by Will Durant
With these spoils the Emperor distributed 650 denarii ($260) to all such citizens as applied for the gift—probably some 300,000; and enough remained to remedy the unemployment of demobilization with the greatest program of public works, governmental aid, and architectural adornment that Italy had seen since Augustus. Trajan improved the older aqueducts and built a new one which is still in operation. At Ostia he constructed a spacious harbor connected by canals with the Tiber and the harbor of Claudius, and decorated it with warehouses that were models of beauty as well as of use. His engineers repaired old roads, carried a new one across the Pontine marshes, and laid the Via Traiana from Beneventum to Brundisium. They reopened the Claudian tunnel that had drained the Fucine Lake, dredged harbors at Centumcellae and Ancona, gave Ravenna an aqueduct, and Verona an amphitheater. Trajan supplied the funds for new roads, bridges, and buildings throughout the Empire. But he discouraged the architectural rivalry of the cities and urged them to spend their surplus on improving the condition and environment of the poor. He was always ready to help any city that had suffered from earthquake, fire, or storm. He tried to promote agriculture in Italy by requiring senators to invest a third of their capital in Italian land; and when he saw that this was extending the latifundia, he encouraged small proprietors by advancing them state funds at low interest for the purchase and improvement of their lands and homes.9 To raise the birth rate he enlarged the alimenta, or feeding fund: the state made mortgage loans at five per cent (half the usual rate) to Italian peasants, and allowed local charity boards to distribute the interest to poor parents at sixteen sesterces ($1.60) monthly for each boy raised by them, and twelve for each girl. The sums seem small, but contemporary testimony indicates that from sixteen to twenty sesterces sufficed for a month’s care of a child on a first-century Italian farm.10 With a similar hope Trajan allowed the children of Rome to receive the corn dole in addition to that given to their parents. The system of alimenta was enlarged by Hadrian and the Antonines, was extended to several parts of the Empire, and was supplemented by private philanthropy; so the younger Pliny gave 30,000 sesterces a year as alimenta to the children of Comum, and Caelia Macrina left a million to like purpose for the children of Tarracina in Spain.
Trajan, like Augustus, favored Italy over the provinces, and Rome over Italy. He used to the full the architectural genius of Apollodorus, a Damascene Greek who had designed the new roads and aqueduct, and the Danube bridge. The Emperor now commissioned him to clear away large blocks of houses, cut 130 feet from the base of the Quirinal hill, lay out in this and the adjoining space a new forum equal in area to all preceding forums combined, and surround it with buildings of a majesty fit for a world capital that had reached the height of its power and opulence. The Forum Traianum was entered through the Triumphal Arch of Trajan. The interior, 370 by 354 feet, was paved with smooth stone and surrounded by a high wall and portico; east and west walls were indented with hemicycle exedrae formed of Doric columns. In the center rose the Basilica Ulpia, named after Trajan’s clan and intended as an office building for commerce and finance; its exterior was adorned with fifty monolithic columns, its floor was of marble, its immense nave was enclosed by granite colonnades, its roof of massive beams was covered with bronze. Near the northern end of the new forum two libraries were built, one for Latin works, the other for Greek. Between them rose the column, behind them the temple, of Trajan. When the forum was complete it was accounted one of the architectural wonders of the world.
