The Classical World (86 page)

To us, his insights are still highly relevant in our age of one-party rule, of ‘spin’ and ‘favourites’ and ‘democracies’ emptied of the word’s real content. His works still guide a real understanding of the Roman Empire, rather than pseudo-bureaucratic studies of its ‘structures’. For one major reason why the flavour of each decade was so different was because of the people whom Tacitus grasped so brilliantly at its centre – the crafty, malign Tiberius, the foolish and pedantic Claudius, the depraved Nero. To complain that Tacitus focused on court politics, not on the social and regional diversity which appeals more to
manymodern historians, is to miss the value of what he gives us. The emperors’ characters did have profound consequences throughout society. The intertwined personalities of their females were also significant for structures and events. The Messalinas and Agrippinas are distinctive facts of the Julio-Claudian era, and only those who have no awareness of high-society women in such contexts are likely to mistake their portraits as mere rhetoric or a male-prejudiced stereotype.

His
Histories
, describing events from 69 to 96, were the first of the long works to be finished, with their brilliant sense of the soldiers’ varying reactions and the differing styles of the crowds who participated in the year of Four Emperors (ad 69). The
Annals
, from 14 to 68, followed next. The date of the
Annals
‘completion continues to be disputed, but the clear sign is that they too were composed entirely in the reign of Trajan. Their terse, mordant style needed no long gestation: Sallust and Cicero had been the staples of Tacitus’ education as a young man. He was not writing them with one eye on Hadrian and the controversial early years of Hadrian’s reign: the work had already been finished under Trajan. Perhaps it was the appearance of each of Tacitus’ masterpieces which prompted Suetonius to attempt his own
Lives
of past rulers, beginning, however, with the life of Julius Caesar, whom Tacitus did not discuss.

Like Suetonius and Pliny, Tacitus considered Christianity to be a ‘pernicious superstition’. He observed, however, that people pitied those Christians whom Nero martyred on a false charge. Suetonius, by contrast, thought that Nero had been right. For Tacitus, rule by a ‘First Citizen’ was an evil, but in some ways an inevitable evil. By being moderate, ‘civil’ and law-abiding, the ruler could mitigate the evil, but the loser would always be sturdy liberty. Aspects of this liberty could still be defended, especially the liberty of free speech: speakers in Tacitus’
Annals
put the decisive case against repressive censorship, a case which Tacitus himself endorses. So, too, laws (he realizes) will never succeed in confining luxury: the standards of luxury simply change and evolve, with the passing of time. Yet neither his own nor his speakers’ conception of liberty is our idea of democratic freedom. They were Romans, after all, and they were senators. When the crafty Tiberius sat in on trials and expressed his own wishes
concerning them, his conduct was regrettable to Tacitus, even when Tiberius’ preferred verdicts were the true and just ones. For Tiberius was undermining a different liberty: the freedom of senators to exert influence on others’ behalf, even if, as true Romans, they used that influence most unfairly.

That joke of his in the baths became famous. Once, he saw a veteran soldier whom he had known during his military service, and the man was rubbing his back and the rest of his body against the wall. So he asked him why he had given himself over to its marbles in order to be rubbed down, and when he heard that he was doing it because he did not have a slave, he gave the man both some slaves and the cost of their maintenance. But on another day, a number of old men started to rub themselves against the wall so as to provoke the emperor’s generosity. But he ordered them to be summoned and then to rub each other down in turn
.

Spartianus,
Life of Hadrian
17.6–7

The rights of Hadrian’s accession were questionable, but he was quick to undo his predecessor’s mistakes. Trajan’s attempted conquests in the Middle East were abandoned. Then his conquests in eastern Europe were scaled down and reorganized. Hadrian quoted old Cato in support: ‘they must have their freedom because they cannot be protected.’
¹
At least the remark gave his decision a ‘traditional’ precedent.

More to the point, Hadrian had close personal ties with the prefect of the Praetorian guards, the elderlyAcilius Attianus, who came from the same home town and had been his guardian as a young man. Back in Rome, four senior senators, all of them ex-consuls, were put to death on Attianus’ orders. While the shock subsided it was as well that Hadrian could travel slowly through the Greek East and not
return to Rome for several months. On his arrival, he insisted in a speech to the Senate that the four men had not been killed on his orders. In his autobiography, at the end of his life, he stated again that he regretted these four executions. But by now they were a pattern, as was the guards’ involvement, which marked the loss of liberty since the fall of the Republic and the ‘classical’ age of Augustus’ rule.

