Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire

by Baker, Simon

  Trajan, the first ‘Spanish’ emperor, was a classic martial hero. As a result, like Julius Caesar, Augustus and all the Roman emperors before him, he was close-shaved, and his hair, combed forward, was a neatly cropped cap. Hadrian’s hair, by contrast, was soft and wavy – a more casual style than that of his predecessors. But it was his facial hair that suggested a clean break with the past regime. Some might have thought it suggested a lack of discipline, the mark of a poor soldier, but that was not the case. In Dacia he had excelled as a commander and had twice been decorated with the highest military honours. He was at ease in conversation and mixing with fellow soldiers of all ranks. His relaxed, open manner was a quality he would carry into his rule, though it was said that this disguised ‘a harsh, jealous, libidinous temperament’.4 Even as emperor he continued to enjoy a military diet of cheese and bacon, he disliked soft mattresses and had an impressive ability to drink copious amounts of alcohol, a talent he had honed on campaign in Trajan’s inner circle.

  Still, the beard would come to say something different about this man’s complex character and the new direction in which he would take the Roman empire. It hinted not at Roman war and conquest, but the culture, the learning and the reflective, intellectual life of the ancient Greeks. Hadrian’s aristocratic education paved the way for the passions of his life. He wrote poetry, and he was proud of his skill in playing the lyre and the flute, but above all he enjoyed geometry and sculpture. As a young man, Hadrian had studied in Athens and earned the nickname ‘Little Greek’. Like Nero, however, he would take his Hellenistic interests way beyond the standard considered acceptable for an educated Roman aristocrat, let alone a future emperor.

  His drive to excel and his inquisitive mind made him, for example, an accomplished, experimenting architect. The building of a temple to Venus would be the very first mark he would make on the city, the first imprint of his reign. He drew up the plans himself. When Apollodorus, the most famous architect of the day, criticized the proportions of the columns on the drafts that, in deference, the emperor had sent to him for approval, the quick-tempered, unforgiving Hadrian promptly had him killed. The criticism did not deter him; rather, it drove him on. The most innovative building that he sponsored was the Pantheon in Rome, an ambitious rebuilding of the structure first erected by Agrippa in the reign of the emperor Augustus. The idea of a temple dedicated not just to one god but to all the gods of the Roman empire was a thoroughly Roman piece of one-upmanship. That same spirit was reflected in the building’s spectacular architecture too, made possible by the Roman invention of concrete. This liberated Hadrian, allowing him to break new ground and experiment with new, non-classical forms. In overseeing the creation of the temple’s dome – even greater than that of St Peter’s in the Vatican – he outstripped the founding father of the Roman empire. Even today the Pantheon is the most complete of the buildings of ancient Rome to survive. As we shall see, the empire at large was also to benefit from Hadrian’s inventive love of architecture.

  In his personal life Hadrian lived too as if in imitation of the ancient Greeks. Sexual norms in the ancient world were not the same as our own. For example, there was a strong Greek tradition that a relationship between an older man and a boy on the threshold of manhood was acceptable (the peak of attractiveness was considered to be the moment when the down appeared on a young man’s cheek). By contrast, a homosexual relationship between men of equal age and status was not deemed acceptable. The philhellenic Hadrian took the Greek role of the older lover to heart. During his years in Trajan’s inner circle, Hadrian was known to be passionately fond of the young men who made up the junior staff in the imperial entourage. Later, in the seventh year of his own rule, Hadrian was travelling with his wife Sabina in Turkey when he met the young, good-looking Antinous. The emperor was smitten. Antinous joined his entourage and for the next seven years, much to the embarrassment of many Romans, never left his lover’s side. (The sex was not the problem; it was rather the fact that the emperor seemed so completely devoted to the young man.) Although thirty years his junior, Antinous shared Hadrian’s Hellenic loves; they debated in the Museum of Alexandria, and while there together, they visited the tombs of Alexander the Great and Pompey the Great.

