Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

by Anthony Everitt

  Before the hunt got under way Polemon was shocked to see the man with his companions, and all of them armed. They surrounded Hadrian, but this “was in no way to show honor to the emperor or because he was well disposed toward him. No, he was looking to do him harm and carrying out his evil designs, which allowed him no rest.”

  Meanwhile the supposed victim was getting ready to set off, aware of nothing un toward. This prevented Polemon and his friends from entering into conversation with him. So, instead, they chatted among themselves about Hadrian—“what an uneasy position he was in, how far removed from the pleasant life people used to say he enjoyed.” They also mentioned the unnamed delinquent, who had crept up on the group and was eavesdropping. “You must have been talking about me,” he said. Polemon admitted the charge, and counterattacked.

  “We did mention you,” I said, “and expressed amazement at your manner. Out with it, then! Tell us how you have imposed this burden on yourself and how you can bear such tensions in your soul.” This resulted in an instant outburst. He had a demon in him, the man admitted, that was responsible for the evil desire in his soul. He began to weep—“Woe is me, I am destroyed!”

  This is a most curious episode, and we never learn the outcome. Polemon may have simply meant to smear someone who was a disagreeable and undependable host or fellow guest. But, as we have already seen, a hunt was a good place to kill an emperor, it being the only occasion when people were officially allowed to carry weapons in his presence. Perhaps the truth is that a grumbling opposition to Hadrian lingered on for some time into his reign and occasionally threatened to coalesce into a plot—but never quite succeeded in doing so.

  Polemon certainly had a point when he wrote of the emperor’s life not being the vie de luxe that many imagined. Even an idle princeps had his hands full with the business of government, but the hyperactive Hadrian kept himself extremely busy addressing a multitude of detailed issues, as his tour of Asia Minor goes to show.

  It is surprising to see the degree of micromanagement to which the Roman state committed itself. The collection of taxes was, naturally and always, a high priority, but most emperors cast themselves as well-meaning arbiters of civic disputes and assessors of local needs; Hadrian was unusual only for the ubiquity of his engagement—and for his propensity to turn up in person to look into matters himself. One consequence was the large number of cities and towns that renamed themselves after their benefactor; a Hadrianopolis here and a Hadriane there mark the emperor’s interventionist progress throughout the eastern provinces.

  The prosperous city of Stratonicea (today an Anatolian village called Eskihisar) is a case in point. It hosted the emperor in 123, and renamed itself Hadrianopolis as thanks for some now forgotten favors. The relationship persisted in the following years. Three letters from the emperor show him taking action on the city’s behalf. He grants it the right to collect taxes in the rural hinterland that previously went to the Roman fiscus, and decides that a wealthy absentee landlord should “either repair [a property in Stratonicea] or sell it to one of the local inhabitants so that it does not collapse from age and neglect.” He also indicates that he has briefed serving provincial governors to look kindly on the city.

  Two anecdotes suggest that the pressure of the emperor’s administrative duties sometimes led to a brief, regretted explosion. While on one of his journeys (the date is unknown, but it could have been now) a woman stepped forward as the emperor passed by, and made a request. “I haven’t got the time,” Hadrian said. With considerable presence of mind, perhaps powered by desperation, she replied, “Well, stop being emperor, then!” This struck home. The emperor relented and gave her a hearing.

  While in Asia Minor, he visited Pergamum, an opulent city of more than one hundred thousand inhabitants. Here, according to Aelius Galenus (or Galen, the famous medical researcher and theorist), in his book on mental illness,

  the emperor Hadrian struck one of his attendants in the eye with a pen. When he realized that [the slave] had become blind in one eye as a result of this stroke, he called him to him and offered to let him ask him for any gift to make up for what he had suffered. When the victim remained silent, Hadrian again asked him to make a request of whatever he wanted. He declined to accept anything else, but asked for his eye back—for what gift could provide compensation for the loss of an eye?