The column, still standing, was first of all an achievement in transportation. It was cut from eighteen cubes of marble, each weighing some fifty tons; the blocks were brought by ship from the island of Paros, were transferred to barges at Ostia, were drawn against the current up the river, and were moved on rollers up the bank and through the streets to their site. The cubes were recut into thirty-two blocks. Eight formed the pedestal; three sides of this were decorated with sculptures; the fourth opened into a spiral stairway of 185 marble steps. The shaft, twelve feet in diameter at the bottom, and ninety-seven feet high, was composed of twenty-one blocks and was topped by a statue of Trajan holding a globe of the world. Before being raised into position the blocks were carved with reliefs picturing the campaigns in Dacia. These reliefs are the culmination of Flavian realism and of ancient historical sculpture. They do not aim at the calm beauty or idealized types of Greek sculpture; they seek rather to convey a vivid impression of living individuals in the actual scenes and turmoil of war; they are Balzac and Zola after Corneille and Racine. In the 2000 figures of these 124 spiral panels we follow the conquest of Dacia step by step: the Roman cohorts issuing from their stations in full armor; the crossing of the Danube on a pontoon bridge; the pitching of a Roman camp in the enemy’s land; the confused conflict of spears, arrows, sickles, and stones; a Dacian village set to the torch, with women and children begging Trajan for mercy; Dacian women torturing Roman prisoners; soldiers displaying before the Emperor the heads of slain enemies; surgeons treating the wounded; the Dacian princes drinking one after another the cup of poison; the head of Decebalus brought as a trophy to Trajan; the long file of captive men, women, and children snatched from their homes into foreign settlement or Roman slavery—this and more the dark column tells in the most masterly narrative relief in sculptural history. These artists and their employers were not chauvinists; they showed Trajan’s acts of clemency, but also they revealed the heroic aspects of a nation’s struggle for freedom; and the finest figure in the scroll is the Dacian king. It is a strange document, too crowded for full effectiveness; some figures so crude that one wonders if a Dacian warrior carved them; superposition primitively substituted for perspective; and the whole observable, like Pheidias’ frieze, only by some skylark scorner of the ground. But it was an interesting deviation from a classic style whose placidity had never expressed the overwhelming energy of the Roman character. Its “method of continuity”11—making each scene melt into the next—carried on the suggestions of Titus’ arch and prepared for medieval reliefs. Despite its defects the spiral story was imitated again and again, from the column of Aurelius in Rome, and that of Arcadius in Constantinople, to the Napoleonic shaft in the Place Vendôme in Paris.
Trajan completed his building program by finishing in the grand manner the baths begun by Domitian. Meanwhile six years of peace had wearied him; administration was a task that did not awaken his reserve energies as war did; he did not feel alive in a palace. Why not take up Caesar’s plans where Antony had failed, settle the Parthian question once and for all, establish a more strategic frontier in the East, and capture control of the trade routes across Armenia and Parthia to Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, and India?
After careful preparation he set out again with his legions (113). A year later he had taken Armenia; yet another year and he had marched down through Mesopotamia, captured Ctesiphon, and reached the Indian Ocean—the first and last Roman general to stand before that sea. The population at home learned geography by following his victories; the Senate was amused to be informed, almost weekly, of another nation conquered or hastily submitting: the Bosporus, Colchis, Asiatic Iberia, Asiatic Albania, Osrhoene, Messenia, Media, Assyria, Arabia Petrea, at last even Parthia. Parthia, Armenia, Assyria, and Mesopotamia were constituted provinces, and the new Alexander had the glory of naming and crowning a client king over the ancient enemies of Rome. Standing on the shores of the Red Sea, Trajan mourned that he was too old to repeat the Macedonian’s advance to the Indus. He contented himself with building a Red Sea fleet to control the passage and commerce to India; left garrisons at all strategic points, and turned back reluctantly toward Rome.
Like Antony he had gone too fast and too far and had neglected to consolidate his victories and his lines. On reaching Antioch he was informed that the Parthian king Osroes, whom he had deposed, had gathered another army and had reconquered central Mesopotamia; that rebellion had broken out in all the new provinces; that the Jews of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Cyrene wer
e in revolt; and that disaffection was flaring up in Libya, Mauretania, and Britain. The old warrior wished to take the field again, but his flesh refused. He had worn himself out by living as actively in the hot East as in the West; dropsy set in, and a paralytic stroke left the great will helpless in a broken frame. Sadly he commissioned Lucius Quietus to put down the uprisings in Mesopotamia, sent Marcius Turba to suppress the Jews in Africa, and left his nephew Hadrian in command of the main Roman army in Syria. He had himself carried down to the Cilician coast, hoping to sail thence to Rome, where the Senate was preparing for him the greatest triumph since Augustus. He died at Selinus on the way (117), aged sixty-four, after a reign of nineteen years. His ashes were taken to the capital, and were buried under the great column that he had chosen as his tomb.
