Somewhere in Egypt—perhaps the border town of Pelusium or Heliopolis, at the southern head of the Nile delta—Hadrian presided over the trial, or at least some kind of official inquiry or hearing, of some hotheaded Alexandrian Greeks, led by a spokesman called Paul. A Jewish delegation was also present. From the reported proceedings it is possible to suppose the following savage sequence of events. After the failure of the Jewish revolt, many Jews were imprisoned and the triumphant Greeks put on a satirical stage show lampooning the rebel “king,” Lukuas. Some of them sang songs criticizing the emperor for deciding to resettle Jewish survivors of the revolt in an area of the city from which they could easily launch new attacks on the native population.
The irritated governor (Rammius’ predecessor) ordered the Greeks to produce their “opera-bouffe monarch.” Unfortunately this “bringing forth” also brought many Greek rioters onto the streets. A Jewish witness asserted an unprovoked attack on a defeated community. “They dragged us out of prison and wounded us.” Charges and countercharges followed. The Jews said of the Greeks: “Sire, they lie.”
Hadrian was inclined to agree. He told the Greeks that the prefect was right to ban the carrying of weapons and that he disapproved of the satire on Lukuas. He advised the Jews to restrict their hatred to their actual persecutors and not to loathe all Alexandrian Greeks indiscriminately. This evenhanded treatment came as a pleasant surprise to the defeated insurgents.
At about the same time Hadrian dismissed the governor of Judaea. This was Trajan’s mysterious and ferocious favorite, Lusius Quietus, who was also removed from command of his Moorish cavalry. According to the Historia Augusta, “he had fallen under suspicion of having designs on the throne,” but this was an unlikely ambition for a tribal chieftain now an old man. More probably, he was feared as a potential “kingmaker” for a serious rival to Hadrian.
Lusius had been sent to Judaea to help suppress the Jewish revolt, for the Jewish community there had recovered, at least partially, from the destruction wrought by the Romans almost fifty years previously. He came to the task fresh from butchering the Jews in Mesopotamia, and his removal delighted the diaspora.
Hadrian was rewarded. In some anti-Roman oracular verses, originating among the Jews of Alexandria and widely read in the eastern Mediterranean, an emperor received a rare compliment.
And after him shall rule
Another man, with silver helmet decked;
And unto him shall be the name of a sea;
And he shall be a man the best of all
And in all things discreet.
The name of the relevant sea is the Adriatic, so the reference is to Hadrian. Here at last, from the point of view of battered Jewry, the catastrophe of the revolt had given way, against every expectation, to a well-wishing ruler.
In early October the emperor left Antioch and proceeded urgently northward, with the troubled Danube provinces as his eventual destination. Meanwhile, Lusius Quietus’ horsemen returned discontented to Mauretania, where they stirred up an anti-Roman revolt. The emperor immediately dispatched Turbo, fresh from his Egyptian success, to deal with the disturbance.
The worst possible news arrived. Quadratus Bassus was dead. We do not know if he fell in battle or was felled by natural causes but the depth of the loss was revealed by the arrangements for the long journey from Dacia to the dead man’s home city, Pergamum. They matched what a prince of the blood might expect, with a military escort for the cortege and civic welcomes whenever it arrived at a town of any size and importance. The tomb was paid for at the public expense. In effect, Bassus received the Roman equivalent of a modern state funeral.
Fortunately, Quintus Pompeius Falco, a friend of Hadrian’s, had been governor for at least two years of the huge Danubian province of Lower Moesia, originally a narrow strip south of the Danube and now also encompassing the kingdom of the Roxolani, Dacia’s neighbor on the river’s northern side. He was able to hold the line temporarily.
The emperor, chased by continuing congratulations, made his way to Thrace or perhaps Lower Moesia itself, and discussed with Falco what was to be done. He decided to appoint the reliable Gaius Avidius Nigrinus, who had been imperial legate in Achaea during Hadrian’s stay in Athens in 112; the two men must have met then and had presumably got on well together.
