy, which met the emperor at Athens; it presented gifts and begged Trajan not to make war on him. Trying to make up for his earlier mistake, the king of kings asked that Armenia be given to Parthamasiris and requested that Rome send him the royal diadem as a token of endorsement. He had deposed his nephew, he claimed, for being “satisfactory neither to the Romans nor to the Parthians.”

Trajan was unrelenting. He refused to accept the gifts and did not respond to Chosroes’ requests, either orally or in writing. He merely stated, forbiddingly: “Friendship is decided by actions and not by words. When I have reached Syria, I will do everything that is proper.”

So what were Trajan’s true motives? What did he have in mind if not in word? We can only speculate, but one thing is certain—he was obedient to the long-established rhetoric of imperial expansion. As he was an admirer of Alexander the Great, an invasion of Parthia would be a happy echo for him of the Macedonian king’s conquests. Now in his mid-fifties, this was Trajan’s last chance to live a dream of youthful adventure.

Hadrian waited in Antioch (today’s Antakya), then capital of Syria, for Trajan to take command of the legions he had assembled. Founded by Seleucus in the fourth century B.C., the city was squeezed in between the river Orontes (the modern Asi or Nehri) to the west and Mount Silpius to the east. It was laid out in imitation of the grid plan of Alexandria; two long colonnaded streets met in the center. With a population of about half a million, Antioch was the empire’s third largest city after Rome and Alexandria.

About four miles away was Daphne, a large paradeisos, or walled park around a gorge with groves of laurel and cypress. There were formal gardens and cascades. A spring called the Castalian fount was believed to have prophetic properties; it was perhaps on this occasion that the superstitious Hadrian consulted it and was informed that he was to become emperor.

However, Daphne had a reputation less for religious observance than as a haunt for sexual promiscuity, as more generally did Antioch itself. This was the city that inspired the stereotype of the slippery, treacherous, and untrustworthy Asiatic—perhaps the closest Romans came to anything approaching contemporary racism. But it was also nicknamed the “Athens of the East” and its great wealth attracted artists, philosophers, poets, and orators from across the Mediterranean, and financed a luxurious and permissive lifestyle. Although he was busy, Antioch would have been an entertaining billet for a man like Hadrian, with an inquisitive mind and an openness to experience.

Toward the end of December he greeted the emperor when he disembarked at Antioch’s port, Seleucia Pieria (near today’s Samandağ). They made their way at once to the neighboring Mount Casius (Jebel Akra) for a religious ceremony at a temple of Zeus Casius. At nearly six thousand feet, this was the highest landmark in northern Syria, with views of Cyprus and the Taurus range in Cilicia.

The imperial pair presented an array of gifts for the god; more was promised if the Romans were victorious in the impending campaign. Hadrian composed a short poem in Greek (of course) elegiac couplets for the occasion.

To Zeus Kasios has Trajan, son of Aeneas, dedicated this gift,

the ruler of men to the ruler of the immortals:

two artistically wrought cups and from a large ox

the horn adorned with all-gleaming gold,

chosen from his former spoils when, unyielding,

he has wasted the Getae with his spear.

But you, lord of the dark clouds, grant him the power

gloriously to complete this Achaemenian conflict,

so that your heart may be twice warmed by the sight

of two spoils, those of the Getae and those of the Arsacids.

Aeneas was the prince who escaped the blazing ruins of Troy and settled in Italy, and whose descendants founded Rome; so Trajan is represented as the millennial inheritor of this great tradition. The Achaemenids (literally the name of the dynasty Alexander overthrew) and the Getae were poetic terms for the Parthians and the Dacians. Hadrian was associating past victories with an assured future one. But would the god smile on the enterprise?

XIII

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

The emperor was in no hurry. He proceeded, by way of the pleasant gardens at Daphne, to Antioch, where he passed the winter of 113. His first destination was Armenia, the ostensible cause of the war, and he was obliged to wait until the winter snows had melted from the passes leading into that remote and high kingdom.

Trajan had promoted Hadrian to something like a modern chief of the general staff and so given him a key role in the management of the Parthian expedition. His ambivalent feelings had apparently firmed into wholehearted approval. Hadrian was for the moment the second man in the empire. However, despite the fact that he was well qualified for the purple, his position remained insecure. Despite his six decades, the emperor still showed no interest in securing the succession.

