For centuries wealthy Romans had built themselves rural retreats, whether on their estates or at seaside resorts like Baiae. Here they could relax from the noise and crowds of Rome. But Hadrian wanted much more than a place where he could get away from it all; he intended a center of government. His architects and he designed a campus of more than three hundred acres rather than a single edifice. Just as the palace of the Ptolemies in Alexandria was a city district, they had in mind a township, both pastoral and splendid, where public buildings, grand entry halls and audience chambers, temples, and baths would intermingle with gardens and terraces and canals.
Hadrian was careful not to be disrespectful of the institutions in the capital city, just visible on the horizon. Senators were bound to live within twenty miles of Rome so that they could easily attend meetings and take part in official duties, and Hadrian’s “villa” was well within the limit.
As early as 117 work began, and it was to continue on and off for most of the rest of the reign. A development on this scale called for a team of architects, a clerk and office of works, and a wide range of experts (some doubtless seconded from the army), including mosaic artists, engineers, purchasing agents, garden designers, and sculptors, and hundreds if not thousands of manual workers.
Despite his engrossing construction projects, the emperor tired of Rome. Perhaps he was missing Athens, for he soon left the city for a tour of Campania, the nearest thing to Greece that Italy could provide. This was a long, fertile region in southern Italy, lying between the Tyrrhenian Sea and Italy’s backbone, the Apennine mountain range. Strabo described it as “the most blest of plains, and round about it lie fruitful hills.” The inhabitants had a reputation for luxury living.
Campania was settled from the eighth century B.C. by Greek colonists. The three great temples in the Doric manner at Paestum in the south still remind the visitor of the splendors of Greek culture. In the north Puteoli (today’s Pozzuoli) began life as the city of Dicaearchia (from the Greek for “good rule”) and was now a thriving harbor for the import of Alexandrian grain and a leading financial center.
Hadrian’s departure may have reminded some of the celebrated occasion when his predecessor Tiberius left the city for Campania under the influence of astrologers—and never returned. When Tacitus described the incident in the Annals, he may have meant readers between the lines to think of their present emperor, also a devotee of the clairvoyant arts. Perhaps Hadrian was to abandon Rome for good. If that was what his contemporaries suspected, we must suppose that the opinionated emperor had already indicated his dislike of the capital.
On this occasion, Hadrian only had an excursion in mind, although he had no intention of spending the rest of his reign among the overblown splendors of the Palatine. His aim in Campania was to “aid all the towns of the region with benefactions and gifts, attaching all the leading men to him.” Inscriptions have been discovered at various towns that record the completion of capital projects he commissioned and financed. Campania was a prosperous region, and the emperor was engaging in public relations rather than responding to some crisis or special need.
His itinerary is not recorded, but we must assume that, as the empire’s commander in chief, he visited the naval base at Misenum and reviewed the fleet. Not far away was Neapolis itself (“new town”), or Naples. Thoroughly Hellenic in appearance and spirit, it was a center of learning and many upper-class young men went there to finish their education by cultivating rhetoric and the arts. Despite centuries of Roman rule, the inhabitants still spoke Greek. Strabo observed how their easy lifestyle attracted people from Rome who wanted
a restful vacation—I mean the kind of people who have made their careers in education, or others who, because of old age or illness, are looking for somewhere to relax. Some Romans, enjoying this way of life and noticing the large number of men who share the same cultural attitudes as themselves staying there, gladly fall in love with the place and make it their permanent home.
Every five years Neapolis staged games in the traditional Greek manner where athletics alternated with musical and poetry competitions. According to the Historia Augusta, Hadrian was honored with the title of demarch (that is, “ruler of the people”), Neapolis’ chief public official; although the date is not given it was probably now, in 119.
Nearby was the small town of Cumae. Here once lived its celebrated clairvoyant, the Sibyl. She let the god Apollo have sex with her if he granted her immortality; but like too many other attractive classical mortals, she forgot to ask for eternal youth as well. She shriveled up and dwindled over the centuries. According to Petronius, novelist and favorite of Nero, she lived in a cave where she sat in a jug moaning, “I want to die.” The cave has been found, and some kind of oracular service seems to have been provided in historical times; if the Sibyl, or more precisely a living priestess, was open to inquiries we can be sure that Hadrian called by.
The journey around Campania gave the emperor a foretaste of how he would like to manage affairs. He conceived a plan to visit every province in his wide dominions. Like the first princeps, he liked to see things for himself, to go to where the problem was, to assess the evidence in person, to make a decision on the spot and not at a distance of tens or hundreds of miles. This, he was sure, was how the empire should be run.
After more than two years in Italy, Hadrian had convincingly asserted his authority. The new regime was no longer new, men loyal to him had been placed at all the power points, and the Senate and people now accepted, if grudgingly, the way things were. He could leave the capital without worrying what was going on behind his back.
The emperor was ready to set off on his travels.
XVI
THE TRAVELER
The emperor had not done quite enough to convince Rome that he loved it. People could still remember the young man who read out Trajan’s letters to the Senate in a Spanish accent. A half foreigner, he had spent most of his adult career soldiering abroad on the empire’s barbarian frontiers. If he was to take to the road for long years in the provinces, as he meant to do, imperium would accompany him—and the city would risk losing its proud sense of itself as capital of the world.
