Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

by Anthony Everitt

  Visitors to the predesert of Algeria and Tunisia today can see substantial stretches of wall and ditch. They are the remains of the fossatum Africae, already under construction by the time of Hadrian’s arrival. This series of border defenses had many features in common with the Britannic wall, although local materials were used—in this case mud bricks. The longest unbroken stretch ran for about forty miles, with a gateway every Roman mile and an additional watchtower equidistant from two gates. Rome had widened its zone of control under the Flavian emperors and Trajan, and the fossatum made it clear that this process of expansion had now concluded.

  However, if the wall asserted a border, it was not there to exclude. Rather, its main purpose was to enable the legions to manage relations between a settled agricultural population to the north and southern nomads who needed to move their herds and flocks to and from summer and winter pastures. This entailed controlling water sources, especially in times of low rainfall.

  By the end of June, Hadrian had reached the former kingdom, now province, of Numidia, where the III Augusta legion was waiting for his inspection. Its legate, Quintus Fabius Catullinus, was an intelligent officer who had obviously been warned what to expect of his demanding commander in chief. He trained his troops to the highest possible level of efficiency, and in an elegant piece of indirect flattery to Hadrian the rainmaker erected two altars, one dedicated to “Jupiter Best and Greatest, lord of the heavenly rainstorms” and the other to “Winds that have the power to bring generous rainstorms.”

  The legion had just moved to a new base at Lambaesis and was busy constructing a fortress. Large parts of an inscription, on the base of a column erected to commemorate the imperial visit, have been found, which transcribe speeches the emperor made to the troops. A shorthand writer must have been in attendance, for his remarks have been taken down verbatim. It is one of the few times we have Hadrian’s own words as he spoke them, and can almost hear his voice.

  Addressing legionary cavalry after they had performed in front of him, he said, “Military exercises, in a manner of speaking, have their own rules, and if anything is added to or subtracted from them, the exercise becomes too insignificant or too difficult. The more difficulties that are added, the less pleasing is the result. Of all difficult exercises the most difficult was the one you performed, throwing the javelin in full battledress … I approve of your eagerness.”

  On July 1 the emperor praised a Spanish cohort for building a stone wall for the new fortress in record time. “A wall requiring much work, and one that is usually made for permanent winter quarters, you constructed in not much longer a time than it takes to build one of turf.”

  The officers came in for a fair share of praise, but there was criticism of a cavalry commander whose name is lost. “I commend Catullinus, my legate, … because he directed you to this exercise, which took on the appearance of a real battle and which has trained you in such a way that I can also praise you. Your prefect Cornelianus also has performed his duties very well. However, the cavalry skirmish did not please me. [———] is the person responsible. A cavalryman should ride across from cover and pursue with caution, for if he cannot see where he’s going or if he cannot restrain his horse when he wishes, it is perfectly possible that he will be exposed to hidden traps.”

  A week later the emperor congratulated some Pannonian auxiliaries for their maneuvers. “If anything had been missing, I would have noticed it, and if anything had stood out as bad, I would have pointed it out. In the entire exercise you have pleased me uniformly.”

  It is easy to see why the emperor was popular. We can imagine him in the African sun in front of hundreds of sweating men. His words crackled with energy. He knew exactly what he was talking about, and had precise ideas of how things should be done. His praise was worth having, and his listeners were fearfully aware that he would not hide his disapproval.

  This was how to keep an army fighting fit when there was no fighting to be done.

  XXII

  WHERE HAVE YOU GONE TO, MY LOVELY?

  Hadrian was in a hurry. The summer of 128 was drawing to a close and he had an appointment he wanted to keep in September. The date of the Eleusinian Mysteries was approaching and he meant to attend for a second time. So he and his traveling court sailed back to Rome, where he spent a few quick weeks dealing with essential business before setting off for Greece.

  He was an epoptes, a full and complete initiate, and, we may guess, so was Antinous, now about eighteen and on the verge of beards and adulthood. No account has come down to us, but one wonders if, in this Greek setting, they felt able to present themselves publicly as an honorable and traditional couple, a mature erastes with his maturing eromenos.

