Hadrian entered public life at age eighteen and rose swiftly. First came minor positions in the city of Rome, then assignment as a junior officer (military tribune), first in central Europe and then in the Balkans. He was in a far-off Balkan region on the Euxine Sea when news came in late 97 that the emperor Nerva had adopted Trajan as his son and successor. At the time, Trajan was in command in Upper Germania. Hadrian was chosen to bring his army’s congratulations to his guardian—now heir to the throne. As a reward, he was transferred from the far-off Euxine Sea to a more central location on the Rhine, while remaining a junior officer. By serving three terms as junior officer rather than the senatorial norm of two, Hadrian grew especially knowledgeable about the military.
Soon afterward, in early 98, news came that Nerva was dead and Trajan was declared emperor. Hadrian seized the moment and hurried northward to inform Trajan in person, a distance of about 110 miles. Along the way, his carriage broke down, but he continued on foot and managed to break the good news to Trajan. So the story goes, and it includes the claim that one Servianus sabotaged Hadrian’s carriage. Skepticism is called for, since the story might well go back to Hadrian himself, and, in later years, Hadrian and Servianus were at daggers drawn. Strangely, the two men were brothers-in-law.
Lucius Julius Ursus Servianus was married to Hadrian’s sister, Paulina. It was a match of access and ambition, since Paulina, like Hadrian, was Trajan’s cousin, and Servianus, a governor and former consul, was headed for Trajan’s inner circle. It’s not surprising that two determined men such as Servianus and Hadrian clashed.
Hadrian was Trajan’s closest living male relative, and once the childless Trajan became emperor, Hadrian had an inside track to succeed him. It was no sure thing, however. Ever since Augustus had passed over his grandson Agrippa Postumus for his stepson Tiberius, it was clear that even a close relative had to earn the job. And earn it Hadrian did, by displaying political, military, and administrative skills. But that was not all.
The rise of Hadrian was a triumph of the arts of the courtier. He beguiled the imperial women closest to Trajan, impressed his former guardian Attianus—now prefect of the Praetorian Guard, as well as Trajan’s right-hand man Sura, among others.
Hadrian’s closest ally as always was Plotina, now wife of the emperor. She persuaded Trajan to give Vibia Sabina to Hadrian as a bride. The marriage moved Hadrian closer to Trajan, since Sabina was his sister Marciana’s granddaughter and so was Trajan’s grandniece. Sabina came from a family of wealth and influence. She personally owned slaves in Hispania as well as in Rome and elsewhere in Italy. Both her mother, Salonia Matidia, and her grandmother, Marciana, lived in the imperial household and were among Trajan’s closest confidants.
The up-and-coming Hadrian and the well-positioned Sabina married in 100. Hadrian adored his mother-in-law, Matidia. Hadrian was twenty-four; Sabina, a girl of fourteen or fifteen. The age gap of ten years between husband and wife was typical for Rome. Rome’s minimum age of marriage for a young woman was twelve and for a young man, fourteen. Although women tended to marry in their late teens and men in their late twenties, the senatorial elite and especially the imperial family often married early. An ambitious man like Hadrian was surely eager to wed a woman as eligible as Sabina.
Hadrian might have found much to like in his bride as she grew into a woman. Admittedly, imperial portrait sculpture is idealized and propagandistic. Still, it is unlikely to represent sheer fantasy, since its subjects wanted to be recognized when seen. The various busts and full-length statues of Sabina display an even-featured, pleasant-looking face, a delicate neck, and a classical nose. There is a gentle air about her. Her hair is thick, wavy, and brushed back from a central part, in a Greek style that surely appealed to Hadrian and perhaps to her as well.
Sabina is the rare Roman woman to have left writing. Admittedly, it is brief: just a postscript to four short poems composed by her traveling companion. Yet that companion was a Greek woman and an intellectual, suggesting that Sabina shared interests with Hadrian or at least made an effort to do so. The writing also shows that Sabina shared her husband’s pride in their own status and achievements.