It was, then, instead of conquering that Hadrian took up touring and inspecting on the Empire-wide journeys with which this book began. From northern Britain to Egypt, he visited his provinces and made himself known to his troops. Nobody who saw or heard him could have missed the differences from his predecessor Trajan. Hadrian chose to have a beard, a short trim one, but it came to be seen as a deliberate sign of his passion for Greek culture. Although beards were the particular fashion of Greek-speaking philosophers, Hadrian himself was not a real intellectual. Unlike Trajan he did have an informed mind but he liked to show it off at intellectuals’ expense. He did not like abstract ideas and reasoning and he had no theoretical views on politics and society: his preferred ‘philosophy’ was the least intellectual Epicureanism. Instead, he had a wide range of learning, and his passion for antiquarian details was supported by his wide travels. He also had a taste for writing poetry and a keen interest in architecture and design. When he tried to interfere with plans of the architect Apollodorus, the master is said to have told him to confine himself to drawing ‘still lives’, not buildings.
²
But Hadrian was certainly a ‘man of taste’.

In this taste, the two worlds of this book, the classical Greek and the Roman, came closely together. Hadrian’s love of Greek culture is evident in his patronage, his favours for Greek cities (especially Athens) and his personal romantic life. Trajan’s patronage had already helped Greek-speakers from the East into the Roman Senate, but they tended to be dynasts and men from grandiose local families. The Greek senators in Hadrian’s reign were abler men from educated and lettered Greek families: they were the sort of people he liked. For the city of Athens, Hadrian had enormous respect. Before his accession he had spent a year in the city and served as its senior magistrate; it became the centre of his new Greek synod, the Panhellenion; it
received such notable buildings that its town-centre was transformed. As emperor, he approved a new structure for its council, the august Areopagus; wearing Greek dress, he presided over the city’s great theatrical festival, the Dionysia, and he was initiated into the Mysteries.

His love-life was more remarkable than anyruler’s since Alexander the Great. Trajan had had sexual affairs with males, but mostly (it was said) with boys in the army-camp or on his staff: Hadrian, by contrast, had a grand passion which was lived out in the Greek style and involved that un-Roman object, a free-born young man. In Pliny’s former province in north-west Asia, Hadrian encountered the young Antinous and fell madlyin love. Theyhunted together; theytravelled, but in October 130 young Antinous died in Egypt, drowned in the river Nile. For want of evidence the circumstances remain obscure. It is probably only gossip that Antinous had voluntarily killed himself as a votive offering for Hadrian’s own poor health. But the effects of his loss are visible far and wide. Not only did Hadrian found a town near the Nile in his lover’s honour: prominent citizens of this new Antinoopolis enjoyed an array of rare civic privileges and exemptions.
³
He encouraged the worship of his dead lover as a ‘new Osiris’, the Egyptian god of rebirth. He promoted worship of Antinous in towns throughout his Empire. Images of him, therefore, have been discovered far beyond Egypt. Whereas Alexander promoted cult of the dead Hephaestion as a hero, Hadrian promoted the dead Antinous as a god, the most positive religious policy of any Roman emperor until the Christians’ dominance.

Hadrian’s love of Greek culture was classicizing because it imitated a classical model but was pursued without the political context of a classical Greek city-state. It also proved to be less flexible. In sculpture, Hadrian’s classicizing taste is still most evident. He favoured statues of white marble, not just for his beloved Antinous, and patronized manysculptors from the big city-centres of Greek western Asia, giving a new prominence to classicism in sculpture at Rome. There was also a rigidityin his cultural tolerance. From Homer onwards, one classical Greek inclination had been to understand foreign non-Greeks as being more like their Greek ‘kinsmen’ than they really were. Even so, the best-known Greek travellers, Herodotus or Alexander the Great, had
not been cultural relativists for whom all customs everywhere were equally valid. Herodotus had been disgusted by the alleged prostitution of Babylonian women, Alexander by the Iranians’ very non-Greek habit of exposing their dead to wild birds and dogs: he banned the practice. But for Hadrian, the classicizing Greekling, the boundaries of cultural tolerance were much more tightlydrawn. His classical world-view could not accommodate the Jews.