How are we to explain what looks like a dereliction of duty on the part of a levelheaded ruler? Perhaps Trajan obstinately refused to acknowledge the approach of old age, part of the same mind-set that encouraged him to emulate the ever-youthful Alexander. But just as powerful a factor may have been disagreements at court. Among the emperor’s comites opinions were sharply divided. The Historia Augusta has a passage on the subject, typically condensed to the point of obscurity:

At this same time [Hadrian] enjoyed … the friendship of Quintus Sosius Senecio, Marcus Aemilius Papus, and Aulus Platorius Nepos, both of the senatorial order, and also of Publius Acilius Attianus, his former guardian, of Livianus, and of Turbo, all of equestrian rank.

These men were the leaders of a meritocracy, for they had all reached the top through talent and endurance. Senecio held high command in Dacia and had twice been consul; a cultivated man, he was a friend of Pliny, who gossiped to him about the difficulty of getting audiences for literary readings, and of Plutarch. Hadrian became a friend of his, probably as early as 101, at the beginning of his career. Papus and Platorius Nepos had Spanish connections and were members of the Baetican “mafia,” with villas in and around Tibur. We have already met the now aging Attianus, when he and Trajan took responsibility for the child Hadrian when he was orphaned nearly three decades previously. He was now praetorian prefect and, as cocommander of the Guard, a guarantor of the stability of the regime. Titus Claudius Livianus had been one of his predecessors as prefect, and was perhaps of special interest to Hadrian as the owner of twin boys celebrated for their beauty.

Turbo we have also already met: he had been a centurion at Aquincum, where he probably first got to know the youthful Hadrian and join his circle, and rose swiftly from the ranks; he was now admiral of the fleet at Misenum (modern Miseno, at the northwestern end of the Bay of Naples). He was Hadrian’s kind of soldier, hardworking and without airs and graces. Dio Cassius writes of him: “He displayed neither effeminacy nor haughtiness in anything he did, but lived like an ordinary person.” (The fact that his character was the complete opposite of the not-long-dead Licinius Sura’s illustrates the wide range of Hadrian’s affections.)

On the debit side, the Historia Augusta pointed to Aulus Cornelius Palma and Lucius Publilius Celsus, “always his enemies.” Palma was a younger friend of Trajan; trusted and trustworthy, he had twice been consul, and in 105 or 106 he had conquered the Nabataean Arabs, hardy nomads on the southern border of Syria who traded in frankincense and myrrh, and brought them within the empire. Celsus was consul for the second time in 113 and stood high in Trajan’s favor. According to Dio, he and a colleague were awarded the signal distinction of public statues. In the shadows, other critics of Hadrian are to be suspected, among them his elderly brother-in-law, Servianus.

Grounds for the distrust of Hadrian are hard to determine. He was obviously competent and intelligent, and no reports have come down to us of serious disloyalty to Trajan. History shows that factions tend to gather around close relatives of a monarch and criticize official policy. So one might speculate that Hadrian opposed the Parthian war, but if he did he surely held his tongue. Otherwise, as he played a large part in preparing the expedition and was working closely with the emperor, he would have been open to charges of subversion or hypocrisy.

There may have been objections to Hadrian’s personality. A picture does emerge of a hardworking but cocksure man—a combination often irritating to colleagues. Not suffering fools gladly is insufferable to the fools.

Whatever the explanation, Trajan would have been rational to conclude that the eve of a major expedition was the wrong moment to alienate one side or the other by coming to a firm decision about his former ward. The question of the succession would have to wait.

In the spring Trajan marched with his army northward from Antioch to the town of Satala in Lesser Armenia, on the Roman bank of the river Euphrates. It was a long trudge—some 475 miles—across awkward terrain, and the Romans probably arrived toward the end of May. The advance precipitated a line of embassies from client kings and minor rulers, all wishing to make their peace with the emperor. One who stayed away was Abgarus, king of Osrhoene, a tiny kingdom on the far side of the Euphrates that he had purchased from the king of kings. “Afraid of Trajan and the Parthians alike,” he sent gifts and kind words, but not himself.

