The empire had a market economy in grain and land. Banks provided a flexible source of credit. Although slavery flourished, emancipation was permitted, and many slaves worked their way to freedom. Not only did the empire reach its maximum geographical extension in this era, but the population peaked at 50 million to 70 million people, Rome’s biggest building boom took place, and it was an explosive era of artistic production. Agriculture, mining, and manufacturing all prospered. Peace and good roads and harbors promoted trade and communication.
Nonetheless, all was not rosy. Mortality rates were high, and public health was poor. Romans suffered from poor nutrition and disease. For women, death in childbirth was a real possibility. Life expectancy at birth for members of the senatorial class was thirty and about twenty-five for others. Infant mortality was sky-high, with about one-third of newborns dead by the age of twenty-eight months.
There was great inequality of wealth. There were only six hundred senators, and they were all superrich. There were an estimated two thousand knights (equestrians) in Rome and thirty thousand across the empire, all wealthy. Then came two other well-to-do groups: large landowners and town councilors, followed by shopkeepers, traders, money changers, artisans, doctors, teachers and other members of the professions, followed by minor municipal officials. Aside from a small group of free wage earners, most people were peasants, which is to say, poor but free farmers. Slaves possibly made up between 15 percent and 20 percent of the Roman population. There was no progressive taxation and no property tax in Italy until the end of the third century. The rich got richer, with the state run for their benefit, and the poor masses had no choice but to go along.
Inhabitants of the city of Rome enjoyed some special privileges, but conditions in Rome were often difficult. Romans received free grain and eventually free oil; wine was subsidized. The public baths were discounted for citizens. Meanwhile, well-connected people higher in the social scale benefited from sportulae: “freebies” from the rich, such as payments to followers for daily visits to patrons. Followers showed their respect by these visits and also by attending their patron in public, which demonstrated his prestige. The Roman poor also benefited from free theatrical shows, chariot races, gladiatorial combats, and animal-slaughtering shows. But the city of Rome suffered from overcrowding in high-rise tenement blocks, which spread disease and worsened fires.
Rome was bursting with energy and people. It had an estimated population of one million. The city barely resembled the small and homogeneous community of centuries before. It was no longer a place where everyone spoke the same language and worshipped the same gods. Although Latin was the language of administration in Rome, you were as likely to hear Aramaic, Celtic, Egyptian, German, Hebrew, and, above all, Greek.
City life flourished throughout the empire in the second century. From Londinium (London) to Berytus (Beirut, Lebanon), cities founded or refounded by Rome came into their own. Some were originally veterans’ colonies, some were army camps that grew into towns, and some were natural market hubs or religious centers. City planning followed Roman patterns, sometimes adjacent to native ones. A Roman might find himself standing in a familiar-looking forum or Senate House in Gaul or Asia Minor or strolling to the column-lined intersection of a town’s main east-west and north-south streets. A slight detour might lead to the winding lanes and local architecture of native homes and temples.
It was a great age of cities. Ambitious local elites often had a country estate, but they centered their lives on their townhouse, just as elites did in Rome. They aimed at serving on a local town council, modeled on the Roman Senate. They strove for Roman citizenship, a privilege that the emperors awarded to ever-increasing numbers of prominent people in the provinces.
The age of the Five Good Emperors overflows with material evidence of the lives of ordinary Romans. From the laced-up sandals of a priestess to the plain leather shoes of a carpenter, from the calloused hands of a hunter to the trim fingernails of a goddess, from the grip of a poet on his scroll to a horseman’s hold on his reins, from the ecstasy of a dancer to the lowered eyes of parents grieving the loss of a child, ancient art offers thousands of glimpses of ordinary life in the Roman Empire. We have children’s dolls and surgeons’ scalpels, helmets and hunting horns, polished mirrors and glass perfume jars, slave collars and shrouds, bottle molds and brick stamps, drinking cups and water pipes, playing dice and slingshot projectiles. These humble remains remind us how little Trajan’s victory monuments reveal about the world in which most Romans lived.
