Rome
Page 30
Almost everywhere: the exception was the narrow border with Parthia. Here, in contrast, the enemy was a rival empire, another super-power based on plough-agriculture. Rome and Parthia confronted one another in a corridor of cultivated land which ran north-west to southeast along the river lines of the upper Tigris and Euphrates. Invasions on this route were hedged with hazard. Elsewhere, on every other frontier, Rome now held the outer line of the plough-lands, and her army was stretched thin along it, often dangerously so. Yet to mount an invasion of Parthia, she had to mass great forces, for the strength of any army was sapped with each march forwards, by attrition in the field, and by the guards and garrisons that had to be left in the rear. Parthia’s vast spaces, the great distance to her heartlands, the invincibility of her armoured cavalry and horse-archers on the open steppe, these things made a Roman conquest of the Orient a supreme military challenge. Repeatedly, since Crassus at Carrhae in 53 BC, the limits of Roman imperial power had been tested against the Parthian Empire, and each time they had been reached far short of any final victory. Rome was at an impasse on the eastern front: though able to contain it, she lacked the means to overthrow the Parthian Empire. Trajan had tried harder than any of his predecessors: his failure in consequence was more complete.
Publius Aelius Hadrianus, like Trajan, was Romano-Spanish. The two men were, in fact, related, and after Hadrian’s father had died when the boy was ten, he had been entrusted to Trajan’s care. Much later, he was married to Trajan’s great-niece, Sabina, a loveless marriage without affection or issue, but one convenient in fixing Hadrian’s position at the centre of his patron’s network. Close family ties made Hadrian trustworthy, but he was also intelligent, well educated and energetic, a man suited to high responsibility. By the time of his elevation in AD 117, he was already a veteran general, having served in all three of Trajan’s wars – as a staff officer in the Second Dacian War, a legionary commander in the Third, and, successively, as Governor of Syria and then commander-in-chief during the Parthian War. Even so, the accession was murky and contested. Nor is it difficult to guess what issue lay at the heart of the bloody clash at the top that inaugurated Hadrian’s principate.
The written sources for Hadrian’s reign are little better than those for Trajan’s, and we have few details of the generals’ plot of AD 117. Before reaching his capital, Hadrian’s Praetorian Prefect had arrested, condemned and executed four of Trajan’s leading marshals, charged with plotting against the new emperor. Probably, with some reason, they had argued that Hadrian was neither the appointed successor, nor an appropriate candidate. Trajan’s death had been sudden. No heir had been publicly announced – perhaps for fear of igniting animosities among the army commanders. But Hadrian was the late emperor’s ward, favourite, nephew by marriage, and commander-in-chief in the East, so perhaps his inheritance was implicit. The formal announcement, however, and the passing on of the imperial signet-ring had been a death-bed scene witnessed only by Trajan’s wife, Hadrian’s mother-in-law, the Praetorian Prefect, and a personal servant of the emperor – who, suspiciously, died suddenly soon after the event. The succession document bore his wife’s, not Trajan’s, signature. Was Hadrian, perhaps, a usurper? The new emperor was certainly at pains to win approval. He spent almost a month among the soldiers before arriving in the capital, determined first to show his face to the frontier legions and collect their acclamations. Then, a shower of largesse: large donatives were paid to the soldiers and the city mob; ‘coronation gold’, a tax traditionally paid at the accession of a new emperor, was remitted for Italy and reduced in the provinces; and all debts to the state were cancelled, at the spectacular cost of 225 million denarii.
