1. The Ruler
Probably we shall never know whether the most brilliant of the Roman emperors won his throne by amorous connivance or by Trajan’s conviction of his worth. “His appointment,” says Dio Cassius, “was due to the fact that when Trajan died without an heir, his widow Plotina, who was in love with Hadrian, conspired to secure him the succession.”12 Spartianus repeats the story.13 Plotina and Hadrian denied the rumor, which nevertheless persisted to the end of his reign. He settled the matter by distributing a generous donative among the troops.
Publius Aelius Hadrianus traced his cognomen and family to the town of Adria, on the Adriatic coast; thence, said his autobiography, his ancestors had migrated to Spain. The same Spanish town, Italica, that had seen the birth of Trajan in 52 saw that of his nephew Hadrian in 76. When the boy’s father died (86) he was placed under the guardianship of Trajan and Caelius Attianus. The latter tutored him and instilled in him so warm a fondness for Greek literature that the youth was nicknamed Graeculus. He studied also singing, music, medicine, mathematics, painting, and sculpture, and later dabbled in half a dozen arts. Trajan called him to Rome (91) and gave him his niece in marriage (100). Vivia Sabina, as preserved in portrait busts that may have idealized her, was a woman of distinguished and conscious beauty, in whom Hadrian found no lasting happiness. Possibly he loved dogs and horses too keenly, and spent too much time hunting with them, and building tombs for them when they died. Perhaps he was unfaithful, or seemed so. In any case, she bore him no children, and though she accompanied him on many of his travels, they lived in lifelong estrangement. He showed her every favor and courtesy, and gave her every kindness but affection. When Suetonius, one of his secretaries, spoke disrespectfully of her he dismissed him.
Hadrian’s first decision as emperor was to revise the imperialistic policy of his uncle. He had counseled Trajan against the Parthian expedition as too great an expenditure of men and means so soon after the Dacian Wars, and as promising, at best, gains difficult to hold; and Trajan’s generals, eager for glory, had never pardoned his opposition. Now he withdrew the legions from Armenia, Assyria, Mesopotamia, and Parthia, made Armenia a client kingdom instead of a province, and accepted the Euphrates as the eastern boundary of the Empire; he played Augustus to Trajan’s Caesar, and consolidated with peaceful administration as much as he could of the unprecedented realm that reckless arms had won. The generals who had led Trajan’s forces—Palma, Celsus, Quietus, Nigrinus—thought this policy cowardly and unwise; to cease to attack, they felt, was merely to defend, and merely to defend was to begin to die. While Hadrian was with his legions on the Danube the Senate announced that the four generals had been detected in a conspiracy to overthrow the government and had been executed by the Senate’s orders. Rome was shocked to find that the men had received no trial; and though Hadrian, returning hurriedly to Rome, protested that he had had nothing to do with the matter, no one believed him. He vowed to put no senator to death except at the Senate’s bidding, distributed a gift of money among the people, amused them with abundant games, canceled tax arrears to the amount of 900,000,000 sesterces, publicly burned the tax records in a fiscal auto-da-fé, and for twenty years governed with wisdom, justice, and peace. But his unpopularity remained complete.