  Having witnessed the most secret rituals, Hadrian broadcast the significance of his participation through an Asiatic coin, a tetradrachm worth six sesterces, which showed him holding a bunch of corn ears; the legend reads Hadrianus P[ater] [Patriae] Ren[atus], “Hadrian, Father of the Fatherland Reborn.” The corn ears indicate his status as an initiate of Eleusis, and renatus his spiritual rebirth. On the obverse is a head of Augustus, the first emperor to attend the Mysteries.

  In the heyday of Athens in the fifth century B.C., its undisputed leader was Pericles. For many years, he was its democratically elected first citizen (its princeps, as a Roman might put it). His contemporaries nicknamed him, flatteringly, “the Olympian,” a title usually reserved for Zeus, king of the gods.

  Greece was still recovering from the destruction wreaked during the Persian invasion. The Persians had been driven back, and Athens headed a league of city-states and island communities whose aim was to continue the struggle against the “barbarians.” Pericles transformed the league into a maritime empire and spent much of the wealth Athens acquired thereby by rebuilding the city as splendidly as possible; the masterpiece was the Parthenon, Athena’s temple on the Acropolis.

  Plutarch writes that Pericles “introduced a bill to the effect that all Hellenes wheresoever resident in Europe or in Asia, small and large cities alike, should be invited to send deputies to a council at Athens.” The aim was to discuss matters of common interest—restoration of the temples the Persians had burned down, payment of vows to the gods for the great deliverance, and clearing the seas of pirates. The Greek colonies of Sicily and Italy were not invited, for they had not been directly involved in the war. Nothing came of the project owing to opposition from the Spartans, then the great military rival of Athens. Pericles let the idea drop.

  More than half a millennium later Hadrian picked it up where it had fallen. During his previous visit, his attention had been caught by the synedrion, or council, at Delphi for the Amphictyonic League, but it did not include enough Greek cities. He decided to launch a new Panhellenion along Periclean lines. As before, a grandly refurbished Athens was to be the headquarters and Greek cities would be invited to send delegates to an inaugural assembly. Member communities had to prove their Greekness, both culturally and in genetic descent, although in practice some bogus pedigrees were accepted.

  The enterprise had a somewhat antiquarian character. So far as we can tell from the fragmentary surviving evidence, Hadrian aimed at roughly the same catchment area as Pericles had done—in essence, the basin of the Ionian Sea. Italy and Sicily were excluded once again, and there was no representation of Greek settlements in Egypt, Syria, or Anatolia. The emperor made a point of visiting Sparta, presumably to ensure that it did not stay away as it had done in the fifth century.

  A renaissance of old glories was reflected in the development of archaized language; so, for example, Spartan young men (epheboi) suddenly took on an antiquated Doric dialect in their dedications to Artemis Orthia, a patron goddess of the city. It seems clear that one of the purposes of Hadrian’s policy was to recruit the past to influence and to help define and improve the decadent present.

  Hadrian began to call himself the “Olympian,” echoing the example of Pericles as well as reflecting the completion
of the Olympieion, the vast temple to Olympian Zeus. He was soon widely known throughout the Hellenic eastern provinces as “Hadrianos Sebastos Olumpios,” Sebastos being the Greek word for Augustus, or indeed “Hadrianos Sebastos Zeus Olumpios.”

  What did the Panhellenion actually do? It administered its own affairs, managed its shrine not far from the Roman Agora and offices, and promoted a quadrennial festival. It also assessed qualifications for membership. But Hadrian was careful to give it no freestanding political powers. All important decisions were referred to him for approval. Rather, the focus was cultural and religious, and a connection was forged with the Eleusinian Mysteries. In essence, the task was to build spiritual and intellectual links among the cities of the Greek world, and to foster a sense of community. The Panhellenion also furthered the careers of delegates, who were usually leading members of Greek elites (but not necessarily Roman citizens), and created an international “old-boy network” of friends who advanced one another’s interests.

