Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

The elderly Attianus was fiercely protective of his onetime ward and wrote to him from Selinus warning of enemies who would do their best to ensure that the new reign was stillborn. In its abbreviating manner, the Historia Augusta provides a less-than-helpful précis:

[He] advised him by letter in the first few days of his rule to put to death [Quintus] Baebius Macer, the prefect of the city, in case he opposed his elevation to power, also [Manius] Laberius Maximus, then in exile on an island under suspicion of designs on the throne, and likewise [Caius Calpurnius] Crassus Frugi [Licinianus].

Laberius carried substantial political weight. A senior figure, he made his name under Domitian and had distinguished himself in Trajan’s Dacian wars. He was that increasingly rare thing in a multicultural court, an Italian, and more than that—a true Latin from Lanuvium, an ancient city near Rome in the Alban Hills. Nothing is known of his plotting, but he may have been implicated in the disgraces of Palma and Celsus. Also a banished man, Crassus labored under the dangerous disadvantage of an ancient aristocratic name. He appears to have been a serial conspirator, against Nerva as well as Trajan.

Emperors often removed favorites or relatives who had fallen from grace to one or other of the many tiny islands that lie off the Italian coast. Expelled from the Senate, these isolated and impotent captives seldom returned to public life. Why Attianus should have particularly feared this pair is unclear; as guard prefect in attendance on the emperor he would have seen secret reports on suspicious activity by dissidents, but perhaps he was being overcautious.

Baebius Macer was a different matter. He was praefectus urbi, prefect of the city of Rome; a combination of chief of police and mayor, the praefectus was responsible for law and order and had jurisdiction in criminal matters. He was of a scholarly disposition and a stickler for what he saw to be right. He was not only in a powerful position, but was likely to take a dim view of any constitutional irregularities as a new regime tried to establish its authority. Attianus had reason to fear a man without the moral flexibility for which the times called.

Hadrian disagreed. Whatever the guilt or innocence of those accused, this was not the moment for a ruler who had not yet established himself to put senior politicians to death. It was too soon to judge loyalties, and he turned down Attianus’ request. To make his position clear publicly, he wrote again to the Senate. Among many high-minded sentiments,

he swore that he would do nothing against the public interest, nor would he put to death any senator, and he invoked destruction on himself if he should violate these promises in any way.

The prefect complied with the emperor’s decision—or at least gave the appearance of doing so. Crassus unwisely left his island, so the official story went, and his keeper had him put to death. The emperor’s writ did not yet run reliably.

Plotina and Matidia, accompanied by Attianus, boarded ship with Trajan’s body and set sail to Antioch and the new emperor. Hadrian went out to meet them, probably at Seleucia, and viewed the remains. These were then cremated and the imperial party took ship for Rome. They carried the ashes with them and eventually they were laid to rest in the small burial chamber at the foot of Trajan’s Column.

As autumn set in, embassies began arriving at Antioch bearing letters of congratulations from municipalities across the empire. Each needed a written answer, which would be taken home and proudly reproduced in stone in every main square. The princeps wrote, in formulaic mode, to the Youth Association of Pergamum:

Noting from your letter, and through the ambassador Claudius Cyrus, the great joy you openly feel in our succession, I consider such sentiments to be indicative of good men. Farewell.

Celebrations were staged all over the Roman world, some of them elaborate. But in Antioch, merrymaking was the last thing on Hadrian’s agenda. Fresh and insecure on the throne, he impulsively had the Castalian springs in the pleasure gardens of Daphne blocked up with a huge mass of stone; he did not want anyone else to receive the same message from the oracular waters that he had.

The empire was breaking up. Everywhere the enemies of Rome could not resist exploiting the tempting coincidence of an imperial military setback and an imperial death. The Historia Augusta summed up the situation:

The nations that Trajan had conquered began to revolt; the Moors, too, were on the attack, and the Sarmatians were waging war, the Britons were running out of Roman control, Egypt was hard pressed by riots, and finally Libya and Palestine were showing the spirit of rebellion.

Within a few days of assuming power, the emperor took the two most important, and bitterly controversial, decisions of his entire reign. One of them was tactical and the other strategic. Neither was improvised, but must have been the product of hard thought.

Long imperial frontiers required a large standing army, and paying for this was extremely expensive, and new provinces meant new garrisons. The army was the state’s largest single cost. There was also a limit to the available manpower that could be safely withdrawn from economically productive activity. The technology of warfare, the logistical difficulty of maintaining extended supply chains, and the slowness of long-range communications placed limits on the size of territory that a central government would find manageable. It is true that Rome ruled with a light touch and expected local elites to manage the day-to-day affairs of provincial towns and cities. However, government business seems to have grown inexorably.

In addition, it was not at all obvious that the benefits, the profits, that would accrue from new conquests would make the effort entailed worthwhile, at least in the medium term. Much of the land contiguous with the empire was ecologically marginal and, with the exception of the Parthian and Dacian empires, economically unrewarding—neither worth the trouble of annexing nor the expense of administering. What, one might ask, would be the point of taking over little-populated Scotland?

The historian Appian, who lived through the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian, made the point well.

The Romans have aimed to preserve their empire by the exercise of prudence rather than extend their dominion indefinitely over poverty-stricken and profitless tribes of barbarians.

Emperors, needing to balance their books, settled for the minimum military establishment consistent with safety. They felt they could not afford a mobile reserve ready to meet crises as and when they occurred. (Such a reserve, when unemployed, would also present them with a potential threat to their own power.)

This parsimony had two main consequences. First, any military defeat would create a hole in the empire’s defenses that would be difficult to plug—as Augustus had found when three legions were destroyed on the Rhine frontier in A.D. 9. Domitian had been forced to withdraw troops from Britannia to meet trouble in Dacia. Second, aggressive war, even when victorious, was just as dangerous to imperial stability. Trajan had raised additional legions during his Dacian campaigns (bringing the total establishment up to thirty); however, for his Parthian expedition, he still had to order legions from Pannonia to join him in the east, imperiling the Danube frontier. Once the expedition had been seen to fail, enemies of Rome on every side had seized the opportunity for rebellion. In fact, just to maintain the status quo was almost too much for the legions.

So military and financial reality argued against further enlargement of the empire. Intermittently, emperors recognized this. Augustus, who had been an out-and-out expansionist for most of his career, advised his successor, Tiberius, to stay within existing frontiers. Tacitus’ Annals, a savage but authoritative study of the early empire, had recently appeared (perhaps published between 115 and 117, but possibly some years later). He reports that the aged Augustus produced a list of the empire’s military resources very near the end of his life; the document was “all catalogued by Augustus in his own hand, with a final clause … advising the restriction of the empire within its present frontiers.” Hadrian may well have seen a copy of, even read, the historian’s masterpiece. In any event, he must have known of the policy. The first princeps being a man whom he greatly admired, he accepted his century-old advice without hesitation. Beneath the rhetoric of attack, Domitian, too, seems to have recognized the dangers of endless advance.

It was against this background that Hadrian issued orders to immediately abandon his predecessor’s three new provinces—Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Assyria—and to regroup permanently behind Rome’s traditional border, the Euphrates. Although this decision came as a great shock, it is evident that the dying Trajan, the aggressive warrior, had himself realized that a pull-back was inevitable. Hadrian deposed Trajan’s puppet king, and as a polite compensation installed him in Osrhoene, from which Abgarus and son had been ejected. The emperor explained his decision by quoting from one of his favorite old Roman authors—Cato the Censor. In 167 B.C. Rome defeated the Macedonians with some difficulty and the Senate was considering what it should do about them. Cato pronounced: “Because it is impossible to keep them under our care, they will have to be left independent.”

The emperor also meant to abandon Dacia, for the conquest of which many Roman lives had been sacrificed, but he was persuaded to reconsider. The original population had been killed or dispersed and their place taken by immigrants from the Roman empire. It would be unacceptable to hand them over to the untender mercies of their barbarian neighbors.

Hadrian went much further than pulling out of Parthia. So far as we know no formal announcement was made; it was unnecessary, and would have been incautious, to do so. However, a new long-term strategy can be inferred from his pacific behavior throughout the rest of the reign: Rome was to abjure military expansion of any kind in the future. Negotiation was to replace ultimatum. Trajan’s eastern adventure had been the last straw, showing that while it was possible to project military power temporarily beyond the frontiers of the empire, it was difficult to preserve territorial gains.

The withdrawals are evidence of Hadrian’s clear-sightedness and political courage, but they deeply angered many senior personalities. Opinion in Italy had fed on a diet of victories and as yet had no clear idea that Parthia had not, after all, been conquered. And even though Trajan’s failure was common knowledge in leading circles, the ethos of aggression was too ingrained to accept that the days of imperium sine fine were over.

A contemporary observer summed up the conventional view. Publius Annius Florus was a poet and rhetorician from northern Africa and the author of a brief sketch for schoolboys of Roman history, largely drawn from Livy. In it he compares Rome to a human individual as it grows up, reaches maturity, and subsequently attains old age. So he identifies childhood with the rule of kings, the conquest of Italy with its youth, and manhood with the late Republic.

From the time of Caesar Augustus down to our own age there has been a period of not much less than two hundred years, during which, owing to the inactivity of the emperors, the Roman people, as it were, grew old and lost its potency, save that under the rule of Trajan it again stirred its arms and, contrary to general expectation, again renewed its vigor—with youth, as it were, restored.

And now the next princeps was reverting to the unacceptable and passive norm, or so the elites angrily regarded his actions. As often happens, military adventures abroad lend stability and popularity to governments at home—provided that they bring victory. Lack of success in this regard helped seal the fate of Domitian. Would it do the same for Hadrian?

The emperor was too busy for hypothetical questions. The indispensable Marcius Turbo was bringing the Jewish revolt to a victorious conclusion in Egypt and Cyrene. But now the Greek community in Alexandria started rioting against the defeated Jews.

The emperor replaced Trajan’s governor with a more competent and energetic figure, Quintus Rammius Martialis. It says much for his rapid decisiveness that Rammius was in his post on or before August 25, just over a fortnight since the news of Trajan’s death had reached Antioch.

Hadrian himself probably paid a quick visit to Egypt. There was great economic distress in the country, and he rapidly produced generous and carefully thought-out measures that provided tax relief for tenant farmers. From now on assessments would be made on the actual agricultural yield rather than land value (the tributum soli). It was far more in character for him to investigate this situation directly, rather than rely at a distance on the recommendations of advisers.

It would have been too provocative to visit Alexandria, but he sent a Greek intellectual in his service who was known for his shrewdness and sharpness of wit, Valerius Eudaemon, as procurator, or financial director, for the city’s local administration; his task was to be the emperor’s eyes and ears.

Somewhere in Egypt—perhaps the border town of Pelusium or Heliopolis, at the southern head of the Nile delta—Hadrian presided over the trial, or at least some kind of official inquiry or hearing, of some hotheaded Alexandrian Greeks, led by a spokesman called Paul. A Jewish delegation was also present. From the reported proceedings it is possible to suppose the following savage sequence of events. After the failure of the Jewish revolt, many Jews were imprisoned and the triumphant Greeks put on a satirical stage show lampooning the rebel “king,” Lukuas. Some of them sang songs criticizing the emperor for deciding to resettle Jewish survivors of the revolt in an area of the city from which they could easily launch new attacks on the native population.

The irritated governor (Rammius’ predecessor) ordered the Greeks to produce their “opera-bouffe monarch.” Unfortunately this “bringing forth” also brought many Greek rioters onto the streets. A Jewish witness asserted an unprovoked attack on a defeated community. “They dragged us out of prison and wounded us.” Charges and countercharges followed. The Jews said of the Greeks: “Sire, they lie.”

Hadrian was inclined to agree. He told the Greeks that the prefect was right to ban the carrying of weapons and that he disapproved of the satire on Lukuas. He advised the Jews to restrict their hatred to their actual persecutors and not to loathe all Alexandrian Greeks indiscriminately. This evenhanded treatment came as a pleasant surprise to the defeated insurgents.

At about the same time Hadrian dismissed the governor of Judaea. This was Trajan’s mysterious and ferocious favorite, Lusius Quietus, who was also removed from command of his Moorish cavalry. According to the Historia Augusta, “he had fallen under suspicion of having designs on the throne,” but this was an unlikely ambition for a tribal chieftain now an old man. More probably, he was feared as a potential “kingmaker” for a serious rival to Hadrian.

Lusius had been sent to Judaea to help suppress the Jewish revolt, for the Jewish community there had recovered, at least partially, from the destruction wrought by the Romans almost fifty years previously. He came to the task fresh from butchering the Jews in Mesopotamia, and his removal delighted the diaspora.

Hadrian was rewarded. In some anti-Roman oracular verses, originating among the Jews of Alexandria and widely read in the eastern Mediterranean, an emperor received a rare compliment.

And after him shall rule

Another man, with silver helmet decked;

And unto him shall be the name of a sea;

And he shall be a man the best of all

And in all things discreet.

The name of the relevant sea is the Adriatic, so the reference is to Hadrian. Here at last, from the point of view of battered Jewry, the catastrophe of the revolt had given way, against every expectation, to a well-wishing ruler.

In early October the emperor left Antioch and proceeded urgently northward, with the troubled Danube provinces as his eventual destination. Meanwhile, Lusius Quietus’ horsemen returned discontented to Mauretania, where they stirred up an anti-Roman revolt. The emperor immediately dispatched Turbo, fresh from his Egyptian success, to deal with the disturbance.

The worst possible news arrived. Quadratus Bassus was dead. We do not know if he fell in battle or was felled by natural causes but the depth of the loss was revealed by the arrangements for the long journey from Dacia to the dead man’s home city, Pergamum. They matched what a prince of the blood might expect, with a military escort for the cortege and civic welcomes whenever it arrived at a town of any size and importance. The tomb was paid for at the public expense. In effect, Bassus received the Roman equivalent of a modern state funeral.

Fortunately, Quintus Pompeius Falco, a friend of Hadrian’s, had been governor for at least two years of the huge Danubian province of Lower Moesia, originally a narrow strip south of the Danube and now also encompassing the kingdom of the Roxolani, Dacia’s neighbor on the river’s northern side. He was able to hold the line temporarily.

The emperor, chased by continuing congratulations, made his way to Thrace or perhaps Lower Moesia itself, and discussed with Falco what was to be done. He decided to appoint the reliable Gaius Avidius Nigrinus, who had been imperial legate in Achaea during Hadrian’s stay in Athens in 112; the two men must have met then and had presumably got on well together.

Once again he came to the conclusion that it was pointless trying to hold on to territory that Rome could defend only at a vast expenditure of treasure and lives. So he instructed Falco and his legions to withdraw from the lands of the Roxolani in eastern Dacia (leaving only a narrow cordon sanitaire north of the river, named Lower Pannonia). The superstructure of Apollodorus’ great bridge across the Danube was dismantled—probably only a temporary measure to foil a possible enemy attack. Under no circumstances could Hadrian’s now controversial reputation survive a barbarian incursion into well-established provinces. The demolition may have been a wise precaution, but it was also an unhappy metaphor for a perceived failure of nerve.

Hadrian reached an agreement with the king of the Roxolani, increasing Rome’s ongoing subsidy (the price Trajan had been willing to pay for acquiescence in annexation), granting him Roman citizenship and, it is to be assumed, “most favored nation” status. He took the name Publius Aelius Rasparaganus, the “Aelius” showing respect for his patron. He may also have made Hadrian a valuable and soon to be much-loved gift. It was about now that the emperor’s favorite horse, Borysthenes, was a colt. He was named after the river Borysthenes (today’s Dnieper), which flowed through the land of the Alani, a tribe related to the Roxolani and their near neighbor. This could be the moment when horse and rider met for the first time.

As an official Friend of the Roman People, the king would rule a buffer state that kept the empire safe from unruly barbarians in the northern hinterland beyond the Roxolani—at a cost much lower than that of garrisoning a reluctant province.

A sensible-enough deal, one might think. But much of the Roman elite never forgave Hadrian for what they saw as pusillanimous behavior. Even half a century later, the rhetorician and friend of emperors Marcus Cornelius Fronto felt strongly enough about the issue to say acidly of Hadrian that he was “energetic enough in mobilizing his friends and eloquently addressing his army.” He trained his legions “with amusing games in the camp rather than with swords and shields: [he was] a general the like of whom the army never afterward saw.”

These sneers about a competent soldier were wide of the mark. Although designed to stress by contrast the supposed talents of a later emperor, they must have been credible to be worth making, and they illustrate the scorn that Hadrian’s new strategy aroused.

It was against this gloomy backcloth that a strange and bloodstained sequence of events unfolded during 118. Attianus, the Praetorian Guard prefect, now back in Rome with the Augustas, laid before the Senate the details of a plot against the emperor and persuaded it to vote for the executions of the conspirators. These were four in number and of high seniority, for each of them was a former consul and had been close to Trajan.

Two of them, Celsus and Palma, were already in Hadrian’s bad books: as already noted, they had fallen from grace in a court intrigue toward the end of the previous reign. Presumably they were living in retirement in Italy. Then there was the dismissed Lusius Quietus, traveling from his last posting in Judaea to an unknown destination—perhaps his homeland of Mauretania.

The fourth guilty man was the new governor of Dacia. Gaius Avidius Nigrinus was a senior politician and general, and a respected member of the Roman social scene. He appears in a very favorable light in Pliny’s letters, as an intelligent public official dedicated to good governance. Once, when tribune of the people, he read out to the Senate

a well-phrased statement of great importance. In this he complained that legal counsel sold their services, faked lawsuits for money, settled them by collusion, and made a boast of the large regular incomes to be made by robbery of their fellow citizens.

He was that useful thing in politics, “a safe pair of hands,” and Trajan had sent him to Greece on a delicate mission to resolve a three-hundred-year-old boundary dispute between Delphi and her neighbors.

Interestingly, Nigrinus had a distant family connection with the onetime Stoic opposition, for his uncle had been a friend of the Republican martyr Thrasea Paetus, one of Nero’s most celebrated victims. Perhaps his hostility to Hadrian owed something to the political idealism that Nerva and Trajan’s commitment to the rule of law and senatorial cooperation had largely made redundant.

But Nigrinus’ motives may not have been so pure. His performance as governor of Dacia seems not to have satisfied the emperor, uncomfortably on the spot or at least close at hand. Hadrian brought his brief tenure to an end and replaced him with Turbo, who had taken little time in suppressing the Berber disturbances in Mauretania. He was given temporary command of both Dacia and Pannonia, with the obvious remit of reorganizing the frontier defenses after the withdrawals. This was a daring appointment, for Turbo was only an eques, and so strictly speaking ineligible for a post reserved for senators. But for Hadrian merit outweighed class.

So each member of the offending quartet had grounds for resentment; Palma’s and Celsus’ careers had been abruptly terminated in the recent past, and Nigrinus and Lusius Quietus had just lost their jobs. But if they all had motives for disaffection, it is not altogether certain that they acted on them. Some observers believed that they were set up. Dio Cassius, writing only a century later, remarked that they were victimized “in reality because they had great influence and enjoyed wealth and fame.”