At Satala the seven eastern legions, gathered by Hadrian, joined others dispatched from the Danube provinces (a risky step, one might have thought, to denude an unsettled region of its troops). Some of them were not at full strength, but Trajan now commanded the equivalent of eight full legions with the same number of auxiliaries—in other words, about eighty thousand men.

He also deployed his towering prestige. He marched into Armenia and then, before an arrow had been released or a spear cast, paused at a place called Elegeia. Here he staged a splendid ceremony—like the durbars of the British Raj—at which local satraps and princes came to meet him and offer their fealty. One of them presented Hadrian with a horse that had been trained to prostrate itself as if it were a subject in the presence of an eastern monarch. It knelt down on its forelegs and placed its head beneath the feet of anyone who stood by it.

The culminating event saw the arrival of the Parthian pretender, Parthamasiris. This should have been a significant propaganda coup, but it went badly, and mysteriously, wrong.

The emperor sat on a tribunal set up in the Roman camp and was forced to wait for his visitor. In a surprising breach of protocol, Parthamasiris turned up late, pleading as excuse the need to evade roaming supporters of his deposed rival, Exedares. He laid his diadem before Trajan, expecting to receive it back. The soldiers shouted in delight at this “victory.” But the emperor refused to crown Parthamasiris, who protested loudly. Trajan replied that he would surrender Armenia to no one, and declared that it was now a Roman province. He gave Parthamasiris permission to leave.

This is a very odd incident. Parthamasiris had been in communication with Trajan and presumably agreed terms for the encounter in advance. He was to be recognized as king of Armenia provided that he accepted Rome’s right of confirmation and coronation. Are we to suppose that events got out of hand by some mischance—or that Trajan had decided in advance to break the negotiated deal and trick Parthamasiris out of his throne? The accounts we have seem to imply confusion rather than conspiracy, except that it is unlikely that Trajan would announce out of the blue the annexation of Armenia. This was a strategic decision of some importance, and the humiliation of Parthamasiris was a striking means of dramatizing it. The Romans were well aware of the propaganda opportunity, as shown by several coin issues that depict the rex Parthus as a supplicant in front of Trajan.

But why let him leave the Roman camp? Surely the prince would be dangerous if set at large? Indeed. The Romans had thought of that. Parthamasiris and his entourage were given a cavalry escort to see them on their way, presumably to Parthia. Soon news arrived of the prince’s death; apparently he had been cut down while trying to escape his guard—an explanation deployed by ruthless captors throughout the ages.

Over the centuries Rome placed great weight on honest and straightforward dealing; treaties were sacred. The episode damaged the good name of the optimus princeps. He must have known it would do so, and we can only assume that Parthamasiris could call on very powerful support in Armenia for it to be worth Rome’s while to tolerate the moral cost of removing him.

Armenia was soon reduced. Various commanders, among them Lusius Quietus, the Moorish chieftain with his fierce horsemen, were dispatched to various parts of the kingdom to subdue resistance. The fighting seems to have gone on into the winter, for there are reports of soldiers making themselves snowshoes. But victory was complete, and previously hesitant local kings decided it was time to join the winning side.

Among them was Abgarus, who had the luck to have an extremely good-looking son, a certain Arbandes, who wore gold earrings and caught the emperor’s roving eye. Thanks in part to the young man’s intercession, his father’s early reluctance to meet the emperor was pardoned. Dio Cassius remarks that the king “became Trajan’s friend and entertained him at a banquet. During the meal he brought in his boy to perform some barbaric dance or other.” History fails to record how the evening concluded.

It would have been difficult to retain control of Armenia without annexing a large slice of the Parthian empire to its south, Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq), the fertile land between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris. That was to be the business of next year’s campaign.

Entry into Parthian territory in 115 was an event of historic proportions, and Trajan led his troops in the field. Despite his age he made a point, as he always had done, of marching on foot with the rank and file, fording rivers with them and so forth. According to Dio, he paid special attention to training. “Sometimes he even made his scouts circulate false reports, so that the soldiers might at one and the same time practice military maneuvers and become fearless and ready for any dangers.”