Once again he came to the conclusion that it was pointless trying to hold on to territory that Rome could defend only at a vast expenditure of treasure and lives. So he instructed Falco and his legions to withdraw from the lands of the Roxolani in eastern Dacia (leaving only a narrow cordon sanitaire north of the river, named Lower Pannonia). The superstructure of Apollodorus’ great bridge across the Danube was dismantled—probably only a temporary measure to foil a possible enemy attack. Under no circumstances could Hadrian’s now controversial reputation survive a barbarian incursion into well-established provinces. The demolition may have been a wise precaution, but it was also an unhappy metaphor for a perceived failure of nerve.
Hadrian reached an agreement with the king of the Roxolani, increasing Rome’s ongoing subsidy (the price Trajan had been willing to pay for acquiescence in annexation), granting him Roman citizenship and, it is to be assumed, “most favored nation” status. He took the name Publius Aelius Rasparaganus, the “Aelius” showing respect for his patron. He may also have made Hadrian a valuable and soon to be much-loved gift. It was about now that the emperor’s favorite horse, Borysthenes, was a colt. He was named after the river Borysthenes (today’s Dnieper), which flowed through the land of the Alani, a tribe related to the Roxolani and their near neighbor. This could be the moment when horse and rider met for the first time.
As an official Friend of the Roman People, the king would rule a buffer state that kept the empire safe from unruly barbarians in the northern hinterland beyond the Roxolani—at a cost much lower than that of garrisoning a reluctant province.
A sensible-enough deal, one might think. But much of the Roman elite never forgave Hadrian for what they saw as pusillanimous behavior. Even half a century later, the rhetorician and friend of emperors Marcus Cornelius Fronto felt strongly enough about the issue to say acidly of Hadrian that he was “energetic enough in mobilizing his friends and eloquently addressing his army.” He trained his legions “with amusing games in the camp rather than with swords and shields: [he was] a general the like of whom the army never afterward saw.”
These sneers about a competent soldier were wide of the mark. Although designed to stress by contrast the supposed talents of a later emperor, they must have been credible to be worth making, and they illustrate the scorn that Hadrian’s new strategy aroused.
It was against this gloomy backcloth that a strange and bloodstained sequence of events unfolded during 118. Attianus, the Praetorian Guard prefect, now back in Rome with the Augustas, laid before the Senate the details of a plot against the emperor and persuaded it to vote for the executions of the conspirators. These were four in number and of high seniority, for each of them was a former consul and had been close to Trajan.
Two of them, Celsus and Palma, were already in Hadrian’s bad books: as already noted, they had fallen from grace in a court intrigue toward the end of the previous reign. Presumably they were living in retirement in Italy. Then there was the dismissed Lusius Quietus, traveling from his last posting in Judaea to an unknown destination—perhaps his homeland of Mauretania.
The fourth guilty man was the new governor of Dacia. Gaius Avidius Nigrinus was a senior politician and general, and a respected member of the Roman social scene. He appears in a very favorable light in Pliny’s letters, as an intelligent public official dedicated to good governance. Once, when tribune of the people, he read out to the Senate
a well-phrased statement of great importance. In this he complained that legal counsel sold their services, faked lawsuits for money, settled them by collusion, and made a boast of the large regular incomes to be made by robbery of their fellow citizens.
He was that us
eful thing in politics, “a safe pair of hands,” and Trajan had sent him to Greece on a delicate mission to resolve a three-hundred-year-old boundary dispute between Delphi and her neighbors.
Interestingly, Nigrinus had a distant family connection with the onetime Stoic opposition, for his uncle had been a friend of the Republican martyr Thrasea Paetus, one of Nero’s most celebrated victims. Perhaps his hostility to Hadrian owed something to the political idealism that Nerva and Trajan’s commitment to the rule of law and senatorial cooperation had largely made redundant.
But Nigrinus’ motives may not have been so pure. His performance as governor of Dacia seems not to have satisfied the emperor, uncomfortably on the spot or at least close at hand. Hadrian brought his brief tenure to an end and replaced him with Turbo, who had taken little time in suppressing the Berber disturbances in Mauretania. He was given temporary command of both Dacia and Pannonia, with the obvious remit of reorganizing the frontier defenses after the withdrawals. This was a daring appointment, for Turbo was only an eques, and so strictly speaking ineligible for a post reserved for senators. But for Hadrian merit outweighed class.