  The story has a good provenance, for its source was probably Galen’s father, a Pergamese architect at the time of Hadrian’s visit. At least, the anecdote is evidence that Hadrian wrote letters himself, pen to parchment, as well as dictating to secretaries. The clear implication is that on this occasion the princeps lost his temper over something, even if (as is probable) the injury itself was unintended.

  Wherever Hadrian went he invested in urban infrastructure; he commissioned aqueducts and canals, new roads or the refurbishment of old ones, and he paid lavishly for the construction of temples and other public buildings.

  He was constitutionally unable to turn down an architectural challenge. At Cyzicus, a busy port on the Propontis, work on a vast temple of Zeus had been started three centuries before, but never finished. Hadrian agreed with Pliny that it was a Roman emperor’s duty to “accomplish what kings could only attempt” and arranged for the temple’s completion. Its columns were about seventy feet high and were carved out of single blocks of marble. “In general,” observed Dio Cassius, “the details of the edifice were more to be wondered at than to be praised.” In this case, Hadrian’s good intentions came to nothing, for in the following reign an earthquake brought the temple down.

  The emperor faced an even more tempting test of his construction team’s abilities. Approaching the end of his long tour, he renewed his acquaintance with Ephesus, where “young men of the city sang a hymn in the theater for the emperor, who listened to it in a gracious and friendly manner,” as we can well imagine. From there he made for Rhodes. Sailing into the island’s port, he passed the recumbent remains of the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. This was a huge statue of the god Helios, the Sun himself. Built in the early third century B.C., it stood at the harbor mouth (or on a breakwater nearby) and was more than one hundred feet high (about three-quarters the height of the Statue of Liberty). It was made from brick towers encased by bronze plates and was mounted on a white marble pedestal fifty feet high. The Colossus had stood for only fifty-six years when it was felled by one of the region’s frequent earthquakes.

  The statue, still apparently in one piece, lay on the ground for centuries and was so impressive that many traveled to see it. Hadrian was one of these tourists and, according to a late and not altogether dependable source, a Byzantine chronicler called John Malalas, had it reerected, providing cranes, ropes, and craftsmen. The difficulty with this account is that there is no corroboration. However, Malalas claims to have seen an inscription commemorating the event. What is more, it was exactly the kind of project to which Hadrian would have been attracted. Perhaps the task proved in the event too difficult and eventually had to be abandoned. Alternatively, the restoration took place, only for the Colossus soon to collapse again. One way or another, by then the emperor was long gone, and the locals could safely leave the god to rest in peace.

  On his travels Hadrian was concerned not only with building programs and economic development; he also took a close interest in the administration of justice. He is the first emperor whose legislation and rulings have been preserved to any extent. This is in large part due to his decision to commission a legal expert, Lucius Salvius Julianus, to compile and systematize in a single document, sometimes called the Perpetual Edict, the diffuse laws and judgments that had grown up over the centuries. As well as laws on the statute book, officeholders such as praetors and provincial governors, who had judicial functions, issued edicts at the beginning of their terms of office that set out their legal priorities. Under the empire the findings of recognized jurists also had legal force, as did the judgments of emperors t
hemselves. This mass of material contained many inconsistencies and disagreements that needed to be resolved.

  The tendency of Julianus’ work was to reinforce the authority of the emperor. The preamble to Justinian’s Digest, published in the sixth century A.D., observed:

  Julianus himself, that most acute framer of laws and of the Perpetual Edict, laid it down in his own writings that whatever was found to be defective should be supplied by imperial decree, and not he alone but the deified Hadrian as well in the consolidation of the Edict and in the decree of the Senate which followed it most clearly prescribed that where anything is not found set out in the Edict shall be provided for in accordance with the rules of the Edict, and by inferences from and analogies to the rules, by more recent authority.

