Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

A
LSO BY
A
NTHONY
E
VERITT

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

Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor

For the shade of
T
OR DE
A
ROZARENA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hadrian is the most enigmatic of ancient Romans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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