  A good deal of notice was required for the summoning of the new assembly, and the buildings the emperor had commissioned in 125 were probably not yet finished. But the future look of Athens was already evident. The city was being transformed and the area around the Olympieion was defined as a new district, named (not difficult to guess) Hadrianopolis. At its boundary an arch was erected, which can still be seen today. On the west side, facing the Acropolis, an inscription on its architrave reads, “This is Athens, the onetime city of Theseus,” Theseus being the city’s legendary founder. On the east side, facing the Olympieion, another reads, “This is the city of Hadrian, not of Theseus.”

  It was cheek of a very high order. However warmly they welcomed the emperor’s pro-Hellenic policies, this expropriation of their city must have irritated many Athenians. But they had no alternative to biting their lips.

  About March 129, with the sea lanes open again, Hadrian set sail for Ephesus. He roamed around the eastern provinces, scattering buildings, instructions, and benefactions in his wake. As usual, he refused to tolerate poor performance by public officials, punishing delinquent procurators and governors, the Historia Augusta reports, “with such severity that it was believed that he incited those who brought the accusations.”

  The emperor’s main political object for this tour was a gathering of client kings along the frontier with the Parthian empire. This “durbar” was the mirror image of the Panhellenion, originally summoned as it had been to manage a continuing Persian threat. The Parthians had now assumed the role of the sinister Other. Hadrian, of course, had not the slightest intention of provoking a war. Instead, he mounted a spectacular but peaceful demonstration that the Roman empire was safe from invasion.

  We do not know if the Parthian king, Chosroes, still embattled by ambitious relatives, was invited to another riverine summit meeting, but he was at least offered sweeteners for good behavior. His daughter, held as hostage in Rome for twelve years, was at last sent back to Parthia and the emperor promised to return the royal throne, which Trajan had captured during his ruinous invasion of Mesopotamia. However, before anything could be decided, Chosroes was deposed and his successor had more important matters on his mind than playing a walk-on role in Hadrian’s political theatricals.

  So far as the client kings were concerned, they were a mixed bunch with uncertain loyalties. Conventional opinion disapproved of Rome’s purchasing peace with subsidies, but the emperor was proud of his achievements. According to the Epitome de Caesaribus, “after procuring peace from many kings by means of secret subventions, [Hadrian] liked to boast openly that he had won more by doing nothing than from waging war.”

  Dealing with distant rulers who knew that it was impractical for the Romans to punish lack of cooperation by military action sometimes led to embarrassment. Pharasmenes was king of the Iberi, a tribe that lived between the Black and Caspian seas (today’s Georgia), and was a case in point. He haughtily declined Hadrian’s invitation to his grand assembly, despite being the recipient of generous gifts—among them an elephant and a detachment of fifty soldiers. When Pharasmenes reciprocated with some gold-embroidered cloaks, the irritated Hadrian apparently ridiculed the king’s presents by sending three hundred condemned men to be killed in the arena dressed in cloth of gold.

  The emperor’s next destination was Egypt, for which he planned an extensive tour, but en route he passed through Judaea. Here he made a fateful decision.

  Since the devastation that followed Titus’ capture of Jerusalem in 70, the ruined and depopulated province had hardly recovered. Jewish society became localized into villages. The high-priestly families that had dominated Judaea disappeared from history, the Sanhedrin, ancient Israel’s supreme court, ceased operations, and the old upper class vanished. As for Jerusalem, the city’s fortifications were left in ruins and the Temple remained rubble. This was typical Roman behavior: in previous ages Carthage had been razed and years passed before reoccupancy of the site was allowed. A similar fate had befallen Corinth.

  The bitter uprising among Jews of the diaspora at the end of Trajan’s reign seems not to have affected Judaea, presumably because the Moorish general Lusius Quietus had been appointed its governor with a brief to stamp out any discontent. Once the uprising had been quashed, Hadrian, newly in power, had won a reputation for being sympathetic to the Jewish cause when he acted as a disinterested arbiter in disputes between Alexandrian Jews and Greeks.