What was the actual offense of which they were accused? Two versions of the story have come down to us. According to the Historia Augusta, Nigrinus and the others planned an attempt on the emperor’s life while he was conducting a sacrifice; but Dio claims that the occasion was a hunt. The contradiction is only an apparent one, for (as we have seen on page 23) hunts were preceded and followed by sacrifices to the gods—especially to Diana, goddess of the chase, and if the catch was good, to the goddess of victory. Hadrian was passionate about the sport, so we can be sure that he often went hunting with his amici as a relaxation from affairs of state and the crisis threatening the empire.

Two interlinked problems arise. First, the only alleged conspirator traveling with the emperor at the time was Nigrinus; the others were many miles away. Second, three of them were executed at their country houses in Italy—Palma at Tarracina (now Terracina), an ancient Latin town some thirty-odd miles southeast of Rome, Celsus at Baiae (today’s Baia), a fashionable seaside resort for Rome’s superrich in the bay of Naples, and Nigrinus at Faventia (modern Faenza) in the Po Valley in northern Italy, presumably his hometown. Lusius was put to death while on the move somewhere in the eastern provinces or northern Africa.

If we assume that there really was a plot to kill Hadrian, how can these data be reconciled with it? Why was Nigrinus not arrested at once in the wake of a failed attack, and why was he allowed to go home? Perhaps the attackers were hired men (legionaries or locals) and it was not immediately obvious who their employer was. But not only would it be hard to recruit people for such a risky mission and control them, but it would be unusual for a noble Roman, especially a distinguished public servant with a link to the brave Stoic opponents of the imperial system, to farm out the cutting off of a tyrant to anonymous others.

Here is a feasible scenario. A hunt was chosen for the attempt, for on no other occasion were armed men routinely allowed in an emperor’s presence, apart from his guards. Nigrinus and some others of like mind in the party decided to strike down Hadrian with their hunting weapons at the ceremonies either at the beginning or the end of a hunt in Thrace or Moesia. Something held them back from making the attack—Nigrinus could have been ill or, most likely, Hadrian turned out to be too well guarded and the intended assassins too few in number for them to have a realistic chance of survival, even if they managed to destroy their victim. So nothing happened, and nothing was noticed.

The scheme came to light only a little later, when the dismissed Nigrinus had returned to Italy and private life. One or more plotters may have revealed it for irrecoverable reasons, or perhaps a servant in the know did so in the expectation of reward. More probably, their correspondence was intercepted, for, if they were to agree on their plans, the principals must have communicated with one another during the weeks following Hadrian’s accession.

Such interception would have been no accident, for Trajan had accessed the public courier or postal service to keep himself informed about “state business”; Hadrian himself quietly put in place Rome’s first organized secret service (before his time, emperors had indeed made use of informers and spies but in an ad hoc manner). To create a new bureau would have been politically controversial, so he added a confidential codicil to the job descriptions of the already-existing frumentarii. These were commissary agents in charge of organizing army supplies and were well placed to gather information about the activities of Roman officials in the provinces. Whether the new service was already in place so early in the reign is uncertain, but its establishment demonstrates Hadrian’s abiding interest in uncovering the unspoken concerns of the senatorial elite. The exposure of the Nigrinus conspiracy thanks to secret surveillance could have been what prompted him to make use of the frumentarii.

A variant explanation for what happened may be found in the career of a German-born centurion, Marcus Calventius Viator. His name appears on two altars, one found in Dacia and the other in Gerasa (today’s Jerash City in Jordan). In the first he appears as the training officer of Nigrinus’ cavalry bodyguard. The second, ten years on, reveals a remarkable promotion; he is now in charge of the cavalry wing of Hadrian’s own imperial bodyguard, the Germanic Batavi whom he inherited from Trajan. Someone close to a traitor could not usually count on a glittering future. Did the emperor take Calventius under his wing as a reward for informing on his commanding officer? It is a tempting speculation.

By a curious chance, the Arabian altar is dedicated to the goddess Diana. It was doubtless in her honor that a hunting party offered up its sacrifice on that dangerous distant day when an emperor was the quarry.

The executions were a political disaster. The fact that senators had been persuaded to vote for them was irrelevant. In their eyes, Hadrian had broken the spirit if not the letter of his guarantee of their personal security, foreshadowing a return to the days of Domitian. Although far away by the Danube, Hadrian immediately recognized the damage that had been done. Disaffection in the ruling class could bring about a return of the Stoic opposition and undo the political settlement, based on consent, that Nerva and Trajan had established.

At about this time the historian Tacitus was finishing the composition of his Annals, and a late passage expresses a melancholy exhaustion with his history of imperial victims during the time of the early emperors; he may also have been covertly alluding to the bloodstained opening of Hadrian’s reign. “This slavish passivity, this torrent of wasted bloodshed far from active service, wearies, depresses, and paralyzes the mind.”

Hadrian tried to extricate himself from blame. It was all Attianus’ fault and what had been done had been done against his own will. Was the emperor protesting too much—or telling the plain truth? It is hard to tell. In a sense, whether or not the quartet did intend the emperor’s death is immaterial. They were Hadrian’s enemies and potentially dangerous. Perhaps what we have here is a prototype of the murder of Thomas Becket; rather as Henry II’s knights made more than was meant of the king’s exasperation with his archbishop, so the guard prefect may have guessed at a new emperor’s fears, and acted. It is conceivable that he did so without informing his employer, in order to give him the deniability he would need when explaining himself to the Senate.

In any event, there was little Hadrian could do at the moment to retrieve the situation, but the sooner he could calm the provinces and return to Rome, the better.

XV

THE ROAD TO ROME

Hadrian stood on the bank of the Danube and reviewed his troops. To show how perfectly his Batavians, the imperial horse guard, were trained, he ordered them to swim across the river in full armor. This was something of a party trick, for they had a long tradition of crossing wide expanses of water en masse.

The Batavians had a deserved reputation for ferocity; Tacitus remarked of them: “They are made exclusively for war, like arms and weapons.” There were about one thousand of them in the guard and, as intended, they made a daunting impression on the barbarian tribes to the north.

A tombstone found near the Danube celebrates in well-turned Latin verse the achievements of one of these guardsmen, a certain Soranus.

I was once the most famous of men on the Pannonian shore … the one who could swim the wide waters of the deep Danube, with Hadrian as my judge, in full battle gear.

This was not the man’s only skill. He was also an archer who could shoot one arrow in the air and hit it with another, splitting it in two—a feat of which Robin Hood would have been proud.

No Roman or barbarian could ever defeat me …

It remains to be seen whether anyone else will beat my record.

Who wrote these lines is unknown, but Hadrian was a frequent poet who liked to mark out his life in Greek or Latin meter. It is probable he was the admiring author.

Whatever his critics were saying, safe in their town houses in the capital or relaxing in their country villas, Hadrian understood and liked soldiers and enjoyed military life.

By June 118 the Danube frontier had been redrawn and hostile tribes—for example, the Iazyges on the Hungarian plain—pacified. Hadrian acquired the services of a Iazygian prisoner-of-war, a certain Mastor, who was a skilled huntsman “because of his strength and daring.” With his steed, Borysthenes, and his groom both having been recruited from the wild regions north of the Danube, the emperor was equipped to enjoy the dangerous thrills of the chase as never before. His relationship with Mastor became close, and he kept him in his service for the rest of his life.

New governors, friendly to Hadrian, were appointed. Thus, Falco was tackling disturbances in the north of Britannia, and making progress. The Parthians were quiet as they reabsorbed the territory that Trajan had annexed. The brushfires of rebellion had been stamped out.

At last, in June the emperor was ready to leave for the long journey to Rome, confident that the military crisis following the failure of the Parthian expedition and Trajan’s death was over. The task now was to pacify his civilian critics at home.

An emperor’s entry into Rome on July 9, especially his first, tended to be a grand, noisy event. Hadrian had probably traveled overland from Pannonia to northern Italy, riding down the coast road to Ariminum and then over the Apennines on the via Flaminia.

As he approached the city, he met the consuls and other officeholders, with their guards of lictors carrying the axe and rods of imperium, who walked out beyond the walls to greet him. They were accompanied by all the senators, dressed in their whitest red-striped togas and leading representatives of the equites. Members of the emperor’s clientela, or client list, were well represented—especially the young sons of senators and equites ambitious for public careers. The praefectus urbi was in attendance, together with other imperial officials.

The road became a long avenue as it crossed the built-over Campus Martius. He rode past the mausoleum of Augustus; this was now full, and at some point he would need to prepare a burial place for himself. A little farther down was the Ara Pacis, a masterpiece of Roman sculpture, albeit inspired by the reliefs on the Parthenon in Athens; its four walls showed the emperor Augustus and his family in the act of sacrificing to the gods. The altar was a celebration of the peace and prosperity that the empire had conferred on its inhabitants.

Next, a large open space to Hadrian’s right gave onto the ruins of the temple to all the gods, the Pantheon, which Augustus’ right-hand man, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, had erected ninety years previously. It had been burned down in 80. The emperor asked himself if it was not time to rebuild it.

The avenue was reaching its conclusion, passing through an old gate, the Porta Fontinalis. Here Rome’s citadel, the Capitol, to the right and a colossal new structure, Trajan’s forum and market, paid for from the loot of Dacia, created an architectural defile. The lesser forums of Julius Caesar and Augustus clustered nearby.

The emperor and his entourage entered the city’s original central square, the Forum Romanum, and from there ascended the winding road to the summit of the Capitol, where stood the enormous temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. A sacrifice was offered in thanks for his safe return to Rome and to mark his assumption of the purple.

The ancient priestly association, the Arvals, met on the Capitol on the same day to mark the happy “arrival of Imperator Caesar Traianus Hadrianus Augustus”; in what must have been a lengthy and messy ceremony, they sacrificed an ox to Jupiter; a cow each to Minerva, the “Public Safety of the Roman People,” “Victory,” and Vesta, protectress of the city’s undying flame; and a bull to Mars. The princeps was a new member of the priesthood ex officio, but as a rule he sent his apologies. On this occasion, Hadrian decided to put in an appearance. He was determined to please, and made himself available to everybody.

Hadrian’s task was to relaunch his reign. The consuls convened the Senate, probably as early as the next day after his return. The mood on its benches must have been all the more gloomy for the fact that senators themselves had colluded in the deaths of the four ex-consuls. Many could recall the not-so-distant time when Domitian had insisted on their active cooperation when he struck down the final list of Stoic idealists.

The emperor was extremely sensitive to the comments that people were making about his behavior. For him the lesson of Domitian’s end was that he had to avoid the vortex of violence and lost trust if he wanted to survive and thrive. Hadrian’s reign had opened with violence, and it was essential that he break away from the potentially dire consequences and establish a reputation as a man of peace and legality.

He addressed the Senate as if he were making a speech for the defense at a trial, and declared on oath that he had not ordered the deaths of the four former consuls (later he repeated the denial in his autobiography). He also swore that he would never put a senator to death without the Senate’s approval. In this he followed similar assurances given by Trajan and Nerva, and while these were welcome they did not mean very much, for history showed that the Senate routinely bowed to the wishes of an angry princeps. His listeners doubtless reserved judgment on the emperor’s guilt, but will surely have attended to the passion with which he asserted his good intentions. Time would reveal whether these would translate convincingly into performance. (Somewhat cheekily, next year the emperor issued a coin boasting of his mercifulness: it showed Clemency, personified as a woman sacrificing at an altar.)

No one would begin to believe the emperor’s assurance unless something was done about the man he was fingering as the real culprit—the elderly Attianus. The Historia Augusta has an odd tale that a murderous Hadrian wanted to do away with his former guardian because he was “unable to endure his power” and was deterred only by his existing notoriety as an executioner. There seems to have been a quarrel, and we can imagine the princeps losing his temper—but surely nothing more.

Praetorian prefects held their job for an indefinite period. Emperors fought shy of dismissing them out of hand for fear of trouble from the Guard. With some difficulty Attianus was persuaded to resign his post as prefect. Only an eques, he was given the signal honor of ornamenta consularia—these were the appurtenances of the consulship, without the post itself. He was not allowed to attend the Senate, but was entitled to sit with former consuls at public banquets and to wear a consul’s richly embroidered toga praetexta on such occasions. Attianus was kicked upstairs.

Attianus’ colleague as prefect was also an old man and sought permission to retire. It is a sign that the emperor was short of experienced and trustworthy talent that he refused to accept the resignation immediately. And who was to replace Attianus? The all-competent Turbo, who in little more than one year had ricocheted around the empire from Parthia, to Egypt, to Mauretania, to Pannonia and Dacia, was a wise choice and he now crowned his career with the top government job to which an eques could aspire.

Hadrian introduced a range of reforms designed to boost his popularity. The headline measure was breathtaking—nothing less than a cancellation of all unpaid debts owed by individual citizens to the public treasury (fiscus or aerarium publicum) and, according to Dio Cassius, to the privy purse (fiscus privatus). The period covered was the previous fifteen years.

The announcement was marked by a striking piece of street theater. In the great square of Trajan’s forum all the relevant tax documents were assembled and publicly burned, to make it clear that this was a decision that could not be revoked. (Hadrian may have got the idea for the incineration from Augustus, for Suetonius records that in 36 B.C. he had “burned the records of old debts to the treasury, which were by far the most frequent source of blackmail.”)

Public opinion was enthusiastic and a celebratory monument was erected on the site of the pyre. The inscription has survived, praising Hadrian,

who remitted 900 million sesterces owed to the

fisci

and by this generosity was the first and only one of all the emperors to have freed from care not only his present citizens but those of later generations.

A carved relief shows the scene when Praetorian Guards entered the forum carrying wax tablets from the treasury archives. To spread the good news around the world a coin was issued showing a lictor setting fire to a pile of bonds in the presence of three taxpayers.

One of the most irritating burdens on local authorities in Italy and elsewhere was the cost of maintaining the government courier service, the cursus publicus, where it ran on main roads through their territories. They were obliged to pay for the horses, carriages, and privately owned hotels and hostels that those traveling on official business needed. The fiscus now took over financial responsibility for the service.

The “crown gold” was waived for Italy and reduced for the provinces; this was a contribution offered to a new emperor, in theory voluntary and in practice compulsory, to the cost of gold wreaths (in imitation of laurel) for grand imperial events such as triumphs.

A supplementary distribution of free and subsidized grain for citizens living in Rome was made, despite the fact that a generous donative of three aurei (that is, gold pieces worth seventy-five sesterces in total) had already been granted before the emperor’s return.

The Italian countryside also benefited from the general largesse. The alimenta scheme had been close to Trajan’s heart, and, as a gesture to the memory of his adoptive father, Hadrian increased its state funding.

It was essential to offer sweeteners that directly benefited the disaffected senatorial class. Existing rules set the minimum wealth a man had to possess if he wished to enter public life at the highest level at 1 million sesterces. Sometimes senators found themselves in financial difficulties; now Hadrian supplemented their income with an allowance, provided they could show that they were impoverished through no fault of their own.

Public office was expensive, for a consul or a praetor faced a number of necessary expenses (for example, the salaries of his lictors) and he was expected to demonstrate his liberalitas as a patron. The emperor made gifts of money to many needy officials—in effect, salaries.

Ever since the Proscriptions launched by the young Octavian (before his elevation to the title of Augustus) and Mark Antony in 43 B.C., rulers short of cash tended to execute opponents ostensibly for political or criminal offenses but in fact to confiscate their lands and wealth. Hadrian was determined to avoid that charge in the case of the four former consuls, so he passed a law assigning the property of condemned persons not to the privy purse but to the state fiscus. In this way he could demonstrate that the emperor was gaining no private advantage from their deaths.

Hadrian had implemented the first part of Juvenal’s gloomy slogan “bread and circuses” by providing cash and grain. It was now time for blood to flow in the arena. To mark his forty-third birthday, January 24, 119, six successive days of gladiatorial games were held; many wild animals were slaughtered too, including one hundred lions and one hundred lionesses. Large numbers of little wooden balls were thrown into the audience: the names of various gifts were written on them—items of food, say, clothing, silver or gold articles, horses, cattle, and slaves—which could be claimed when presenting them later.

The package of reforms succeeded: it was well received and stabilized the new regime. Even if members of the elite were reserving judgment, there was no talk of outright opposition or even noncooperation. Despite a shaky start Hadrian had demonstrated his competence, both militarily and domestically. The empire was quiet and in the Senate no one now had any doubt who was in charge. From managing immediate challenges, the emperor could now take his time and plan a strategy for the longer term.

Hadrian was a man who knew his own mind and was impatient of inefficiency in others, but he also had a disarming talent for admiration. He learned much about the art of government from Trajan, but the true hero among his predecessors was Augustus.

We learn from the Arvals that when the emperor wrote to them in February 118 proposing a co-opted member of the association, “the waxed tablets, fastened with a seal showing the head of Augustus, were opened.” For the image on Hadrian’s signet ring to have been that of the first princeps was an elegantly simple way of acknowledging indebtedness to everyone throughout the empire who mattered. Later, he asked the Senate for permission to hang an ornamental shield, preferably of silver, in Augustus’ honor in the Senate.

Ten years into his reign, Hadrian announced to the world that, speaking symbolically, he was a reincarnation of Augustus. He issued a high-value silver coin, a tetradrachm (worth twelve sesterces), with Augustus’ head on one side, and on the other an image of himself holding corn ears, signifying prosperity, with the legend Hadrianus Augustus Pater Patriae Renatus—“Father of his People, Reborn.”

When appointing the heads of his secretariat he chose an eques, the biographer Suetonius, to be his ab epistulis, the official secretary, who controlled the emperor’s correspondence and as such was one of the most influential people at court. A bookish protégé and friend of Pliny, he had made a name for himself ten years or so previously for his De Viribus Illustribus, “On Famous Men,” a copious collection of brief lives of literary celebrities—grammarians, rhetoricians, poets, and historians.

Suetonius was now working on what was to be his masterpiece, De Vita Caesarum, “The Lives of the Caesars.” In the biography of Augustus, he writes of an unusual cognomen his subject was given as a boy, Thurinus—an allusion to the town of Thurii in southern Italy where his father’s family had originated and where his father had won a battle.

That he was surnamed Thurinus I may assert on very trustworthy evidence, since I once obtained a bronze statuette, representing him as a boy and inscribed with that name in letters of iron almost illegible from age. This I presented to the emperor [Hadrian], who cherishes it among the

Lares

[household gods] of his bedroom.

What was it that Hadrian valued so highly in his predecessor? Not least the conduct of his daily life. Augustus lived with conscious simplicity and so far as he could avoided open displays of his preeminence. A passage from Suetonius is almost echoed by another from the Historia Augusta. About Augustus the former observed:

On the day of a meeting of the Senate he always greeted members in the House and in their seats, calling each man by name without a prompter; and when he left the House, he used to take leave of them in the same manner, while they remained seated. He exchanged social calls with many, and did not cease to attend all their anniversaries.