Still, theirs was a dynastic marriage, not a love match, and the bridal couple had their differences. The marriage was childless. Hadrian preferred young men. Rumor said the couple disliked each other; that they had sex but Sabina took precautions to prevent pregnancy; that Hadrian found her irritable and short tempered and wished that he were a private citizen so he could divorce her. But rumors are just rumors, and it is not unknown for political spouses to work together even if they don’t get along in bed. Despite the alleged bad blood between Sabina and Hadrian, there is also evidence of cooperation and harmony, and Hadrian rewarded his wife with honors. Still, Sabina’s role could not have been entirely easy.
Hadrian had the opportunity to advance his career in Trajan’s wars in Dacia in 101–102 and 105–106. In the first campaign, Trajan took Hadrian with him as a high-ranking staff member. Hadrian spent a year at the front, an experience from which only one detail survives: that Hadrian came to share Trajan’s hard-drinking wine habits, and Trajan rewarded him for this.
Hadrian served again in Trajan’s second Dacian campaign in 105–106, this time as a legionary commander. He received military decorations for both campaigns. Although other men played bigger roles in Rome’s victory, Hadrian received a symbolic gift from Trajan: a diamond that Trajan had received from the previous emperor, Nerva. It seemed like an omen of success, and Hadrian set great store by omens. Although a student of philosophy, he had a lifelong interest in magic and astrology.
Hadrian continued to rise quickly under Trajan but not as quickly as the ambitious young man would have liked. From 106 to 108, he was governor of Lower Pannonia. In May 108 he was named suffect (substitute) consul at age thirty-two, which was early for a nonpatrician. The story goes that Hadrian now learned from one of Trajan’s closest advisors, Sura, that the emperor was going to adopt him. Sura died soon afterward, so the truth of this tale is unknown. In any case, Trajan did not adopt Hadrian, although he did make him his speechwriter.
It was a trusted position but not enough to keep Hadrian in Rome. By 112, if not earlier, he was living in Athens, presumably with Trajan’s permission. The emperor might have considered it useful to have the talented young man as his eyes and ears in the Greek east—and perhaps a relief, too, to have this aspirant to power out of his hair. Athens was small compared with Rome, but its cultural heritage still cast a giant shadow. Between the Parthenon, the philosophers, and the poetry, Hadrian was enchanted. The city’s elite invited him to become an Athenian citizen, and, shortly after, he was elected chief magistrate.
This stay in Athens might have been the moment when Hadrian made his well-known contribution to Roman fashion: his beard. He set a precedent, and for the next century and a half, his successors as emperor followed suit.
His hirsute young cousin might have surprised Trajan as he passed through Athens on the way to a vast new war in the East. Much of his court came with him, including Plotina and Matidia.
Like Caesar and Mark Antony, Trajan set his sights on war with Parthia. The previous chapter has already told the story of the campaign. Suffice it to add a reference to reports that Plotina used her influence to get Hadrian a position on Trajan’s staff during the war. But apparently Hadrian exercised little power before becoming governor of Syria in 117, another job that he is said to have owed to Plotina. It was supposedly her influence as well that allowed him to be named consul a second time, to serve in the year 118.
The smart money was on Hadrian succeeding Trajan, especially when the second consulship was announced. Rumor said that Hadrian was bribing Trajan’s freedmen and courting Trajan’s influential boyfriends. And yet the emperor neither adopted Hadrian nor honored him with the title of Caesar or with the powers that Tiberius, Titus, and Trajan himself all had when they were made heir. Nor over the years did Trajan ever make Hadria
n one of his top generals. Perhaps the reason was Hadrian’s lack of enthusiasm for military conquest. Unlike Trajan, Hadrian did not want to expand the empire. That might have made Trajan hesitate to name him as his successor. The severe old Roman also likely distrusted his former ward’s Hellenism.
There was a rumor that Trajan planned to name another man his heir or that he would turn the decision over to the Senate. Some even said that the great admirer of Alexander intended to leave the succession “to the strongest,” as the Macedonian did when he died in 323 BC, but since Alexander’s decision resulted in fifty years of civil war, it seems unlikely that Trajan wanted to follow that precedent. And then the crisis came.