The campaign went well, and it appears that Mesopotamia was entrapped in a pincer movement with Lusius Quietus moving into eastern and Trajan into western Mesopotamia (taking care to march around the lovely Arbandes’ Osrhoene).

The emperor returned to Antioch for the winter, and before the end of the year Trajan sent dispatches to Rome—a “laureled letter” betokening victory. He probably announced the creation of Armenia and Mesopotamia as two new Roman provinces. The Senate received the news on February 21 to loud acclaim. It awarded Trajan the title of Parthicus, despite the fact that much of the Parthian empire remained to conquer.

Meanwhile, the emperor had a narrow escape from death. Early one morning in January a severe earthquake occurred, with its epicenter near the city. The emperor’s presence had attracted large numbers of soldiers, officials, visiting embassies, and tourists, so the loss of life was all the greater. Many people were trapped beneath collapsed buildings, “able neither to live any longer nor to find an immediate death.” Two of the very few to be pulled out of the debris some days later were a mother and child; she had survived by feeding both herself and her baby with her own milk. One of the consuls for 115, Marcus Vergilianus Pedo, lost his life—and Trajan was lucky to have saved his by jumping out of a window.

The disaster did not materially impede the course of the war. With the beginning of spring the emperor “hurried” back into enemy territory. Settling the Armenian quarrel may have been the original war aim, but now he was determined, as one suspects he had been from the beginning, on the overthrow of the Parthian empire. He built a fleet of fifty river vessels on the Euphrates and marched alongside it down into the Parthian heartland. Meanwhile other forces followed the Tigris south; some of them passed through Gaugamela, where Alexander had scored the culminating victory over Darius III that had made him master of the Persian empire and its new, foreign king of kings. To Trajan’s mind, history was ready to repeat itself.

By the summer he arrived at Seleucia, a city opposite the Parthians’ winter capital, Ctesiphon, which stood on the far or eastern bank of the Tigris. At this point the two rivers flow within twenty miles of each other and the fleet was dragged overland from the Euphrates to the Tigris. The Romans entered Ctesiphon without encountering any resistance and found it empty.

It has been supposed that the Parthians had fled, but as the Romans arrived in the summer it was unsurprising that the place was deserted. Chosroes and his court were presumably to be found at their summer capital, Ecbatana, in the Zagros Mountains, where the air was cooler. However, the king had evidently decided against challenging the Romans in the field: according to Dio Cassius, civil strife had removed Parthia’s capacity to the resist the invader.

For Trajan the moment was sweet. He now deserved the cognomen Parthicus, and new coins showed a military trophy (enemy shields and weapons fixed on a pole) with two captives and the legend Parthia capta, “Parthia taken.” He busied himself with the details of administration—for example, raising the ferry charges across the Tigris and the Euphrates for camels and horses. He made arrangements to create a third new province, Assyria.

And then, a vacation, sailing down the Tigris with his river ships. According to Arrian,

four of them carried the royal flags and they led the way for the flagship furnished with long planks of wood. This ship was about the length of a trireme [about 130 feet], its width and depth those of a merchantman, like the largest Nikomedian or Egyptian vessel, and it gave the emperor satisfactory living quarters. It displayed stem-post ornaments [of gold] and on top of the sail the emperor’s name was inscribed along with the rest of his imperial titles in gold letters.

Traveling downriver, the emperor continued the business of government, holding conferences on board the flagship. When navigating around an island in the Tigris delta, he was nearly sunk by a combination of storm and tide, but eventually reached the Persian Gulf at a place called Charax (today’s Basra). He saw a ship sailing to India and said wistfully: “I would certainly have crossed over to the Indians, too, if I were still young.” He counted Alexander, who reached the subcontinent, a lucky man.

The emperor built a statue of himself signaling the limit of his advance (it was still standing in 659) and lost no opportunity to send another laureled letter to Rome. Public opinion was astounded by the demolition of the Parthian empire and the stunned Senate voted him many honors, among them the privilege of holding triumphs over as many peoples as he pleased. The senators explained, helplessly:

Because of the large number of peoples about whom you are constantly writing to us, we are unable in some cases to follow you intelligently, or even to use their names correctly.

If ever a mission had been accomplished, this was the occasion.