As for Hadrian, according to the Historia Augusta,

he frequently attended the official functions of praetors and consuls, was present at friends’ banquets, visited them twice or three times a day when they were sick, including some who were

equites

and freedmen, revived them with sympathetic words and supported them with advice, and always invited them to his own banquets. In short, he did everything in the style of a private citizen.

Both Augustus and Hadrian made a point of being civiles principes, polite autocrats.

It was not enough to placate the upper classes; it was also important to keep happy Rome’s urban masses. Audiences at the games were infuriated if an emperor in his imperial box was inattentive and worked on his papers. Nor did they appreciate arrogant behavior on his part. Whenever Augustus was present, he took care to give his entire attention to the gladiatorial displays, animal hunts, and the rest of the bloodthirsty rigmarole. Hadrian followed suit.

He once nearly made a dangerous faux pas. The crowd was baying loudly for some favor or other, which he was unwilling to grant. He ordered the herald to call for silence. This had been Domitian’s autocratic way, and the astute herald merely lifted his arm, without uttering a word. The shouting died down. The herald then announced: “That is what he wants.” The emperor was not in the least put out, for he realized that by refusing to issue the tactless verbal order the herald had saved him from an odious comparison.

Augustus well understood that to hold power it was not necessary to show that one was holding power; in fact, it could be positively damaging to do so. While he was consolidating his authority in the 20s B.C. he held the consulship for eight years in a row. The post no longer commanded executive imperium as it had under the Republic, but it remained a great honor. For an emperor to treat it as if it were a permanent office was felt to be insulting, as well as being unnecessary. It also reduced by 50 percent the chance for a senatorial aspirant to become consul ordinarius and have “their year” named after him and his colleague. So from 23 B.C. the princeps more or less gave up the consulship, with only two more tenures during the rest of a long life.

By contrast, the Flavians were greedy; Vespasian held nine consulships in a ten-year reign, Titus eight, and Domitian a record-breaking seventeen. Trajan was more moderate, spreading six consulships across the reign. Hadrian followed Augustus’ example to the letter—that is, once confirmed in place, he abstained. He was consul for the third and last time in 119.

An incoming emperor faced the challenge of making his power effective throughout such a wide domain. In this respect, there was one further characteristic of Augustus’ dominance that must have attracted Hadrian’s attention. The first princeps believed that communications were too slow and subordinates too unreliable for governing from Rome: in his view, he could run the empire only by being on the spot. For many years he spent his time on the move in the provinces, checking, settling, supervising, solving problems. And so did his dear friend and colleague in government, Agrippa. It was only with the onset of age and the coming to maturity of trustworthy young male relatives who could fill his place that Augustus abandoned his travels.

Hadrian’s imitation of Augustus made it clear that he intended to rule in an orderly and law-abiding fashion, and his enthusiasm for great men of the past underscored his commitment to traditional romanitas, Romanness. It was on these foundations that he would build the achievements of his reign.

Like the first princeps, Hadrian looked back to paradigms of ancient virtue to guide modern governance. Augustus liked to see himself as a new Romulus, the second founder of a restored Rome; twelve vultures had flown overhead when he assumed his first consulship in his late teens, just as they had at the city’s original establishment in 753 B.C.

Hadrian followed in his footsteps, associating himself with Romulus’ peace-loving (and legendary) successor, Numa Pompilius. He had not forgotten those lines from Virgil about Numa that had foretold his imperial future. Known for his religious piety, the king was credited with the creation of Rome’s religious institutions and, related to these, the annual calendar of sacred and profane days.

Florus, historian and friend of the emperor, wrote of Numa in his Epitome:

In a word, he induced a fierce people to rule with piety and justice an empire which they had acquired by violence and injustice.

This could have been Hadrian’s own political motto, with his strategies of nonaggression and competent administration.

According to Plutarch, writing in Hadrian’s lifetime, Numa was a follower of the Greek mystic and mathematician Pythagoras. This was a historical impossibility, for the former lived more than a century before the latter was born. Nevertheless, the notion that the king was influenced by Greek philosophy, especially a creed with a spiritual dimension, would have appealed to the emperor. According to Aurelius Victor, “in the fashion of the Greeks or Numa Pompilius, he began to give attention to religious ceremonies, laws, schools, and teachers to such an extent that he even established a school of fine arts called the Athenaeum.” The site of the Athenaeum has not been discovered, but the building was a theater or perhaps an amphitheater and was used for readings and training in declamation. It was seen as a token of the emperor’s interest in supporting culture.

In December 119, Hadrian was dealt a heavy personal blow. His beloved mother-in-law and Trajan’s niece, Matidia, died at the relatively early age of fifty-one. He arranged for her immediate deification and issued coinage to announce the fact: a denarius struck at Rome shows a bust of Matidia, wearing a triple diadem, and the legend The deified Augusta Matidia; on the reverse a veiled woman drops incense on an altar, the personification of pietas Augusta, or “the emperor’s sense of duty and family affection.”

The Augusta was given a splendid funeral and a formal consecratio as a goddess. After staging the “most immense delights,” the emperor handed out spices to the people in her honor. The Arvals recorded their generous contribution in this regard by providing two pounds of perfumed ointment in their name and fifty pounds of frankincense as a gift of the association’s servants.

Competent but unsympathetic, Domitian was a domineering ruler.

The Senate loathed him, and he repaid the compliment, terrorizing its members. MUSEI CAPITOLINI.

For much of his life, Nerva was the ultimate courtier, without convictions or shame, but as emperor his signal achievement was to reconcile the imperial system and its opponents in the Senate. PALAZZO ALLE TERME, ROME.

Trajan as triumphant commander. This was how the Romans liked to imagine their emperor, scoring victory after victory and presiding over an imperium sine fine, an empire without end. XANTEN, GERMANY.

Hadrian in energetic middle age, wearing a general’s military cloak. He was the first Roman emperor to grow a beard in the Greek manner, setting a new fashion that many of his successors followed. BRITISH MUSEUM.

A bust of Hadrian as a young man, but sculpted toward the end of his reign. This was how he may have imagined himself, reborn after the self-sacrifice of Antinous.

FOUND IN THE VILLA AT TIVOLI.

But this was how the aging Hadrian really looked in a late study—disillusioned and ill.

ARCHAEOLOGICAL MUSEUM OF CHANIA, CRETE.

Antoninus Pius succeeded Hadrian and maintained his policies. Unlike his predecessor he was neither a military man nor a traveler. He governed without incident and his reign was one of the most peaceful in the history of the Roman Empire. REAL ACADEMIA DE BELLAS ARTES DE SAN FERNANDO, MADRID.

TRAJAN’S COLUMN

Trajan’s Column rises ninety-eight feet from the ruins of his forum. It tells the story, in the manner of a strip cartoon, of Rome’s victorious wars in Dacia.

It used to be topped by a heroically nude statue of the emperor, but a statue of Saint Peter has replaced him.

Two scenes from Trajan’s Column illustrate the outset of the Dacian wars. In the lower one, a troop of Praetorian standard-bearers marches across the Danube on a bridge of boats. They are led by Trajan, as he sets foot on enemy soil. He is preceded by trumpeters and dismounted cavalrymen. Above, soldiers build a fortress connected by a bridge to a marching camp.

THE WALL

The wall that Hadrian commissioned to run seventy-three miles across northern Britain, from South Shields on the east coast to Ravenglass on the west, was one of Rome’s greatest engineering achievements. This view shows one of eighty milecastles near Steel Rigg in Northumberland.

“MY HOUSE AT TIVOLI”

This model evokes the huge scale of Hadrian’s villa near Tivoli. A road on the right of the picture skirts the long colonnaded terrace in the foreground and leads to the villa’s formal entrance building. Beyond this lies a stretch of water called the Canopus, where summer banquets were held. Further still, at the top right, is a group of buildings, the so-called Academy, where the empress Sabina may have held her court. A temple of Antinous was discovered before the model was made; it should stand on the green land along the side of the entrance road where it approaches its destination. VILLA ADRIANA.

In the heart of the villa complex stand the ruins of Hadrian’s bolt-hole—a tiny circular building separated from the outside world by a moat. Here, in the midst of splendor and publicity, the emperor could be alone.

The Canopus at Hadrian’s villa, so-called after a canal and popular tourist resort outside Alexandria in Egypt. This was the scene of large open-air dinner parties. The long pool was lined with statues, and sculptures of maritime beasts rose from the water. At the far end stands a vast, half-domed water feature, which towers above a semicircular stone dining couch. From this vantage point, the emperor could survey his guests.

THE YOUNG BITHYNIAN

Antinous as a chubby-faced teenager. This was how he looked when Hadrian first set eyes on him in Bithynia. He fell in love with the boy. BRITISH MUSEUM, LONDON.

Antinous lost his life in Egypt.

Hadrian deified his dead lover and buried him in a temple built in his honor beside the entrance to the villa at Tivoli. It housed statues of Antinous, including this image of him as pharoah, the ruler who embodied the skygod Horus in life, and Osiris, god of the underworld, when dead. MUSEI VATICANI.

Antinous was the last sculptural type of male beauty to have been invented in the classical world—lush, melancholy, and demure. With his ivy and grape headband, he is shown here as an incarnation of the gods Dionysus and Osiris. MUSEI VATICANI.

HADRIAN’S OTHER BOYS

Hadrian adopted Lucius Ceionius Commodus and made him his heir, renaming him Lucius Aelius Caesar. Critics said unkindly that he was chosen for his looks rather than his ability as a ruler. Unfortunately he was seriously ill, probably suffering from tuberculosis. He soon died, upsetting the emperor’s plans for the succession.

Young Marcus Annius Verus. A solemn and dutiful child, he was fascinated by philosophy. Hadrian was very fond of him and affectionately teased him for his virtuous behavior, nicknaming him “Verissimus” or “truest.” After the death of Aelius Caesar, Hadrian made Antoninus Pius his heir and designated Marcus as his next successor but one. He reigned as Marcus Aurelius. MUSEI CAPITOLINI.

THE WOMEN IN HADRIAN’S LIFE

Trajan’s wife, Pompeia Plotina, shown here on a sesterce. Devoted to Hadrian, she smoothed his way to power.

Salonina Matidia, shown here on a silver denarius, was Trajan’s daughter and the mother of Hadrian’s wife, Sabina. Hadrian adored her and was greatly saddened when she died.

Hadrian shared little with his wife, Vibia Sabina, except for mutual dislike; he greatly preferred her mother, Matidia. However, he treated his empress with respect and arranged for her to accompany him on many of his journeys. VILLA ADRIANA.

Lucius Julius Ursus Servianus. The image of a tough, ruthless Roman, Servianus served in the Dacian wars with distinction. He married Hadrian’s sister, Paulina, but was critical of his brother-in-law. STRATFIELD SAYE PRESERVATION TRUST.

MAUSOLEUM

An outsize cylinder standing on a cube, Hadrian’s mausoleum was surmounted by a roof garden and a colossal four-horse chariot. It was still under construction when the emperor died. Similar in appearance to the mausoleum of Augustus but bigger, it was not only designed for him but also as a resting place for his successors. In the Middle Ages the tomb was transformed into a fortress, and later became a papal residence. It is now known as the Castel Sant’Angelo. Hadrian also built the bridge, the Pons Aelius, still in use but only for pedestrians.

Originally commissioned by Agrippa, Augustus’s friend and partner in empire, the Pantheon was completely rebuilt by Hadrian. Best preserved of all the buildings of ancient Rome, it is still in use as a Christian church.

The emperor delivered the eulogy. We have his own words, which have survived, mutilated but readable, on an inscription. He called Matidia his “most loving mother-in-law,” whom he honored as if she were his own mother, and said that he was overcome with grief at her death.

She came to her uncle [Trajan] after he had taken over the principate, and from then on she followed him until his last day, accompanying him and living with him, honoring as a daughter should, and she was never seen without him … [She was] most dear to her husband, and after his death, through a long widowhood, passed in the very flower and fullest beauty of her person, most dutiful to her mother, herself a most indulgent mother, a most loyal relative, helping all, not troublesome to anyone, always in good humor.

Through the sorrow, can we perhaps detect an indirect dig at “my Sabina,” his phrase for her in the speech, as a spoiled child? In any event, the emperor maintained good formal relations with his little-loved wife, and it may be now that he promoted her to Augusta in the wake of Matidia’s death.

On the Palatine all was calm, order, and luxury, but when Hadrian walked down the hill into the busy, crowded heart of the world’s first megalopolis what did he find? What was Rome like? Luckily, we have one man’s personal view; his perspective was embittered and exaggerated, but he offers us his eyes, senses, and feelings as he strives to survive, if not thrive. He was Juvenal, whose sixteen furious satirical poems describe, condemn, flay the skin off his fashionable or powerful fellow citizens.

Most of what we surmise of his life has been deduced from his poetry. Born probably in 55, he was the son of a rich freedman. Juvenal portrays himself in the satires as a needy client, who lived “in pretentious poverty” on the perilous edge of insolvency, a hanger-on of wealthy patrons.

His circumstances greatly improved after 117 and Hadrian’s accession. This was no coincidence. For once he wrote kind things about an emperor.

All hopes for the arts, all inducement to write, rest on Caesar.

He alone has shown respect for the wretched Muses

in these hard times, when famous established poets would lease

an out-of-town bath concession or a city bakery …

But no one henceforth will be forced to perform unworthy labors …

So at it, young men: your Imperial Leader’s indulgence

is urging you on, surveying your ranks for worthy talent.

Juvenal’s unusual generosity of spirit seems to have been rewarded. He was granted (surely by the emperor) a pension and a small but adequate farmstead near Tibur, that home-away-from-home for the Aelii. Hadrian was, once again, modeling himself on Augustus, who was a generous patron of poets—as was his close friend and associate Maecenas, who bought the hard-up poet Horace a rural retreat at Tibur.

In his third satire Juvenal paints an unforgettable picture of daily life in ancient Rome, then a huddled conurbation of an estimated 1 million souls. Augustus claimed to have found a city of brick and left one of marble. This was an exaggeration, but successive emperors built or restored forums, basilicas, public baths, and theaters. After more than a century of nonstop construction, the result was a magnificent architectural assemblage in the old city center and on the Campus Martius. A network of streets, mostly unpaved and at best laid with pebbles, led to the city’s main gates. Otherwise Rome was a huddle of narrow, dark alleys, punctuated by piazzettas and crossroads shrines. There were temples everywhere and, as Roman religion entailed numerous animal sacrifices, the groans and odors of the abattoir were added to the already complex soundscape and scent of city life.

Aqueducts brought water to numerous public fountains and the public baths and drains ran under main streets. But these amenities only mitigated a universal lack of hygiene and frequent visitations of infectious disease.

In the poem, a friend of Juvenal, a certain Umbricius, explains why he abandoned the city for “a charming coastal retreat.” While the wealthy few lived in quiet, spacious homes with windowless walls on the street frontage and courtyards open to the sky, many ordinary people had single rooms in jerry-built multistory apartment blocks, which tended to come crashing down without warning. Nobody was afraid that his house in the country—“at Tibur perched on its hillside”—would collapse, says Umbricius.

But here

we inhabit a city largely shored up with gimcrack stays and props: that’s how our landlords postpone slippage, and—after masking great cracks in the ancient fabric—assure the tenants that they sleep sound, when the house is tottering. Myself, I prefer life without fires, without nocturnal panics.

The night was noisy for other reasons. Since the days of Julius Caesar wheeled traffic was allowed on the streets only after sunset.

Insomnia causes most deaths here … The wagons thundering past through those narrow twisting streets, the oaths of draymen caught in a traffic jam, would rouse a dozing seal …

There were no street lights, and in the hours of darkness the solitary walker was at risk of a severe beating up.

… however flown with wine our young hothead may be, he carefully keeps his distance from the man in a scarlet cloak, the man surrounded by torches and big brass lamps and a numerous bodyguard. But for me, a lonely pedestrian, trudging home by moonlight or with hand cupped around the wick of one poor guttering candle he only has contempt …

The victim is slugged to a pulp and begs for his few remaining teeth—“as a special favor.”

Immigrants were Umbricius’ “pet aversion”—and, one suspects, Juvenal’s too. They were mostly Greeks—meaning anyone from the eastern provinces. They poured into Rome with their outlandish habits, says Umbricius, including

the whores pimped out around the Circus [Maximus]. That’s where you go if you fancy a foreign pickup, in one of those saucy toques.

There were villains, con men, gangsters everywhere. Even at home the citizen was not safe.

When every building

is shuttered, when shops stand silent, when doors are chained, there are still cat-burglars in plenty waiting to rob you, or else you’ll be knifed—a quick job—by some homeless tramp.

Like his imperial predecessors, Hadrian was determined to place his mark on the ugly, grubby, and higgledy-piggledy metropolis by commissioning masterworks of architecture. He was well aware that Trajan, Domitian, Nero, and Augustus had all spent vast sums of money beautifying Rome. An architectural enthusiast himself, one might even say an amateur architect, he was determined to outbuild them.

At the outset, he focused his attention on the Campus Martius. His aim was to create a visual connection between himself and the first princeps, between the structures that Augustus and Agrippa had left behind them and his own grand edifices, some brand-new and others radical remodelings of the old—beginning with the burned-out Pantheon.

Hadrian decided to reconstruct it using the existing floor plan—a conventional temple portico with columns and a pediment with a circular building behind it. If this circular building had had a roof it was probably made from wood—hence the successive fires. Hadrian had in mind something far more ambitious than Agrippa’s temple, and gave his architect one of the most exciting and challenging commissions in history. With studied modesty he intended to retain the inscribed attribution to Agrippa, and nowhere would Hadrian’s name be mentioned. The new Pantheon would be his homage to the admired founders of the imperial system—simultaneously eye-catching and discreet, a most Aelian touch.

The emperor restored two more of Agrippa’s buildings, the basilica or stoa of Neptune, god of the sea, and his public baths. In addition to these exercises in radical refurbishment, there was one major item of new construction: next to the Pantheon he commissioned a large temple dedicated to that most recent of goddesses, the Augusta Matidia; it was to be flanked by deep, two-story porticoes on either side that came to be known as the basilicas of Matidia and her mother, Marciana. No divae had ever been so honored. In this magnificent new quarter, which stood within easy walking distance from Augustus’ mausoleum and the Ara Pacis, and rivaled their visual impact, past and present were interlocked in marble.

His greatest project by far not only expressed Hadrian’s delight in the art of architecture but also his determination to attach to the traditional governance of the empire something approaching the court of an absolute Hellenistic monarch. This was his celebrated villa on the plain beneath Tibur. As we have seen, the town and its environs were where a Spanish “colony” of expatriates from Baetica established itself and where the Aelian family may have had a country home. Perhaps this was the first-century B.C. house around which the emperor designed his new development; in that case, he was returning to the fields where he had played as a little boy.

For centuries wealthy Romans had built themselves rural retreats, whether on their estates or at seaside resorts like Baiae. Here they could relax from the noise and crowds of Rome. But Hadrian wanted much more than a place where he could get away from it all; he intended a center of government. His architects and he designed a campus of more than three hundred acres rather than a single edifice. Just as the palace of the Ptolemies in Alexandria was a city district, they had in mind a township, both pastoral and splendid, where public buildings, grand entry halls and audience chambers, temples, and baths would intermingle with gardens and terraces and canals.

