Hadrian

• 1. Introduction

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  Hadrian was born Publius Aelius Hadrianus on the 24th of January 76, in the town of Italica in southern Spain, far from the city he would one day rule. He governed Rome from 117 to 138, yet he spent more than half that time outside Italy, restless and roving. He built a wall to mark the northern edge of Britannia, then left before it was finished and never saw it complete. His own Senate found him remote and authoritarian, and four of its leading members died in the first years of his reign. He wept like a woman, one ancient writer claimed, when a young man named Antinous drowned in the Nile. He has been called enigmatic and contradictory, capable of great generosity and extreme cruelty alike. How did a provincial boy become heir to the most admired emperor of his age? Why did he turn his back on conquest? And what drove a Roman ruler to fall so deeply in love with Greece?

• 2. A Provincial Inheritance

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  Italica, the town where Hadrian was born, had been founded by Italic settlers during the Second Punic War at the initiative of Scipio Africanus. His branch of the Aelia gens took its name from Hadria, an ancient town in the Picenum region of Italy. His father, Publius Aelius Hadrianus Afer, was a senator of praetorian rank, and his mother, Domitia Paulina, came from a distinguished senatorial family based in Gades. When Hadrian was ten years old, both parents died, in 86. He and his elder sister became wards of two men: Trajan, his father's first cousin, and Publius Acilius Attianus. Trajan was also a native of Italica and of senatorial stock, and this family connection would prove the most significant of Hadrian's life. The boy was physically active and loved hunting. At fourteen, Trajan called him to Rome and arranged his education in subjects fit for a young Roman aristocrat. His passion for Greek literature earned him the nickname Graeculus, meaning Greekling, a form of mild mockery. One person from those early years stayed with him always: his wet nurse Germana, a slave probably of Germanic origin, whom he later freed and who outlived him, as her funerary inscription found at his villa at Tivoli attests.

• 3. The Ladder Of Honours

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  The decemviri stlitibus judicandis was Hadrian's first official post in Rome, one of the lowest offices on the cursus honorum, the course of honours that could lead to a senatorial career. He served as a military tribune three times, first with the Legio II Adiutrix in 95, then with the Legio V Macedonica, and later with Legio XXII Primigenia. Most sons of older senatorial families served one or two tribunates at most, so his three gave him an edge. When the aged emperor Nerva adopted Trajan as heir, Hadrian was sent to deliver the news, or at least was among many emissaries with that task. When Nerva died in 98, Hadrian is said to have hurried to Trajan to inform him before the official envoy, sent by his own brother-in-law and rival Lucius Julius Ursus Servianus. In 101 he was back in Rome, elected quaestor and then quaestor imperatoris Traiani, the liaison who read the emperor's speeches to the Senate and possibly composed them. As imperial ghostwriter he took the place of the recently deceased Licinius Sura, Trajan's all-powerful friend and kingmaker. He served in both Dacian Wars within Trajan's personal entourage. Between 107 and 108, as governor of Lower Pannonia, he defeated an invasion of Roman-controlled Banat and Oltenia by the Iazyges. In his mid-thirties he travelled to Greece, where he was granted Athenian citizenship and appointed eponymous archon of Athens in 112, an honour the Athenians recorded on a statue in the Theatre of Dionysus.

• 4. A Contested Crown

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  Vibia Sabina, Trajan's grandniece, was seventeen or eighteen when Hadrian married her around 100 or 101. Trajan himself seemed less than enthusiastic, with good reason, for the marriage would prove scandalously poor. The match may have been arranged by Trajan's empress, Plotina, a cultured and influential woman who shared Hadrian's vision of the empire as a commonwealth bound by Hellenic culture. Hadrian could also count on his mother-in-law, Salonia Matidia. Trajan promoted his protege cautiously. Late in his reign Hadrian failed to win a senior consulship, holding only a suffect consulship for 108, which gave him no distinction befitting an heir. The Historia Augusta records that Trajan gave Hadrian a diamond ring that he himself had received from Nerva, a gift that encouraged Hadrian's hopes of succeeding to the throne. As Trajan lay dying, nursed by Plotina and watched by Prefect Attianus, an adoption document was eventually produced, but it was signed by Plotina rather than Trajan. That Hadrian was still in Syria added a further irregularity, since Roman adoption law required both parties present. Trajan got as far as the coastal city of Selinus in Cilicia and died there on the 8th of August 117. Ancient sources split on whether the adoption was real: Cassius Dio saw it as bogus, while the Historia Augusta writer judged it genuine. Trajan's young manservant Phaedimus died very soon after his master, and it has been suggested he was killed, or killed himself, rather than face awkward questions.