A DEATH IN TRAJANOPOLIS
As he faced defeat in the East, Trajan’s health failed. A bronze bust that some identify as the emperor in his later years shows sunken cheeks, a prominent nose, a furrowed brow, and something of a haunted look in his eyes, as if he knew the end was near. In 117 he is reported to have suffered a stroke, leaving him partially paralyzed. The cause was surely either genetics or hard living, but Trajan was convinced it was poison. It wouldn’t be surprising if he were a bitter man at the end, having seen his successes in Parthia fade like flowers in his hand. Although poison cannot explain Trajan’s long decline, it is not inconceivable that someone finally gave him poison to finish off the failing emperor.
Plotina and Matidia persuaded Trajan to go home to Rome. No previous emperor had died outside Italy, and no one wanted Trajan to be the first. So he and his party sailed from Antioch’s port. After two or three days, however, his condition was so bad that they had to put into the nearest harbor, Selinus, in a rugged region known as “Rough Cilicia” (today Turkey’s southwestern Mediterranean coast). It was described by an ancient writer as a zone whose “coast is narrow and has no level ground, or scarcely any; and, besides that, it lies at the foot of the Taurus Mountains, which affords a poor livelihood.” Its main claim to fame was as a former pirates’ nest.
There was no glory here: no palace and no battlefield. Clearly incapacitated by paralysis and, as Cassius Dio notes, edema (severe swelling caused by fluid retention), the emperor died here, approximately sixty-three years old, on August 8, 117. Selinus was renamed Trajanopolis, Trajan City. Trajanopolis acquired new buildings, in particular, a two-story monument-plus-temple to Trajan, but it never became a city worthy of Trajan’s grandiose ambition.
Trajan’s remains would be brought back to Antioch for cremation. They then made the long journey home to Rome. After the honor of a triumphal parade, they were placed in an urn at the base of Trajan’s Column. Although burial within the city of Rome was prohibited, a unique exception was made for the man dubbed by the Senate as Rome’s best ruler.
Perhaps. Or perhaps Trajan was a magnificent and Machiavellian anachronism who provided surprisingly good government when he wasn’t chasing vainglory. A rare conqueror-emperor, Trajan was no intellectual, but he more than made up for it in practical wisdom. He combined cunning with self-control. He concentrated power in his hands, but he gave the senators their dignity and spared their lives. He gratified the people while not forgetting to reward the legions. He promoted the image of patriarchy, which might have been a relief after the antics of his predecessors, but his wife probably wielded considerable power. Although he took credit for his vast public works, they served the public and not merely his ego. He promoted trade and communication. Warrior though he was, Trajan laid the groundwork for Rome’s greatest era of peace and prosperity.
Yet that prosperity was not shared equally. Most people—tens of millions—lived in poverty, while millions more were enslaved and lived in chains. Things were slightly better for the free population of Italy and especially of Rome. Most people could be grateful at least for the Roman peace, considering how bloody the history of the ancient world often was.
Yet Trajan also annihilated tens of thousands of people in Dacia and all but destroyed its language and culture. He willfully waged a war of aggression against the Parthians in the East that ended in utter failure. And then there was the matter of the succession.
Trajan’
s philosophy of governance was that Rome could have it all. He could expand the empire, go on a spree of building and infrastructure improvement, start a new welfare program in Italy, and satisfy the Senate, the people, and the army all at the same time. And Rome could do all this without busting the budget or exhausting its resources. His successor would revisit these conclusions.
Who would Rome’s new ruler be? Few matters were more important to resolve. Trajan had not done so, although he had made moves in that direction. He finally settled things on his deathbed. Or did he? Uncertainty about that contributed to violence that stained the next reign from the start—the reign of another Roman of Spanish descent, Trajan’s distant cousin Hadrian.
Bust of Hadrian.
6
HADRIAN
THE GREEK
Before he died in out-of-the-way Selinus, Trajan adopted his distant cousin Hadrian. So the official story went, but Trajan’s past behavior left doubt in some minds. For years, Trajan had promoted Hadrian to ever higher offices. He also allowed him to marry into the imperial family, but he showed a certain hesitation as well, perhaps because of policy differences. He neither adopted Hadrian nor gave him the honors of previous imperial heirs.
Some people claimed that on his deathbed Trajan said nothing about adoption and that the whole affair was stage-managed by two people: Hadrian’s champion Plotina, who was Trajan’s wife, and Hadrian’s former guardian Publius Acilius Attianus, who was Praetorian prefect. They were both with Trajan at the end. One source notes with suspicion that Plotina signed Trajan’s letters to the Senate naming Hadrian as his son and heir, even though she had never signed any previous letter by the emperor. Another source claims that Plotina smuggled in an actor to impersonate Trajan and declare, in a weak voice, his decision to adopt Hadrian—without letting people know that Trajan was already dead.
Then there is this odd detail: A chance discovery of a gravestone shows that two days after Trajan’s death, his wine taster, a young freedman, died at age twenty-eight. Of course, a natural death is possible—he and Trajan might each have died of the same virus, for example—but we might wonder whether the young man was killed or committed suicide because he knew too much. That it took twelve years to bring his ashes to Rome also incites suspicion, as if someone wanted to keep his memory quiet.
Was there fire behind this smoke or is it just coincidence and another case of Roman prejudice against a strong woman? We’ll never know. What is clear is that Rome had a vigorous and talented new ruler.
Hadrian was tall, well built, strong, and fit. Portrait busts show an intelligent and commanding person, with an oval-shaped face with rounded cheeks, an aquiline nose, large ears, and eyes that were “full of light and bright,” as a contemporary described them. In those days, he had a full but neatly trimmed beard and a full head of hair that he kept carefully curled.
Hadrian’s beard was not just a fashion statement but also a cultural and political sign. Elite Roman men normally went clean shaven; Greek men grew a beard. By not shaving, Hadrian signaled his love of Greek culture and his policy of elevating the eastern, Greek-speaking part of the empire.
The wonder was that he stood still long enough for the very large number of images of him that survive—more than of any other emperor. Always, it seemed, Hadrian was on horseback or aboard ship, always moving from one end of the empire to another, from Britain to Syria and nearly every province in between, visiting more places than any other emperor. He made a point of meeting ordinary people—“pressing the flesh,” as the saying goes, in the manner of a modern democratic politician. Everywhere he went, he mingled with the troops, sharing their simple food and eating, like them, outdoors. To set an example, he went without a hat, “alike amid German snows and under scorching Egyptian suns,” and he once marched twenty miles in armor to encourage his soldiers. For recreation, he tested his prowess in his favorite pastime, hunting. He was so skilled that once he pulled off the feat of killing a boar with a single blow.
Hadrian was one of the most important and most fascinating of Rome’s emperors. No one ever made a greater effort for peace or took a stronger stand against imperial expansion. No one ever paid more personal attention to the provinces. No other emperor was a more committed student of the classics or a better poet or architect—and he was a sculptor and painter to boot. And yet no one ever outmatched Hadrian for paradox. To one ancient writer, “He was, in the same person, austere and genial, dignified and playful, dilatory and quick to act, stingy and generous, deceitful and straightforward, cruel and merciful, and always in all things changeable.”
He was a Roman who loved Greece but is best remembered in Italy and Britain—and by Jews, whose culture he tried to destroy and whose annals curse his memory. He was a man’s man who owed his success to the women who loved him, but he gave his heart to an adolescent boy.
THE IRRESISTIBLE RISE OF PUBLIUS AELIUS HADRIANUS
The story begins in hope and ambition. Hadrian was born on January 24, 76. Named Publius Aelius Hadrianus after his father, he was born in Rome, where his father’s career had brought the family, but their home was Hispania. They came from a city grown rich on its olive oil exports. A prominent family who numbered a senator among their ancestors, they traced their roots to an early settler, a Roman soldier from the northeastern Italian city of Hadria. Hence the name Hadrian.