  In fact, the world over which Hadrian was supreme ruler was largely Greek. The culture of the Romans had grown partly out of ancient Greek culture, partly as a reflection of Greek culture and partly in opposition to Greek culture. In ancient literature there could have been no Aeneid by Virgil without the epic Odyssey and Iliad by Homer. Without the Stoic school of philosophy, the philosophical works of Cicero and Seneca would have lacked their inspiration. Without Epicurus (Hadrian’s favourite philosopher) there would have been no Lucretius. Indeed, half the Roman world (the eastern half) spoke Greek, not Latin, as their first language. Now a different kind of man was in charge of this Greek-Roman empire. He was a successful commander, a soldier’s soldier and highly popular with the army. He had legitimacy, an undisputed claim to the throne, and he took his Hellenistic leanings seriously. Indeed he had an obsessive desire to be the best. Under this man’s rule the old idea that war and conquest alone shaped the Roman world was unceremoniously dumped.

  The start of the change was apparent at the very beginning of his reign. Hadrian abandoned Trajan’s eastern campaigns. Their failure had discredited the policy of Roman expansion, and the change in direction fitted harmoniously with the mood of the Senate. The priority now was not conquest, but staying within the existing frontiers and reinforcing them. In 121 Hadrian set out from Italy and went to the Rhine frontier. Its strategic importance was reflected in the large number of legions manning it – eight in Germany alone. After arriving on this northern border, Hadrian spent the rest of the year ensuring that the Roman forts, ramparts and watchtowers were strengthened, and that the legions on this and the Danube frontier were drilled to a high standard of military discipline. A determination for the same strategy to be deployed in the empire’s most northerly frontier next took Hadrian to Britain in 122. While there it is possible that he initiated the construction of the impressive Pons Aelius, the Roman bridge named after him, which straddled the broad estuary at Newcastle. On the northern side of the river he stood at the site of the future World Heritage landmark, the great symbol of Roman containment that bears his name today.

  FRONTIERS

  The sheer scale and ambition of Hadrian’s vision still staggers. Running 118 kilometres (70 miles) across country, from the North Sea to the Irish Sea, the frontier wall he authorized took ten years to build. Its construction was supervised by the new governor of Roman Britain, Aulus Platorius Nepos. Although just under two-thirds of the wall was made of stone, the last (easternmost) third was originally made of turf and timber. The proportions were as bold as its length. The stone section was 3 metres (10 feet) thick and 4.2 metres (14 feet) high; the turf section matched the stone part for height, but was 6 metres (20 feet) thick. About twenty paces to the north of the wall, and running parallel with it, was a V-shaped ditch 8 metres (26 feet) wide and 3 metres (10 feet) deep. On top of the wall itself was a walkway defended by a crenellated parapet. A Roman soldier walking it would have come across a towered, fortified gateway every Roman mile (approximately 1.5 kilometres), and in between, at every third of that mile (0.5 kilometres) an observation turret. Servicing the wall, as well as forming part of it, were sixteen forts.

  One historical summary of Hadrian’s rule says simply that the wall divided ‘the Romans and the Barbarians’.5 Touring the wall today, it’s tempting to see it as a powerful, entirely defensive structure against an amorphous barbaric enemy. That, however, was not Hadrian’s intention, as recent historians have emphasized. A comparison with another Roman feat of engineering is revealing. Hadrian’s predecessor Trajan had dammed the river Danube and then built a spectacular bridge across its broad expanse. This became his neat little stepping stone into Dacia. (In the east he even intended to build – but never did – a canal between th
e Tigris and the Euphrates of Mesopotamia in order to ferry his fleet between the rivers.) Like Julius Caesar’s bridge across the Rhine, Trajan’s structure in Dacia imposed Roman will on the landscape to make it serve the empire. In the methodical, stately language of architecture and engineering, it loudly proclaimed Roman power.