So each member of the offending quartet had grounds for resentment; Palma’s and Celsus’ careers had been abruptly terminated in the recent past, and Nigrinus and Lusius Quietus had just lost their jobs. But if they all had motives for disaffection, it is not altogether certain that they acted on them. Some observers believed that they were set up. Dio Cassius, writing only a century later, remarked that they were victimized “in reality because they had great influence and enjoyed wealth and fame.”
What was the actual offense of which they were accused? Two versions of the story have come down to us. According to the Historia Augusta, Nigrinus and the others planned an attempt on the emperor’s life while he was conducting a sacrifice; but Dio claims that the occasion was a hunt. The contradiction is only an apparent one, for (as we have seen on page 23) hunts were preceded and followed by sacrifices to the gods—especially to Diana, goddess of the chase, and if the catch was good, to the goddess of victory. Hadrian was passionate about the sport, so we can be sure that he often went hunting with his amici as a relaxation from affairs of state and the crisis threatening the empire.
Two interlinked problems arise. First, the only alleged conspirator traveling with the emperor at the time was Nigrinus; the others were many miles away. Second, three of them were executed at their country houses in Italy—Palma at Tarracina (now Terracina), an ancient Latin town some thirty-odd miles southeast of Rome, Celsus at Baiae (today’s Baia), a fashionable seaside resort for Rome’s superrich in the bay of Naples, and Nigrinus at Faventia (modern Faenza) in the Po Valley in northern Italy, presumably his hometown. Lusius was put to death while on the move somewhere in the eastern provinces or northern Africa.
If we assume that there really was a plot to kill Hadrian, how can these data be reconciled with it? Why was Nigrinus not arrested at once in the wake of a failed attack, and why was he allowed to go home? Perhaps the attackers were hired men (legionaries or locals) and it was not immediately obvious who their employer was. But not only would it be hard to recruit people for such a risky mission and control them, but it would be unusual for a noble Roman, especially a distinguished public servant with a link to the brave Stoic opponents of the imperial system, to farm out the cutting off of a tyrant to anonymous others.
Here is a feasible scenario. A hunt was chosen for the attempt, for on no other occasion were armed men routinely allowed in an emperor’s presence, apart from his guards. Nigrinus and some others of like mind in the party decided to strike down Hadrian with their hunting weapons at the ceremonies either at the beginning or the end of a hunt in Thrace or Moesia. Something held them back from making the attack—Nigrinus could have been ill or, most likely, Hadrian turned out to be too well guarded and the intended assassins too few in number for them to have a realistic chance of survival, even if they managed to destroy their victim. So nothing happened, and nothing was noticed.
The scheme came to light only a little later, when the dismissed Nigrinus had returned to Italy and private life. One or more plotters may have revealed it for irrecoverable reasons, or perhaps a servant in the know did so in the expectation of reward. More probably, their correspondence was intercepted, for, if they were to agree on their plans, the principals must have communicated with one another during the weeks following Hadrian’s accession.
Such interception would have been no accident, for Trajan had accessed the public courier or postal service to keep himself informed about “state business”; Hadrian himself quietly put in place Rome’s first organized secret service (before his time, emperors had indeed made use of informers and spies but in an ad hoc manner). To create a new bureau would have been politically controversial, so he added a confidential codicil to the job descriptions of the already-existing frumentarii. These were commissary agents in charge of organizing army supplies and were well placed to gather information about the activities of Roman officials in the provinces. Whether the new service was already in place so early in the reign is uncertain, but its establishment demonstrates Hadrian’s abiding interest in uncovering the unspoken concerns of the senatorial elite. The exposure of the Nigrinus conspiracy thanks to secret surveillance could have been what prompted him to make use of the frumentarii.