Rome under Vespasian, who ruled when Hadrian was born, was increasingly friendly to talented elite men from the provinces, and Hadrian’s father was one of them. Aelius Hadrianus Afer was a senator, and served as praetor and possibly a legionary commander, a member of a provincial governor’s staff, or even governor himself. Hadrian’s mother, Domitia Paulina, another Spaniard, came from a seaport on Hispania’s Atlantic coast, from a family that probably traced its ancestry back to Phoenician colonists. Hadrian also had a sister, Paulina.
Hadrian Senior died when Hadrian was ten, leaving the boy fatherless, like young Augustus. Since Roman women married younger than Roman men, we might guess that Domitia was still alive. If so, she presumably looked out for her son, as Atia once looked out for the young Augustus. Another resemblance between the two men is certain, because like Augustus, young Hadrian received access to powerful men in Rome. He had two guardians, both with roots in his hometown. One was Acilius Attianus, a Roman knight who would become commander of the Praetorian Guard. The other was Hadrian’s father’s cousin, an up-and-coming soldier and statesman: the future emperor Trajan. Since Trajan was busy at the time as a commanding officer, Attianus took charge of Hadrian’s upbringing. Except for two visits as a teenager to inspect the family property in Hispania, Hadrian was brought up entirely in Rome.
Highly intelligent, with a prodigious memory, Hadrian was an excellent student. The main curriculum item in the schooling of elite Roman youth was the Greek and Latin classics. Hadrian took to Greece’s language and literature with passion. Certainly he had plenty of exposure to Greek, since the Rome of his day had a very large Greek population. In fact, Rome rivaled Alexandria as the largest Greek city in the world. Hadrian was Greek even in his taste in sports: he adored hunting, an elite Greek activity but not beloved of Romans.
It all earned him the nickname of Graeculus: “the little Greek.” It wasn’t a compliment. Elite Romans admired and resented Greece’s cultural superiority. Sometimes they compensated by recalling Rome’s power over Greece. Hadrian’s guardian Trajan was not unusual in his prejudiced comment that “the little Greeks are fond of their gymnasia.” He disapproved of Hadrian’s hunting.
Luckily for Hadrian, Trajan’s wife, Plotina, felt otherwise. Like Hadrian, she was an enthusiastic Hellenist. Indeed, the two had much in common. They were both intelligent and educated, both students of philosophy, both in Trajan’s orbit, and—a cynic might say—both loved Hadrian. Hadrian’s not inconsiderable self-love aside, Plotina adored her husband’s bright, young ward.
Although Plotina was probably closer in age to Hadrian than to Trajan, who was
twenty-two years older than Hadrian, she served as a sort of surrogate mother. She certainly looked out for his interests at crucial points in his career, beginning with his education. Plotina arranged for Hadrian to study with one of the best teachers in Rome.
Plotina was a student of Epicurean philosophy, a system of thought developed in Athens centuries earlier and that still had a school there in Hadrian’s day. Today an Epicurean is someone devoted to pleasure, especially to sensual and luxurious pleasure, but ancient Epicureans believed in limiting desires. They were materialists who considered religion to be superstition and reason to be the best guide. They preferred good company to gourmet food, and they valued working behind the scenes over being in the public eye. “Live unknown” was their motto, and friendship was their goal. Many elite Romans were Epicureans, including politicians who found the philosophy consoling even if they rejected its quietism.
For Plotina, as for Hadrian, “Greekness” was not merely a fashion statement. Although the Romans owed their empire to force, Hadrian understood that the pen was mightier than the sword—and that the greater pen belonged to the Greeks. He recognized, with the poet Horace, that “conquered Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought her arts in rustic Latium.” He believed that Greece still had deep wisdom to impart. Several of the Greek philosophical schools of his day seem to have influenced him, including Epicureanism, and he once met with the great Stoic philosopher Epictetus.
Hadrian took the life of the mind more seriously than any previous emperor had. After the proudly unintellectual Trajan and the aggressively plebeian Vespasian, it was a big change. Intellectualism undergirded the singular vision that Hadrian brought to the job. It also made him the greatest Roman friend that Greece ever had.
Ten Caesars Page 19