His ancient biographer describes him as tall and elegant, with hair curled, and “a full beard to hide the natural blemishes of his face”;14 thenceforth all Rome wore beards. He was strongly built and kept himself in vigor by frequent exercise, above all by hunting; on several occasions he killed a lion with his own hands.15 So many elements were mingled in him that description is baffled. We are told that he was “stern and cheerful, humorous and grave, sensual and cautious, hard and liberal, severe and merciful, deceptively simple, and always in all things various.”16 He had a quick, impartial, skeptical and penetrating mind, but he respected tradition as the connective tissue of generations. He read and admired the Stoic Epictetus, but he sought pleasure with shamelessness and taste. He was irreligious and superstitious, laughed at oracles, played with magic and astrology, encouraged the national faith, and sedulously performed the duties of pontifex maximus. He was courteous and obstinate, sometimes cruel, usually kind; perhaps his contradictions were merely adaptations to circumstance. He visited the sick, helped the unfortunate, extended existing charities to orphans and widows, and was a generous patron to artists, writers, and philosophers. He was a good singer, dancer, and harpist, a competent painter, a middling sculptor. He wrote several volumes—a grammar, an autobiography, poems decent and indecent,17 in Latin and Greek. He preferred Greek to Latin literature, and old Cato’s simple Latin to Cicero’s smooth eloquence; under his example many authors now affected an archaic style. He organized the state-paid professors into a university, paid them well, and built for them a magnificent Athenaeum to rival the Museum of Alexandria. It delighted him to gather scholars and thinkers about him, to puzzle them with questions, and laugh at their contradictions and disputes. Favorinus of Gaul was the wisest of this philosophic court; when his friends rallied him for yielding to Hadrian in argument, he answered that any man with thirty legions behind him must be right.18
Along with these multiple intellectual interests went an unerring sense for the practical. Following Domitian’s lead, Hadrian reduced his freedmen to subordinate functions, chose businessmen of tried ability to administer the government, and formed from them and senators and jurists a concilium to meet in regular sessions for the consideration of policies. He appointed an advocatus fisci, or Attorney for the Treasury, to detect corruption or deceit in the payment of taxes, with the illuminating result that while taxes remained as before, revenues were decidedly increased. He himself kept watch on each department and, like Napoleon, astonished its heads by detailed knowledge of their field. “His memory was vast,” says Spartianus; “he wrote, dictated, listened, and conversed with his friends, all at the same time”19—though the frequency of this tale invites suspicion. Under his care, and with the help of an extended civil service, the Empire was probably better governed than ever before or afterward. The price of this zealous order was a swelling bureaucracy, and a “mania of regulation” that moved the principate still closer to absolute monarchy. Hadrian observed all the forms of co-operation with the Senate; nevertheless, his appointees and their executive orders encroached more and more upon the functions of what had once seemed “an assembly of kings.” He was too close to his problems to foresee that his efficient but proliferating bureaucracy might become in time an unbearable burden upon the taxpayers. On the contrary, he believed that within the framework of law and ordinance which his government had established every person in the Empire would find career open to talent and any man could rise rapidly from class to class.
His clear and logical mind resented the chaos of accumulated, obscure, and contradictory laws. He commissioned Julianus to co-ordinate the enactments of past praetors into a Perpetual Edict, and encouraged further codifications that paved the way for Justinian. He acted as a supreme court both in Rome and on his journeys, and earned the reputation of a fair and learned judge, always as lenient as the reign of law would permit. He issued innumerable decrees, usually in favor of the weak against the strong, the slave against the master, the small farmer against the large estate, the tenant against the landlord, the consumer against the deceptions of retailers and the multiplication of middlemen.20 He rejected accusations for maiestas, refused bequests from parents, or persons unknown to him, and ordered a tolerant application of the laws against Christians.21 By his own example on state lands he encouraged the practice of emphyteusis (“implanting”), by which owners rented rough acres to tenants to be planted with orchards and remain rent-free till fruit grew. He was not a radical reformer; he was only a superlative administrator seeking, within the limits and inequalities of human nature, the greatest good of the whole. He preserved old forms, but he quietly poured new content into them according to the needs of the time. Once, when his passion for administration flagged, he refused audience to a petitioning woman with the plea, “I haven’t time.” “Don’t be emperor, then,” she cried. He granted her a hearing.22
2. The Wanderer
Unlike his predecessors Hadrian was as interested in the Empire as in the capital. Following the wholesome precedent of Augustus, he decided to visit every province, examining its conditions and needs and alleviating them with the expedition and resources available to an emperor. He was curious, too, about the ways and arts, dress and beliefs, of the diverse peoples in his realm; he wished to see the famous places of Greek history, to steep himself in that Hellenic culture which was the background and adornment of his mind. “He loved,” says Fronto, “not only to govern, but to perambulate, the world.”23 In 121 he set out from Rome, accompanied not by the pomp and trappings of royalty, but by experts, architects, builders, engineers, and artists. He went first to Gaul and “came to the relief of all the communities with various acts of generosity.”24 He passed into Germany and astonished everyone by the thoroughness with which he inspected the defenses of the Empiretagainst its future destroyers. He reorganized, extended and improved the limes between the Rhine and the Danube. A man of peace, he knew the arts of war and was resolved that his pacific temper should neither weaken his armies nor misguide his enemies. He issued severe regulations to maintain military discipline and obeyed these rules while visiting the camps; there he lived the life of the soldiers, eating their fare, never using a vehicle, walking with full equipment twenty miles on a march, and showing such endurance that no one could have guessed that he was at heart a scholar and a philosopher. At the same time he rewarded excellence, raised the legal and economic status of the legionaries, gave them better weapons and ample supplies, and relaxed the discipline of their free hours, merely insisting that their amusements should not unfit them for their tasks. The Roman army was never in better condition than in his reign.
