The Story of Civilization: Volume III: Caesar and Christ

by Will Durant

  2. The Wanderer

  Unlike his predecessors Hadrian was as interested in the Empire as in the capital. Following the wholesome precedent of Augustus, he decided to visit every province, examining its conditions and needs and alleviating them with the expedition and resources available to an emperor. He was curious, too, about the ways and arts, dress and beliefs, of the diverse peoples in his realm; he wished to see the famous places of Greek history, to steep himself in that Hellenic culture which was the background and adornment of his mind. “He loved,” says Fronto, “not only to govern, but to perambulate, the world.”23 In 121 he set out from Rome, accompanied not by the pomp and trappings of royalty, but by experts, architects, builders, engineers, and artists. He went first to Gaul and “came to the relief of all the communities with various acts of generosity.”24 He passed into Germany and astonished everyone by the thoroughness with which he inspected the defenses of the Empiretagainst its future destroyers. He reorganized, extended and improved the limes between the Rhine and the Danube. A man of peace, he knew the arts of war and was resolved that his pacific temper should neither weaken his armies nor misguide his enemies. He issued severe regulations to maintain military discipline and obeyed these rules while visiting the camps; there he lived the life of the soldiers, eating their fare, never using a vehicle, walking with full equipment twenty miles on a march, and showing such endurance that no one could have guessed that he was at heart a scholar and a philosopher. At the same time he rewarded excellence, raised the legal and economic status of the legionaries, gave them better weapons and ample supplies, and relaxed the discipline of their free hours, merely insisting that their amusements should not unfit them for their tasks. The Roman army was never in better condition than in his reign.

  He now traveled down the Rhine to its mouth and sailed across to Britain (122). We are not informed of his activities there, except that he ordered a wall built from the Solway Firth to the mouth of the Tyne “to divide the barbarians from the Romans.” Returning to Gaul he passed leisurely through Avignon, Nimes, and other towns of the provincia, and settled down for the winter at Tarragona in northern Spain. While he was strolling alone in the gardens of his host a slave rushed upon him with drawn sword and tried to kill him. Hadrian overpowered him and quietly handed him over to the servants, who found that he was insane.

  In the spring of 123 he led some legions against the Moors of northwest Africa, who had been raiding the Roman towns of Mauretania. Having defeated them and driven them back into their hills, he took ship for Ephesus. After wintering there he visited the cities of Asia Minor, listening to petitions and complaints, punishing malfeasance, rewarding competence, and providing money, designs, and workmen for municipal temples, baths, and theaters. Cyzicus, Nicaea, and Nicomedia had suffered a severe earthquake; Hadrian had the damage made good by imperial funds, and built at Cyzicus a temple that was at once ranked among the seven wonders of the world.25 He pushed eastward along the Euxine to Trapezus, ordered the governor of Cappadocia—the historian Arrian—to examine and report to him the condition of all the ports on the Black Sea, moved southwest through Paphlagonia, and spent a winter at Pergamum. In the fall of 125 he sailed to Rhodes and thence to Athens. He passed a happy winter there and then turned homeward. Still curious at fifty, he stopped in Sicily, and climbed Mt. Etna to see the sunrise from a perch 11,000 feet above the sea.

  It is worthy of note that he could leave his capital for five years and trust to his subordinates to carry on; like a good manager, he had organized and trained an almost automatic government. He stayed in Rome something more than a year. But the lust for travel was in his blood, and so much of the world remained to rebuild! In 128 he set out again, this time to Utica, Carthage, and the flourishing new cities of northern Africa. Returning to Rome in the fall, he left soon afterward and spent another winter in Athens (128-29). He was made archon, presided happily at games and festivals, and enjoyed being called Liberator, Helios, Zeus, and Savior of the World. He mingled with philosophers and artists, imitating the graces, without the follies, of Nero and Antony. Distressed by the free chaos of Athens’ laws, he commissioned a corps of jurists to codify them. Always skeptically interested in religion, he had himself initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries. Finding Athens beset with unemployment, and resolved to restore the city to the splendor of Periclean days, he summoned architects, engineers, and skilled artisans, and began a building program more extensive than his public works in Rome. In a square enclosed by an extensive colonnade his workmen raised a library with marble walls, 120 columns, a gilded roof, and spacious rooms sparkling with alabaster, paintings, and statuary. They built a gymnasium, an aqueduct, a temple to Hera, and another to Zeus Panhellenicos—god “of all the Greeks.” The most ambitious of these architectural undertakings was the completion (131) of the Olympieum—that lordly temple to Zeus the Olympian which Peisistratus had begun six centuries before and Antiochus Epiphanes had failed to finish. When Hadrian left Athens it was a cleaner, more prosperous, and more beautiful city than ever before in its history.26