THE SUCCESSION CRISIS
As we have seen, some challenged the report that Trajan adopted Hadrian on his deathbed. But Hadrian had a powerful response, the legions of the East, whose support he obtained immediately after he moved smartly to give them a double bonus. He later apologized to the Senate for taking the throne without its consent, but the state, he said, could not be left without an emperor. Meanwhile, like Vespasian, another emperor who took power by force, he counted the day of his acclamation by the army as the start of his reign: August 11, 117.
Meanwhile, the new rule began with a gangland-style series of assassinations of Trajan’s ex-marshals. Some were rivals for imperial power, while others were not happy with the defensive military policies that Hadrian had in mind. In Rome, Hadrian’s former guardian, Attianus, claimed to have found a four-man conspiracy against the new emperor. They were men of great substance: ex-consuls of the Roman state, including one of Trajan’s closest associates and another man who was admired by Plutarch. They were killed without trial, and the Senate was forced to approve. Many senators never forgave their new ruler for what became known as “the Affair of the Four Ex-Consuls,” but few failed to fear him. As for Attianus, Hadrian promoted him to the Senate, which meant giving up his job as Praetorian prefect, a position reserved for Roman knights.
For all his love of philosophy, the arts, and astrology, Hadrian was ruthless, violent, and unafraid of murder. Yet he was also a politician, and he knew to mend fences. In Rome, Hadrian gave cash to the plebeians, burned the records of overdue taxes, put on splendid gladiatorial games, and started a big building program.
But Hadrian did not believe in constitutional government. Gibbon sums him up nicely by saying, “He was by turns an excellent prince, a ridiculous sophist, and a jealous tyrant.”
PEACE AND CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS
Few emperors came to office with as much vision and self-confidence as Hadrian. He wanted nothing less than to be a transformative leader. He came to see himself—eventually, if not at first—as a second Augustus. Indeed, in time he called himself Hadrian Augustus, preferring it to his full name, Imperator Caesar Traianus Hadrianus Augustus. He considered himself a second founder of the empire.
Actually, he was a second Tiberius. By reversing Trajan’s policy of expansion, he restored the largely defensive strategy of Tiberius. If Hadrian was more of a humanist than Tiberius, he did not shy away from Tiberius’s quarrels with the Senate and, from time to time, his tyranny.
Hadrian faced revolts east and west at the start of his reign: in Dacia, on the Danube, in Mauretania (Morocco), and Britain. He responded by firmness in some areas and pullback in others. He ordered an immediate withdrawal from the little territory that was left of Trajan’s conquests in the Parthian Empire, and he made peace with the Parthian king. He also gave up the eastern part of Dacia. As a precautionary measure to stop invaders, Hadrian even had the superstructure of Trajan’s great bridge across the Danube dismantled.
Surrendering territory seemed un-Roman, and many senators opposed it fiercely. Indeed, disagreement with the new policy and not a conspiracy was probably the real reason the Four Ex-Consuls paid with their lives. But Hadrian insisted. In his judgment, the empire was exhausted after Trajan’s wars of expansion. Furthermore, he seems to have recognized the advantages of rearmament: militarily, economically, and morally.
Though the emperor did have his opponents, most members of the Roman elite probably agreed with Hadrian. There was no longer the same incentive to fight wars to conquer new territory. In fact, there was a disincentive, since emperors feared and sometimes executed victorious generals. It was no longer necessary to have major military experience in order to forge a successful public career or be a senator. One contemporary writer probably spoke for many when he wrote, “within my own time the emperor Hadrian . . . was extremely religious in the respect he paid to the deity and contributed very much to the happiness of his various subjects. He never voluntarily entered upon a war.”
For Trajan, Rome was a superpower, and it had to act like one. For Hadrian, Rome was a commonwealth; more like the European Union than the United States, Russia, or China. Hadrian wanted a new empire in which provincial elites participated in government as equals. He earned their loyalty by extending Roman citizenship to city councilors around the empire—a boon previously limited to magistrates.