Hadrian was careful not to be disrespectful of the institutions in the capital city, just visible on the horizon. Senators were bound to live within twenty miles of Rome so that they could easily attend meetings and take part in official duties, and Hadrian’s “villa” was well within the limit.

As early as 117 work began, and it was to continue on and off for most of the rest of the reign. A development on this scale called for a team of architects, a clerk and office of works, and a wide range of experts (some doubtless seconded from the army), including mosaic artists, engineers, purchasing agents, garden designers, and sculptors, and hundreds if not thousands of manual workers.

Despite his engrossing construction projects, the emperor tired of Rome. Perhaps he was missing Athens, for he soon left the city for a tour of Campania, the nearest thing to Greece that Italy could provide. This was a long, fertile region in southern Italy, lying between the Tyrrhenian Sea and Italy’s backbone, the Apennine mountain range. Strabo described it as “the most blest of plains, and round about it lie fruitful hills.” The inhabitants had a reputation for luxury living.

Campania was settled from the eighth century B.C. by Greek colonists. The three great temples in the Doric manner at Paestum in the south still remind the visitor of the splendors of Greek culture. In the north Puteoli (today’s Pozzuoli) began life as the city of Dicaearchia (from the Greek for “good rule”) and was now a thriving harbor for the import of Alexandrian grain and a leading financial center.

Hadrian’s departure may have reminded some of the celebrated occasion when his predecessor Tiberius left the city for Campania under the influence of astrologers—and never returned. When Tacitus described the incident in the Annals, he may have meant readers between the lines to think of their present emperor, also a devotee of the clairvoyant arts. Perhaps Hadrian was to abandon Rome for good. If that was what his contemporaries suspected, we must suppose that the opinionated emperor had already indicated his dislike of the capital.

On this occasion, Hadrian only had an excursion in mind, although he had no intention of spending the rest of his reign among the overblown splendors of the Palatine. His aim in Campania was to “aid all the towns of the region with benefactions and gifts, attaching all the leading men to him.” Inscriptions have been discovered at various towns that record the completion of capital projects he commissioned and financed. Campania was a prosperous region, and the emperor was engaging in public relations rather than responding to some crisis or special need.

His itinerary is not recorded, but we must assume that, as the empire’s commander in chief, he visited the naval base at Misenum and reviewed the fleet. Not far away was Neapolis itself (“new town”), or Naples. Thoroughly Hellenic in appearance and spirit, it was a center of learning and many upper-class young men went there to finish their education by cultivating rhetoric and the arts. Despite centuries of Roman rule, the inhabitants still spoke Greek. Strabo observed how their easy lifestyle attracted people from Rome who wanted

a restful vacation—I mean the kind of people who have made their careers in education, or others who, because of old age or illness, are looking for somewhere to relax. Some Romans, enjoying this way of life and noticing the large number of men who share the same cultural attitudes as themselves staying there, gladly fall in love with the place and make it their permanent home.

Every five years Neapolis staged games in the traditional Greek manner where athletics alternated with musical and poetry competitions. According to the Historia Augusta, Hadrian was honored with the title of demarch (that is, “ruler of the people”), Neapolis’ chief public official; although the date is not given it was probably now, in 119.

Nearby was the small town of Cumae. Here once lived its celebrated clairvoyant, the Sibyl. She let the god Apollo have sex with her if he granted her immortality; but like too many other attractive classical mortals, she forgot to ask for eternal youth as well. She shriveled up and dwindled over the centuries. According to Petronius, novelist and favorite of Nero, she lived in a cave where she sat in a jug moaning, “I want to die.” The cave has been found, and some kind of oracular service seems to have been provided in historical times; if the Sibyl, or more precisely a living priestess, was open to inquiries we can be sure that Hadrian called by.

The journey around Campania gave the emperor a foretaste of how he would like to manage affairs. He conceived a plan to visit every province in his wide dominions. Like the first princeps, he liked to see things for himself, to go to where the problem was, to assess the evidence in person, to make a decision on the spot and not at a distance of tens or hundreds of miles. This, he was sure, was how the empire should be run.

After more than two years in Italy, Hadrian had convincingly asserted his authority. The new regime was no longer new, men loyal to him had been placed at all the power points, and the Senate and people now accepted, if grudgingly, the way things were. He could leave the capital without worrying what was going on behind his back.

The emperor was ready to set off on his travels.

XVI

THE TRAVELER

The emperor had not done quite enough to convince Rome that he loved it. People could still remember the young man who read out Trajan’s letters to the Senate in a Spanish accent. A half foreigner, he had spent most of his adult career soldiering abroad on the empire’s barbarian frontiers. If he was to take to the road for long years in the provinces, as he meant to do, imperium would accompany him—and the city would risk losing its proud sense of itself as capital of the world.

Hadrian took two steps that would prove beyond doubt his devotion, his pietas, that most traditional of virtues. First he designed a temple dedicated to the goddess Venus, mother of Aeneas, who renewed ruined Troy in the fields of Latium, and Roma, the city’s divine spirit. This huge structure was to rest on a high man-made platform on the Velia, a low hill between the Forum and the Colosseum. It was to be large enough to rival the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitol, at the Forum’s other end, and no doubt that visual echo was what the emperor intended.

Second, the emperor felt that Rome deserved a birthday party. On April 21, 753 B.C., legend had it, Romulus founded his new city on the Palatine Hill, digging a trench along the route where its boundary, a strip of consecrated ground called the pomerium, would run. Hadrian announced an annual celebration on that day to mark the Natalis Urbis Romae; it was superimposed on an already existing festival, the Parilia, which honored a pastoral deity, Pales, and sought protection for shepherds and fecundity for their flocks. Interestingly, the birthday of the emperor’s favorite king, Numa Pompilius, also fell on April 21.

This was all clever marketing, but Hadrian was not simply intent on seeking to please. In another ceremony evoking Rome’s distant past, he reasserted his policy of containment rather than expansion. It was permissible to redraw the pomerium and take in a larger area, provided that the territory of the empire had also expanded. In Trajan’s case it had obviously done so, but he had not gotten around to ordering an extension before his death. Rather than complete unfinished business from the previous reign, Hadrian confirmed the pomerium exactly as it was. He conducted a lustratio, a ritual of purification, along the route of the boundary, and in this way made his peaceful intentions absolutely clear.

In 121, not long after the reformed Parilia, the emperor left the city. According to Dio Cassius, he dispensed “with imperial trappings, for he never used these outside Rome.” It was as if he were shaking himself free from the stifling grandeur and constricting rituals of the capital and embracing the freedom of the road.

Hadrian had little idea of the date of his return. He probably sailed to Massilia (Marseille), southern Gaul’s main port, and made his way up the Rhône in the direction of Lugdunum (Lyon). Little information about his activities has come down to us. According to the Historia Augusta, he “went to the relief of all the communities with various acts of generosity.” Evidently, he was still pursuing the popularity of the open hand. Years later imperial coins hailed him as restitutor, or “restorer,” of the province; in one series, Gallia as a draped woman kneels before the princeps, who grasps her hand as if to raise her up.

Gaul was a sideshow, though, for Hadrian’s real destination was the German frontier, where he was to unveil the military policy through which he meant to implement his strategy of nonexpansion.

For inspiration, Hadrian looked back to the generals of the Republic, not the flashy ones like Scipio Africanus who won brilliant victories, but those who had had to labor against disadvantage. Two men of the second rather than the first rank attracted his particular approval.

Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus Numantinus was Africanus’ adopted grandson. During the sack of Carthage, Rome’s great rival, in 146 B.C., he turned to a friend and, with tears in his eyes, remarked: “A glorious moment, but I have a terrible fear that some day the same fate will be pronounced on my own country.” He went on to quote from Homer the famous lines:

There will come a day when sacred Troy shall perish

and Priam, and the people of Priam of the strong ash spear.

This fusion of pessimism about the benefits of war and magnanimity will have appealed to Hadrian, but what really struck home was Aemilianus’ generalship during a rebellion by Spanish tribes.

Fighting had been going on for a long time around the tribal settlement of Numantia, and the Roman troops were demoralized and ill disciplined. Aemilianus realized he would never win the war unless he brought his men under control. He arrived at the army camp with a small escort and immediately ordered the removal of everything that was not necessary to the war effort. The numerous civilians in the baggage train—tradesmen and prostitutes in the main—were sent away.

[The soldiers’] food was limited to plain boiled and roasted meats. They were forbidden to have beds, and [Aemilianus] was the first one to sleep on straw. He forbade them to ride on mules when on the march; “for what can you expect in a war,” said he, “from a man who is not able to walk?”

The harsh medicine worked; but Aemilianus knew that his legions were not yet ready for battle. So he instituted a severe and exhausting training regime. The troops were sent on route marches and were made to build, demolish, and rebuild camps. Tasks had to be completed within strict deadlines.

It was only when the legions were in good physical condition and morale had sharply improved that Aemilianus resumed his (ultimately successful) campaign against the Spaniards.

Hadrian’s second military hero was Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus, who flourished in the second century B.C. After holding the consulship, he was posted to North Africa to lead the campaign against the able and ambitious Numidian king, Jugurtha.

For him, too, training was the watchword. His predecessor in command had kept his forces in permanent camp, moving only when the bad smell or a lack of food supplies forced him. Men absented themselves from duty when the mood took them.

Just like Aemilianus, Metellus got rid of all the civilians, moved camp daily, undertook cross-country marches. At night he placed sentry posts at short intervals and did the rounds himself. When on the march, he moved up and down the column to check that no one left the ranks, that the men kept close to their standards and carried their own food and weapons. In this way, by inflicting exercise rather than punishment, Metellus soon restored discipline and morale.

The dowager empress’s serious mind and quiet disposition owed much to her appreciation of the philosophy of Epicurus. His thinking derived from an atomic idea of nature (originally promoted by the fifth-century B.C. scientific theorist Democritus). The fundamental constituents of everything, he asserted, were indivisible little bits of matter, or atoms, and everything that happened was the consequence of these atoms colliding with one another. Unlike Hadrian’s admired Epictetus, who saw the universe as the expression of a divine will, Epicurus held that it was no more than a sequence of random events.

On what foundation, then, was it possible to rest a system of ethics? The answer was that all good and bad originate in sensations of pleasure and pain. It was from these sensations that we construct a moral code. Epicurus also taught that death was the end of body and soul; it should not be feared, for there were no posthumous rewards and punishments. In later centuries Christian propagandists inaccurately labeled Epicurus as a hedonist (hence our terms epicure and epicurean). In fact, he sought no more than a tranquil life without pain, and cultivated simplicity.

Epicurus attracted a small band of devoted followers whom he taught in his house and garden just outside Athens. Above the garden gate a sign read: “Stranger, you will do well to linger here; here our highest good is pleasure.”

On his deathbed he informed a friend, with a whiff of self-congratulatory sangfroid:

A painful inability to urinate has attacked me, and also dysentery, so violent that nothing can be added to the violence of my sufferings. But the cheerfulness of my mind, arising from the recollection of all my philosophical contemplations, counterbalances all these afflictions.

Epicurus left the house and garden to a nominated successor and they were handed on in turn from one philosopher to another, down to Hadrian’s day. They were both a shrine and a continuing “school,” known as the Succession of Epicurus. Its doctrines survived and thrived.

Plotina learned of a problem facing the Epicureans at Athens. The Successor at the time was a man called Popillius Theotimus. Popillius is a Latin name and indicates that he held Roman citizenship, and in this fact lay the difficulty. The provincial authorities insisted that the head of the Succession of Epicurus be a Roman citizen. Theotimus wanted the rule to be relaxed. Evidently he had someone in mind to take over from him who was ineligible.

He was fortunate to be well connected. He asked Plotina to intervene and she was happy to do so. She wrote a letter to her adopted son, which reached him during his European tour:

You know very well, sir, [the interest I] have in the sect of Epicurus. His school needs your help. [Since, as of now], a successor must be taken from those who are Roman citizens, the choice is narrowly limited. [I ask,] therefore, in the name of Popillius Theotimus, who is currently Successor at Athens, that it be permitted by you to him … to be entitled to appoint as successor to himself one of foreign nationality, if the distinction of the person should make it advisable.

Hadrian complied without demur and sent Theotimus the necessary permissions. The dowager empress was delighted and wrote to “all the Friends”:

We have what we were so eager to obtain … We owe … a debt of gratitude to him who is in truth the benefactor and overseer of all culture and therefore a most reverence-worthy emperor, very dear to me in all respects as both an outstanding guardian and loyal son.

But she added a note of warning, knowing how personal feelings could warp judgment in tightly knit communities. It was important to choose as a successor “the best of all fellow-sectarians and to attribute more importance to his view of the overall interest than to his private congeniality with certain members.”

Surely, Plotina had at the back of her mind another succession. She had had recent experience of an awkward handover of authority, in which she was widely supposed to have played a leading role. Hadrian had not been the most congenial personality at Trajan’s court, but in her calm way the empress had acted firmly to ensure that the best man, in her opinion, followed her husband to the purple. The same principle, she was certain, should be applied in the garden of Epicurus.

When the emperor arrived at the German front he soon showed what he had learned about the art of command, both from his own experience and from a study of history. His strategy of defensive imperialism did not make him unwarlike or negate his many years in the army: quite the reverse, he was a soldier’s soldier. Also, he needed to pacify his critics by demonstrating his prowess as a general.

Hadrian realized that the army had been growing slack thanks to the “inattention of previous supreme commanders,” as the Historia Augusta has it: an interesting phrase, for, despite Hadrian’s appreciation of Trajan’s generalship, it implies that his adoptive father had been careless about the day-to-day routines of life in the camp and in the field.

Hadrian introduced the highest standards of discipline and kept the soldiers on continual exercises, as if war were imminent. In order to ensure consistency, he followed the examples of Augustus (once again) and Trajan by publishing a manual of military regulations. His approach to training was innovatory; he made his soldiers practice the fighting techniques of potential or actual opponents—Parthians, Armenians, Sarmatians, and Celts—and, according to Arrian, devised some of his own “with a view to beauty, speed, the inspiring of terror, and practical use.” He led by example, sharing the life of the rank and file and cheerfully eating “such camp fare as bacon, cheese, and vinegar.” It may be while on campaign that he developed a liking for tetrafarmakon, a pie made from pheasant, sow’s udder, and ham. The Historia Augusta writes: “He generally wore the commonest clothing—refusing gold ornamentation on his sword belt, fastening his cloak with an unjeweled clasp, and only reluctantly allowing himself an ivory hilt to his sword.”

The emperor joined his men on the regular route marches he insisted on, walking with them for as many as twenty miles (the target was to cover this distance in five hours). He made a point of never setting foot in a chariot or sitting in a four-wheeled carriage, and always walked or rode on horseback. Whatever the weather, he went about with his head bare.

Hadrian was naturally inquisitive, and these qualities now came into their own. Dio Cassius writes: “He personally viewed and investigated absolutely everything.” He inspected garrisons and forts, closing some down and relocating others. He examined all aspects of camp life—the weapons, the artillery, the trenches, ramparts, and palisades—making sure that every detail came up to his high standards.

The private lives of both rank-and-file soldiers and officers came under close scrutiny. The main aim was to eliminate luxury. Some officers behaved as if they were on vacation. The emperor put a stop to all that. According to the Historia Augusta, he “demolished dining rooms in the camps, and porticoes, covered galleries, and ornamental gardens.”

The emperor also took steps to improve the professional caliber of officers. He was particularly anxious about military tribunes, who were, in effect, a legionary commander’s general staff. He took care to appoint somewhat older men “with full beards or of an age to give to the authority of the tribuneship a full measure of prudence and maturity.”

As for the ordinary legionary, Hadrian improved the quality of weapons and other equipment, and forbade the recruitment or maintenance in service of men who were either too young or too old to cope with the physical demands of military life. He found other ways of softening the severity of military regulations. He ruled that the death penalty should be used as sparingly as possible.

Soldiers were not allowed to marry during their term of enlistment, but often contracted informal partnerships with women and had children by them. On their discharge many married their mistresses and so legitimized any offspring. But if they died in service, their sons were bastards and not permitted to become principal heirs. In a letter discovered in the Egyptian desert, Hadrian discussed the matter with the prefect of Egypt. He had decided that it was time to allow illegitimate soldiers’ sons the same limited property rights as relatives. The emperor was pleased to “put a more humane interpretation on the rather too strict rule established by emperors before me.”

So far as we can tell, Hadrian’s provincial survey was comprehensive. He visited the two Germanias, Lower and Upper, and the two small provinces along the upper Danube—Raetia (in today’s geography, Bavaria and Swabia, with parts of Austria, Switzerland, and Lombardy) and Noricum (some of today’s Austria and Slovenia).

Hadrian’s army reforms should be seen alongside his defensive foreign policy. If war was to be discounted, his soldiers needed something else to ensure discipline and spur morale—namely, a leader who knew how to marry discipline with affection and concern for their welfare. Hadrian became very popular with them, and for the rest of his reign never found reason to doubt their loyalty. The impact of his reforms was deep and long-lasting. Through unremitting energy and skill, he forged a peacetime army into a powerful war machine. Hadrian’s legions were one of the most valuable legacies he left to his successors.

The Roman had a different idea of a frontier than we do today. It was not a line demarcating the edge of a national or political territory, on the far side of which another power owned the freehold. Rather, he saw it as the edge of land that the state, the Senatus Populusque Romanus, directly administered.

Beyond lay a swath of territory also held to be in his possession, even if he chose not to govern it. Its inhabitants were to a certain degree imperial subjects. Some lived in client kingdoms, others were members of allied tribes who perhaps received subsidies from Rome or, alternatively, paid tribute. The result was that most frontiers were porous. Merchants and travelers, men looking for jobs, came and went. Goods were declared and dues paid. Embassies ferried complaints and compliments. At the same time, of course, the legions had to be on their guard against raiders, serious armed incursions, or even revolts. So a frontier was not like a city wall, the purpose of which was purely defensive. The job of guards was less to keep intruders out than to be traffic policemen.

When Hadrian arrived in Upper Germania he was especially interested in the limes that Domitian and, later, Trajan had erected. Originally a limes was a pathway between two fields, but here it meant a road lined with about one thousand watchtowers and two hundred or so forts and fortlets, running from the Rhine above Mainz southeast to the Danube above Regensburg. The limes bridged an awkward gap between the two great rivers that otherwise constituted Rome’s natural borders between the North and Black seas.

When the emperor visited the limes, he made an important and innovative decision. On the “enemy” side of the road he ordered his soldiers to build an unbroken wooden palisade perhaps ten feet high, consisting of large oak posts, split in two with the flat sides facing out, and strengthened by crossbeams. This was a tremendous enterprise, for the limes was about 350 miles long. Wide swaths of German forest were harvested.