Hadrian took two steps that would prove beyond doubt his devotion, his pietas, that most traditional of virtues. First he designed a temple dedicated to the goddess Venus, mother of Aeneas, who renewed ruined Troy in the fields of Latium, and Roma, the city’s divine spirit. This huge structure was to rest on a high man-made platform on the Velia, a low hill between the Forum and the Colosseum. It was to be large enough to rival the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitol, at the Forum’s other end, and no doubt that visual echo was what the emperor intended.
Second, the emperor felt that Rome deserved a birthday party. On April 21, 753 B.C., legend had it, Romulus founded his new city on the Palatine Hill, digging a trench along the route where its boundary, a strip of consecrated ground called the pomerium, would run. Hadrian announced an annual celebration on that day to mark the Natalis Urbis Romae; it was superimposed on an already existing festival, the Parilia, which honored a pastoral deity, Pales, and sought protection for shepherds and fecundity for their flocks. Interestingly, the birthday of the emperor’s favorite king, Numa Pompilius, also fell on April 21.
This was all clever marketing, but Hadrian was not simply intent on seeking to please. In another ceremony evoking Rome’s distant past, he reasserted his policy of containment rather than expansion. It was permissible to redraw the pomerium and take in a larger area, provided that the territory of the empire had also expanded. In Trajan’s case it had obviously done so, but he had not gotten around to ordering an extension before his death. Rather than complete unfinished business from the previous reign, Hadrian confirmed the pomerium exactly as it was. He conducted a lustratio, a ritual of purification, along the route of the boundary, and in this way made his peaceful intentions absolutely clear.
In 121, not long after the reformed Parilia, the emperor
left the city. According to Dio Cassius, he dispensed “with imperial trappings, for he never used these outside Rome.” It was as if he were shaking himself free from the stifling grandeur and constricting rituals of the capital and embracing the freedom of the road.
Hadrian had little idea of the date of his return. He probably sailed to Massilia (Marseille), southern Gaul’s main port, and made his way up the Rhône in the direction of Lugdunum (Lyon). Little information about his activities has come down to us. According to the Historia Augusta, he “went to the relief of all the communities with various acts of generosity.” Evidently, he was still pursuing the popularity of the open hand. Years later imperial coins hailed him as restitutor, or “restorer,” of the province; in one series, Gallia as a draped woman kneels before the princeps, who grasps her hand as if to raise her up.
Gaul was a sideshow, though, for Hadrian’s real destination was the German frontier, where he was to unveil the military policy through which he meant to implement his strategy of nonexpansion.
For inspiration, Hadrian looked back to the generals of the Republic, not the flashy ones like Scipio Africanus who won brilliant victories, but those who had had to labor against disadvantage. Two men of the second rather than the first rank attracted his particular approval.
Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus Numantinus was Africanus’ adopted grandson. During the sack of Carthage, Rome’s great rival, in 146 B.C., he turned to a friend and, with tears in his eyes, remarked: “A glorious moment, but I have a terrible fear that some day the same fate will be pronounced on my own country.” He went on to quote from Homer the famous lines:
There will come a day when sacred Troy shall perish
and Priam, and the people of Priam of the strong ash spear.
This fusion of pessimism about the benefits of war and magnanimity will have appealed to Hadrian, but what really struck home was Aemilianus’ generalship during a rebellion by Spanish tribes.
Fighting had been going on for a long time around the tribal settlement of Numantia, and the Roman troops were demoralized and ill disciplined. Aemilianus realized he would never win the war unless he brought his men under control. He arrived at the army camp with a small escort and immediately ordered the removal of everything that was not necessary to the war effort. The numerous civilians in the baggage train—tradesmen and prostitutes in the main—were sent away.
[The soldiers’] food was limited to plain boiled and roasted meats. They were forbidden to have beds, and [Aemilianus] was the first one to sleep on straw. He forbade them to ride on mules when on the march; “for what can you expect in a war,” said he, “from a man who is not able to walk?”
The harsh medicine worked; but Aemilianus knew that his legions were not yet ready for battle. So he instituted a severe and exhausting training regime. The troops were sent on route marches and were made to build, demolish, and rebuild camps. Tasks had to be completed within strict deadlines.
It was only when the legions were in good physical condition and morale had sharply improved that Aemilianus resumed his (ultimately successful) campaign against the Spaniards.
Hadrian’s second military hero was Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus, who flourished in the second century B.C. After holding the consulship, he was posted to North Africa to lead the campaign against the able and ambitious Numidian king, Jugurtha.
For him, too, training was the watchword. His predecessor in command had kept his forces in permanent camp, moving only when the bad smell or a lack of food supplies forced him. Men absented themselves from duty when the mood took them.
Just like Aemilianus, Metellus got rid of all the civilians, moved camp daily, undertook cross-country marches. At night he placed sentry posts at short intervals and did the rounds himself. When on the march, he moved up and down the column to check that no one left the ranks, that the men kept close to their standards and carried their own food and weapons. In this way, by inflicting exercise rather than punishment, Metellus soon restored discipline and morale.