  Hadrian’s Wall should perhaps be seen more accurately as his attempt to bellow a similar message of his and Rome’s power.6 Other evidence too suggests that it is misleading to regard the wall as a purely defensive structure. It could, for example, be deployed aggressively; as well as being a sophisticated and powerful bulwark, the wall could also be a starting point for northward attacks and forays. The wall was not just a barrier but a road too, an important line of communication connecting it with a wider network of roads and stopping-off points that scored the breadth of the Roman empire. The administration and domination of the Roman world depended on such lines of communication. As further evidence countering the impression of Hadrian’s Wall as a final frontier, there existed under Hadrian many examples of working Roman forts further north of the wall. At the time of the wall’s construction, the Roman army was on relatively peaceful terms with the native Britons on either side of it. The peoples to the north and south were not easily distinguished as ‘barbarian’ or ‘Roman’; as in many frontier regions today, they were much more culturally mixed than those terms suggest. The idea of defence, then, was only one aspect of a project that was in fact proud, versatile and dynamic.

  The wall increased Roman power in one way above all. It gave the garrisons stationed on it the power of observation. From this stemmed the power of controlling who entered or left the commonwealth of the Roman world, the ability to monitor who traded in it, spoke its language and wore its dress, and the means of regulating who paid its taxes and how that tax was spent. In short it emphasized Roman mastery of their world. Only later, in a less prosperous, more unstable time in the future, would the wall shift in significance, as walls have done throughout history. Only then would it become a symbol of containment, a hermetic seal, the vestigial outpost of a once-vibrant entity.

  Although the wall is, then, symbolic of the new direction in which Hadrian would take the empire, this was not a simple about-turn. It was erected not in the spirit of vulnerability or retraction, but quite the opposite.

  THE MECHANICS OF EMPIRE

  What kind of prospering worldwide empire, then, did Hadrian’s Wall enclose at its northernmost point? A thumbnail sketch of the empire at peace might begin with the soldiers inhabiting the barracks close to the wall. The Latin accents and second languages that would have been heard paint a picture of extraordinary fluidity. The soldiers came not only from Britain, but from Belgium, Spain, Gaul and Dacia. Stationed at Arbeia (the fort at present-day South Shields) there was even a naval auxiliary unit from Mesopotamia.7 The beautifully sculpted tombstone of Regina, the British wife of a man called Barates, tells an equally fascinating story. It shows how this man, possibly a soldier or camp follower, came all the way from Palmyra in Syria, fell in love with his female slave from Hertfordshire, freed her and settled down to married life in Britain. His valedictory inscription to his dead wife is written in Aramaic, his native tongue. The name of one Arterius Nepos is similarly revealing. It crops up in records in both Armenia and Egypt, before finding its way to northern Britain.

  The theme of fluidity is important. The Roman armies on the frontiers were not fixed garrisons. Locally, and from province to province, the legions and the auxiliary units were recruited and deployed with great flexibility; they were constantly on the move. The visibility and presence that this mobility gave them was the key factor in the Roman army successfully controlling an area far larger than it was possible to garrison.

  At one fort near the wall, Vindolanda, an unprecedented discovery was made in the 1970s and 1980s – a haul of several hundred wooden writing tablets all found at the one site. Many record administrative matters, such as financial accounts and requests for leave. Others make for more entertaining reading. For example, there is an affectionate invitation to a birthday party from one garrison commander’s wife to another, and a soldier’s receipt of fresh supplies of socks, sandals and underwear to keep out the winter chills. These letters would have reached the forts from the wider empire through the imperial postal service. Coursing along a network of roads some 90,000 kilometres (56,000 miles) long and connecting Carlisle to Aswan, the letters reached Hadrian’s Wall courtesy of the cursus publicus (the postal service for official Roman business). Replies were dispersed in exactly the same way. The postmen who collected and delivered these letters stayed at inns en route, and the roads they travelled on were designed for easy drainage and marked by milestones.