What problem was the emperor trying to solve? The existing fortifications seem to have been perfectly adequate, and the tribes in the hinterland posed no special threat of invasion. However, a wall would enable tax-hungry officialdom to discourage smuggling and increase customs dues, as well as control immigration. It would also be a time-consuming fatigue duty that would keep the legions busy for years.

But the sheer ambition of the project suggests another, overriding motive. The wall was a visible confirmation of Hadrian’s policy of imperial stasis. It was a spectacular symbol both of the power of Rome and of its determination not to grow any further. This interpretation is supported by an observation in the Historia Augusta that Hadrian used artificial barriers to shut off or set apart barbarians “during this period [his first provincial tour] and on many other occasions.” In other words, the German palisade was not a one-off project to meet a particular threat, but an example of an empire-wide policy that was bound to have a demonstrative as well as a practical effect.

The policy may well have been unpopular with his generals and with the Senate, but the emperor never wavered in his determination to implement it. With the passage of time, the benefits of defensive imperialism became widely accepted, at least in the provinces. Later in the century a commentator remarked approvingly: “An encamped army, like a rampart, encloses the civilized world in a ring.”

Having introduced his new training regime and commissioned his palisade, the emperor was ready to move on. His next major destination was the island of Britannia, perched on the outer boundary of the known world.

XVII

EDGE OF EMPIRE

Halfway between the North Sea and the Solway Firth on the largely treeless and windswept moors of the northern Pennines, the fort of Vindolanda stood on a small plateau, well watered with springs. The beautiful, bleak landscape around it has changed little during the last two thousand years.

The fort’s name brought together two Celtic words—vindos, “white” (winter derives from the same root), and landa, signifying enclosure or lawn. It was surely so-called because of a still-persisting trick of the weather. For about half an hour after sunrise in winter, the plateau remains in the shadow of a neighboring hill. While all around the frost on the ground melts away, the fort remains crisp and white—a magical shining enclosure.

Vindolanda was one of a series of strongpoints strung along a road (now known by its medieval name, Stanegate), rather like the limes of Domitian in Germania. High ramparts topped by a palisade formed a rectangle with rounded corners, and inside could be found the usual components of a Roman camp—tidy rows of barracks, storehouses, a hospital, and the commander’s grand residence, the praetorium. The cultural amenities of urban life were available: a stone bathhouse stood outside the fort, and a temple.

Britannia’s northern defenses were guarded by auxiliary troops, mainly Germans. Vindolanda was home variably to Tungrians, a Germanic tribe that had settled in northeastern Gaul, and the indispensable Batavians. It was not originally on the front line, but between 85 and 105 demands elsewhere in the empire led Domitian, and then Trajan, to pull back from forts in Scotland. The legions themselves were held in reserve in three towns whose Latin names were all drawn from native languages—Eboracum (York), Deva (Chester), and Isca Silurum (Caerleon).

The auxiliaries thought little of the locals’ fighting quality—unfairly, for they had acquitted themselves well during their rebellion, probably led by a militant tribe, the Brigantes, who had controlled much of northern England and the Midlands before the coming of the Romans. Now it was policy to recruit from them, much to the disgust of the Batavians, who called them Britunculi, “miserable little Brits.”

The early forts at Vindolanda were built of wood and were replaced every seven or eight years. Rather than clear a site before rebuilding, the Romans simply demolished it and overlaid the wreckage with a layer of clay or turf. The wet conditions ensured an environment without oxygen and preserved every object the legionaries discarded.

Since the early 1970s archaeologists have unearthed much priceless, well-preserved evidence of life as it was lived in an outpost of empire two thousand years ago. Shoes, belts, textiles, wooden tools, utensils of bronze and iron, have been discovered—and, most remarkable of all, correspondence, including personal letters, accounts, requests for leave, even drawings.

Most of the letters were penned in ink on slivers of oak or alder, usually the size and shape of a modern postcard or half a postcard (some were scratched onto wax-layered tablets). They reanimate the long-vanished dead—among them Flavius Cerealis, prefect of the ninth cohort of the Batavians, and his wife, Sulpicia Lepidina, who were in Vindolanda around the turn of the century.

A colleague apologizes to Cerealis for not having attended his wife’s birthday party, and a woman friend dictates a note to Lepidina inviting her to her birthday celebrations. She has added, in her own slightly wobbly hand, “I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, sister, as I hope to prosper, and hail.” The same woman gets her husband’s permission for Lepidina to visit her at her home in another fort, for she had “certain personal matters” she wanted to discuss. Lonely in Vindolanda one winter and in need of society, Cerealis asks a highly placed correspondent, perhaps a senator, to “furnish me with very many friends that, thanks to you, I may enjoy a pleasant period of military service.”

Cerealis and other cohort prefects appear to have been Germanic noblemen, and so well placed to win the loyalty of their men. However, the Vindolanda documents show that they and their families willingly Romanized themselves. Education of the young was a key tool: a couple of tablets reveal the efforts of a little boy, doubtless Cerealis and Lepidina’s son, to learn lines from Virgil’s Aeneid. He wrote down from memory a famous quotation: interea pavidum volitans pinnata p’ ubem, or “meanwhile, the winged creature [Rumor] flying through the trembling city.” He abbreviated per with p’ and accidentally left out the r of urbem. A tantalizing glimpse of a young Batavian learning to grow up into a proper Roman.

It was not only the elite that corresponded. In their remote outpost ordinary people were needy for news. Solemnis wrote to his “brother” Paris (their names suggest they were slaves, not soldiers): “Many hellos. You should know that I am well, and I hope you are too. You are a most disloyal man, for you haven’t sent me a single letter. I think I am behaving much more decently by writing to you.”

The northern edge of Roman rule was the emperor’s main destination, and there is evidence that the garrison at Vindolanda made expensive preparations to receive the great man in appropriate style. Archaeologists have discovered and explored a building that was erected at about the time of the emperor’s visit to Britannia. It was more elaborate and substantial than anything seen before on the site; it had massive oak posts and the floors were laid with opus signinum, a pavement mix of material such as gravel, terra-cotta, or stone set in limestone or clay, a common feature of private houses. The internal walls were plastered and some were painted. These were spacious quarters specially commissioned for a personage of higher status than had ever stayed at the fort before. The obvious candidate was Hadrian, who had to have a domestic base appropriate for an emperor during his tour of the north. Vindolanda’s central position made it a good choice, and doubtless provincial governors found it a convenient billet in the coming years long after the emperor had departed.

Hadrian probably crossed the sea to Britannia in June 122. He brought with him one of the Rhine legions, the VI Victrix (Victorious), which he added to the provincial garrison (perhaps replacing a legion lost in the late rebellion or transferred elsewhere). Also, three thousand men, borrowed from Spain and Germania, joined the expedition. The emperor was accompanied by the newly appointed governor, Aulus Platorius Nepos. Nepos was a friend and possibly a relative who originated in Hadrian’s hometown of Italica. He had fought in the Parthian war and governed Thrace, before holding a suffect consulship in Hadrian’s first year, 119. Platorius Nepos was to replace Falco, who had put down the stubborn British insurgents with efficiency but only after heavy losses.

Falco’s last task was to organize the imperial visit, a feat comparable to staging the modern Olympic Games. Thousands of legionaries needed to be accommodated, as did a detachment of the Praetorian Guard and the Batavian cavalry. Then there was a phalanx of dignitaries—the members of the emperor’s consilium, assorted comites and amici. Key members of the bureaucracy were present too, among them the ab epistulis Suetonius. A route had to be agreed and a series of hapless towns warned to prepare hospitality and plan to accommodate costly disruption with a smile.

The empress was of the party, there not from love but for decorum, and would have had her own court. The most politically significant of those accompanying the emperor was the praetorian prefect, Gaius Septicius Clarus (his colleague Turbo was still in charge in Rome). A distinguished eques and former governor of Egypt, this civilized man was a correspondent of Pliny and the dedicatee of Suetonius’ masterpiece, De Vita Caesarum, “The Lives of the Caesars.”

Information about Hadrian’s movements in Britannia are scarce. He probably set sail from the main base for the Britannic fleet, the classis Britannica, at Gesoriacum (today’s Boulogne), landing on the south coast and traveling up to the provincial capital, Londinium, where he doubtless parked the empress and most of the administrative staff. His subsequent itinerary is unknown, but a rational guess would have him visit the three legionary bases. Certificates were issued to soldiers from every army unit in the province whose service contracts had expired. These granted the usual privileges—in particular, “to their children and descendants, the citizenship and the right of legal marriage with the common-law wife they had at the time that citizenship was granted to them, or, if there are any bachelors, with the wife they subsequently marry”—the formula judiciously adds, “but only one at a time.” This mass discharge was unusual and we may safely suppose was designed to justify a grand ceremony at which the emperor addressed his men, something he liked doing.

It appears that the VI Victrix sailed directly from the Continent to the river Tyne. On their arrival they dedicated two altars; one, to the sea god Neptune, was decorated with a dolphin curled around a trident, and the other, to Oceanus, with a ship’s anchor. Oceanus was believed to be a vast river that encircled all land (of course, nobody knew then of the Americas, Australasia, and the Arctic). The event was powerfully evocative of a similar rite conducted by Alexander the Great on the eastern edge of the known world.

The emperor was surely present, and was perhaps making a political point about his predecessor. The glamorous ghost of Alexander ran through the Roman imagination like an obsession. Trajan had ruefully confessed that he was too old to emulate the conqueror of the Persian empire and reach Oceanus. And here was Hadrian offering the identical sacrifice at the other end of the world, where neither Alexander nor Trajan had ever been, at a time of peace rather than of war.

Britannia might have been a long way from the center of things, but the business of empire had to be maintained. One day a letter arrived from the governor of Asia asking for guidance on how to deal with Christians. By a happy chance the emperor’s letters secretary, Suetonius, was able to offer well-informed advice: he had been Pliny’s secretary in Bithynia a little more than ten years previously when Pliny had corresponded on the same subject with Trajan.

The governor wrote that he had received a petition to take action against local Christians and was unsure how to respond. The imperial government kept comprehensive archives, which enabled officials to keep an eye on precedents when requests, appeals, and petitions came in. While having no sympathy for the new sect, Trajan had had little wish to hunt down its adherents. They should be condemned only if the evidence against them was incontrovertible.

Hadrian took the same line. His reply survives (it found its way into Christian hands and is cited as an appendix in Justin’s First Apology, Christian propaganda published some thirty or so years later). He makes clear that detractors should put up proofs, or shut up. “I will not allow them simply to beg and shout,” the emperor insisted. If there was evidence, then the governor should hear it. If it was shown that the accused had committed offenses—in particular, that they were Christian and refused to make the appropriate sacrifices—then they should receive punishment proportional to their guilt. Provided that the text has not been tampered with, it looks as if Hadrian wanted to pursue Christians only for specific alleged crimes, not merely for membership in their church.

The emperor’s anger is aroused less by the Christians than by their ill-natured critics. “And this, by Hercules, you shall pay special attention to, that if any man shall, through sheer ill will, bring an accusation against any of these persons, you shall sentence him to more severe penalties in proportion to his wickedness.” The oath and the strangled syntax suggest that Hadrian was dictating the letter, and was in an irritated frame of mind.

The emperor may have adopted a tolerant policy because he saw through the hysterical prejudice against the sect and understood that it was not a group of fanatical criminals who practiced cannibalism, but was in fact pacific and posed no serious political threat. Alternatively, we know that he was fascinated by religion, especially the kind concerned with spiritual experience and individual commitment, and this may have motivated his approach.

One way or another, having won popularity with the Jews for his fairness toward them after their revolt in Egypt and Cyrene had been put down, the emperor became a favorite with Christian apologists. The Historia Augusta reports that Hadrian commissioned the building of temples throughout the empire without any divine images in them, and that it was thought they were dedicated to Christ. Apparently they came to be known as Hadrian’s temples. It is difficult to be sure what to make of this: the story may simply be the product of authorial fantasy, but if there is anything in it, it is more likely to have been the emperor’s general attempt to widen the scope of recognized or official worship than to single out any particular sect (rather as the Athenians did with their altar to the Unknown God). However, he could well have had Christianity in mind alongside other salvationist and monotheistic creeds of the day.

It was only a few years since rebellion in Britannia had marked the transition between Trajan and Hadrian. Curiously, though, the Vindolanda tablets do not convey an impression of military danger. Social life among senior officers was relaxed. A document of May 18 of an unknown year sets down the whereabouts of the members of the first cohort of the Tungrians, from which we learn that most of them, 456 soldiers out of a total complement of 752, were away from Vindolanda on every kind of errand and business. Of thirty-one soldiers who were sick, six were recovering from wounds—the only reference to fighting in all the Vindolanda texts. About half the cohort was at the neighboring fort of Coria (today’s Corbridge), about twelve miles away to the east along the Stanegate for training or some military exercise. Nearly fifty were singulares—that is, soldiers deputed to the provincial governor’s bodyguard. A number of small groups were in London or elsewhere; one detachment had gone to collect the cohort’s pay, perhaps at York. Nine men and a centurion were in Gaul, probably on a mission to collect clothing.

All these traveling soldiers doubled as postmen, carrying messages and goods to and fro up and down the country. The Vindolanda tablets demonstrate how much of the army’s time was devoted to economic activity and business trips. Nothing seems to have been exactly corrupt or incompetent, but the system would have been hard put to respond quickly and effectively to an emergency.

What did the emperor make of such commercial bustle? We are not told, but we may guess. There is plenty of evidence that discipline was a theme of his visit to Britannia. The Historia Augusta remarks that he “corrected many abuses.” An altar found at Chesters, where a fort stood on the Tyne, was dedicated “To the discipline of the emperor Hadrian” by a regiment of horse “called Augustan because of its valor.” Coins made the same point. A young military tribune with the VI Victrix at the time learned a lesson he never forgot. We hear of him forty years later as “a man of character and a disciplinarian of the old school”; arriving at a new posting, he saw that his soldiers were better clothed than armed. He

ripped up their cuirasses with his fingertips; he found horses saddled with cushions, and by his orders the little pommels on them were slit open and the down plucked from their saddles as from geese.

We can reasonably infer that Hadrian tightened arrangements in the Britannic army that had worked themselves loose, and that the Batavians at Vindolanda awaited his arrival with justifiable anxiety.

Rather than fear of punishment, one man had high hopes of redress from the emperor. A draft letter of protest to him has been discovered at the fort, complaining of mistreatment. A civilian trader scribbled it on the back of some accounts he had prepared. He was not from Britannia, but a transmarinus, from overseas, and so believed he was exempt from corporal punishment. However, a centurion had given him a good flogging for delivery of substandard wine or oil. “I implore Your Clemency,” he wrote, “not to suffer a transmarinus and an innocent one to have been made to bleed by a beating, as though I had committed some crime.”

The single most telling feature of the letter is where it was unearthed—in the centurions’ quarters. Someone must have found and confiscated the draft appeal, and we may doubt that a fair copy ever found its way to its addressee. Even if it did, the trader’s accounts do not look altogether defensible. A best guess at an outcome is that the poor man merely earned himself another beating.

Something very strange took place during the expeditio Britannica that implies strongly that although the reign had already lasted four years the emperor’s position was not entirely secure. Hadrian had a suspicious mind and he made full use of the secret police that had been developed from army supply officers. He had these agents pry into people’s private lives, including those of his friends. They acted with the utmost secrecy so that their surveillance went unnoticed.

In one case, there was an amusing sequel. A woman wrote to her husband to complain that he spent too much time enjoying himself at the public baths and generally living a life of pleasure, and as a result neglected her. Hadrian found out about this from his frumentarii, and when the man applied for leave reproached him for his selfish conduct. He replied: “Oh, don’t tell me she wrote to you as well to complain!”

More seriously, the frumentarii unearthed some delinquent behavior among senior members of the court. The details are obscure. With inexplicit brevity, the Historia Augusta says that Hadrian

replaced Septicius Clarus, Praetorian prefect, and Suetonius Tranquillus, his letters secretary, and many others as well, because, without his consent, they had behaved at that time toward his wife, Sabina, in a more informal manner than respect for the imperial family required. He would have dismissed his wife, too, for being moody and difficult—if he had been a private citizen.

It is hard to work out from this what actually took place, but the impression given is of a venial offense. Sabina seems to have been innocent of any material wrongdoing, for she is criticized only for being a trying spouse. “More informally” (familiarius) could mean something as slight as a breach of court etiquette or something as damaging as a sexual flirtation. Hadrian made a point of not being a stickler for etiquette, but would have expected appropriately proper behavior in his wife’s circle.

Whatever the offense was, we can only conclude that it was a pretext. The dismissal of two such senior figures was a political event of the first order, and so it must have been regarded at the time by informed opinion at court and in the Senate. Something grave had happened, but whatever it was is lost for good.

Sabina made her own, heavy riposte to Hadrian’s treatment of her. She used to say in public that because of his monstrous personality, she had taken pains not to become pregnant by him, for it would be “to the destruction of the human race.” Contraception was an imperfect and inconvenient art in the ancient world, entailing such prescriptions as wiping the vagina with old olive oil or moist alum, or jumping up and down and sneezing. However, sympathy for the empress is unnecessary, for we cannot suppose that Hadrian often insisted on his conjugal rights.

Suetonius’ dismissal has been bad news for classical historians, for he now no longer had access to the imperial archives. Only his biographies of Rome’s first two emperors, Augustus and Tiberius, were complete. Thereafter, he was unable to quote from original papers.

The most famous Roman monument in the British Isles is Hadrian’s Wall, the Vallum Aelium. Despite its celebrity today, there is only one literary reference to it in antiquity linking it to Hadrian. The Historia Augusta observes that he was “the first to construct a wall, eighty [Roman] miles long, which was to separate the barbarians from the Romans.”

Much of the wall survives in good condition, especially the midsection, and is northern England’s most popular tourist attraction. Its construction appears to have been planned before the emperor set off on his travels, if we can trust a much-restored inscription on two fragments of sandstone found at Jarrow and dating from 118 or 119, which asserted that the “necessity of keeping intact the empire [within its borders] had been imposed upon [Hadrian] by divine instruction” and announces the building of the wall.

The wall was a tremendous venture; all three of the British garrison legions, the Britannic fleet, and auxiliary troops were engaged in its construction. We may assume that the emperor took the closest interest in the design, and a sample length of wall could well have been built for his inspection.

At Newcastle a new bridge, made from timber on an estimated ten stone piers, was to cross the Tyne. This was the Pons Aelius, or “Hadrian’s Bridge,” which stood on the site of today’s swing bridge. Here work on the great fortification began and proceeded westward for seventy-three miles to the Irish Sea. It was to be a stone wall, thirty feet broad and fifteen high, with added battlements (some parts survive today up to ten feet high). Along its northern side a huge ditch was dug, thirty feet wide and nine feet deep. The ditch was V-shaped, making it difficult for an attacker to climb out of, once he had fallen in.