As far as Hadrian was concerned, those elites would speak Latin in the West and Greek in the East. But what of the other native elites in the empire? What of Arabs, Celts, Dacians, Egyptians, Germans, Jews, Mauretanians, Numidians, Phoenicians, Syrians, and others? They would have to assimilate or be left out. Hadrian said to them, in effect, “You don’t have the right to be free; you have the right to be Roman—or Greek.” Greek was the dominant language in the eastern half of the empire. Its sound was music to the ears of Hadrian, “the little Greek,” and he intended to favor it.
Hadrian focused on the eastern half of the empire for most of his reign. That reflected not merely his personal preference but also the realities of power. Rome had the military force and the political organization, but the East had the manpower, the wealth, the cities, the culture, and the intellectual and spiritual depth. The West outside Italy was comparatively underdeveloped and backward, boasting few great cities. The greatest exception was Carthage, located across the Mediterranean Sea, on the northern coast of Africa. Destroyed in the Third Punic War in 146 BC, Carthage was rebuilt as a Roman colony by Augustus in accordance with the plan of Julius Caesar. By Hadrian’s day, Carthage was the second city of the western Mediteranean. Yet the empire’s urban center was in the East, and to some, that region represented Rome’s future. Hadrian had no doubt of that.
Both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony were tempted to move the capital of the empire eastward, either to Alexandria or even Troy. Hadrian turned his eyes to Athens. He loved all Greek cities, but he preferred Athens, where he spent more time than any other place in the Greek world. He was initiated into the so-called Mysteries, the city’s most solemn and exclusive religious ritual. It was a secret ceremony offering hope of life after death.
Hadrian built up Athens to a degree not seen since the Golden Age of Pericles more than five hundred years earlier. He sponsored a building boom there, and he made Athens the center of a new Panhellenic League of Greek cities. Visitors to Athens today can still see such signs of Hadrian’s construction projects in the remains of a library; a cistern—now a public square but once part of a new water supply system—the massive columns of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, which was the largest temple in Greece; and a combination marble arch and gate that led to a new quarter of town labeled Hadrian’s City. But Athens was only a small part of Hadrian’s construction program.
A TEMPLE AND A VILLA
Hadrian might be more famous today as a place name than as a person. He is probably best known for Hadrian’s Wall in England and Hadrian’s villa in Italy, and those are just the most familiar examples. The city of Rome boasts Hadrian’s tomb, also known as Castel Sant’Angelo. Moving on to Hadrian’s building projects that don’t bear his name, Rome also once contained the massive Temple of Venus and Rome, which amateur architect Hadrian designed himself, to the disgust of Trajan’s master architect Apollodorus, who criticized it in writing. Hadrian was so angry
that when Apollodorus died shortly afterward, it was rumored that the emperor had ordered him executed. But neither the tomb nor the temple was Hadrian’s most important building.
Augustus left his mark on the Field of Mars, an area located between the old core of the city and the bend of the Tiber River. Hadrian emphasized his claim to be the new Augustus by rebranding the area. He rebuilt an important but damaged structure there—the temple to all the gods, the Pantheon—originally constructed by Augustus’s right-hand man, Agrippa. The result is not only the best-preserved edifice to survive from classical antiquity but also one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. Standing inside the Pantheon and looking upward, a visitor realizes that the dome is one of Rome’s gifts to civilization.
The building shows genius in its conception and perfection in its execution. It also demonstrates the abundance of the emperor’s finances, because a structure this splendid and enduring did not come cheap. Hadrian deserves credit for the idea of the building, although he was too amateurish an architect to have designed it in detail. We don’t know the architect’s name, but whoever it was succeeded in symbolizing the unity of the empire through brick, marble, and concrete. The rotunda recalls the “circle of lands,” as the Romans called the world. The grid of the marble floor or the coffered ceiling brings to mind the regular pattern of a Roman military camp or town or landscape. The dome symbolizes the heavens, ruled over by Jupiter, just as the emperor rules the empire. The dome was a technological marvel, ranging from a massive thickness of 23 feet at its base to only 2 feet at the top. At a diameter of 142.4 feet, the Pantheon’s dome was the world’s widest vault for 1,300 years, until the Duomo (Cathedral) of Florence was built in 1436—and that span was not surpassed until the late nineteenth century.
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