A variant explanation for what happened may be found in the career of a German-born centurion, Marcus Calventius Viator. His name appears on two altars, one found in Dacia and the other in Gerasa (today’s Jerash City in Jordan). In the first he appears as the training officer of Nigrinus’ cavalry bodyguard. The second, ten years on, reveals a remarkable promotion; he is now in charge of the cavalry wing of Hadrian’s own imperial bodyguard, the Germanic Batavi whom he inherited from Trajan. Someone close to a traitor could not usually count on a glittering future. Did the emperor take Calventius under his wing as a reward for informing on his commanding officer? It is a tempting speculation.
By a curious chance, the Arabian altar is dedicated to the goddess Diana. It was doubtless in her honor that a hunting party offered up its sacrifice on that dangerous distant day when an emperor was the quarry.
The executions were a political disaster. The fact that senators had been persuaded to vote for them was irrelevant. In their eyes, Hadrian had broken the spirit if not the letter of his guarantee of their personal security, foreshadowing a return to the days of Domitian. Although far away by the Danube, Hadrian immediately recognized the damage that had been done. Disaffection in the ruling class could bring about a return of the Stoic opposition and undo the political settlement, based on consent, that Nerva and Trajan had established.
At about this time the historian Tacitus was finishing the composition of his Annals, and a late passage expresses a melancholy exhaustion with his history of imperial victims during the time of the early emperors; he may also have been covertly alluding to the bloodstained opening of Hadrian’s reign. “This slavish passivity, this torrent of wasted bloodshed far from active service, wearies, depresses, and paralyzes the mind.”
Hadrian tried to extricate himself from blame. It was all Attianus’ fault and what had been done had been done against his own will. Was the emperor protesting too much—or telling the plain truth? It is hard to tell. In a sense, whether or not the quartet did intend the emperor’s death is immaterial. They were Hadrian’s enemies and potentially dangerous. Perhaps what we have here is a prototype of the murder of Thomas Becket; rather as Henry II’s knights made more than was meant of the king’s exasperation with his archbishop, so the guard prefect may have guessed at a new emperor’s fears, and acted. It is conceivable that he did so without informing his employer, in order to give him the deniability he would need when explaining himself to the Senate.
In any event, there was little Hadrian could do at the moment to retrieve the situation, but the sooner he could calm the provinces and return to Rome, the better.
XV
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THE ROAD TO ROME
Hadrian stood on the bank of the Danube and reviewed his troops. To show how perfectly his Batavians, the imperial horse guard, were trained, he ordered them to swim across the river in full armor. This was something of a party trick, for they had a long tradition of crossing wide expanses of water en masse.
The Batavians had a deserved reputation for ferocity; Tacitus remarked of them: “They are made exclusively for war, like arms and weapons.” There were about one thousand of them in the guard and, as intended, they made a daunting impression on the barbarian tribes to the north.
A tombstone found near the Danube celebrates in well-turned Latin verse the achievements of one of these guardsmen, a certain Soranus.
I was once the most famous of men on the Pannonian shore … the one who could swim the wide waters of the deep Danube, with Hadrian as my judge, in full battle gear.
This was not the man’s only skill. He was also an archer who could shoot one arrow in the air and hit it with another, splitting it in two—a feat of which Robin Hood would have been proud.
No Roman or barbarian could ever defeat me …
It remains to be seen whether anyone else will beat my record.
Who wrote these lines is unknown, but Hadrian was a frequent poet who liked to mark out his life in Greek or Latin meter. It is probable he was the admiring author.
Whatever his critics were saying, safe in their town houses in the capital or relaxing in their country villas, Hadrian understood and liked soldiers and enjoyed military life.
By June 118 the Danube frontier had been redrawn and hostile tribes—for example, the Iazyges on the Hungarian plain—pacified. Hadrian acquired the services of a Iazygian prisoner-of-war, a certain Mastor, who was a skilled huntsman “because of his strength and daring.” With his steed, Borysthenes, and his groom both having been recruited from the wild regions north of the Danube, the emperor was equipped to enjoy the dangerous thrills of the chase as never before. His relationship with Mastor became close, and he kept him in his service for the rest of his life.
Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome Page 22