  In the spring of 129 he sailed to Ephesus and traveled again in Asia Minor, spawning buildings and cities as he went. He sallied into Cappadocia and reviewed the garrisons there. At Antioch he provided funds for an aqueduct, a temple, a theater, and public baths. In the fall he visited Palmyra and Arabia, and in 130 he journeyed to Jerusalem. The Holy City was still in ruins, almost as Titus had left it sixty years before; a handful of destitute Jews lived in lairs and hovels amid the rocks. Hadrian’s heart was touched by the desolation; and his imagination was moved by the empty site. He had hoped, by his restoration of Greece and the Hellenistic East, to raise higher than before the barriers between Greco-Roman civilization and the Oriental world; now he dreamed of transforming Zion itself into a pagan citadel. He ordered that Jerusalem should be rebuilt as a Roman colony and renamed Aelia Capitolina in memory of Hadrian’s gens and Jupiter’s Capitol in Rome. It was an astonishing error of psychology and statesmanship in one of the wisest statesmen in history.

  He passed on to Alexandria (130), smiled tolerantly at its disputatious populace, enriched the Museum, rebuilt Pompey’s tomb, and then, surpassing Caesar, abandoned himself to a leisurely sail up the Nile with his wife Sabina and his beloved Antinoüs. He had come upon the young Greek some years before in Bithynia; he had been stirred by the youth’s rounded beauty, soft eyes, and curly head; he had made him his favored page and had formed for him a tender and passionate attachment. Sabina made no protest that has come down to us, but the gossip of the cities assumed that the boy played Ganymede to the new Zeus; possibly, however, the childless Emperor loved him as a heaven-sent son. Now, at the height of Hadrian’s happiness, Antinoüs, still but eighteen, died—apparently by drowning in the Nile. The monarch of the world “wept like a woman,” says Spartianus; he ordered a temple to be raised on the shore, buried the lad there, and offered him to the world as a god. Around the shrine he built a city, Antinoöpolis, destined to be a Byzantine capital. While Hadrian returned sadly to Rome, legend began to remold the story: the Emperor, it said, had learned by magic divination that his greatest plans would succeed only if that which he loved most should die; Antinoüs had heard of the prophecy and had gone voluntarily to his death. Perhaps the legend formed soon enough to embitter Hadrian’s declining years.

  Back in Rome (131), he could feel that he had made the Empire better than he had found it. Never before, not even under Augustus, had it been so prosperous, and never has the Mediterranean world reached that fullness of life again; never has it again been the home of so advanced a civilization so widely spread and so deeply shared. And no man had so beneficently ruled it as Hadrian. Augustus had thought of the provinces as a lucrative appendage to Italy, to be husbanded for Italy’s sake; now for the first time the ideas of Caesar and Claudius reached fulfillment, and Rome became not a tax collector for Italy, but the responsible administrator of a realm in which all parts alike received the care
of the government, and in which the Greek spirit ruled the East and the mind as openly as the Roman spirit ruled the state and the West. Hadrian had seen it all and had made it one. He had promised that he “would manage the commonwealth as conscious that it was the people’s property, not his own”;27 and he had kept his promise.

  3. The Builder

  Only one thing remained—to make Rome, too, more beautiful than before. The artist in Hadrian was ever competing with the governor; he rebuilt the Pantheon while reorganizing Roman law. No other man ever built so plentifully, no other ruler so directly. The structures erected for him were sometimes designed by him, and were always subject to his expert inspection as they progressed. He had a hundred edifices repaired or restored and inscribed his name on none of them. Rome in all quarters benefited from his rare union of wisdom with power. Si jeunesse savait et vieillesse pouvait was in him a riddle solved.