III. HADRIAN
1. The Ruler
Probably we shall never know whether the most brilliant of the Roman emperors won his throne by amorous connivance or by Trajan’s conviction of his worth. “His appointment,” says Dio Cassius, “was due to the fact that when Trajan died without an heir, his widow Plotina, who was in love with Hadrian, conspired to secure him the succession.”12 Spartianus repeats the story.13 Plotina and Hadrian denied the rumor, which nevertheless persisted to the end of his reign. He settled the matter by distributing a generous donative among the troops.
Publius Aelius Hadrianus traced his cognomen and family to the town of Adria, on the Adriatic coast; thence, said his autobiography, his ancestors had migrated to Spain. The same Spanish town, Italica, that had seen the birth of Trajan in 52 saw that of his nephew Hadrian in 76. When the boy’s father died (86) he was placed under the guardianship of Trajan and Caelius Attianus. The latter tutored him and instilled in him so warm a fondness for Greek literature that the youth was nicknamed Graeculus. He studied also singing, music, medicine, mathematics, painting, and sculpture, and later dabbled in half a dozen arts. Trajan called him to Rome (91) and gave him his niece in marriage (100). Vivia Sabina, as preserved in portrait busts that may have idealized her, was a woman of distinguished and conscious beauty, in whom Hadrian found no lasting happiness. Possibly he loved dogs and horses too keenly, and spent too much time hunting with them, and building tombs for them when they died. Perhaps he was unfaithful, or seemed so. In any case, she bore him no children, and though she accompanied him on many of his travels, they lived in lifelong estrangement. He showed her every favor and courtesy, and gave her every kindness but affection. When Suetonius, one of his secretaries, spoke disrespectfully of her he dismissed him.
Hadrian’s first decision as emperor was to revise the imperialistic policy of his uncle. He had counseled Trajan against the Parthian expedition as too great an expenditure of men and means so soon after the Dacian Wars, and as promising, at best, gains difficult to hold; and Trajan’s generals, eager for glory, had never pardoned his opposition. Now he withdrew the legions from Armenia, Assyria, Mesopotamia, and Parthia, made Armenia a client kingdom instead of a province, and accepted the Euphrates as the eastern boundary of the Empire; he played Augustus to Trajan’s Caesar, and consolidated with peaceful administration as much as he could of the unprecedented realm that reckless arms had won. The generals who had led Trajan’s forces—Palma, Celsus, Quietus, Nigrinus—thought this policy cowardly and unwise; to cease to attack, they felt, was merely to defend, and merely to defend was to begin to die. While Hadrian was with his legions on the Danube the Senate announced that the four generals had been detected in a conspiracy to overthrow the government and had been executed by the Senate’s orders. Rome was shocked to find that the men had received no trial; and though Hadrian, returning hurriedly to Rome, protested that he had had nothing to do with the matter, no one believed him. He vowed to put no senator to death except at the Senate’s bidding, distributed a gift of money among the people, amused them with abundant games, canceled tax arrears to the amount of 900,000,000 sesterces, publicly burned the tax records in a fiscal auto-da-fé, and for twenty years governed with wisdom, justice, and peace. But his unpopularity remained complete.