  At last the emperor could say farewell to his eastern provinces. He had a much-anticipated, long-delayed pleasure in store. This was a return to Athens, after a decade’s absence. In the last couple of years he had been in touch with the city fathers and, at their request, helped them recast their constitution. Now he had a more radical ambition to fulfill. This was nothing less than making Greece an equal partner with Rome, and rebalancing the empire. The imperial flotilla left Rhodes and set a course across the Aegean Sea.

  XX

  THE ISLES OF GREECE

  The piglet squealed and wriggled as it tried to escape from Hadrian’s arms. They were on the seashore near Athens and it was his awkward task to wash the pair of them in the water. Once he had accomplished this, the emperor took the young animal and offered it up for sacrifice to Demeter, goddess of the earth’s fertility and provider of grain. Its death was intended to stand in place of his own.

  Then followed a ritual of purification. Wearing a blindfold, the emperor sat down on a stool covered with a ram’s fleece. A winnowing fan was waved over him and then a flaming torch brought close to him. In this way he was cleansed by air and fire.

  Hadrian was now a mustes, a novice whose initiation would be complete only when he took part in the Mysteries, at the small harbor town of Eleusis in Attica. This religious ceremony took place every year in the autumn month of Boedromion, the first in Athens’ calendar year. The emperor had arrived in Greece from Rhodes in the late summer, to ensure he was in time for his spiritual induction.

  In the prehistory of the world, Zeus and his fellow deities lived and schemed against one another on the snowy peaks of Mount Olympus in northern Greece. One day the goddess Demeter’s beautiful daughter, Persephone, disappeared. She had been kidnapped by Zeus’ brother, Hades, lord of the underworld, but her mother had no idea where she was. So Demeter roamed the earth looking for Persephone. Eventually she learned of the abduction and was shocked to discover that the king of the gods had approved the crime in advance. She abandoned her divine status and disguised herself as an old Cretan woman. Eventually she arrived at Eleusis, where she got a job as nanny to a local chieftain’s son.

  At night when everyone else was asleep Demeter anointed her infant charge with ambrosia, a cream which with repeated use conferred immortality, and put him into the hearth-fire, where he lay unharmed. Unfortunately the boy’s mother spied on her once and screamed when the flames touched his body.

  An incensed Demeter resumed her full divine form and demanded that a temple be built in her honor. There she would teach people her special rituals—and, just as usefully, the art of agriculture. With that promise she vanished. Meanwhile the earth began to undergo a great famine, for Demeter refused to let the seeds grow. A compromise solution was agreed among the gods: Persephone would spend one third of the year in the underworld and nature would temporarily stop work, but for the rest of her time she would return to her mother and the copious earth.

  So the fundamental myth of Eleusis was the death and rebirth of growing and flowering things. But the huge popularity for more than one thousand years of the Eleusinian ceremonies was less that they guaranteed the safely turning seasons than that they offered initiates the promise of a happy afterlife. Becoming an adept of Demeter was an attractive insurance policy to ensure a prosperous posthumous future. Men and women, slaves and freedmen, all were entitled to become initiates (provided only that they could speak Greek). Murderers burdened with blood guilt were excluded. Upper-class Romans, weary of the arid superstitions of their state religion, often participated in the Mysteries at Eleusis. Cicero believed that the Mysteries helped to civilize his rough-and-ready compatriots. “We have learned from them the beginnings of life, and gained the power not only to live happily, but also to die with a better hope.”

  Initiates were sworn to perpetual secrecy, on pain of death, about what they saw, heard, and experienced. Luckily, some disrespectful Christian apologists revealed what they knew, or thought they knew. The broad shape of the ceremony in which Hadrian took part is understood, although significant details can only be guessed.

  On the fourteenth day of Boedromion, 124, a band of young men collected the hiera, or “sacred things” (ritual utensils of some kind), from Eleusis, and deposited them at a small shrine at the foot of the Acropolis. Usually they carried knives during religious ceremonies, but Hadrian had learned his lesson by now about the danger of allowing armed men into his presence, and this year weapons were banned.