The root of both the plotters’ malevolence and the emperor’s anxiety lay, almost certainly, in a deep split within the army command about the military débâcle in the East and the future direction of the empire. For Hadrian had resolved to pull out and consolidate. More than that: to stamp this policy on the empire forever. The contrast between the politics of Trajan and those of his protégé could not have been more radically different. Two men, both reared in the same stable, the one the pampered favourite and intimate of the other, reached diametrically opposed conclusions about how the empire should be governed. And while both were ideologically driven, Trajan’s vision was a reactionary one, an attempt to return to the glory days of war and conquest, whereas Hadrian was a radical trying to make sense of new realities and fashion a new model empire. It was perhaps crucial that he was a provincial emperor. Reared in Spain, he had travelled during his career in Gaul, Germany, the Balkans, Asia Minor, the Levant and Mesopotamia. Italy, for him, was just one among the many provinces of the empire. He was the first emperor for whom the traditional imperial title pater patriae (father of his country) – which, like his model, Augustus, he adopted only at the end of his reign – meant not merely protector and patron of Rome and Italy, but of all the provinces of the empire. He wished to raise all to the same level of peace, prosperity, good governance, urban life and classical culture; to create a commonwealth of peoples enjoying the benefits of the Pax Romana and united by their allegiance to emperor, empire and Roman values. Thus would the empire grow stronger within. Thus would its people more willingly shoulder the burden of defence. Thus would the frontiers – now better defined, fortified and garrisoned – more easily be held. Hadrian set out to create a dichotomous world, in which the difference between civilization and barbarism was to be made sharper, the boundaries between them more rigid and immutable. It was a vision and a policy for an empire that had reached its limits.
Hadrian spent much of his reign travelling. But while his predecessors had sometimes done this in order to make war, Hadrian travelled in order to govern. The restless energy of the top commander that he had been became that of the visionary statesman, the nation-builder, the modernizing reformer, determined to see everything for himself, to make assessments on the spot, and to set in train the great projects needed to remake the world. He first toured the western provinces – the Rhineland, Britain, Gaul, Spain and Mauretania (Morocco) – in AD 120–123. Then he visited the Greek cities of Asia Minor, Old Greece and Sicily in AD 124–126. After two years in Rome, his third trip took him to Africa in AD 128. His fourth, in AD 129–131, was again to the East, to revisit Athens, and then on to Antioch, to Palmyra and Damascus, to Jerash and Petra, to Jerusalem, to Alexandria in Egypt and Cyrene in Libya.
Everywhere he went the emperor seems to have left an indelible mark: the archaeology of the Roman Empire still bears, on the frontiers and in the great classical cities, the imprint of Hadrian the Builder. He had made himself known already to the legions in the East and on the Danube, so in the early years of his reign he visited the men stationed on the Rhine, in Britain and in North Africa. Over some ten years Hadrian completed a great tour of inspection of the entire army and frontier system. ‘He personally viewed and investigated absolutely everything,’ explained Dio Cassius, ‘not merely the usual installations of the camps, such as weapons, engines, trenches, ramparts and palisades, but also the private affairs of everyone, both of the men serving in the ranks and of the officers themselves – their lives, their quarters, their habits – and he reformed and corrected in many cases practices and arrangements for living that had become too luxurious. He drilled the men for every kind of battle, honouring some and reproving others, and he taught them all what should be done.’(14) The praises of the commander-in-chief, witness to a military tattoo at Lambaesis legionary fortress in North Africa, were proudly recorded on the base of a stone column: ‘You did everything in orderly fashion. You filled the field with manoeuvres. Your javelin hurling was not without grace, although you use javelins which are short and stiff. Several of you hurled your lances equally well. And your mounting was smart just now and lively yesterday. If there was anything lacking, I should notice it; if there were anything conspicuously bad, I should point it out. But you pleased me uniformly throughout the whole exercise. My legate C
atullinus, vir clarissimus, devotes equal care to all the branches he commands … Your prefect evidently looks after you carefully. I bestow upon you a largesse …’(15)
But it is the frontier defences that most visibly record the emperor’s passing. Open lines controlled by forts, signal-stations and patrols were replaced by continuous linear barriers formed of ditches, palisades and walls. Hadrian’s Wall in Britain is the supreme and best-studied example. Extending 73 miles (117 km) from Newcastle to Carlisle, it comprised a stone wall up to 3 m thick and perhaps 4.5 m high, with small forts for around 30 men every mile, and observation turrets every third of a mile. It was fronted by a wide, deep, V-shaped ditch, and between wall and ditch was an entanglement of forked and sharpened branches – the Roman equivalent of barbed wire. Gateways at the milecastles provided the only approved crossing-places, such that traffic over the border could be controlled and tolls perhaps levied on traders. Outpost forts were built north of the wall to facilitate long-range patrolling. The system of mile-castles and turrets – though without the wall between – was extended far down the Cumberland coast. As work progressed, plans were modified: the thickness of the wall was reduced; sections built originally of turf were replaced in stone; a continuous linear earthwork (the Vallum) was dug to the south, defining a broad belt of land behind the wall as a ‘military zone’; and, most importantly, a series of regimental forts were built along the line of the wall, at first 12, eventually 16, putting 6 or 7,000 auxiliary troops on the frontier line itself.