He now traveled down the Rhine to its mouth and sailed across to Britain (122). We are not informed of his activities there, except that he ordered a wall built from the Solway Firth to the mouth of the Tyne “to divide the barbarians from the Romans.” Returning to Gaul he passed leisurely through Avignon, Nimes, and other towns of the provincia, and settled down for the winter at Tarragona in northern Spain. While he was strolling alone in the gardens of his host a slave rushed upon him with drawn sword and tried to kill him. Hadrian overpowered him and quietly handed him over to the servants, who found that he was insane.
In the spring of 123 he led some legions against the Moors of northwest Africa, who had been raiding the Roman towns of Mauretania. Having defeated them and driven them back into their hills, he took ship for Ephesus. After wintering there he visited the cities of Asia Minor, listening to petitions and complaints, punishing malfeasance, rewarding competence, and providing money, designs, and workmen for municipal temples, baths, and theaters. Cyzicus, Nicaea, and Nicomedia had suffered a severe earthquake; Hadrian had the damage made good by imperial funds, and built at Cyzicus a temple that was at once ranked among the seven wonders of the world.25 He pushed eastward along the Euxine to Trapezus, ordered the governor of Cappadocia—the historian Arrian—to examine and report to him the condition of all the ports on the Black Sea, moved southwest through Paphlagonia, and spent a winter at Pergamum. In the fall of 125 he sailed to Rhodes and thence to Athens. He passed a happy winter there and then turned homeward. Still curious at fifty, he stopped in Sicily, and climbed Mt. Etna to see the sunrise from a perch 11,000 feet above the sea.
It is worthy of note that he could leave his capital for five years and trust to his subordinates to carry on; like a good manager, he had organized and trained an almost automatic government. He stayed in Rome something more than a year. But the lust for travel was in his blood, and so much of the world remained to rebuild! In 128 he set out again, this time to Utica, Carthage, and the flourishing new cities of northern Africa. Returning to Rome in the fall, he left soon afterward and spent another winter in Athens (128-29). He was made archon, presided happily at games and festivals, and enjoyed being called Liberator, Helios, Zeus, and Savior of the World. He mingled with philosophers and artists, imitating the graces, without the follies, of Nero and Antony. Distressed by the free chaos of Athens’ laws, he commissioned a corps of jurists to codify them. Always skeptically interested in religion, he had himself initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries. Finding Athens beset with unemployment, and resolved to restore the city to the splendor of Periclean days, he summoned architects, engineers, and skilled artisans, and began a building program more extensive than his public works in Rome. In a square enclosed by an extensive colonnade his workmen raised a library with marble walls, 120 columns, a gilded roof, and spacious rooms sparkling with alabaster, paintings, and statuary. They built a gymnasium, an aqueduct, a temple to Hera, and another to Zeus Panhellenicos—god “of all the Greeks.” The most ambitious of these architectural undertakings was the completion (131) of the Olympieum—that lordly temple to Zeus the Olympian which Peisistratus had begun six centuries before and Antiochus Epiphanes had failed to finish. When Hadrian left Athens it was a cleaner, more prosperous, and more beautiful city than ever before in its history.26
In the spring of 129 he sailed to Ephesus and traveled again in Asia Minor, spawning buildings and cities as he went. He sallied into Cappadocia and reviewed the garrisons there. At Antioch he provided funds for an aqueduct, a temple, a theater, and public baths. In the fall he visited Palmyra and Arabia, and in 130 he journeyed to Jerusalem. The Holy City was still in ruins, almost as Titus had left it sixty years before; a handful of destitute Jews lived in lairs and hovels amid the rocks. Hadrian’s heart was touched by the desolation; and his imagination was moved by the empty site. He had hoped, by his restoration of Greece and the Hellenistic East, to raise higher than before the barriers between Greco-Roman civilization and the Oriental world; now he dreamed of transforming Zion itself into a pagan citadel. He ordered that Jerusalem should be rebuilt as a Roman colony and renamed Aelia Capitolina in memory of Hadrian’s gens and Jupiter’s Capitol in Rome. It was an astonishing error of psychology and statesmanship in one of the wisest statesmen in history.