The Jews had never forgotten the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of Titus. Scattered throughout the eastern Mediterranean, large settlements flourished alongside their Greek-speaking neighbors. Unhappily, they seldom got on with them well and there was regular intercommunal strife, for which both sides bore a fair share of the blame.

Many Jews remained bitterly opposed to their Roman oppressors and despised the pagan environment in which they lived. They especially disliked the fiscus judaicus, which Titus had imposed after the bloody end of the siege of Jerusalem in 70. Nerva had restricted its application to religious Jews, but it still rankled.

In 115 the Jews in Cyrene revolted and by the next year the insurrection had spread to Alexandria, where about 150,000 Jews lived, and to the island of Cyprus. The match that lit the fire is uncertain; it is not inconceivable that the Parthians incited the Jews to disrupt the Romans’ supply chain to the legions in the east, but anti-Roman nationalism may be a sufficient explanation. Messianic fervor could also have played a part, for the Jewish leader in Libya, one Lukuas, was elected king by his coreligionists.

Dio Cassius paints a picture of unrelieved brutality. The Jews, he claimed,

would eat the flesh of their victims, make belts for themselves of their entrails, anoint themselves with their blood and wear their skins for clothing. Many they sawed in two, from the head downward; others they gave to wild beasts [in the arena] and still others they forced to fight as gladiators.

We do not need to give much credit to these anti-Semitic fantasies, but there is no doubt that ordinary people went in fear of their lives, in the countryside as well as in the towns, as papyri retrieved from desert sands testify. A glum rural correspondent noted: “The one hope and remaining expectation was the attack from our village against the unholy Jews—the opposite of which has now happened. For on the twentieth [?] we engaged them and were defeated, although many of them were killed.” Another strategos apologized to the prefect of Egypt for being away from his post: “Not only because of my long absence do my affairs begin to be in complete disorder, but also, because of the unholy Jews’ attack, just about everything I have in the villages of Hermopolis and in the metropolis needs repair from me.”

That the Jews went on the rampage is beyond doubt; but their objective is mysterious. Could they seriously have hoped to drive the Roman occupiers out, or permanently suppress the indigenous populations among which they lived? We can only suppose that this was a spontaneous uprising. There was no strategic plan, simply a passionate thirst for revenge against an unjust world. In Cyrene many thousands of gentiles were massacred and temples destroyed. The death toll was also high in Cyprus, and the important town of Salamis razed. There was still a sizable Jewish community in Mesopotamia; Trajan suspected their loyalty and ordered his enforcer Lusius Quietus to “clean them out” of the province. Quietus achieved this by the straightforward means of a massacre.

Some legions were withdrawn from Mesopotamia under the able Quintus Marcius Turbo to confront the emergency and support the civilian power. The affected territories were pacified with some difficulty and the utmost ferocity. In Alexandria the Romans had to fight a pitched battle. The troubles were not over until 117. The impact on the Jewish diaspora was catastrophic. Jews were banished from Cyprus (a measure still in force a century later); they also appear to have vanished from the Egyptian and Cyrenian countrysides, and largely from Alexandria.

So far as Trajan was concerned, the Jewish rebellion was bad enough, but worse was to come. On his arrival at Babylon he learned that an insurgency had broken out in all the territories he had conquered. Legions were sent in every direction to meet the crisis. There were three theaters—Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Babylonia. The Armenians had found a replacement for Parthamasiris, another nephew of the king of kings, and although he lost his life in battle with the Romans, his son picked up the baton—to good effect. From a position of military strength, he asked the Roman commander for an armistice, and it was given. Subsequently, Trajan granted him a part of Armenia in return for a peace agreement. It is all too evident that the emperor had overextended himself and did not have the forces to retain his easy conquests.

Another general was defeated and killed in Mesopotamia, but (as well as killing Jews) Lusius Quietus recaptured a number of cities in the province, including the capital of Osrhoene (for Abgarus and his charming son had turned coat).

Finally, down in the south the thriving metropolis of Seleucia, on the Mesopotamian side of the Tigris, was sacked and the Romans, led in person by Trajan, won a great battle outside Ctesiphon. Nonetheless, the emperor could recognize reality. For the time being at least, he decided to cut his losses and pull back from the new provinces, spinning a humbling defeat into victory.