Debate about the purpose of the wall continues. The recent discovery of the thicket of spikes along its front implies a military purpose. But contemporary Roman military doctrine had it that pre-emptive and punitive aggression was the best form of defence, so the wall was more likely intended as a police and customs barrier. Even this, perhaps, is to over-rationalize a profoundly political project. If Trajan offered battles and military glory, Hadrian offered instead great buildings, monuments to imperial grandeur, a symbolic marking out of boundaries, a way of ‘separating the Romans from the barbarians’. Hadrian’s frontier works, moreover, were part of a larger package. It had been necessary to settle the soldiers – with bribes, flattery and hard work. But then, having ritually charged the boundaries of the empire by marking them with lines of earth and stone, Hadrian turned his attention to the people within, the subjects of Rome, all of whom were now to become stakeholders and loyalists in an imperial commonwealth. The showcases of the new world order would be, of course, the cities of the empire.
Here, not only was Hadrian’s the vision, but very often so too were the plans, the blueprints, the engineering needed to monumentalize it in stone. Hadrian, it seems, was something of an architect. His masterpiece was the Pantheon in Rome. In it, the structurally redundant pillars of Greek temple architecture were abandoned, and the central shrine, released from its cage, became the whole building. But instead of a traditional box, the full potential of the Roman vault was realized, and the shrine was built as a huge dome, one describing a complete and perfect circle from apex to floor and from side to side. The huge span, an awesome 43.20 m, has been surpassed only in modern times, an achievement made possible by having an immense ring of concrete as foundation, by the use of top-quality Roman mortar, and by a careful grading of the thickness and types of material used in constructing the dome from top to bottom.
Rome, as ever, was intended as a model for the provinces. Hadrian, as he travelled, initiated great building projects in city after city. Today, when we visit ruined Roman cities around the Mediterranean, a good proportion of what we see belongs to the ‘golden age’ of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, his immediate successor. Over several decades, the downtown areas of scores of imperial cities were transformed into building sites and recast with new complexes of monumental classical architecture and baroque decoration. Take Athens, for example, an old Greek university town that was a special favourite of the philhellene emperor. Close to the ancient agora, he built a library complex, more than 120 m by 80 m in extent, complete with walled garden, lily-pond, surrounding colonnades, and sitting-out places. On the edge of the city, he completed – 600 years after the foundations were laid – the Temple of Olympian Zeus, one of the largest classical temples in the world, of which 17 towering Corinthian columns still stand. More than that, in the area around the temple, he laid out an entire new city suburb, memorializing this achievement in a stone arch positioned between the old and new cities: ‘This is Athens, the ancient city of Theseus’ reads the inner face, ‘This is the city of Hadrian, not of Theseus’ reads the outer. The past – the glory that was Greece, the fount of classical civilization, the foundation on which Hadrian planned to build – this was honoured. But it was added to, made yet grander, renewed by Hadrianic monuments which appropriated that past to the exigencies of the present. Here, however, in his great projects of acculturation, no less than Trajan in his of subjugation, Hadrian discovered that empire had limits.