Every Roman mile (slightly shorter than today’s statute mile), measured from the pons, there was a guardpost or “mile castle,” with barracks accommodating up to sixty or so men; and between each pair of guardposts, two signaling turrets every mile enabled the rapid communication of danger along the wall. The wall itself had a clay-and-rubble core with a stone facing, probably with a stone-floored walkway on top. It curved down the coast to guard against sea raiders.

The wall ran a few hundred yards north of the Stanegate, which enabled the rapid arrival of reinforcements when needed. An old Stanegate fortress such as Vindolanda ensured the ready presence of reserves.

The wall is believed to have taken about six years to complete. There was evidently some pressure applied to work as fast as possible, for some parts of it were reduced in width to six feet, and widened later. For the eastern third of its length from sea to sea, the wall was a turf rampart about sixteen feet wide, topped by a wooden palisade and walkway and punctuated by timber-framed turrets and mile castles. Perhaps this was because there were no ready supplies of stone and lime. Later the stretch up to the western coast was rebuilt in stone.

Originally the wall was to be garrisoned and patrolled by soldiers based at the mile castles, but this turned out to be unsatisfactory, so a number of large garrison forts were built, some for infantry and others for cavalry.

The single most striking feature of the wall was its visual appearance. It seems to have been finished with plaster, grooved to represent smooth courses of cut stone, and then whitewashed. A ribbon tracing the rise and fall of the rugged green moorland, it could be seen for miles as it shone in the sunlight, an almost magical metaphor for Roman imperium.

Soon after work on the wall had finished, another ambitious project was launched—the construction, south of the wall, of two turf banks, each about ten feet high, separated by a flat-bottomed, twenty-foot-wide ditch. Between each bank and the central ditch was a level space roughly thirty feet wide. This vallum was crossed by roadways running south from the wall forts toward the Stanegate.

What was Hadrian’s Wall for? This is a harder question to answer than one might think. Little is known for sure about the population of northern Britannia (Scotland), but it is hard to believe that it posed much of a military threat. It is not obvious that building and managing a defended frontier along a fixed line was cheaper in manpower and treasure than annexing and governing the Scottish Lowlands (there was very little point, of course, in casting a covetous eye on the barren and sparsely populated Highlands). They could have been defended by a loose arrangement of forts that would cost no more, and maybe less, than manning a great wall from the Solway coast to the North Sea. It has been estimated that four thousand men, a little fewer than a legion, would have been a sufficient garrison.

As in Germania, the fact of a wall did not mean that Rome made no claim on land beyond it. Quite the opposite: it provided a secure baseline from which to project Roman power farther north as and when required. On a day-to-day basis we may safely assume that the fortification was permeable for migrants and merchants; indeed it bisected Brigantine territory, and tribesmen caught on the Pictish side were surely allowed access to their southern heartland. By enabling greater control of people’s comings and goings the wall must have generated income through customs dues. But were the benefits accruing from the wall enough to justify the high cost of its construction?

The vast vallum presents its own particular mystery. It was not topped by a palisade, and so cannot have had a defensive function. If it was to mark a rearward boundary behind the wall, creating an exclusion zone, then surely something less elaborate—a fence of some sort—would have sufficed. Perhaps the vallum was a two-way communications route along either side of the central ditch, which troops and civilians could use, conveniently closer to the wall itself than the Stanegate. But little evidence of a road surface has been found, and the vallum sometimes traverses very steep terrain, unsuitable for travel. In any case, we know that a purpose-built supply road ran between the wall and the vallum.

One can only conclude that the emperor was restating his commitment to imperial containment. As with his building program in Rome, he used the visual language of architecture and engineering to make a political point. The white ribbon thrown across an empty landscape and the monumental vallum were politics as spectacular art.

XVIII

LAST GOOD-BYES

The great cavalcade that was the imperial court gathered itself together and moved on. The next stage in the emperor’s travels was a return to Gaul, then Spain and North Africa.

Florus ribbed Hadrian for his inability to stay still and sent him a few satirical verses, detailing his movements so far in reverse order.

I couldn’t bear to be Caesar

roaming up and down Britannia

loitering around Germania

freezing my balls off in Scythia.

“Scythia” was a poetic way of referring to the wild Danubian provinces. The emperor was amused and composed a good-humored but sharp reply.

I couldn’t bear to be Florus

one of nature’s pub crawlers

who stuffs his face with burgers

and lets bedbugs share his mattress.

As we have seen, Florus did not agree with what he saw as the emperor’s do-nothing foreign policy, although he did remark that “it is harder to hold on to new provinces than to create them”—a dig at Trajan, one must suppose, which coincided with Hadrian’s opinion. In a number of respects, the two men had prejudices in common. A couplet by Florus on the nature of women may well have won the concurrence of Sabina’s husband.

Every woman’s breast conceals a noxious slime,

sweet words pass her lips, but her heart contains venom.

However, consistency is not everything. Plotina’s adopted son simultaneously cherished an affectionate opinion of the opposite sex. It depended on the woman in question. Some time about now, the news came from Italy of the much-cherished dowager empress’s death. As Dio Cassius put it bluntly, she had been “the woman through whom he had secured the imperial office because of her love for him.”

So far as we can tell, this love was platonic. The Augusta had run the oddest of happy households. At its center was a sexually uninterested emperor. Husband and wife liked and trusted each other, but they had no children, and probably no sex. Relations with the other senior ladies at court, Trajan’s sister Marciana and her daughter Matidia, were harmonious. In fact, at the eye of the storm of power they lived lives of Epicurean calm, and present themselves as a high-minded, slightly monochrome sorority.

The empress was never accused of interfering in politics until the intestate Trajan’s dying hours. On that occasion she did the state some service. She may have staged the less-than-convincing charade in Trajan’s darkened bedroom, but the outcome had been worth the deceit.

Hadrian was very upset by her passing, for (says Dio) he “honored her exceedingly.” He wore black for nine days and wrote some hymns in her honor (they are lost). In due course he arranged for her deification. He remarked of her: “Although she asked much of me I never refused her anything.” By this he meant that he never had to refuse her anything, for her requests were always reasonable.

Plotina came from Nemausus (today’s Nîmes, in southern France), capital of the Narbonesis province. The Pont du Gard, part of its aqueduct, and an extraordinarily well-preserved temple, now called the Maison Carrée, survive to the present day, but not the basilica “of marvelous workmanship” that Hadrian built in the empress’s memory.

Hadrian retained his youthful passion for hunting. He had become so skillful that he famously brought down a huge boar with a single spear thrust. On one occasion, he broke his collarbone and on another suffered a leg injury that came close to crippling him.

When he visited Vindolanda during his tour of the Britannic frontier, he would have found to his delight that the sport was part of the garrison’s culture. Presumably he made full use of the opportunities there to ride out with horses. And so he did in Gallia, too. We know of one particular hunt that came to a sad end. The Gallo-Roman town of Apta Julia (today’s Apt, in Provence, some thirty miles or so from Aix) stood on the via Domitia, which led down to Spain, and so was on Hadrian’s itinerary (Hannibal had traveled along it in the opposite direction on his march to Italy). There is mountainous hunting country nearby, and it is no accident that five dedications to the god of huntsmen, Silvanus, have been found in and near Apt.

The emperor’s favorite horse, Borysthenes, died here, and the emperor prepared a tomb with an epitaph for him. The epitaph is a short poem of praise of little artistic worth, which must have been quickly scribbled by the bereaved, versifying owner.

Borysthenes the barbarian

Caesar’s hunting horse

was accustomed to flash by

through sea and through bog

and past Etruscan barrows.

It is a private tribute. Something amusing or un toward must have happened at a tumulus in Tuscany, but the author does not trouble to tell us what it was. He goes on to claim that no boar ever gored Borysthenes, so that cannot have been the cause of his death at Apta. Perhaps the horse fell and broke a leg, and had to be put down. In any event,

Killed on his fated day

here he lies beneath the soil.

Hadrian was very fond of animals, and Borysthenes was not the only creature to be buried with honors. According to the Historia Augusta, he loved his horses and dogs so much that he provided tombs for them all when they died.

The saddened emperor continued his journey south, spending the winter of 122 at the capital of the province of Hispania Tarraconensis. This was Rome’s oldest foundation in Spain, Tarraco (today’s Tarragona)—or to call it by its proper title, Colonia Julia Urbs Triumphalis Tarraco. A walled city built on terraces on high ground, it stood on the coast but lacked a safe harbor. It was well appointed with all the appurtenances of the civilized life.

According to the poet Martial, who, out of favor for his excessive flattery of Domitian, spent his last years in his native Hispania, Tarraco had much to recommend it, especially to a keen huntsman like his friend Licinianus.

There you will slaughter deer snared in soft-meshed toils and native boars

and run the cunning hare to death with your stout horse (stags you will leave to the bailiff).

The nearby wood shall come down right to your own hearth and its girdle of grimy brats.

The hunter will be invited; shout from close by, and a guest will come to share your dinner.

The simple life without luxuries in the countryside appealed to generations of world-weary urban Romans. This could be little more than a literary trope, and often meant lounging around in comfortable rural villas. But Hadrian had a genuine taste for roughing it in the company of ordinary, unpretentious folk. It was one of the delights that hunting guaranteed.

Hadrian would have known Tarraco. It had been the hometown of his dead patron and promoter, Licinius Sura, and was a regular stopping-off point for travelers from Baetica in the south as they made their way by the safe if slow land route to Italy.

Among the city’s amenities were some gardens. They were probably those which, according to an inscription, a certain Publius Rufius Flavus left during his lifetime to four of his manumitted slaves. The legacy was to honor the “perpetual memory” of his dead wife, and the gardens could not be sold by the heirs or their successors, so we can deduce that they were to be a public park under the management of his freedmen and freedwomen.

It was here that the emperor took a stroll one day. According to the Historia Augusta,

one of the slaves of the household rushed at him madly with a sword. But he merely laid hold of the man, and when the servants ran to the rescue handed him over to them. Afterward, when it was found that the man was mad, he turned him over to the physicians for treatment, and all this time showed not the slightest sign of alarm.

The attempt had no political implications—except that the emperor’s calm and clement reaction won him widespread admiration.

Hadrian somewhat tarnished his popularity by announcing a recruiting drive for the legions. Roman citizens of Italian origin were not used to signing up in the army, and good-humoredly (but probably unsuccessfully) objected. It is a curious, and perhaps not unrelated, fact that on his journey south through Spain he failed to revisit his hometown of Italica, despite investing heavily in public buildings there over the years. His fellow citizens may have been preparing to submit a request to raise their town’s municipal status, but they were disappointed. Any petition had to be put in writing, and the emperor merely promised to speak to the subject when next in the Senate.

Urgent matters were calling for the emperor’s attention. While he was still in Britannia, reports had arrived of a renewed rebellion in Mauretania and riotous disturbances in Alexandria. It was only four years since the civil strife between rebellious Jews and the Greek community had been suppressed by Marcius Turbo (now the praetorian prefect in Rome). But this time the trouble came from the native Egyptians in the form of a found bull.

According to their cosmogony the universe was dreamed of and then created by the god Ptah; in another epiphany he was Osiris, the murdered deity who rose from the dead and was the redeemer and merciful judge in the afterworld. Ptah’s incarnation or messenger on earth was a sacred bull, Apis. The bull was recognized by special markings on his forehead, tongue, and flank, and was housed in Ptah’s temple at Memphis. He was given a harem of cows and worshipped. On his death, he was interred alongside his predecessors in a huge sarcophagus in a necropolis known as the Serapeum.

A new Apis bull had recently been identified and coins minted in Alexandria welcomed the happy event. However, a dispute broke out; according to the Historia Augusta, different communities put in a claim to look after the Apis bull, and widespread disorder ensued. The nervous prefect of Egypt sought the emperor’s presence.

The North African phase of Hadrian’s travels is very poorly documented. We must assume that the Mauretanian problem was not as large as supposed; if there had been a major war and the emperor had had to intervene personally, we would have heard something about it. The provincial governor may have dealt with the matter before his arrival in the region, or the very fact of his arrival may have calmed angry breasts.

So far as Alexandria was concerned, good advice was at hand. Suetonius’ successor as ab epistulis was very probably a Gallic intellectual, Lucius Julius Vestinus. A cultured man, he had been director of the imperial libraries and, germanely, had held the top academic post in the ancient world. He had been head of the Mouseion, a scientific research institution and literary academy in Alexandria with a celebrated library, which the ruling Ptolemies founded in the third century B.C. So Vestinus had direct knowledge of the Egyptian way of life, and was well placed to counsel his employer on the best course of action.

For the time being, Hadrian contented himself with a stern letter of reproof, which had the surprising effect of immediately stopping the rioting. Once again, the knowledge that he was slowly but inexorably journeying toward Egypt may have concentrated minds.

Hardly had these passing crises died away than a new and larger one loomed. Parthia was stirring. The emperor forwent a full inspection of the African provinces, probably setting sail for Antioch and arriving there in June 123. His aim was to meet the Parthian king, whichever member of the royal family happened to be on the throne for the moment, and dissuade him from aggression.

The city had not yet fully recovered from the devastating earthquake of eight years previously, and Hadrian scattered cultural largesse about him. He seems to have cherished an affection for the morally dubious gardens at Daphne and remained grateful to the clairvoyant Castalian springs there which had predicted his accession to the purple. He founded a “festival of the springs” to be held there every June 23, as well as commissioning a “theater of the springs” and a shrine of the nymphs. Although there is no record of the fact, presumably he removed the stones with which he had fearfully blocked the source in the first days of his reign.

Before setting off for the Parthian border Hadrian took care to honor Trajan’s memory by ordering the construction of a “very elegant” temple dedicated to his predecessor. The honor of Rome, and the practicalities of negotiation with a resentful interlocutor, meant that Trajan’s disastrous attempt to conquer the Parthian empire had to be presented as a victory.

Few details have survived about the quarrel, and it is even uncertain which of two rival rulers was occupying the throne at the time. It was probably Chosroes, whom Hadrian had acknowledged as rightful king in 117 when pulling the legions back from Parthia. As already noted, the new Roman emperor had deposed the puppet monarch whom Trajan had installed, Chosroes’ renegade son Parthemaspates, awarding the young man the consolation prize of Osrhoene, the little kingdom in northwestern Mesopotamia.

Five years later, Chosroes may have objected to this continuing thorn in his side. He may also have pressed for the return of his daughter and his throne, both of them captured and held hostage during Trajan’s campaign. One wonders, too, whether the king pressed for some kind of reparations for all the damage the legions had done during their blitzkrieg offensive. Rome was used to subsidizing neighboring states or tribes to keep them quiet.

The usual form for encounters between Roman and Parthian heads of state was for them to gather on either bank of the Euphrates, which marked the border between the two realms, and meet face-to-face on an island in the river; and that was presumably what happened on this occasion. As for the outcome, the Historia Augusta is brief and vague. “War with the Parthians had not at that time passed beyond the preparatory stage, and Hadrian checked it by a personal conference.” From this we can safely deduce that the emperor gave ground. Because he was uninterested in recouping Trajan’s brief gains, war would bring no practical advantage and would contradict his policy of self-containment. It would also consume vast quantities of treasure.

Coins tell the story of how the emperor presented the entente with Chosroes. For some time they made reference to an expeditio Augusti, or “the emperor on campaign,” which covered the defense review of Britannia, putting down the Moorish rebellion, and addressing the Parthian threat. Then the image of Janus began to appear on the coinage.

Janus was the god of entrances and exits, of comings and goings, beginnings and endings. He was presented as two-faced “since he is the doorkeeper of heaven and hell,” and presided over gates and doorways. A small temple in the Roman Forum was dedicated to him, the doors of which were opened in times of war and closed when the empire was at peace. The Romans understood peace to be the fruit of victory on the battlefield, so if, as seems very likely, the new coins mean that the emperor shut Janus’ doors, he was claiming military success for what was at best an achievement of negotiation.

It can be no accident that the ruler he revered so much, Augustus, took the same line on Parthia as he did—namely, that talking is better than fighting. He, too, presented the deals he struck in 20 B.C. and A.D. 2 with Parthian monarchs as the result of compelling, rather than compromising with, a recalcitrant enemy. And it was the first princeps who made clever use of the doors of Janus; they had been shut only twice before in Rome’s whole, warlike history, but Augustus closed them three times.

The past came vividly to life for the emperor when he visited the spot where a famous incident had taken place in the fifth century B.C. It was a rough pathway leading up to a mountain ridge that overlooked the Black Sea and the port of Trapezus in northern Cappadocia (today’s Treb izond). It was here that one day in 401 B.C. a harassed band of Greek mercenaries found themselves after struggling through a high pass along a very narrow, steep, and winding route.

Greek infantry (“hoplites”) were widely believed to be the best soldiers of their day, and about ten thousand of them had been hired by a pretender to the throne of the Persian empire. They joined his army and marched against the sitting king of kings. Near Babylon they helped the pretender win a decisive victory, but he fell in the fighting. The rebellion died with him, and the Greeks, now unemployed and unwelcome, had to fight their way through hundreds of miles of hostile territory to escape from the Persians. Their generals and senior officers were killed or captured, and the Athenian Xenophon, then an inexperienced but able young soldier, was elected as commander. He was a natural leader and, against the odds, brought his men to the safety of the Black Sea coast, with its Greek cities and ships to sail them home.

As the bedraggled regiment toiled its way up the slope, Xenophon and the rearguard heard a great shout from the brow of the hill and feared that it was some more enemies attacking from the front. Xenophon, who wrote a memoir of the long march home (modestly speaking of himself in the third person), described what happened next:

However, when the shouting got louder and drew nearer, and those who were constantly going forward started running toward the men in front who kept on shouting, and the more there were the more shouting there was, it looked then as though this was something of considerable importance. So Xenophon mounted his horse and, taking … the cavalry with him, rode forward to give support and, quite soon, they heard the soldiers shouting out: “The sea! The sea!”

It was as famous a moment of return as Odysseus’ homecoming in Ithaca from the Trojan war. Hadrian, who was inspecting the eastern frontier provinces after agreeing his entente with Chosroes, made sure he found the time to pay homage to one of his heroes. He regarded Xenophon highly not just for his courage and decency, but because he was an enthusiastic huntsman and, as we have seen, the author of a classic text on the subject.

Hadrian was touched by the place. To mark his visit, he added to memorial cairns built by the Greek soldiers by arranging for altars to be erected, plus a statue of himself. A few years later, Arrian, the emperor’s friend and an even more fervent admirer of the Athenian, was appointed governor of Cappadocia and toured the area in that capacity. He was dismayed by what he found at the mountain ridge. He informed the emperor that the altars had indeed been built, but in rough stone with an inaccurately cut inscription, and he had decided to replace them. As for the statue of the emperor,

although [it] has been erected in a pleasing pose—it points out to the sea—the work neither looks like you nor is beautiful in any way. So I have sent for a sculpture worthy to bear your name, in the same pose; for that spot is very well suited to an everlasting monument.

No doubt the replacements were a distinct improvement, but Arrian’s reference to an “everlasting monument” was challenging fate. Nothing now remains of altars or statue—but the cairns are still there. Immortality, only where it is due.