In 117, the Romans managed to find yet another member of the Arsacid clan, a certain Parthemaspates, and invited him to accept the Parthian throne. It took a bribe for him to accept this dangerous promotion. From a high platform erected on a plain not far from the Parthian winter capital, the emperor addressed a large assembly of Romans and Parthians and described “in grandiloquent language” all that he had achieved. The prince prostrated himself before Trajan, who placed the royal diadem on his head.

A coin of the day shows the emperor crowning Parthemaspates while a personification of Parthia kneels beside them. The legend reads proudly rex Parthis datus, “a king is given to the Parthians.” A more honest assessment of the situation was given in a letter Trajan wrote to the Senate.

So great and so boundless is this land and so immeasurable the distances that separate it from Rome that we do not have the reach to administer it, but let us present them with a king subject to the power of the Romans.

An attempt was made to rescue something from the debacle. If Rome was ever to project its power again beyond the Tigris, it was essential to recover the citadel of Hatra, which controlled a strategic road leading east to Babylon. Trajan placed himself in charge of the siege. It was a hard place to capture, for there were running springs inside its walls but little water in the surrounding desert.

The emperor was on his horse watching a failed cavalry attack and, although he had removed his imperial uniform, was recognized because of his “majestic gray head.” An archer shot at him and killed a cavalryman in his escort. The weather was hot and wet, with rain, hail, and thunder. Whenever the soldiers ate, flies settled on their food and drink. Hatra refused to fall. Eventually Trajan lost heart and left. A little later he began to feel ill.

A bronze bust of the emperor, beautifully preserved, used to hang on a wall in the public baths in Ankyra (today’s Ankara). It was made about this time by a fine and candid sculptor who, in place of the haughty, fleshy features of the usual official portraits, reveals a lined, worn face—the very image of disappointment. The adventure was over.

XIV

THE AFFAIR OF THE FOUR EX-CONSULS

From today’s distant standpoint, Hadrian vanishes from sight during the Parthian war. He is not listed as an army commander, though presumably he accompanied Trajan on campaign and was responsible for some unglamorous but essential duty, such as the maintenance of almost impossibly long supply lines through inhospitable country. Dio Cassius records him at this time as being the emperor’s companion, comes Augusti, “sharing his daily life”; but that is all we are told. Then, suddenly, he is back, center stage.

More bad news arrived at the depressed imperial headquarters. Serious disorder had broken out in the Danube provinces, from which substantial forces had been incautiously borrowed. The eastern expedition was threatening to loosen the bonds that held the empire together. Trajan appointed one of his best generals, Gaius Julius Quadratus Bassus, to restore order. An imperial administrator promoted on merit, he was a Galatian and related to one of those onetime royal families who (like Philopappus in Athens) had Romanized themselves when their kingdoms had been annexed and made provinces. He knew Dacia very well, for he had fought successfully in the Dacian wars.

At the time Bassus was governor of Syria. This was a frontline position in light of the insurgency and the more or less simultaneous Jewish revolt, and a competent successor was required. Trajan selected Hadrian. For the first time since the consulship, he was being given a proper job where he could display his talents for all to see.

This was not all. Hadrian was promised the consulship for 118. The story went the rounds that Plotina used her influence with the emperor to win him the appointment. According to the Historia Augusta, Hadrian was no novice himself in the dark art of palace politics. Well known for his promiscuity, he had no qualms in deploying his sexuality to secure advancement.

Widespread rumor asserted that he had bribed Trajan’s freedmen, had cultivated his boy favorites and had frequent sexual relations with them during the periods when he was an inner member of the court.

It looked very much as if the succession to Trajan, if he were to die now, was settled. Unsurprisingly, this stirred Hadrian’s critics into action. Although we have no details, his enemies at court, Palma and Celsus, came under suspicion of planning a coup d’état and fell from grace. Hadrian’s position was further strengthened.

The emperor’s illness worsened. He was intending a fresh attack on Mesopotamia, but he was obliged to leave the front and withdraw to Antioch. Within the constraints of medical knowledge in the classical world, or (more accurately) ignorance, Dio Cassius gives a good description of Trajan’s symptoms:

The blood, which descends every year into the lower parts of the body, was in his case checked in its flow. He had also suffered a stroke, so that a portion of his body was paralyzed, and he was dropsical all over.