His ancient biographer describes him as tall and elegant, with hair curled, and “a full beard to hide the natural blemishes of his face”;14 thenceforth all Rome wore beards. He was strongly built and kept himself in vigor by frequent exercise, above all by hunting; on several occasions he killed a lion with his own hands.15 So many elements were mingled in him that description is baffled. We are told that he was “stern and cheerful, humorous and grave, sensual and cautious, hard and liberal, severe and merciful, deceptively simple, and always in all things various.”16 He had a quick, impartial, skeptical and penetrating mind, but he respected tradition as the connective tissue of generations. He read and admired the Stoic Epictetus, but he sought pleasure with shamelessness and taste. He was irreligious and superstitious, laughed at oracles, played with magic and astrology, encouraged the national faith, and sedulously performed the duties of pontifex maximus. He was courteous and obstinate, sometimes cruel, usually kind; perhaps his contradictions were merely adaptations to circumstance. He visited the sick, helped the unfortunate, extended existing charities to orphans and widows, and was a generous patron to artists, writers, and philosophers. He was a good singer, dancer, and harpist, a competent painter, a middling sculptor. He wrote several volumes—a grammar, an autobiography, poems decent and indecent,17 in Latin and Greek. He preferred Greek to Latin literature, and old Cato’s simple Latin to Cicero’s smooth eloquence; under his example many authors now affected an archaic style. He organized the state-paid professors into a university, paid them well, and built for them a magnificent Athenaeum to rival the Museum of Alexandria. It delighted him to gather scholars and thinkers about him, to puzzle them with questions, and laugh at their contradictions and disputes. Favorinus of Gaul was the wisest of this philosophic court; when his friends rallied him for yielding to Hadrian in argument, he answered that any man with thirty legions behind him must be right.18
Along with these multiple intellectual interests went an unerring sense for the practical. Following Domitian’s lead, Hadrian reduced his freedmen to subordinate functions, chose businessmen of tried ability to administer the government, and formed from them and senators and jurists a concilium to meet in regular sessions for the consideration of policies. He appointed an advocatus fisci, or Attorney for the Treasury, to detect corruption or deceit in the payment of taxes, with the illuminating result that while taxes remained as before, revenues were decidedly increased. He himself kept watch on each department and, like Napoleon, astonished its heads by detailed knowledge of their field. “His memory was vast,” says Spartianus; “he wrote, dictated, listened, and conversed with his friends, all at the same time”19—though the frequency of this tale invites suspicion. Under his care, and with the help of an extended civil service, the Empire was probably better governed than ever before or afterward. The price of this zealous order was a swelling bureaucracy, and a “mania of regulation” that moved the principate still closer to absolute monarchy. Hadrian observed all the forms of co-operation with the Senate; nevertheless, his appointees and their executive orders encroached more and more upon the functions of what had once seemed “an assembly of kings.” He was too close to his problems to foresee that his efficient but proliferating bureaucracy might become in time an unbearable burden upon the taxpayers. On the contrary, he believed that within the framework of law and ordinance which his government had established every person in the Empire would find career open to talent and any man could rise rapidly from class to class.
His clear and logical mind resented the chaos of accumulated, obscure, and contradictory laws. He commissioned Julianus to co-ordinate the enactments of past praetors into a Perpetual Edict, and encouraged further codifications that paved the way for Justinian. He acted as a supreme court both in Rome and on his journeys, and earned the reputation of a fair and learned judge, always as lenient as the reign of law would permit. He issued innumerable decrees, usuall
y in favor of the weak against the strong, the slave against the master, the small farmer against the large estate, the tenant against the landlord, the consumer against the deceptions of retailers and the multiplication of middlemen.20 He rejected accusations for maiestas, refused bequests from parents, or persons unknown to him, and ordered a tolerant application of the laws against Christians.21 By his own example on state lands he encouraged the practice of emphyteusis (“implanting”), by which owners rented rough acres to tenants to be planted with orchards and remain rent-free till fruit grew. He was not a radical reformer; he was only a superlative administrator seeking, within the limits and inequalities of human nature, the greatest good of the whole. He preserved old forms, but he quietly poured new content into them according to the needs of the time. Once, when his passion for administration flagged, he refused audience to a petitioning woman with the plea, “I haven’t time.” “Don’t be emperor, then,” she cried. He granted her a hearing.22