  On the nineteenth of the same month a multitude of people formed a procession and proceeded along the Sacred Way, the road that ran for twenty-one miles from Athens to Eleusis. Priestesses carried the sacred things in closed hampers. As well as Hadrian and the other mustai, there were the more numerous epoptai, those who had already been initiated and witnessed Demeter’s secrets at Eleusis at least once before. A rhythmic shout, Iakh’ oIakhe, was repeated again and again, perhaps referring to a boy god, Iakchos, in Demeter’s service. The crowd danced itself into a state of euphoria and waved bundles of branches in the air.

  At a certain point on the road masked figures mocked the passing mustai, shouting and making obscene gestures. This commemorated an old woman who met Demeter when she was mourning her daughter and offered her a refreshing drink. On being rebuffed, she had pulled aside her skirt and “uncovered her shame, and exhibited her nudity.” The goddess had “laughed and laughed”—and swallowed the drink after all.

  The procession crossed a new bridge over the river Kephisos, about a mile from Eleusis. A couple of years previously a flood had swept away its predecessor and Hadrian had commissioned a replacement. He would have been pleased with the result: 165 feet long and 16 wide, it was built of well-cut limestone blocks and has survived in good condition to the present day, although the river itself silted up in modern times.

  At last twilight fell and the stars appeared. Once they had arrived at Eleusis, the mustai were allowed to break their fast. Hadrian and the rest drank down (just as the goddess had once done) a beverage called kukeon, which consisted of barley meal and water mixed with fresh pennyroyal mint leaves. Some modern scholars believe that the barley was contaminated naturally with ergot, which causes hallucinations (among other more distressing symptoms), or that some other intoxicating ingredient was added to the potion.

  The initiates passed through two columned gateways into a large walled enclosure. After uttering an enigmatic password, they walked on and found themselves in front of a square, windowless building with a columned porch, like a blind temple. This was the Telesterion, or hall of mysteries. Inside its dark interior were rows of columns and stepped benches along the walls, from which thousands of participants watched the proceedings. Hadrian, like the other new initiates, was accompanied by a guide and was not allowed to see all the sights (he probably wore a veil).

  What took place now is known only approximately. In the center of the Telesterion was an oblong stone construction with a doorway opening onto a piece of natural, unhewn rock, the Anactoron. Dreadful, ineffable things took place by flickering torchlight, possibly reenacting the story of Persephone’s abduction and all that followed.

  On top of the Anactoron, which functioned like an
altar, a fire blazed. Perhaps there was some sort of apotheosis by fire, recalling the unharmed boy in the flames. Perhaps animals were killed and burned. The officiating priest, or Hierophant, announced: “The holy Brimo [‘the raging one,’ a name for Demeter] has been delivered of a holy son, the Brimos.”

  When the drama came to an end, the priest withdrew through the Anactoron doorway, and then reemerged with the sacred things, a great light shining out when the door opened. This was the culminating revelation, and we have no idea today of what it consisted. A Christian source claimed that it was “an ear of corn in silence reaped. [This was] considered among the Athenians to constitute the perfect enormous illumination.”

  The religious authorities were well aware of the presence of their illustrious guest. The female partner of the Hierophant, who helped induct Hadrian into the rites, wrote a poem honoring the

  ruler of the wide, unharvested earth,

  the commander of countless mortals,

  Hadrian, who poured out boundless wealth

  on all cities, and especially famous Athens.

  The emperor did not reveal what the experience of initiation meant to him. At one level he was merely treading in the footsteps of many Roman predecessors, among them Augustus. But the fact that the Historia Augusta mentions the initiation at all suggests that for Hadrian it was more than a routine experience. He was committed to religion as a transcendent experience, and had been fascinated since childhood by magic and astrology. For someone of this cast of mind Eleusis conveyed a powerful spiritual meaning. On a point of detail, the example of the piglet whose life had been sacrificed to secure his own survival may have lodged in his mind, to be exploited when future occasion demanded.