In modern terms, Trajan was suffering from peripheral edema, or water in tissues, and hemostasis in his legs, or halting of the blood flow. The cause of these symptoms, and of the stroke, appears to have been congestive heart failure, possibly caused by high blood pressure. He may have been genetically predisposed to the disease, but the stresses and strains of campaigning and his insistence on sharing the privations of his men must also have taken their toll. The prognosis was poor, as will have been apparent to anyone with access to the emperor.

Trajan was of a different opinion; he was sure, however unreasonably, that he had been poisoned. If so, could he guess by whom? If he considered the history of his assassinated predecessors, the only possible conclusion was that their deaths were inside jobs. The killers were family members, servants, or guards. Claudius, it was said, received poisoned mushrooms at the hands of his wife; and Domitian’s wife had joined the conspiracy against her husband. So the fact of the emperor’s suspicions may mean that he had begun to distrust his household, perhaps even the faithful Plotina.

The decision was taken for the emperor to return to Rome. If he were to die in Antioch, he would be the first emperor to do so outside Italy, and Trajan or his advisers may have sought to avoid this luckless eventuality. In any event, his condition deteriorated further, and after two or three days at sea the imperial party put in at the port of Selinus on the Cilician coast, once the haunt of pirates.

Trajan’s life was approaching its end. It was said that he intended to send a list of likely candidates to the Senate and ask them to choose a new emperor. Perhaps an undated anecdote of Dio Cassius’ took place in these days. Apparently Trajan at dinner asked his guests to name ten men who were capable of being sole ruler; after a moment’s pause, he corrected himself. “I mean nine, for I have one name already—Servianus.”

Whatever the truth of this, his sickness overcame him and he was no longer able to conduct public business. An attack of diarrhea, perhaps an infection caught on campaign, finally killed the emperor. Something had to be done. Plotina—aided and abetted by the city prefect, Attianus, and (we may suppose) the other Augusta, Matidia, made sure that an heir was produced before the death was announced. Dio writes:

My father, Apronianus, who was governor of Cilicia, had ascertained accurately the whole story, and he used to relate the various incidents, in particular stating that the death of Trajan was concealed for several days in order that Hadrian’s adoption might be announced first.

This was shown also by Trajan’s letters to the senate, for they were signed, not by him, but by Plotina, although she had not done this in any previous instance.

The empress went further, said the rumormongers. In a darkened bedroom, an impostor stood in for the lifeless Trajan and whispered commands in a tired voice for the adoption of Hadrian.

Whether or not Trajan himself agreed to the succession of Hadrian, it was essential that news of the decision be sent to Rome with all possible speed. For the sake of appearances, there should be as long a delay as possible before the emperor’s demise was announced. Arrangements were made for the Rome mint to issue coinage celebrating the adoption, for dissemination throughout the empire. A gold piece showed Trajan Augustus wearing a laurel wreath on one side and Hadrian, also laureled, on the other, with the inscription Hadriano Traiano Caesari, or “Hadrian, son of Trajan Caesar.” This was the first time the cognomina “Augustus” and “Caesar” were separated, with the former signifying the emperor and the latter the publicly announced heir and junior partner in government, as was to be the custom during the rest of the history of the empire.

On August 9 the beneficiary of this scheming, waiting impotently in Antioch, received his letter of adoption. If it is true that Trajan was already dead, he was surely told that as well. A few more days of patience were required. On the night of August 11 he experienced a portent. He climbed Mount Casius in order to see the sunrise (a very Hadrianic project, for most Romans were far too practical to waste energy on a fine view). A storm struck as Hadrian was preparing a sacrifice and lightning flashed down, striking both the victim and an attendant but leaving Hadrian unharmed and, it is reported, unfrightened. The event signified that he was serenely ready for his great promotion, and at last, on the following day, the official announcement of the end of the reign reached him. The little boy from Baetica, the Graeculus, had at last attained the purple. He had had to wait a long time. The new emperor was forty-one years old.