He passed on to Alexandria (130), smiled tolerantly at its disputatious populace, enriched the Museum, rebuilt Pompey’s tomb, and then, surpassing Caesar, abandoned himself to a leisurely sail up the Nile with his wife Sabina and his beloved Antinoüs. He had come upon the young Greek some years before in Bithynia; he had been stirred by the youth’s rounded beauty, soft eyes, and curly head; he had made him his favored page and had formed for him a tender and passionate attachment. Sabina made no protest that has come down to us, but the gossip of the cities assumed that the boy played Ganymede to the new Zeus; possibly, however, the childless Emperor loved him as a heaven-sent son. Now, at the height of Hadrian’s happiness, Antinoüs, still but eighteen, died—apparently by drowning in the Nile. The monarch of the world “wept like a woman,” says Spartianus; he ordered a temple to be raised on the shore, buried the lad there, and offered him to the world as a god. Around the shrine he built a city, Antinoöpolis, destined to be a Byzantine capital. While Hadrian returned sadly to Rome, legend began to remold the story: the Emperor, it said, had learned by magic divination that his greatest plans would succeed only if that which he loved most should die; Antinoüs had heard of the prophecy and had gone voluntarily to his death. Perhaps the legend formed soon enough to embitter Hadrian’s declining years.
Back in Rome (131), he could feel that he had made the Empire better than he had found it. Never before, not even under Augustus, had it been so prosperous, and never has the Mediterranean world reached that fullness of life again; never has it again been the home of so advanced a civilization so widely spread and so deeply shared. And no man had so beneficently ruled it as Hadrian. Augustus had thought of the provinces as a lucrative appendage to Italy, to be husbanded for Italy’s sake; now for the first time the ideas of Caesar and Claudius reached fulfillment, and Rome became not a tax collector for Italy, but the responsible administrator of a realm in which all parts alike received the care of the government, and in which the Greek spirit ruled the East and the mind as openly as the Roman spirit ruled the state and the West. Hadrian had seen it all and had made it one. He had promised that he “would manage the commonwealth as conscious that it was the people’s property, not his own”;27 and he had kept his promise.
3. The Builder
Only one thing remained—to make Rome, too, more beautiful than before. The artist in Hadrian was ever competing with the governor; he rebuilt the Pantheon while reorganizing Roman law. No other man ever built so plentifully, no other ruler so directly. The structures erected for him were sometimes designed by him, and were always subject to his expert inspection as they progressed. He had a hundred edifices repaired or restored and inscribed his name on none of them. Rome in all quarters benefited from his rare union of wisdom with power. Si jeunesse savait et vieillesse pouvait was in him a riddle solved.
His most famous reconstruction was the Pantheon—the best-preserved building of the ancient world. The rectangular temple reared by Agrippa had been destroyed by fire; apparently only the frontal Corinthian portico remained. North of this remnant Hadrian had his architects and engineers raise a circular temple, in the most indigenous of Roman styles. His Hellenic tastes inclined him to prefer Greek to Roman forms in the architecture of his capital. The new temple did not form with the portico a harmonious whole; but the interior—a circle 132 feet in diameter, with no impeding supports-gave a sense of space and freedom equaled only by the Gothic cathedrals. The walls were twenty feet thick, of brick externally faced in the lower section with marble, in the rest with stucco relieved by pilasters. The ceiling of the portico was of bronze plates so thick that when they were removed by Pope Urban VIII they sufficed to cast 110 cannon and to form the baldachin over the high altar in St. Peter’s.29 The massive bronze doors were originally covered with gold. Seven niches were cut into the lower section of the windowless interior wall and were adorned with lofty marble columns and entablatures; once these niches served as alcoves for statuary, now they are modest chapels in a magnificent church. A higher section of the wall was plated with panels of costly stone, separated by pillars of porphyry. The coffered dome, rising inward from the top of the walls, was the supreme triumph of Roman engineering. It was erected by pouring concrete into ribbed sections and letting the whole congeal into one solid mass. Its monolithic character did away with lateral thrust, but to make security doubly sure the architect built buttresses into the walls. At the top of the dome an opening (the oculus, or “eye”), twenty-six feet in diameter, gave the interior its sole and sufficient illumination. From this majestic dome, the largest in history, an architectural lineage descends through Byzantine and Romanesque variations to the dome of St. Peter’s, and to that of the Capitol in Washington.