  His most famous reconstruction was the Pantheon—the best-preserved building of the ancient world. The rectangular temple reared by Agrippa had been destroyed by fire; apparently only the frontal Corinthian portico remained. North of this remnant Hadrian had his architects and engineers raise a circular temple, in the most indigenous of Roman styles. His Hellenic tastes inclined him to prefer Greek to Roman forms in the architecture of his capital. The new temple did not form with the portico a harmonious whole; but the interior—a circle 132 feet in diameter, with no impeding supports-gave a sense of space and freedom equaled only by the Gothic cathedrals. The walls were twenty feet thick, of brick externally faced in the lower section with marble, in the rest with stucco relieved by pilasters. The ceiling of the portico was of bronze plates so thick that when they were removed by Pope Urban VIII they sufficed to cast 110 cannon and to form the baldachin over the high altar in St. Peter’s.29 The massive bronze doors were originally covered with gold. Seven niches were cut into the lower section of the windowless interior wall and were adorned with lofty marble columns and entablatures; once these niches served as alcoves for statuary, now they are modest chapels in a magnificent church. A higher section of the wall was plated with panels of costly stone, separated by pillars of porphyry. The coffered dome, rising inward from the top of the walls, was the supreme triumph of Roman engineering. It was erected by pouring concrete into ribbed sections and letting the whole congeal into one solid mass. Its monolithic character did away with lateral thrust, but to make security doubly sure the architect built buttresses into the walls. At the top of the dome an opening (the oculus, or “eye”), twenty-six feet in diameter, gave the interior its sole and sufficient illumination. From this majestic dome, the largest in history, an architectural lineage descends through Byzantine and Romanesque variations to the dome of St. Peter’s, and to that of the Capitol in Washington.

  Probably Hadrian himself designed the double-apsed temple to Venus and Roma which rose opposite the Colosseum, for legend tells how he sent his plans for it to Apollodorus and had the old architect put to death for returning a scornful comment.30 The temple was notable in several particulars: it was the largest in Rome; it had two cellas, one for each of its gods, who sat back to back on incommunicative thrones; and its vaulted roof of gold-plated bronze tiles was among the most brilliant sights of the city. For himself the Emperor built a yet ampler home—the villa whose remains still draw visitors to the pleasant suburb known to him as Tibur, to us as Tivoli. There, in an estate seven miles in circumference, rose a palace with every variety of room, and gardens so crowded with famous works of art that every major museum in Europe has enriched itself from the ruins. The designer showed here the usual Roman indifference to symmetry; he added building to building as need or fancy prompted, and made no greater attempt at harmony than we find in the architectural chaos of the Forum; perhaps the Romans, like the Japanese, were tired of symmetry and pleased with the surprises of irregularity. Besides porticoes, libraries, temples, a theater, a music hall, and a hippodrome, the profuse architect added small replicas of Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, and Zeno’s Stoa—as if the Emperor, amid all this vain wealth, would make some amends to philosophy.

  The villa was finished in the last years of Hadrian’s life. We do not know that he found happiness there. The revolt of the Jews in 135 embittered him; he put it down without mercy and fretted that he could not end his reign without war. In that same year, still only fifty-nine, he was stricken with a painful and wasting illness—akin to tuberculosis and dropsy—which slowly crushed his body, his spirit, and his mind. His temper became sharper, his manner querulous; he suspected his oldest friends of conspiring to kill and replace him; at last—perhaps in an illucid interval, and how justly we cannot say—he ordered that several of them should be put to death.

  To end the war of succession that was forming in his court, he adopted as heir his friend Lucius Verus. When, soon after, Lucius died, Hadrian called to his bedside at Tibur a man with an unblemished reputation for integrity and wisdom, Titus Aurelius Antoninus, and adopted him as his son and successor. Looking far ahead, he advised Antoninus to adopt in turn, and educate for government, two youths then growing up at the court: Marcus Annius Verus, then seventeen, and Lucius Aelius Verus, then eleven, respectively the nephew of Antoninus and the son of Lucius Verus. The title of Caesar, heretofore borne by the emperors and their agnatic descendants, was conferred by Hadrian upon Antoninus; and thereafter, while the emperors kept for themselves the title of Augustus, they granted the name Caesar to each heir presumptive to the throne.

  Hadrian’s sickness and sufferings had now increased; blood often gushed from his nostrils; and in his distress he began to long for death. He had already prepared his own tomb beyond the Tiber—that huge mausoleum whose gloomy remains are today the Castel Sant’ Angelo, still reached by the Pons Aelius that Hadrian built. He was impressed by the example of the Stoic philosopher Euphrates, then in Rome, who, weary with illness and old age, asked Hadrian’s permission to kill himself and, receiving it, drank hemlock.31 The Emperor begged for poison or a sword, but no attendant would accommodate him. He bade a Danubian slave stab him, but the slave fled; he commanded his physician to poison him, but the physician committed suicide.32 He found a dagger and was about to kill himself when it was taken from him. He mourned that he, who had the power to put anyone to death, was not himself permitted to die. Dismissing his doctors, he withdrew to Baiae and deliberately fed on foods and drinks that would hasten his end. At last, exhausted and maddened with pain, he died (138), after sixty-two years of life and twenty-one of rule. He left behind him a little poem that expressed like Dante the sadness of recalling in grief the days of our happiness:

  Animula vagula, blandula,

  Hospes comesque corporis,

  Quae nunc abibis in loca,

  Pallidula, rigida, nudula,

  Nee ut soles dabis iocos?

  Soul of mine, pretty one, flitting one,

  Guest and partner of my clay,

  Whither wilt thou hie away—

  Pallid one, rigid one, naked one,

  Never to play again, never to play?33

  IV. ANTONINUS PIUS

  Of Antoninus there is no history, for he had almost no faults and committed no crimes. His ancestors had come from Nimes two generations before, and his family was one of the wealthiest in Rome. Reaching the throne at fifty-one, he gave the Empire the most equitable, and not the least efficient, government it would ever have.

  He was the most fortunate man that ever wore a crown. We are told that he was tall and handsome, healthy and serene, gentle and resolute, modest and omnipotent, eloquent and a despiser of rhetoric, popular and immune to flattery. If we are to believe his adopted son Marcus we should have to reject him as “that faultless monster whom the world ne’er knew.” The Senate called him Pius as a model of the milder Roman virtues, and Optimus Princeps as the best of princes. He had no enemies and hundreds of friends. But he was not unacquainted with grief. His elder daughter died as he was setting out as proconsul to Asia; h
is younger daughter proved a dubious wife to Aurelius; and scandal accused his own wife of being as faithless as she was beautiful. Antoninus bore these rumors silently; and after Faustina’s death he established in her name and honor a fund for the support and education of girls and raised to her memory one of the loveliest temples in the Forum. He did not marry again, lest he mar the happiness and inheritance of his children, but contented himself with a concubine.

  He was not a man of intellect in the narrower sense of that term. He had no learning and looked with an aristocrat’s indulgence upon men of letters, philosophy, or art; nevertheless, he helped such men richly and invited them often to his home. He preferred religion to philosophy, worshiped the old gods with apparent sincerity, and gave his adopted sons an example of piety that Marcus never forgot. “Do everything as a disciple of Antoninus,” Marcus bade himself; “remember his constancy in every reasonable act, his evenness in all things, his piety, and the serenity of his countenance, and his disregard of empty fame ... with how little he was satisfied; how laborious and patient, how religious without superstition.”34 Yet he was tolerant of non-Roman creeds, moderated Hadrian’s measures against the Jews, and continued his predecessor’s lenience toward the Christians. He was no killjoy; he loved a jest and made many a good one; he played, fished, and hunted with his friends, and from his behavior none could have guessed that he was emperor. He preferred the quiet of his villa at Lanuvium to the luxury of his official palace and nearly always spent the evenings in the intimacy of his family. When he inherited the throne he put aside all thought of that careless ease to which he had looked forward as the consolation of old age. Perceiving that his wife anticipated increased splendor he reproved her: “Do you not understand that we have now lost what we had before?”35 He knew that he had succeeded to the cares of the world.