A sad, strange footnote to the intrigues at Selinus has been discovered in modern times. It is the gravestone of a certain Marcus Ulpius Phaedimus, which reads:

To [the memory of] Marcus Ulpius Phaedimus, imperial freedman, sommelier and head butler of the deified Trajan; chief

lictor

[official attendant of senior Roman officeholders] and secretary for grants and promotions. He lived for twenty-eight years and died at Selinus on August 12 in the consulships of Niger and Apronianus [117: this Apronianus was not connected with Dio]. His remains were removed [to Rome, where the gravestone was found] by permission of the College of Pontiffs after an atonement sacrifice

[piaculo]

had been made in the consulships of Catullinus and Aper [130].

Much can be deduced from this text, but the heart of a mystery remains. From our knowledge of Trajan’s tastes, we can guess that Phaedimus, originally a slave, was an attractive young man. He was certainly an important one, for his duties gave him easy access to the emperor’s person.

Two questions arise. Is it not a curious coincidence that Phaedimus died on the very day that Hadrian received the announcement of Trajan’s death? And why did it take twelve years before his body was returned to Rome?

If the immediate cause of Trajan’s demise (compounding his heart condition) was an infection contracted out east, then perhaps Phaedimus fell victim to it too, alongside his master. Conceivably (but certainly no more) he killed himself from grief. However, the delay in removing his remains is strange.

The only rational explanation is that some scandal attached to the dead man’s name, for which a discreet silence, a forgetting, was the right response. So the trail leads to Attianus and Plotina. If there was truth in the rumor of subterfuges, a loyal Phaedimus may have known too much, seen too much to permit his survival. Liquidated to protect Plotina’s credibility, the sooner he, and even his very existence, was forgotten, the better.

Hadrian needed to take swift, firm action, or other governors with armies under their command would themselves be tempted to bid for the purple. The memory of the Year of the Four Emperors was still green. He presented himself to his legions, who hailed him as emperor without demur. Hadrian was careful to be generous and gave the men—and doubtless the rest of the army throughout the empire—a “double donative,” or bonus.

The Senate needed delicate handling, for it treasured its constitutional right to approve the appointment of a new head of state. Hadrian drafted a polite, carefully worded letter in which he sought divine honors for Trajan. He apologized that he had not left the Senate the opportunity to decide on his accession. He explained: “The unseemly haste of the troops in acclaiming me emperor was due to the belief that the state could not be without an emperor.”

The gesture seems to have been appreciated. He received the Senate’s reply a few weeks later, in September. They had voted unanimously to deify the optimus princeps and added numerous other honors. So far as Hadrian was concerned, they offered him the high title of pater patriae, father of the people. He declined, taking Augustus’ view that this was one honor that had to be earned; he would defer acceptance until he had some real achievements to his credit.

He was also awarded a Triumph—to mark Trajan’s victories. He declined the offer, but because the pretense of success had to be preserved, Hadrian authorized one for the late princeps. Instead of the man himself, an effigy would, unusually, preside over the celebrations and ride in the triumphal chariot.

Coins were quickly issued to disseminate an image of benevolent continuity. One gold piece showed Trajan handing a globe to Hadrian, signifying the transfer of the rulership of the world. In another appears the image of the phoenix, the wonder bird of Egyptian legend. When it dies it burns itself on a pyre and from its ashes its successor arises, which then buries its parent’s remains. The phoenix was an image of continual renewal—and Hadrian the new link in an eternal chain. A third coin from early in the reign reprises the phoenix theme, adding the more ambitious claim that the “Golden Age” had returned.

The dowager empress and Hadrian’s mother-in-law, Matidia, received a due reward in the coinage; they share a splendidly preserved aureus (in the British Museum’s collection) in which a bust of Plotina is partnered by one of Matidia. The message was clear: Trajan’s women were going to remain key members of the imperial household.

Perhaps the most remarkable is a coin with two obverses—that is, one side carries a head of Trajan and the other of Hadrian, both laureled. What was unprecedented was the latter’s short-cut beard. Those who met him from day to day were familiar with this artful innovation; as he well knew, in civilian dress it made him look like a Greek, and when wearing armor, like a down-to-earth soldier. Until his accession, emperors’ faces, whether in statuary or on coins, had been clean-shaven. Now the fashion changed: men in every corner of the empire looked at their money and discarded their razors.