The emperor’s next stop was Bithynia-Pontus. The province was of strategic importance because it lay on the southern littoral of the Black Sea and was the main communication route between the Danube and Euphrates frontiers. According to ancient sources, the region was settled by Thracians from across the Propontis, but along the coastline a necklace of cities was founded by Greek colonists from the mainland and Asia Minor. Hellenic culture flourished there, as is borne out by the distinguished men whom the province produced—the famous rhetorician Dio Chrysostom of Prusa; Arrian, author and soldier; and, born later in the second century, the historian Dio Cassius.

There was plenty for an inquisitive visitor to inspect. The politics of Bithynia-Pontus was disputatious and corrupt and, for all Pliny’s attempts at reform in the previous reign, it is unlikely that much had changed since. Also, his correspondence with Trajan discussed numerous building and engineering projects, exactly the kind of thing that fascinated the emperor. At the city of Amastris, for example, Pliny wrote of a “long street of great beauty” marred by an open sewer running down the middle of it; he won Trajan’s permission to cover it and remove a “disgusting eyesore which gives off a noxious stench.” Hadrian could not have resisted the temptation to inspect the street himself to make sure that the project had been completed satisfactorily and the problem solved.

An earthquake had struck the province, and Nicomedia, the provincial capital, and the town of Nicaea had sustained much damage. The emperor provided funds for the necessary restoration work and doubtless busied himself with the detail of public development projects.

He expected no especial surprises during his stay in the province and laid plans for his future destinations—Thrace and then northward to the frontier provinces on the Danube. Finally, to his huge pleasure and as a reward for his labors, he anticipated a lengthy stay in his spiritual homeland, Greece. However, before he went on his way a chance encounter took place.

He came across a country boy in his mid-teens, who was to transform his life.

XIX

THE BITHYNIAN BOY

He came from an upland town called Claudiopolis (today’s Bolu). Named after the emperor Claudius, its citadel rose from a high plain in a mountain range that closed off the province’s flat and fertile coastal fringe. The mountain slopes were covered with fir trees, oaks, and beeches, from which generations of fleets were constructed. There was little agricultural land but grass meadows fattened cattle and the area was well known for its milk and cheeses (and still is). In winters ice and snow could render the roads impassable.

Then as now, the lakes, forests, and mountains were rich in wild-life, including wild boar. This was excellent hunting country and it is very possible that Hadrian rode out here to take part in his favorite pastime.

Claudiopolis was a prosperous place and the local worthies were ambitious, sometimes overly so, for their city. Pliny reported indignantly to Trajan that they were “building, or rather excavating, an enormous public bath at the foot of a mountain.” Not only was the site dangerously inappropriate, but its funding was dubious. He could not make up his mind whether to complete the original plans and hope that good money was not being thrown after bad, or to begin again at a new location and sacrifice the original outlay. Trajan replied shortly that the governor must decide for himself.

The main road from Cappadocia passed through Claudiopolis, and we can hardly doubt that Hadrian, copy of Pliny in his hand, stopped off to see how the dilemma had been resolved. It may be then and there that he met, or at least noticed, the boy.

Antinous was about fifteen or maybe a little younger in 123; if the year of his birth is uncertain, his birthday probably fell on November 27. History has not recorded his first encounter with the emperor. Before 130, when the pair went sightseeing in Egypt and North Africa, they are invisible. However, this was the only time when we find them in one place and they could have set eyes on each other.

It is possible to make a judgment by assessing the many statues of Antinous that have survived. Most of the images are posthumous—idealized and melancholy. But some survive from the beginning of Antinous’ career that evoke a cheerful, chubby-faced teenager, almost a child (puberty seems to have arrived late in the ancient world, officially at fourteen for boys but in practice between fourteen and sixteen). In about 130 we see Antinous in a carved relief, as a whiskered young man with short hair, twenty or so years old.

So it is reasonable to infer that the paths of the forty-seven-year-old emperor and the young Bithynian crossed during the former’s journey through the province. Rulers do not happen upon strangers in the street, and we must assume that Antinous was taking part in some public ceremony when he was noticed. This could well have occurred at Claudiopolis, but, if not, then at the capital, Nicomedia. Heraclea offers a third possibility, for games were founded and held there in the emperor’s honor, and Antinous could have been a competitor.

Nothing whatever is known of the boy’s parents, except that they claimed or assumed Greek descent. The people of Claudiopolis believed (whether rightly or wrongly is unclear) that migrants from Arcadia in the Peloponnese established their city. The capital of Arcadia was Mantinea, and it is relevantly curious that a woman called Antinoe was its secondary founder: inspired by an oracle and guided by a helpful snake, she moved the city to a new location. Antinous is the male form of her name, which was, we may suppose, popular in Claudiopolis.

A late reference to Antinous as Hadrian’s “slave” can be discounted, for that would have been seen as a thoroughly disreputable provenance for an imperial favorite. We may guess, and it is no more than a guess, that Antinous belonged to a modestly prosperous family, prominent enough to enable their son to take part in some kind of public event, but not for a social position of any distinction. If they had belonged to the established, property-owning class that ran most local authorities, we might have expected some mention of this to survive in the record.

Whatever the details of the boy’s origins and social status, the large, the overwhelming fact is that Hadrian fell in love with Antinous. The relationship was to color the rest of their lives.

But what did “falling in love,” and for that matter in lust, mean for an elite citizen in the Roman empire? Something very different from our ideas today. Sex did not have the attributes of sin and guilt that Christianity brought to it. Most people in the ancient world found making love to be, in principle, an innocent, or at least an innocuous, pleasure.

There were limits, of course, to sexual freedom. The comic playwright Titus Maccius Plautus, writing as early as the third century B.C., set out a basic principle that remained current for centuries. A slave reassures his young master, who yearns for a prostitute rather than a free-born girl:

no one keeps you from coming here or forbids you from buying what is openly for sale—if you have the cash. No one keeps you from traveling on the public road; so long as you do not make your way through a fenced-off farm, so long as you keep away from a married woman, an unmarried woman, a maiden, young men, and free boys, love whatever you like.

The point was that sex with Roman citizens outside marriage was beyond the pale, for not even the shadow of a doubt should be allowed to fall across a citizen’s paternity. Slaves and foreigners of either gender, though, were fair game.

It follows from this that Hadrian would have broken the rules when sleeping with Antinous if he was a Roman citizen. However, this was probably not the case, for citizenship was an honor usually granted only to members of local elites in the provinces.

The second rule for the Roman male was that he should be sexually “active” rather than “passive.” It did not greatly matter into whom he inserted his penis, but he must never allow anyone to insert theirs into him. To be sodomized was to fall under someone else’s power, and to be classed as a pseudo-woman.

The Romans had no particular theory of same-sex behavior and saw it simply as one among a number of sexual variations. Through a law passed in the second century B.C., the lex Scantinia, they tried to control homosexual acts of which they disapproved (male prostitution, for example), but by the time of the empire legal sanctions had more or less become a dead letter.

By contrast, the Greeks developed an idealized and specialized version of homosexual behavior. It involved relations between young men and postpubertal teenagers. The older partner was expected to educate his boy lover in virtue in the public square and courage on the battlefield. Some form of sexual activity was an expected, but (so far as we can tell) not absolutely essential, component in these relationships. The boy was not meant to desire his mentor, however charming or good-looking, but allowed himself to be the object of desire; provided discretion was exercised, he might even agree to being sodomized, whether intercrurally or rectally. The wider function of the pairings is uncertain, but people at the time believed that they encouraged martial valor. Also, just as marriage was a useful means of uniting families, so these love affairs facilitated the creation of informal networks of political alliances.

Homosexual practices varied from state to state, and were often restricted to aristocrats or elite groups. In Sparta and Thebes close affection between young men was part of the military ethos. The Cretans engaged in a procedure that resembles tribal initiation ceremonies in different parts of the world. A young man asked a boy’s friends to abduct him and hand him over. He then gave the boy expensive presents, after which they went out into the countryside with all the boy’s friends and spent two months hunting and feasting. The philetor, or befriender, and the parastates, or stander-beside-in-battle, as they were called, were now a recognized couple.

The Athenian system is well described in Plato’s Symposium, or “The Drinking Party” (dialogues were a popular form of “faction” in Greco-Roman culture, combining real-life debaters and fictional debates). Pausanias, one of the speakers, makes it clear that a love affair between an erastes, or lover, and an eromenos, or beloved one, was highly respectable.

Lovers of their own sex … do not fall in love with mere boys, but wait until the age at which they begin to show some intelligence, that is to say, until they are near growing a beard. By choosing that moment in the life of their favorite they show, if I am not mistaken, that their intention is to form a lasting attachment and a partnership for life.

In other words, the heat of passion, eros, would give way over time to a deep but nonphysical friendship between adults, philia. A sexual relationship, intense or otherwise, was in the nature of things ephemeral. It came to an end when a beard replaced a smooth cheek.

The theory and practice of “Greek love” survived the fall of the free city-states and their absorption into the Roman empire, and remained current in Hadrian’s day. In one of his numerous dialogues, Plutarch, the emperor’s older and much admired contemporary, the leading Hellenic intellectual of his day, gave the floor to a spokesman for same-sex relationships, a certain Protogenes.

The true genuine love is that of boys, not afire with lust … nor besmeared with perfumed ointments, nor alluring with smiles and rolling glances; but you shall find this love plain and simple and undebauched, delighting in the schools of the philosophers, or in the wrestling lists and gymnasia … and exhorting to virtue all that he finds to be fit objects of his attention.

How seriously should we take assurances of this kind? Cynics such as Cicero suspected the motives of the erastes who claimed to be interested only in the soul of his eromenos. Why is it, he mused, that no one falls in love with an ugly youngster?

Men did not categorize themselves as homosexual, for, until the inventions of modern psychology, there was no concept, and so no term, for man-to-man sexual preference as a viable and exclusive alternative to heterosexuality and as a describer of personality. But too much can be made of this apparent lack of definition. There were impolite terms for the “out,” feminized homosexual (cinaedus, for example); and, more pertinently, Romans were quite capable of telling straights from gays even without our words for them. Many slept impartially with members of both sexes. (We have little clear idea of homosexual behavior among women, except that sophisticated circles knew of it. Martial certainly did when he played on the two meanings of girlfriend, sexual and amicable.

Lesbia of the Lesbians, Philaenis, how right you are

to call the woman you fuck “my girlfriend.”

It is a pity that more is not known of attitudes in Trajan’s womanly household, in which heterosexual males were conspicuous by their absence.)

One of the remarkable features of this period is that for nearly fifty years the imperial government was headed by two men who engaged predominantly, if not exclusively, in homosexual behavior. There are no references at all to Trajan sleeping with women. As for Hadrian, Sabina’s remark about taking precautions to avoid pregnancy implies at least occasional coitus, if we are to credit an angry witness. The Historia Augusta cites reports of his “passion for males and adulteries with married women,” but there is not a sliver of supporting evidence for the latter in any of the sources. Whatever the exact nature of the emperors’ sexuality, it was not felt to be of political significance since they never allowed their private lives to influence their public decisions, and no one complained.

However, it is hard to believe that this homosexual preference did not have some impact on cultural and social attitudes, although such evidence as remains fails to show causal links. A literature of pederasty flourished. A poet called Straton, who came from Sardis in the fertile Hermus Valley in Asia Minor and was a contemporary of Hadrian, happily acknowledged that he was a philopais, or boy lover. He published an anthology of gay epigrams, Mousa Paidike, or “The Boyish Muse,” many of which he wrote himself. Playful lip service to love concealed a more cynical motive—how to find a pretty lad and have his way with him; abuse masked as flirtatiousness.

Juvenal takes a bleaker view of Rome’s ubiquitous and corrupt gay scene. He sympathizes with a male prostitute “who used to fancy himself as a soft, pretty boy, a latter-day Ganymede” and has grown up to be no more than a well-hung “two-legged donkey” buggering old men up their depilated, distended rear passages. This, we may gloomily infer, was the fate awaiting Straton’s little favorites.

Where do we place the philopais emperor and his Antinous in this variegated landscape of the senses? Hadrian’s reported behavior at Trajan’s court suggests a strong libido and a promiscuous nature. He could well have regarded his Bithynian boy as a plaything—the kind of golden lad that graces Straton’s pages. With Hadrian’s reputation as a procurer of every luxury and licentiousness, Antinous was simply another in a long line of conquests.

There is a more attractive alternative—that this most Hellenic of emperors cast himself as an erastes with Antinous as his eromenos. If he followed the rules, he would have treated the boy with respect, wooed him, and given him the choice whether or not to accept his advances. Any “favors” Hadrian was granted would have been matched by a serious commitment to Antinous’ moral development as he grew into an adult.

The strongest argument in favor of this hypothesis is that the relationship did indeed endure. Antinous was no brief fling. However, social equality was implicit in Greek love, and the disparity of power between the man and the boy was far too wide to allow genuine freedom of choice, however much an idealistic lover may have wished to confer it on his beloved. Who says no to an autocrat? Also, it was inconceivable that someone of Antinous’ class could be trained for a political and military career when an adult, for Rome’s political elite would have been shocked to its core by such a promotion.

The most likely conclusion is that Hadrian’s emotions were complicated. Antinous may have started off as the kind of boy whom Straton hymns, but for some reason, unknowable and unguessable now, he attracted the emperor’s deepest feelings. So what looked to outsiders like a routine liaison, Hadrian decorated with the anachronistic appurtenances of Greek love.

The relationship between an erastes and an eromenos, was meant to ripen into philia, a lifelong friendship. But what would happen five or so years later, when summer inevitably gave way to fall, and stubble grew on Antinous’ cheeks? Would Hadrian stay true?

Hadrian traveled in style, serviced by an agmen comitantium, a “moving multitude of companions.” There were the bureaucrats, who looked after his correspondence with provincial governors and the Senate in Rome, helped him reply to petitions that poured in from every corner of the empire, and controlled the finances. There were the Praetorians, and the fiercely loyal Batavians. There were specially recruited “cohorts on the model of military legions” of workmen, stonemasons, architects, and “every kind of specialist in the construction and interior decoration of great buildings.”

If it was what the emperor wanted, it was easy enough to add a boy to the retinue. However, Antinous needed an induction into the mysterious and complicated ways of life at court, and it seems rather more likely that he was packed off to the imperial Paedogogium in Rome, the ruins of which have been excavated by archaeologists. This was a boarding school for boys between twelve and eighteen years, where they trained to be pages at court; the gravestone of one of its directors about this time reveals that his name was, aptly enough, Titus Flavius Ganymedes. Inscriptions suggest that they were well looked after, for we hear of a “master medical rubber of distinguished children”—an anointer—and a hairdresser. Youth and good looks were insufficient for a complete career, and students also acquired the wider skills they would need for the rest of their lives as servants or slaves. These were to be the chamberlains, bookkeepers, secretaries, valets, and butlers of the future.

As well as writing, arithmetic, and so forth, the students would learn how to serve drinks and present food. One disapproving observer spoke of such establishments as “colleges for the most contemptible vices—the seasoning of food to promote gluttony and the more extravagant serving of courses.” And Juvenal grumpily complained of a carver of meat who danced and gestured at the same time as wielding his “flying knife.”

Something of the mood of the place can be discerned in some two hundred graffiti low down on the walls of small rooms in the Paedogogium. Most of them are happy messages of delight from students after graduation. “Corinthus is leaving the Paedogogium!” “Narbonensis is leaving the Paedogogium!” Two friends or brothers write their names together, and another scrawl refers to “lovers.” The most striking image is of a boy kneeling in front of a cross on which hangs a male figure with a donkey’s head. Underneath, a scornful legend reads: “Alexamenos worships his god!” Presumably he was a young Christian, teased for his beliefs.

Hadrian traversed the narrow stretch of water dividing Asia from Europe and reviewed the multitribal, now Hellenized province of Thrace. He then recrossed the Propontis and toured Mysia. Once more the emperor indulged his fascination with the past. He visited the site of the battle of Granicus, where in 334 B.C. Alexander the Great had daringly charged across a stream with a steep slope to confront and defeat the massed forces of the Persian commander. The emperor moved on to Troy, then a tiny coastal settlement devoted entirely to tourists, where he was the latest in a long line of distinguished leaders to pay his respects, among them Alexander himself. Hadrian noticed that the so-called tomb of the Greek warrior Ajax was in a state of disrepair. Apparently the sea had washed open the entrance to the grave mound and revealed bones of gigantic size; the kneecaps alone were as large as a boy’s discus. The emperor had them reinterred. It is hard to say what had been unearthed, perhaps some misinterpreted fossils.

Hadrian took time off for some highly successful hunting. He was so pleased with killing a she-bear in Mysia’s wooded mountainous hinterland that he founded a town on the spot called Hadrianutherae, or Hadrian’s Hunt. It may have been at this point that there was another apparent assassination attempt on the emperor, during which nothing seems to have happened (like the one with which his reign began).

A friend of his, a member of his entourage at the time, told the story. He was Marcus Antonius Polemon, a leading Hellenic intellectual and orator, who was about ten years younger than the emperor; descended from kings of Pontus, he lived in the grand manner, at some cost to the imperial budget, but in compensation he could not have been a more enthusiastic proponent of Greek culture. He ran a school of rhetoric in Smyrna, where he taught “select and genuinely Hellenic” students.

Polemon, via an unsure translation of his Greek text into Arabic, wrote: “Once I accompanied the greatest king, and while we were traveling with him from Thrace to Asia with his troops and vehicles, that man mingled with them.” The identity of “that man” is not revealed, but Polemon thought very little of him; he was insolent, shameless, an inciter of trouble against authority, and, worst of all, an alcoholic who took his drink badly.

Before the hunt got under way Polemon was shocked to see the man with his companions, and all of them armed. They surrounded Hadrian, but this “was in no way to show honor to the emperor or because he was well disposed toward him. No, he was looking to do him harm and carrying out his evil designs, which allowed him no rest.”

Meanwhile the supposed victim was getting ready to set off, aware of nothing un toward. This prevented Polemon and his friends from entering into conversation with him. So, instead, they chatted among themselves about Hadrian—“what an uneasy position he was in, how far removed from the pleasant life people used to say he enjoyed.” They also mentioned the unnamed delinquent, who had crept up on the group and was eavesdropping. “You must have been talking about me,” he said. Polemon admitted the charge, and counterattacked.

“We did mention you,” I said, “and expressed amazement at your manner. Out with it, then! Tell us how you have imposed this burden on yourself and how you can bear such tensions in your soul.” This resulted in an instant outburst. He had a demon in him, the man admitted, that was responsible for the evil desire in his soul. He began to weep—“Woe is me, I am destroyed!”

This is a most curious episode, and we never learn the outcome. Polemon may have simply meant to smear someone who was a disagreeable and undependable host or fellow guest. But, as we have already seen, a hunt was a good place to kill an emperor, it being the only occasion when people were officially allowed to carry weapons in his presence. Perhaps the truth is that a grumbling opposition to Hadrian lingered on for some time into his reign and occasionally threatened to coalesce into a plot—but never quite succeeded in doing so.