  The correspondence filtering into the channels of the imperial post also reveal how Hadrian’s empire was run. It is extraordinary to think that any one of the empire’s 70 million Roman citizens could in theory appeal to the emperor for help. He was the final arbiter. It’s no less surprising that citizens could expect a response. As we shall see, emperors such as Hadrian liked to cultivate an ideology of accessibility. The reality of course was very different. The sheer numbers of petitions and requests for imperial favour from this or that community, for adjudication in a matter of law for this or that individual is salutary. Exact figures are not known, but in this period of Rome’s golden age the governor of Egypt is said by one source to have fielded an extraordinary 1208 petitions in a single day. One can only imagine how many the emperor Hadrian in Rome received.

  Clearly, in order to process all the petitions, the emperor and his provincial governors relied on a huge bureaucracy of administrative advisers with wide, albeit circumscribed, areas of responsibility. The preserved correspondence between the Roman governor of Bithynia-Pontus, Pliny the Younger, and Trajan reflect the vitality of that relationship and where those limits of accountability lay. Pliny’s letters to Trajan and others are works of world literature. There was, however, no space for creative flourishes in the bulk of functional, administrative correspondence. In one letter Pliny complains that one of the chores of being a public servant was having to write a vast amount of ‘highly illiterate letters’.8

  Although one might imagine the Roman emperor, governor or commander perfunctorily signing off the replies to the mass of mundane requests that either they or their subordinates had dealt with, one thing is certain. The replies and the resolution of the problems presented – be it a dispute over land, a question of divorce or the matter of citizenship – would transform the lives of the petitioners. The successful running of the empire and the happiness of its citizens thus depended on delegation on a massive scale.

  How could the Roman emperor, the Roman governor or the Roman commander be sure that decent, deserving people were appointed to posts in the imperial administration and were able to discharge their duties effectively? As the wooden tablets found at Vindolanda reveal, the imperial post also delivered the all-important letters of recommendation. Among them one can read the advocacy by one friend to another of the virtues and qualities of yet another friend. Such references were vital in selecting people to play a part in the pyramids of bureaucratic administration. In short, what your friends said about you established your reputation and trustworthiness. The logic of this system was simple and effective. The more people wanted to protect their reputation, the less likely they were to recommend a bad egg and thus jeopardize their own standing in the future.

  In the hands of administrators appointed by this highly personal Roman system of hiring, most issues were dealt with locally. Only when a matter became a crisis did it come to the attention and decision of the emperor. Beyond this basic prescription for government, Hadrian had also found another way of bringing his rule closer to the citizens of his empire. Under his reign, the presence and visibility of the emperor were stronger than under his predecessors for one simple reason: he liked to travel.

  Hadrian spent no less than half of his twenty-on
e-year rule abroad. Between 121 and 125 his travels took him from his wall in northern Britain to southern Spain, North Africa, Syria, the Black Sea and Asia Minor. Later, the period 128–32 saw him in Greece, Judaea and Egypt. Whether in York, Seville, Carthage, Luxor, Palmyra, Trabzon or Ephesus, Hadrian was always within the bounds of one political state, where Greek and Latin were the commonly spoken languages and over which he was the supreme ruler. He travelled always with his wife Sabina, and their imperial cavalcade of friends, baggage-carriers, guards, slaves and secretaries stayed in the palace of the local governor or of a prominent figure from the local élite. Sometimes, in a carefully planned and executed itinerary, the imperial community set up a camp of royal tents en route.

  Accordingly, and in contrast to Nero who left Italy only once (for Greece), Hadrian was seen by and interacted with more of his subjects than most Roman emperors. This contributed to his popularity and the image of an accessible, approachable emperor. One anecdote reveals how that visibility mattered. An old woman was said to have spotted the emperor’s entourage passing along a road. Sidling up, she tried to detain Hadrian and put a question to him. The wheels of the imperial train, however, did not brake and the woman was left mouthing her words into thin air. Not one to be cowed, she caught up with Hadrian and told him that if he did not have time to stop and hear her request, he did not have time to be emperor at all. Hadrian duly stopped and listened. His standing and popularity, like that of all the emperors at the high point of empire, depended on public opinion. But being highly ‘visible’ did not in everyone’s eyes make a ‘good emperor’. To be away from Rome for so long was also the neglectful characteristic of ‘bad emperors’.