Not for the first time in the history of the Empire, the Jews of Palestine proved themselves the hardest rock of resistance. For 200 years, the peasants of Galilee and Judaea had rejected the temptations of Romanitas, and withstood the insults and bullying of its local agents. At root, they knew, Rome meant the rule of landlords, tax-collectors and government soldiers. The trinkets and trappings were mainly for the rich. The new gods were pagan idols offensive to the righteous. Here, for Hadrian, on the other hand, was a worm of corruption within his commonwealth, a class of men whose boorishness could feed an irrational opposition and a weakening of the body-politic. In AD 70, the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed, the Temple tithe diverted to Jupiter, and a Roman legion stationed on the Temple Mount. Yet, Judaism and a Jewish national identity had survived, even in Roman-occupied Jerusalem, where at least seven synagogues remained. The race, the monotheism and the nationalism of the Jews made them an enemy within, and Hadrian came to Jerusalem in AD 130 determined to destroy them, to ethnically cleanse his empire, to obliterate an ideological alternative, to impose by force the Graeco-Roman norms that had become compulsory.
Jerusalem was re-founded as a Roman colony – Aelia Capitolina – and a temple for the worship of Hadrian-Jupiter was built on the Temple Mount. The practice of circumcision – the single most distinctive marker of Semitic identity – was banned on pain of death. Hadrian declared himself successor to Antiochus Epiphanes, the Greek ruler who had tried to destroy Judaism three centuries before, and he erected a monument to Pompey, the first Roman enemy of the Jews. Alexandria and Cyrene, Greek cities devastated in the Jewish Revolt of AD 115–118, were conspicuously reconstructed. By AD 132 the Jews had been goaded into revolt. In scale, duration and ferocity, the resistance fully matched that of AD 66–73. Led by Bar-Kokhba, ‘Son of the Star’, a new Jewish messiah who was to prove himself a brilliant guerrilla commander, and by the radical-nationalist rabbi Akiba, the revolutionaries took immediate control of Jerusalem, restored the worship of Yahweh, and issued coins announcing the ‘Redemption of Israel’. Quickly reinforced by returning emigrés and a general rising in the countryside, the rebels overwhelmed local Roman forces. Two legions were not enough. The empire was trawled for troops. With fresh legions poured into the war zone, Jerusalem was retaken; but the rebels re-established themselves at Herodium and various remote desert cave-complexes. It took four years to crush the revolt entirely. By the time it ended, in AD 136, 50 fort-resses and 1,000 villages had been destroyed, and 500,000 people killed or enslaved; Palestine, Dio Cassius tells us, was left a wilderness of wolves and hyenas feeding on corpses.
By now, Hadrian, back in Italy, was embittered and dying. His vision of a commonwealth of peoples had been consumed in the Palestinian apocalypse: all that remained there was the arrogance of foreign overlords and pagan gods. His relations with his commanders and officials had soured. The emperor’s philhellenism, his open homosexuality, his public affair with the beautiful Greek youth Antinoös, the creation of a cult in his honour after
he was drowned in the Nile: all this offended the sensibilities of conservative members of the Roman governing class. It seemed to many to symbolize the decadence of the regime. The withdrawal from Mesopotamia, the failure to advance elsewhere, the freezing of the frontier lines, the favouritism towards Greeks, the diluting of Roman citizenship, the spilling out of imperial wealth on the embellishment of provincial cities: all highly questionable. It was not just Jewish freedom-fighters who contested the Hadrianic vision; so, too, did the Old Guard at home.
Hadrian retreated to the grand country residence he had built for himself at Tivoli, in the hills a short distance from Rome, a palace and garden-city modelled on Athens and Alexandria, sprawling across some 300 hectares (making it not much smaller than Rome itself). He seemed no longer to care. He named as successor a handsome young fop with a reputation for idleness, self-indulgence, and reading love poetry and cookery books while reclining on scented cushions strewn with flowers. Presumably he was the old man’s fancy. The fop predeceased his master. Hadrian then adopted an old friend: Titus Antoninus – soon to be Antoninus Pius – and thereafter relapsed into bitter apathy and derangement, awaiting death – sometimes, it is said, trying unsuccessfully to hasten it – a man psychologically and politically broken by the contradictions of an empire at bay.