Probably Hadrian himself designed the double-apsed temple to Venus and Roma which rose opposite the Colosseum, for legend tells how he sent his plans for it to Apollodorus and had the old architect put to death for returning a scornful comment.30 The temple was notable in several particulars: it was the largest in Rome; it had two cellas, one for each of its gods, who sat back to back on incommunicative thrones; and its vaulted roof of gold-plated bronze tiles was among the most brilliant sights of the city. For himself the Emperor built a yet ampler home—the villa whose remains still draw visitors to the pleasant suburb known to him as Tibur, to us as Tivoli. There, in an estate seven miles in circumference, rose a palace with every variety of room, and gardens so crowded with famous works of art that every major museum in Europe has enriched itself from the ruins. The designer showed here the usual Roman indifference to symmetry; he added building to building as need or fancy prompted, and made no greater attempt at harmony than we find in the architectural chaos of the Forum; perhaps the Romans, like the Japanese, were tired of symmetry and pleased with the surprises of irregularity. Besides porticoes, libraries, temples, a theater, a music hall, and a hippodrome, the profuse architect added small replicas of Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, and Zeno’s Stoa—as if the Emperor, amid all this vain wealth, would make some amends to philosophy.
The villa was finished in the last years of Hadrian’s life. We do not know that he found happiness there. The revolt of the Jews in 135 embittered him; he put it down without mercy and fretted that he could not end his reign without war. In that same year, still only fifty-nine, he was stricken with a painful and wasting illness—akin to tuberculosis and dropsy—which slowly crushed his body, his spirit, and his mind. His temper became sharper, his manner querulous; he suspected his oldest friends of conspiring to kill and replace him; at last—perhaps in an illucid interval, and how justly we cannot say—he ordered that several of them should be put to death.
To end the war of succession that was forming in his court, he adopted as heir his friend Lucius Verus. When, soon after, Lucius died, Hadrian called to his bedside at Tibur a man with an unblemished reputation for integrity and wisdom, Titus Aurelius Antoninus, and adopted him as his son and successor. Looking far ahead, he advised Antoninus to adopt in turn, and educate for government, two youths then growing up at the court: Marcus Annius Verus, then seventeen, and Lucius Aelius Verus, then eleven, respectively the nephew of Antoninus and the son of Lucius Verus. The title of Caesar, heretofore borne by the emperors and their agnatic descendants, was conferred by Hadrian upon Antoninus; and thereafter, while the emperors kept for themselves the title of Augustus, they granted the name Caesar to each heir presumptive to the throne.
Hadrian’s sickness and sufferings had now increased; blood often gushed from his nostrils; and in his distress he began to long for death. He had already prepared his own tomb beyond the Tiber—that huge mausoleum whose gloomy remains are today the Castel Sant’ Angelo, still reached by the Pons Aelius that Hadrian built. He was impressed by the example of the Stoic philosopher Euphrates, then in Rome, who, weary with illness and old age, asked Hadrian’s permission to kill himself and, receiving it, drank hemlock.31 The Emperor begged for poison or a sword, but no attendant would accommodate him. He bade a Danubian slave stab him, but the slave fled; he commanded his physician to poison him, but the physician committed suicide.32 He found a dagger and was about to kill himself when it was taken from him. He mourned that he, who had the power to put anyone to death, was not himself permitted to die. Dismissing his doctors, he withdrew to Baiae and deliberately fed on foods and drinks that would hasten his end. At last, exhausted and maddened with pain, he died (138), after sixty-two years of life and twenty-one of rule. He left behind him a little poem that expressed like Dante the sadness of recalling in grief the days of our happiness:
Animula vagula, blandula,
Hospes comesque corporis,
Quae nunc abibis in loca,
Pallidula, rigida, nudula,
Nee ut soles dabis iocos?
Soul of mine, pretty one, flitting one,
Guest and partner of my clay,
Whither wilt thou hie away—
Pallid one, rigid one, naked one,
Never to play again, never to play?33