Polemon certainly had a point when he wrote of the emperor’s life not being the vie de luxe that many imagined. Even an idle princeps had his hands full with the business of government, but the hyperactive Hadrian kept himself extremely busy addressing a multitude of detailed issues, as his tour of Asia Minor goes to show.

It is surprising to see the degree of micromanagement to which the Roman state committed itself. The collection of taxes was, naturally and always, a high priority, but most emperors cast themselves as well-meaning arbiters of civic disputes and assessors of local needs; Hadrian was unusual only for the ubiquity of his engagement—and for his propensity to turn up in person to look into matters himself. One consequence was the large number of cities and towns that renamed themselves after their benefactor; a Hadrianopolis here and a Hadriane there mark the emperor’s interventionist progress throughout the eastern provinces.

The prosperous city of Stratonicea (today an Anatolian village called Eskihisar) is a case in point. It hosted the emperor in 123, and renamed itself Hadrianopolis as thanks for some now forgotten favors. The relationship persisted in the following years. Three letters from the emperor show him taking action on the city’s behalf. He grants it the right to collect taxes in the rural hinterland that previously went to the Roman fiscus, and decides that a wealthy absentee landlord should “either repair [a property in Stratonicea] or sell it to one of the local inhabitants so that it does not collapse from age and neglect.” He also indicates that he has briefed serving provincial governors to look kindly on the city.

Two anecdotes suggest that the pressure of the emperor’s administrative duties sometimes led to a brief, regretted explosion. While on one of his journeys (the date is unknown, but it could have been now) a woman stepped forward as the emperor passed by, and made a request. “I haven’t got the time,” Hadrian said. With considerable presence of mind, perhaps powered by desperation, she replied, “Well, stop being emperor, then!” This struck home. The emperor relented and gave her a hearing.

While in Asia Minor, he visited Pergamum, an opulent city of more than one hundred thousand inhabitants. Here, according to Aelius Galenus (or Galen, the famous medical researcher and theorist), in his book on mental illness,

the emperor Hadrian struck one of his attendants in the eye with a pen. When he realized that [the slave] had become blind in one eye as a result of this stroke, he called him to him and offered to let him ask him for any gift to make up for what he had suffered. When the victim remained silent, Hadrian again asked him to make a request of whatever he wanted. He declined to accept anything else, but asked for his eye back—for what gift could provide compensation for the loss of an eye?

The story has a good provenance, for its source was probably Galen’s father, a Pergamese architect at the time of Hadrian’s visit. At least, the anecdote is evidence that Hadrian wrote letters himself, pen to parchment, as well as dictating to secretaries. The clear implication is that on this occasion the princeps lost his temper over something, even if (as is probable) the injury itself was unintended.

Wherever Hadrian went he invested in urban infrastructure; he commissioned aqueducts and canals, new roads or the refurbishment of old ones, and he paid lavishly for the construction of temples and other public buildings.

He was constitutionally unable to turn down an architectural challenge. At Cyzicus, a busy port on the Propontis, work on a vast temple of Zeus had been started three centuries before, but never finished. Hadrian agreed with Pliny that it was a Roman emperor’s duty to “accomplish what kings could only attempt” and arranged for the temple’s completion. Its columns were about seventy feet high and were carved out of single blocks of marble. “In general,” observed Dio Cassius, “the details of the edifice were more to be wondered at than to be praised.” In this case, Hadrian’s good intentions came to nothing, for in the following reign an earthquake brought the temple down.

The emperor faced an even more tempting test of his construction team’s abilities. Approaching the end of his long tour, he renewed his acquaintance with Ephesus, where “young men of the city sang a hymn in the theater for the emperor, who listened to it in a gracious and friendly manner,” as we can well imagine. From there he made for Rhodes. Sailing into the island’s port, he passed the recumbent remains of the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. This was a huge statue of the god Helios, the Sun himself. Built in the early third century B.C., it stood at the harbor mouth (or on a breakwater nearby) and was more than one hundred feet high (about three-quarters the height of the Statue of Liberty). It was made from brick towers encased by bronze plates and was mounted on a white marble pedestal fifty feet high. The Colossus had stood for only fifty-six years when it was felled by one of the region’s frequent earthquakes.

The statue, still apparently in one piece, lay on the ground for centuries and was so impressive that many traveled to see it. Hadrian was one of these tourists and, according to a late and not altogether dependable source, a Byzantine chronicler called John Malalas, had it reerected, providing cranes, ropes, and craftsmen. The difficulty with this account is that there is no corroboration. However, Malalas claims to have seen an inscription commemorating the event. What is more, it was exactly the kind of project to which Hadrian would have been attracted. Perhaps the task proved in the event too difficult and eventually had to be abandoned. Alternatively, the restoration took place, only for the Colossus soon to collapse again. One way or another, by then the emperor was long gone, and the locals could safely leave the god to rest in peace.

On his travels Hadrian was concerned not only with building programs and economic development; he also took a close interest in the administration of justice. He is the first emperor whose legislation and rulings have been preserved to any extent. This is in large part due to his decision to commission a legal expert, Lucius Salvius Julianus, to compile and systematize in a single document, sometimes called the Perpetual Edict, the diffuse laws and judgments that had grown up over the centuries. As well as laws on the statute book, officeholders such as praetors and provincial governors, who had judicial functions, issued edicts at the beginning of their terms of office that set out their legal priorities. Under the empire the findings of recognized jurists also had legal force, as did the judgments of emperors themselves. This mass of material contained many inconsistencies and disagreements that needed to be resolved.

The tendency of Julianus’ work was to reinforce the authority of the emperor. The preamble to Justinian’s Digest, published in the sixth century A.D., observed:

Julianus himself, that most acute framer of laws and of the Perpetual Edict, laid it down in his own writings that whatever was found to be defective should be supplied by imperial decree, and not he alone but the deified Hadrian as well in the consolidation of the Edict and in the decree of the Senate which followed it most clearly prescribed that where anything is not found set out in the Edict shall be provided for in accordance with the rules of the Edict, and by inferences from and analogies to the rules, by more recent authority.

At last the emperor could say farewell to his eastern provinces. He had a much-anticipated, long-delayed pleasure in store. This was a return to Athens, after a decade’s absence. In the last couple of years he had been in touch with the city fathers and, at their request, helped them recast their constitution. Now he had a more radical ambition to fulfill. This was nothing less than making Greece an equal partner with Rome, and rebalancing the empire. The imperial flotilla left Rhodes and set a course across the Aegean Sea.

XX

THE ISLES OF GREECE

The piglet squealed and wriggled as it tried to escape from Hadrian’s arms. They were on the seashore near Athens and it was his awkward task to wash the pair of them in the water. Once he had accomplished this, the emperor took the young animal and offered it up for sacrifice to Demeter, goddess of the earth’s fertility and provider of grain. Its death was intended to stand in place of his own.

Then followed a ritual of purification. Wearing a blindfold, the emperor sat down on a stool covered with a ram’s fleece. A winnowing fan was waved over him and then a flaming torch brought close to him. In this way he was cleansed by air and fire.

Hadrian was now a mustes, a novice whose initiation would be complete only when he took part in the Mysteries, at the small harbor town of Eleusis in Attica. This religious ceremony took place every year in the autumn month of Boedromion, the first in Athens’ calendar year. The emperor had arrived in Greece from Rhodes in the late summer, to ensure he was in time for his spiritual induction.

In the prehistory of the world, Zeus and his fellow deities lived and schemed against one another on the snowy peaks of Mount Olympus in northern Greece. One day the goddess Demeter’s beautiful daughter, Persephone, disappeared. She had been kidnapped by Zeus’ brother, Hades, lord of the underworld, but her mother had no idea where she was. So Demeter roamed the earth looking for Persephone. Eventually she learned of the abduction and was shocked to discover that the king of the gods had approved the crime in advance. She abandoned her divine status and disguised herself as an old Cretan woman. Eventually she arrived at Eleusis, where she got a job as nanny to a local chieftain’s son.

At night when everyone else was asleep Demeter anointed her infant charge with ambrosia, a cream which with repeated use conferred immortality, and put him into the hearth-fire, where he lay unharmed. Unfortunately the boy’s mother spied on her once and screamed when the flames touched his body.

An incensed Demeter resumed her full divine form and demanded that a temple be built in her honor. There she would teach people her special rituals—and, just as usefully, the art of agriculture. With that promise she vanished. Meanwhile the earth began to undergo a great famine, for Demeter refused to let the seeds grow. A compromise solution was agreed among the gods: Persephone would spend one third of the year in the underworld and nature would temporarily stop work, but for the rest of her time she would return to her mother and the copious earth.

So the fundamental myth of Eleusis was the death and rebirth of growing and flowering things. But the huge popularity for more than one thousand years of the Eleusinian ceremonies was less that they guaranteed the safely turning seasons than that they offered initiates the promise of a happy afterlife. Becoming an adept of Demeter was an attractive insurance policy to ensure a prosperous posthumous future. Men and women, slaves and freedmen, all were entitled to become initiates (provided only that they could speak Greek). Murderers burdened with blood guilt were excluded. Upper-class Romans, weary of the arid superstitions of their state religion, often participated in the Mysteries at Eleusis. Cicero believed that the Mysteries helped to civilize his rough-and-ready compatriots. “We have learned from them the beginnings of life, and gained the power not only to live happily, but also to die with a better hope.”

Initiates were sworn to perpetual secrecy, on pain of death, about what they saw, heard, and experienced. Luckily, some disrespectful Christian apologists revealed what they knew, or thought they knew. The broad shape of the ceremony in which Hadrian took part is understood, although significant details can only be guessed.

On the fourteenth day of Boedromion, 124, a band of young men collected the hiera, or “sacred things” (ritual utensils of some kind), from Eleusis, and deposited them at a small shrine at the foot of the Acropolis. Usually they carried knives during religious ceremonies, but Hadrian had learned his lesson by now about the danger of allowing armed men into his presence, and this year weapons were banned.

On the nineteenth of the same month a multitude of people formed a procession and proceeded along the Sacred Way, the road that ran for twenty-one miles from Athens to Eleusis. Priestesses carried the sacred things in closed hampers. As well as Hadrian and the other mustai, there were the more numerous epoptai, those who had already been initiated and witnessed Demeter’s secrets at Eleusis at least once before. A rhythmic shout, Iakh’ oIakhe, was repeated again and again, perhaps referring to a boy god, Iakchos, in Demeter’s service. The crowd danced itself into a state of euphoria and waved bundles of branches in the air.

At a certain point on the road masked figures mocked the passing mustai, shouting and making obscene gestures. This commemorated an old woman who met Demeter when she was mourning her daughter and offered her a refreshing drink. On being rebuffed, she had pulled aside her skirt and “uncovered her shame, and exhibited her nudity.” The goddess had “laughed and laughed”—and swallowed the drink after all.

The procession crossed a new bridge over the river Kephisos, about a mile from Eleusis. A couple of years previously a flood had swept away its predecessor and Hadrian had commissioned a replacement. He would have been pleased with the result: 165 feet long and 16 wide, it was built of well-cut limestone blocks and has survived in good condition to the present day, although the river itself silted up in modern times.

At last twilight fell and the stars appeared. Once they had arrived at Eleusis, the mustai were allowed to break their fast. Hadrian and the rest drank down (just as the goddess had once done) a beverage called kukeon, which consisted of barley meal and water mixed with fresh pennyroyal mint leaves. Some modern scholars believe that the barley was contaminated naturally with ergot, which causes hallucinations (among other more distressing symptoms), or that some other intoxicating ingredient was added to the potion.

The initiates passed through two columned gateways into a large walled enclosure. After uttering an enigmatic password, they walked on and found themselves in front of a square, windowless building with a columned porch, like a blind temple. This was the Telesterion, or hall of mysteries. Inside its dark interior were rows of columns and stepped benches along the walls, from which thousands of participants watched the proceedings. Hadrian, like the other new initiates, was accompanied by a guide and was not allowed to see all the sights (he probably wore a veil).

What took place now is known only approximately. In the center of the Telesterion was an oblong stone construction with a doorway opening onto a piece of natural, unhewn rock, the Anactoron. Dreadful, ineffable things took place by flickering torchlight, possibly reenacting the story of Persephone’s abduction and all that followed.

On top of the Anactoron, which functioned like an altar, a fire blazed. Perhaps there was some sort of apotheosis by fire, recalling the unharmed boy in the flames. Perhaps animals were killed and burned. The officiating priest, or Hierophant, announced: “The holy Brimo [‘the raging one,’ a name for Demeter] has been delivered of a holy son, the Brimos.”

When the drama came to an end, the priest withdrew through the Anactoron doorway, and then reemerged with the sacred things, a great light shining out when the door opened. This was the culminating revelation, and we have no idea today of what it consisted. A Christian source claimed that it was “an ear of corn in silence reaped. [This was] considered among the Athenians to constitute the perfect enormous illumination.”

The religious authorities were well aware of the presence of their illustrious guest. The female partner of the Hierophant, who helped induct Hadrian into the rites, wrote a poem honoring the

ruler of the wide, unharvested earth,

the commander of countless mortals,

Hadrian, who poured out boundless wealth

on all cities, and especially famous Athens.

The emperor did not reveal what the experience of initiation meant to him. At one level he was merely treading in the footsteps of many Roman predecessors, among them Augustus. But the fact that the Historia Augusta mentions the initiation at all suggests that for Hadrian it was more than a routine experience. He was committed to religion as a transcendent experience, and had been fascinated since childhood by magic and astrology. For someone of this cast of mind Eleusis conveyed a powerful spiritual meaning. On a point of detail, the example of the piglet whose life had been sacrificed to secure his own survival may have lodged in his mind, to be exploited when future occasion demanded.

However, Eleusis was also important for reasons of state. Oddly, the Historia Augusta claims that the emperor was following the example of Alexander the Great’s father, Philip of Macedon, a reference that must derive from a statement in Hadrian’s memoirs. Presumably (although there is no direct evidence for it) the king had taken part in the Mysteries, and for some reason Hadrian had wanted to draw attention to the association. But why?

Philip had brutally extinguished Greek liberty at the famous battle of Chaeronea in 338 B.C., and was the last man the emperor would have been expected to cite as a distinguished forerunner. But the message Hadrian wished to convey was that the Macedonian monarch united all the disputatious Greeks under his leadership, and that he had done so by force was less telling than that he was a Panhellene. He had seen Greece as a single entity—an ideal very close to the emperor’s heart.

For Hadrian, the Mysteries at Eleusis, which bound together all initiates of whatever nationality and class, were the religious dimension of this single entity. It is no accident that an inscription found at Eleusis, carved after his death, refers to “Hadrian, god and Panhellene.”

When he was at Eleusis, Hadrian characteristically kept his eyes open. He noticed, or was informed, that locally caught fish were being sold at an inflated price during the busy period of the Mysteries, and that supply failed to meet demand. He soon discovered that professional retail merchants bought the catch from the fishermen, or from first purchasers, and then sold it to the public with a steep markup. He published a letter to the authorities forbidding this practice and exempting anyone selling fish from the regular purchase tax. He ruled: “I want the vendors to have been stopped from their profiteering or else a charge to be brought against them.”

Hadrian now set off on a tour of the Peloponnese, taking Sabina with him. Wherever the imperial court went, ancient cities received the emperor’s largesse. Sometimes this was practical, at others extravagantly useless. Not far from the uninhabited ruins of Mycenae stood a great shrine to Hera, queen of the gods, at which Hadrian dedicated “a peacock in gold and glittering stones, because peacocks are considered to be Hera’s sacred birds.”

In return, names were changed to honor the donor, statues were erected, and temples dedicated. The small town of Megara, for example, received the full force of the emperor’s benevolence; a brick temple was rebuilt in stone and a road widened to allow chariots to drive past each other in opposite directions. Grateful inscriptions hailed Hadrian as their “founder, lawgiver, benefactor, and patron,” and the empress was enrolled as a “New Demeter.” However, Megara remained an impoverished backwater. According to Pausanias, second-century author of a guidebook to Greece, “not even the emperor could make the Megarians thrive: they were his only failure in Greece.” This implies there was more to the emperor’s munificence than self-aggrandizement. It had a practical purpose—economic development.

Hadrian visited the obvious tourist destinations—among them, austere Sparta, where boys were still whipped until the blood flowed to prove their bravery (and to entertain visitors), and Corinth, systematically devastated by the Romans in 146 B.C. and resettled by Julius Caesar.

But at Mantinea, Hadrian’s personal feelings were engaged. On a plain four miles or so south of the town a great battle was fought in 362 B.C. between Thebes, then the leading power in Greece, and an allied army of other city-states. The brilliant and charismatic general Epaminondas led the Thebans and won the day. However, he and his eromenos, or beloved, were mortally wounded. They were buried at the roadside. A pillar with a shield on it engraved with a serpent, denoting his clan, marked the spot. Hadrian was touched by the fate of these tragic lovers and wrote a poem about them, which he inscribed on a memorial stone by the tomb (it has not survived).

The walled city of Mantinea also had a special significance, being the reputed origin of the Greek settlers at Claudiopolis, Antinous’ birthplace. We do not know of the boy’s whereabouts at this time. However, more than a year had passed since they had (probably) first set eyes on each other. If Antinous did go to Rome for training at the Paedogogium, he would surely have graduated by now and been ready for service at court. If we speculate that the couple were together, princeps and pais will have enjoyed researching the latter’s family tree.

Although there is not a jot of evidence, it is hard to believe that Hadrian failed to visit Xenophon’s farm near Olympia, thirty miles or so from Mantinea. When the Greek adventurer and huntsman Xenophon bought the estate he built a small temple to Artemis (the Greek Diana), for having helped to save him from the Persians, and he held an annual celebration in her honor. The goddess will have been delighted, for the hunting on his land was excellent. Nothing much had changed over the centuries. Hadrian encouraged Antinous to hunt, and here was ideal country, rich in game, for the young man to learn the art of the chase.

The emperor made sure that he was back in Athens in time for the great theater festival of the Dionysia in March 125 (which he had first attended in 112). He presided as its agonothetes, or president, and made a good impression on the locals. Dio Cassius reports: “He wore local dress and carried it off brilliantly.”

His hosts during his stay were the international Romanized super-rich. One of these had been Philopappus, whom Hadrian met during his first visit to the city, but he had died in 116. His sister, Balbilla, built a grandiose monument for him near the Acropolis, decorated with statues of Philopappus and his ancestors, kings of Commagene. Courtesy of Balbilla, Hadrian may well have billeted himself at the family town house or a villa in the countryside.

Another successful Greek was Gaius Julius Eurycles Herculanus Lucius Vibullius Pius, to give him his complete nomenclature. He was of Spartan stock and descended from a Eurycles who had fought on Augustus’ side at Actium and had enthusiastically albeit fruitlessly chased after Antony and Cleopatra as they sped away by sail to Egypt and their doom. A Roman senator and former praetor, he was a senior member of the imperial elite. Plutarch knew him well and dedicated an essay to him (tongue in cheek?) entitled, “How to Praise Oneself Without Incurring Disapproval.”