  The emperor’s sympathy seems to have been tactical and did not represent his real opinion. He now determined that enough time had passed to reconstitute Judaea as an ordinary province, by which he meant that it should be Hellenized. Quite a number of affluent Jews, he observed, were willing to become collaborators. It may even be that some of them actively encouraged the emperor to pursue his Hellenizing agenda.

  Circumcision had been outlawed by Domitian and Nerva. Interestingly, Christians, too, disapproved of the procedure: Paul of Tarsus called it mutilation and argued that those who inflicted it should be “cut off,” or castrated. Hadrian renewed the prohibition and made the offense punishable by death.

  At Jerusalem the emperor refounded the city and commissioned a temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, to be built on the ruins of Herod’s temple. He brought in settlers and seems to have established a colonia of Roman citizens, which in the course of time would produce recruits for the garrison legion that had been based nearby for sixty years, the X Fretensis.

  To underline the point that Jerusalem was now a Roman city with Greek-speaking inhabitants and no longer had the slightest association with Jewry, Hadrian named it Aelia Capitolina, in honor of his own family, the Aelii, and the king of the Olympian gods whose great shrine stood on Rome’s citadel. Jehovah was banished. If we can trust the new city’s celebratory coinage, the emperor personally helped to plow a furrow around its boundary. Cities in the neighborhood also signaled his presence. Shrines in his honor were founded at Caesarea and Tiberias, and Gaza launched a Hadrianic festival.

  So far as Hadrian was concerned, the Jewish question was settled.

  The emperor had been greatly looking forward to touring Egypt, with its strange animal-headed gods, its lauded skill in magic, and its extraordinary temples and palaces. Here was a mysterious, age-old civilization that had largely preserved its unique character. The Macedonian dynasty of the Ptolemies, ruling from Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast, had only partly Hellenized it. A Roman province since the defeat and deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, Egypt was the emperors’ private domain, and nothing was allowed to imperil its huge strategic value as a grain producer for the capital. Senators were forbidden to visit, and few emperors bothered to go there either, despite their having the title of pharaoh. The kingdom’s governance was entrusted to a prefect, who was always a nonpolitical eques. Unless there was trouble, Egypt was largely left to its own devices.

  Hadrian, ever the missionary, was determined to deepen Egypt’s conversion into a worthy member of the Greco-Roman world. What he had i
n mind was to found yet another Hadrianopolis, somewhere many miles south in the country’s traditional heartland.

  He may have had another, more personal reason for his visit. A fourth-century church father, Epiphanius, claims that he suffered from leprosy, which none of his doctors could heal, and that he went to Egypt to find a cure. At first sight, the story is unconvincing. It is highly unlikely that he contracted leprosy, a disease which is hard to catch and often associated with poverty and a bad diet. However, the assertion may be a faulty echo of the emperor’s previously reported subcutaneous affliction. Egypt had a high reputation for medicine; the healing and magical arts were closely allied, something that would have appealed to Hadrian. A recurrence of erysipelas could well have made him abandon conventional treatment for the arcane nostrums of the Egyptian priesthood.

  No later than the end of August 130, Hadrian traveled down the coast road from Gaza to Pelusium, the fortress town that guarded the entry into Egypt. It lay between the marshes of the Nile and the Mediterranean shore. It was on the beach here that in 48 B.C., at the start of Rome’s long civil war, Pompey the Great (Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus) was lured ashore from his ship and stabbed to death by a renegade legionary in Egyptian pay. He had been fleeing from Julius Caesar after his army’s decisive defeat in Pharsalus in Greece and was hoping to find sanctuary with the pharaoh. “Dead men don’t bite,” said one of the king’s advisers. Pompey’s head was cut off and presented to Caesar.

  The body was buried on the shore and a small monument erected above it. With the passage of time sand blew over it and covered it from view. Never one to pass up the chance to mourn a dead celebrity, the emperor located the grave and had the sand brushed away. And, of course, he wrote a poem, which was inscribed on the monument. Referring to the fact that many shrines had been erected in Pompey’s name throughout the empire, one line reads: