Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

by Everitt, Anthony

  ALSO BY ANTHONY EVERITT

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

  Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor

  For the shade of

  TOR DE AROZARENA

  PREFACE

  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 melanch
oly, 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.

  Women were generally known by the feminine form of their nomen, although this rule had been relaxed by Hadrian’s day; thus, his sister was not called Aelia, but was known by her mother’s names, Domitia Paulina.

  Most people these days encounter ancient Rome through sword-and-sandals epics in the cinema or television miniseries. These can be entertaining, but often leave us unsatisfied. This is because they dump inappropriate contemporary viewpoints onto classical attitudes. For example, we today regard the arena as an inexplicable display of mass sadism. But, although spectators certainly took a cruel pleasure in what they saw, one purpose of gladiatorial combat was to witness courage and to be strengthened or inspirited by it. Rome was a military society and physical bravery—virtus—was at a premium.

  This book will have succeeded if it introduces the reader not only to the man Hadrian, but also to his world. This means making the unfamiliar familiar; for without a sense (however tentative and provisional) of what it was like to be alive in those distant days, the reader will make little sense of the events that follow in these pages and the people who acted them out.

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Chronology

  Maps

  Introduction

  I. INVADERS FROM THE WEST

  II. A DANGEROUS WORLD

  III. YOUNG HOPEFUL GENTLEMAN

  IV. CRISIS OF EMPIRE

  V. A NEW DYNASTY

  VI. ON THE TOWN

  VII. FALL OF THE FLAVIANS

  VIII. THE EMPEROR’S SON

  IX. “OPTIMUS PRINCEPS”

  X. BEYOND THE DANUBE

  XI. THE WAITING GAME

  XII. CALL OF THE EAST

  XIII. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

  XIV. THE AFFAIR OF THE FOUR EX-CONSULS

  XV. THE ROAD TO ROME

  XVI. THE TRAVELER

  XVII. EDGE OF EMPIRE

  XVIII. LAST GOOD-BYES

  XIX. THE BITHYNIAN BOY

  XX. THE ISLES OF GREECE

  XXI. HOME AND ABROAD

  XXII. WHERE HAVE YOU GONE TO, MY LOVELY?

  XXIII. “MAY HIS BONES ROT!”

  XXIV. NO MORE JOKES

  XXV. PEACE AND WAR

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Sources

  CHRONOLOGY

  B.C.

  753 Romulus founds Rome (legendary)

  509 Monarchy overthrown; Roman Republic founded

  264–241 First war with Carthage

  239–169 Ennius, epic poet

  234–149 Cato the Censor

  218–201 Second war with Carthage

  185–129 Scipio Aemilianus

  160–91 Caecilius Metellus Numidicus

  146 Carthage destroyed

  62 Pomp
ey the Great returns from the east

  49 Julius Caesar launches civil war

  44 Julius Caesar assassinated

  31 Octavian wins battle of Actium; end of civil wars

  27 Octavian, now Augustus, establishes the imperial system

  A.D.

  14 Augustus dies; succeeded by Tiberius

  37 Tiberius dies; succeeded by Gaius (Caligula)

  41 Gaius assassinated; succeeded by Claudius

  c. 46 Birth of Publius Aelius Hadrianus (Hadrian’s father)

  53 September 18 Birth of Marcus Ulpius Traianus (Trajan)

  54 Claudius poisoned; succeeded by Nero

  c. 60 Marcus Ulpius Traianus pater proconsul of Baetica

  66 Jewish revolt

  c. 67 Marcus Ulpius Traianus pater legatus legio X Fretensis in Syria; under Vespasian’s command for the Jewish war

  68 June 9 Nero commits suicide

  69 “Year of the Four Emperors”

  early July Eastern legions declare for Vespasian

  70 June Vespasian enters Rome

  September 8 Titus captures Jerusalem Defeat of Batavian revolt

  71 spring Titus returns from the east

  June Jewish Triumph

  71–75 Banishment from Rome of astrologi and philosophi

  72 Annexation of Commagene Armenia Minor added to Cappadocia

  73 or 74 Fall of Masada

  74 Grant of Latin rights to Spain

  c. 75 Trajan tribunus laticlavius with legion in Syria Birth of Domitia Paulina, Hadrian’s sister

  75 Banishment of Helvidius Priscus

  76 January 24 Birth of Publius Aelius Hadrianus Afer (Hadrian)

  c. 77–84 Agricola governor of Britain

  c. 77 Trajan transferred as tribunus laticlavius with legion in

  Germany

  c. 78 Trajan marries Pompeia Plotina