Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

by Anthony Everitt

  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 wi
fe 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.