• 5. Blood And The Senate

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  Four leading senators were tried in absentia, hunted down, and killed early in Hadrian's reign: Lusius Quietus, Lucius Publilius Celsus, Aulus Cornelius Palma Frontonianus, and Gaius Avidius Nigrinus. Hadrian's praetorian prefect Attianus claimed to have uncovered a conspiracy among them. Hadrian then claimed Attianus had acted on his own initiative, rewarded him with senatorial and consular rank, and pensioned him off no later than 120. The reasons for the executions remain obscure. These were Trajan's closest friends, the most senior members of the imperial council, any of whom might have been a legitimate rival, and any of whom might have backed the expansionist policies Hadrian meant to abandon. The Historia Augusta names Palma and Celsus as personal enemies who had spoken publicly against him. Nigrinus, an ex-consul, intellectual, and friend of Pliny the Younger, was probably his chief rival; the same source claims Hadrian had once considered making him heir apparent. To repair the damage, Hadrian assured the Senate that their right to judge their own members would be respected, and in 125 he appointed his close friend Quintus Marcius Turbo as praetorian prefect. It was not enough. His relationship with the Senate was soured for the rest of his reign. Some sources describe his recourse to the frumentarii, a network of informers used to investigate persons of high standing, including senators and his own close friends.

• 6. The Emperor Who Walked His Empire

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  More than half of Hadrian's reign was spent outside Italy. Earlier emperors had relied on reports from their representatives, but Hadrian wished to see things for himself. He sought to fold provincials into a commonwealth of civilised peoples under a common Hellenic culture, supporting semi-autonomous towns called municipia rather than imposing new Roman colonies. Coins of his later reign show the emperor raising up the personifications of various provinces, and the orator Aelius Aristides wrote that Hadrian extended a protecting hand over his subjects, raising them as one helps fallen men to their feet. In Britannia, which had suffered a major rebellion from 118 to 119, he initiated in 122 the construction of a wall to separate Romans from barbarians. A shrine was erected in York to Britannia as the divine personification of the island. Crossing to Mauretania in 123, he led a minor campaign against local rebels before reports of Parthian war preparations sent him east. At the Euphrates he personally negotiated a settlement with the Parthian King Osroes I. In Nicomedia, struck by an earthquake shortly before his stay, he provided funds for rebuilding and was acclaimed as restorer of the province. Italy itself felt his hand too, not always happily: in 127 he divided it into four regions under imperial legates with consular rank, an innovation the Senate disliked and that did not long outlive him. His near-incessant travels marked a break with the idea of the empire as a purely Roman hegemony.

• 7. The Greekling On The Throne

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  The Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens had been under construction for more than five centuries when Hadrian committed the vast resources at his command to finish it. He arrived in Greece in the autumn of 124 and took part in the Eleusinian Mysteries, and at the Athenians' request he revised their constitution, adding a new tribe named after him. He gave Athens two nymphaea, public fountains, one of which brought water from Mount Parnes through an ambitious system of aqueduct tunnels. He gave several to Argos to remedy a water shortage so old that thirsty Argos featured in Homeric epic. During his tour of the Peloponnese he showed particular generosity to Mantinea, restoring its Temple of Poseidon Hippios and, according to Pausanias, its original classical name, which had been changed to Antigoneia in Hellenistic times. He persuaded the Spartan grandee Eurycles Herculanus and the Athenian Herodes Atticus the Elder to enter the Senate, the first from Old Greece to do so. His vision crystallised in the Panhellenion, a grand league of all Greek cities focused on the Athenian Temple to Olympian Zeus, which he dedicated in the winter of 131 to 132. Membership demanded mythologised claims to Greek origins and affirmations of loyalty to Rome. His notion of Hellenism was narrow and deliberately archaising, defining Greekness by classical roots rather than the broader Hellenistic culture. The German sociologist Georg Simmel remarked that the Panhellenion rested on games, commemorations, and the preservation of an ideal, an entirely non-political Hellenism.

• 8. Antinous And The Nile

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  Antinous was a young man of humble birth, possibly from Claudiopolis, whom Hadrian may have first seen during his travels through Anatolia around 123, when the youth would have been thirteen or fourteen. Literary and epigraphic sources say nothing of when or where they met, and the actual historical detail of their relationship is mostly unknown. The two held a lion hunt in the Libyan desert, and a poem on the subject by the Greek Pankrates is the earliest evidence that they travelled together. While Hadrian and his entourage were sailing on the Nile, Antinous drowned. The exact circumstances are unknown, and accident, suicide, murder, and religious sacrifice have all been proposed. The Historia Augusta records that Hadrian wept for the youth like a woman, and notes the varying rumours: some claimed Antinous had devoted himself to death for Hadrian, others suggested what his beauty and Hadrian's sensuality imply. The Greeks deified him at Hadrian's request. The emperor founded the city of Antinoöpolis in his honour on the 30th of October 130, a proper Greek polis built in Graeco-Roman style near the place of his death, granted a subsidised alimentary scheme and the right of its citizens to intermarry with the native population. Antinous was deified as Osiris-Antinous, and his cult grew widely popular across the Greek-speaking world and the West. In the west he was identified with the Celtic sun god Belenos. Hadrian was criticised for the open intensity of his grief, particularly since he had delayed the apotheosis of his own sister Paulina. Yet the cult endured: local coins with Antinous's effigy were still being struck during Caracalla's reign, and he was invoked in a poem celebrating the accession of Diocletian.