We still do not have enough evidence to be sure of the origins of his major war against the Jews in Judaea (from 132 to 135). Unlike a truly classical Greek, he was heir to a tradition of anti-Semitism, passed on in literature since its Greek originators in Alexandria, especially since the second century
BC
. The year of Antinous’ death (130) does show signs of being a turning point in Hadrian’s own behaviour. Ancient sources do connect the major uprising among the Jews with Hadrian’s decision, while in the Near East, to ban circumcision (a classicizing Greekling would find it an offensive habit). He even planned to turn Jerusalem into a classicizing city with pagan temples and to name it Aelia (after himself) Capitolina (after the Romans’ great Jupiter of the Capitol hill). The result was a bitter rebellion, led in Judaea byBar Kochva (‘son of a star’) which cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews during more than three years. From the Jews’ own coins, we learn that the ‘redemption’ and ‘freedom’ of Israel were publicly proclaimed: Bar Kochva was probably seen as a Messiah.
⁴
Hadrian had to send for one of his best generals, all the way from Britain, in order to defeat what was evidently a massive challenge. Only then did he have his way, turning Jerusalem into a pagan city and banning the surviving Jews from entering it. ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ the early Christian author Tertullian was soon to ask, challenging the link between classical Greek culture and Christianity.
⁵
For Hadrian, the answer was simple: intolerance, and total destruction.

Like Alexander the Great and his Successors, Hadrian was also a passionate hunter, the sport which he most enjoyed in life. In northwest Asia, he founded a cityto commemorate his killing of a she-bear in the wild; in Egypt, he and darling Antinous killed a lion. At Rome, eight round sculpted reliefs portrayed Hadrian’s great hunting moments on a building which was probably begun as a special
hunting-monument.
⁶
But Hadrian was not just being philhellenic: hunting was part of a wider culture which cannot be split into ‘Greek’ or ‘Roman’ elements. It had already been championed by Trajan, another man from that paradise for the sport, Spain. Hadrian would surely have enjoyed it in Italy long before going east. The long days which he spent on it helped to shape his varied unintellectual gifts: his notable endurance on horseback in all weathers and his conspicuous openness to the company of his fellow men.
⁷

These manners linked him commendably to the difficult question of ‘luxury’. As an emperor, Hadrian had the power and the money to gratify almost any personal taste, but nonetheless he cultivated the civility which befitted a ‘good emperor’. In the city of Rome, on his travels and especially in front of his troops, he showed a popular plainness and openness. This accessibility had been a virtue in Greek tradition, but it was as a Roman soldier and traveller and, above all, as a hunter that Hadrian maintained it as his style. He was said to be the ‘most self-proclaimed lover of the plebs’:
⁸
he would receive petitioners while in the bath; he would even bathe with the plebs in the public baths, no doubt in Trajan’s vast new establishment in Rome. In the army-camps, too, he set a personal example of austerity and disdain for comfort. He consumed the cheese, bacon and coarse wine which belonged in a proper soldier’s diet. He avoided soft bedding, restoring standards of military discipline which were still being cited long after him.

In Homer’s poems, our starting point, luxury was admired unreservedlyas the splendour of the heroes’ palaces and the fairytale kings whom wandering Odysseus met. It first became problematic for the earlyGreek aristocrats who feared it as a source of disruptive competition from the seventh century
BC
onwards. Philosophers then idealized ‘austerity’ against the ‘softness’ of luxurious Asia and its kings, a view which the puritanical Plato supported. After Alexander, nonetheless, the Greek kings, especially those in Egypt, exploited ‘luxury’ as part of their royal image and their fantasy ‘world apart’. There was so much more now worldwide for them to want, acquire and display.

At Rome, these attitudes converged and became one of straightforward disapproval. Opposition to monarchy had been rooted in the
Republic and its ruling class from its very origins: royal luxury was out of the question. In the ideal peer group of free senators, ‘luxury’ was morally disreputable and socially disruptive. Together, this heritage persisted after the ending of Cicero’s world and was maintained in the earlyEmpire and its increasingly unclassical culture: it belonged with the emperor’s public image of restoration and moral ‘back-to-basics’. So Hadrian, too, limited expenses on public banquets to the ‘levels prescribed by ancient laws’. But public munificence had not been a bad sort of luxury: Hadrian also gave public beast-shows and days of human blood sports, setting a scale which made even Julius Caesar’s seem limited. To enhance his marginal links with the previous dynasty, he built vast public monuments to family members, including women, and a big Mausoleum in Rome (the modern Castel Sant’ Angelo), outdoing even Augustus. In Trajan’s honour, he even had all the seats in the theatre washed with the most expensive of floral extracts, oil from the saffron-crocus, a gift which would have needed whole hillsides of these flowers to meet the demand. And in later life he withdrew more and more to his enormous villa at Tibur (modern Tivoli), which had no less than three sets of heated baths and a canal named after the notoriously luxurious Canopus, the waterway which ran beside Egypt’s Alexandria. The visible, sprawling ruins of this villa are less than half of its probable extent: the rest still waits to be excavated.