The dowager empress’s serious mind and quiet disposition owed much to her appreciation of the philosophy of Epicurus. His thinking derived from an atomic idea of nature (originally promoted by the fifth-century B.C. scientific theorist Democritus). The fundamental constituents of everything, he asserted, were indivisible little bits of matter, or atoms, and everything that happened was the consequence of these atoms colliding with one another. Unlike Hadrian’s admired Epictetus, who saw the universe as the expression of a divine will, Epicurus held that it was no more than a sequence of random events.
On what foundation, then, was it possible to rest a system of ethics? The answer was that all good and bad originate in sensations of pleasure and pain. It was from these sensations that we construct a moral code. Epicurus also taught that death was the end of body and soul; it should not be feared, for there were no posthumous rewards and punishments. In later centuries Christian propagandists inaccurately labeled Epicurus as a hedonist (hence our terms epicure and epicurean). In fact, he sought no more than a tranquil life without pain, and cultivated simplicity.
Epicurus attracted a small band of devoted followers whom he taught in his house and garden just outside Athens. Above the garden gate a sign read: “Stranger, you will do well to linger here; here our highest good is pleasure.”
On his deathbed he informed a friend, with a whiff of self-congratulatory sangfroid:
A painful inability to urinate has attacked me, and also dysentery, so violent that nothing can be added to the violence of my sufferings. But the cheerfulness of my mind, arising from the recollection of all my philosophical contemplations, counterbalances all these afflictions.
Epicurus left the house and garden to a nominated successor and they were handed on in turn from one philosopher to another, down to Hadrian’s day. They were both a shrine and a continuing “school,” known as the Succession of Epicurus. Its doctrines survived and thrived.
Plotina learned of a problem facing the Epicureans at Athens. The Successor at the time was a man called Popillius Theotimus. Popillius is a Latin name and indicates that he held Roman citizenship, and in this fact lay the difficulty. The provincial authorities insisted that the head of the Succession of Epicurus be a Roman citizen. Theotimus wanted the rule to be relaxed. Evidently he had someone in mind to take over from him who was ineligible.
He was fortunate to be well connected. He asked Plotina to intervene and she was happy to do so. She wrote a letter to her adopted son, which reached him during his European tour:
You know very well, sir, [the interest I] have in the sect of Epicurus. His school needs your help. [Since, as of now], a successor must be taken from those who are Roman citizens, the choice is narrowly limited. [I ask,] therefore, in the name of Popillius Theotimus, who is currently Successor at Athens, that it be permitted by you to him … to be entitled to appoint as successor to himself one of foreign nationality, if the distinction of the person should make it advisable.
Hadrian complied without demur and sent Theotimus the necessary permissions. The dowager empress was delighted and wrote to “all the Friends”:
We have what we were so eager to obtain … We owe … a debt of gratitude to him who is in truth the benefactor and overseer of all culture and therefore a most reverence-worthy emperor, very dear to me in all respects as both an outstanding guardian and loyal son.
But she added a note of warning, knowing how personal feelings could warp judgment in tightly knit communities. It was important to choose as a successor “the best of all fellow-sectarians and to attribute more importance to his view of the overall interest than to his private congeniality with certain members.”
Surely, Plotina had at the back of her mind another succession. She had had recent experience of an awkward handover of authority, in which she was widely supposed to have played a leading role. Hadrian had not been the most congenial personality at Trajan’s court, but in her calm way the empress h
ad acted firmly to ensure that the best man, in her opinion, followed her husband to the purple. The same principle, she was certain, should be applied in the garden of Epicurus.
When the emperor arrived at the German front he soon showed what he had learned about the art of command, both from his own experience and from a study of history. His strategy of defensive imperialism did not make him unwarlike or negate his many years in the army: quite the reverse, he was a soldier’s soldier. Also, he needed to pacify his critics by demonstrating his prowess as a general.
Hadrian realized that the army had been growing slack thanks to the “inattention of previous supreme commanders,” as the Historia Augusta has it: an interesting phrase, for, despite Hadrian’s appreciation of Trajan’s generalship, it implies that his adoptive father had been careless about the day-to-day routines of life in the camp and in the field.
Hadrian introduced the highest standards of discipline and kept the soldiers on continual exercises, as if war were imminent. In order to ensure consistency, he followed the examples of Augustus (once again) and Trajan by publishing a manual of military regulations. His approach to training was innovatory; he made his soldiers practice the fighting techniques of potential or actual opponents—Parthians, Armenians, Sarmatians, and Celts—and, according to Arrian, devised some of his own “with a view to beauty, speed, the inspiring of terror, and practical use.” He led by example, sharing the life of the rank and file and cheerfully eating “such camp fare as bacon, cheese, and vinegar.” It may be while on campaign that he developed a liking for tetrafarmakon, a pie made from pheasant, sow’s udder, and ham. The Historia Augusta writes: “He generally wore the commonest clothing—refusing gold ornamentation on his sword belt, fastening his cloak with an unjeweled clasp, and only reluctantly allowing himself an ivory hilt to his sword.”
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