Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

by Anthony Everitt

  How pitiful a tomb for one so rich in temples.

  The high point of Hadrian’s visit was to be a journey up the Nile. The expedition had to wait until late September or October, when the river’s annual flood would abate. In the meantime the emperor spent some time in Alexandria, where there was plenty to see and do. The Greek community had long believed that the Romans always favored the Jews at their expense. Now there were hardly any Jews left in the city, following the suppression of their uprising, and Hadrian the Hellenizer made himself popular by investing in restoration projects to make good the damage that had been done.

  The old palace of the Ptolemies was not a single edifice but a royal campus filled with buildings of every kind. Among them was the Mouseion, which housed the ancient world’s most distinguished scholars, intellectuals, and authors. Membership was a high privilege, and brought with it the honor of free meals. “By Mouseion,” wrote Philostratus, a third-century expert on Greek intellectuals, “I mean a dining table in Egypt to which the most distinguished men from all over the world receive invitations.”

  Hadrian took a close interest in the Mouseion’s work. He is known to have appointed two members, and, as already noted, his ab epistulis, successor to the dismissed Suetonius, was a former head of the Mouseion, the Gallic scholar Julius Vestinus. The emperor was not going to miss dinner at the high table for anything. However, it is not certain that his visit was well received. Behaving as usual with uneasy uppitiness to the gathered scholars, the emperor “put forward many questions for consideration,” claims the Historia Augusta, “only to provide the answers himself.”

  The emperor’s relations with intellectuals were often fraught.

  Although he wrote verse and composed speeches with great facility he treated academics as though he were their intellectual superior and liked to ridicule, scorn, and humiliate them. He competed with these professors and philosophers, with both sides in turn publishing books and poems.

  He was said to have been jealous of celebrated philosophers and rhetoricians, and promoted others to attack them and try to destroy their reputations. In response, a victim, Dionysius of Miletus, said acidly to one of Hadrian’s officials, who had tried to rival him in public speaking, “The emperor can give you money, but he can’t make you an orator.”

  Apparently Hadrian did not publish under his own name, but under those of his freedmen with literary reputations. One of his offerings was Catachannae (presumably some sort of miscellany, for the word refers to a tree onto which several different types of fruit have been grafted). This was an “extremely obscure work” of which nothing is known except that it was a homage to Antimachus, himself an extremely obscure poet from about 400 B.C. who sought consolation for the death of his mistress by retelling stories of legendary disasters.

  One of the most original academics of the age was the Sophist Favorinus of Arelate (Arles); he was described as a hermaphrodite and was beardless with a high-pitched voice. When Hadrian criticized a word he had used, he accepted the point. His friends later reproached him for giving way, to which he replied: “You are giving me bad advice. You must allow me to regard as the greatest of scholars the man who commands thirty legions.”

  However much he tormented them with his cross-examinations, Hadrian lavished honors and money on anyone who professed the arts. At the beginning of his reign he conferred a series of immunities on practitioners of the liberal professions—philosophers, rhetoricians, grammarians, and doctors—that remained in force until the latter part of the second century. Although he was himself responsible for hurting people’s feelings, he took it to heart, he used to say, whenever he saw anyone upset as a result of his disputatiousness.

  Hadrian allowed himself some free time with Antinous. He relaxed at the Canopic canal, which ran from Alexandria to the port of Canopus. Although it was well known for a temple of Serapis where the sick could sleep overnight and hope for healing, the place was mostly notable for its disreputable pleasures. Strabo, the Greek travel writer and geographer, observed:

  Some writers go on to record the cures, and others the virtues of the oracles there. But to balance all this is the crowd of revelers who go down from Alexandria by the canal to the public festivals; for every day and every night it is crowded with people on boats who play the flute and dance without restraint and with extreme licentiousness, both men and women.

  By an odd coincidence there was a village called Eleusis on the canal. But there were no mysteries there, rather rooms for hire and “commanding views for those who wish to engage in revelry.” Shameless things were done that marked the “Canopic lifestyle.”

  There is no record of an imperial visit, but the fact that Hadrian gave the name Canopus to a stretch of water and a large nymphaeum, or artificial grotto, at his villa at Tibur suggests that the Egyptian resort held some special meaning for him. We can infer that he and Antinous went there—and memorably enjoyed themselves.

  Hadrian would not have been Hadrian without finding time for a hunt. He and Antinous made a foray into the countryside in Cyrenaica, the province adjoining western Egypt, and went in search of lions. On a fragment of papyrus a poem, composed in the high, heroic epic manner by a certain Pancrates, describes what happened. This is, in fact, the only occasion where there is an explicit written record of the couple being together in one place.

  There is also evidence in stone confirming that the pair hunted together. Eight large tondi, or circular reliefs, now displayed on the Arch of Constantine in Rome but once adorning a memorial of the emperor’s exploits, show Hadrian and his party hunting various kinds of animals including a lion, and making sacrifices. In at least one of the carvings a huntsman can be seen who strongly resembles the young Bithynian—but with a difference. What we see is no longer a boy but a short-haired young man of about twenty with sideburns and down on his cheeks, no longer gracefully feminine but strong and active.

  The desert adventure nearly had an unhappy ending. Hadrian and Antinous came across a fierce lion. According to the poet,

  First Hadrian with his brass-fitted spear wounded the beast, But did not kill him, for he purposely missed the mark, Wishing to test to the full the sureness of aim Of his lovely Antinous, son of the Argus slayer.

  The infuriated lion charged at Antinous and gored his horse. It was then struck in the neck, evidently by Hadrian (the papyrus breaks up at this point), and fell beneath the hooves of the emperor’s horse. It was a close shave, but the lover had triumphantly rescued the beloved from the threat of serious injury, or even death.

  At last Hadrian was able to set off on his journey up the Nile. We may suppose that a grand barge was prepared for him and a flotilla of boats assembled, including warships from the Alexandrian fleet, to carry the court and the guard. As usual, places warned to expect an imperial visitation had been making preparations for many months and stockpiling generous supplies of food and other necessaries. One of these was the town of Oxyrhyncus, which laid in 700 pecks of barley, 3,000 bales of hay, 372 suckling pigs, nearly 200 pecks of dates, and 2,000 sheep, together with olives and olive oil. The imperial cavalcade, locustlike, consumed everything in its path.

  Pachrates (whose Hellenized name was Pancrates) was a magician and priest, as well as a poet. He looked the part of a holy ascetic—“with shaved head, clothed in white linen, speaking Greek with an accent, tall, flat-nosed, with thick lips and thin legs.”

  He was based at the ghost town of Heliopolis (a Greek name meaning Sun City; the Egyptians called it Iunu, or “place of pillars”). Since time immemorial it had been a revered center of learning, but competition from Alexandria, founded in 334 B.C., removed its raison d’être. By the first century A.D. the place was deserted except for a handful of hierophants, who, according to Strabo, “performed the sacrifices and explained to strangers what pertained to the sacred rites.”

  With his lifelong interest in the dark arts, Hadrian stopped off at the city for an explanation of the rites. He consulted Pachrat
es and, according to an ancient papyrus, received instruction in the art of a spell to “attract those who are uncontrollable … It inflicts sickness excellently and destroys powerfully, sends dreams beautifully.” The priest prepared a magic recipe, which included, among assorted ingredients, a field mouse and two moon beetles, all drowned in the Nile, the fat of a virgin goat, and the dung of a dog-faced baboon, pounded together in a mortar. A little of this unpleasant paste was burned on a charcoal fire as an offering, and a charm recited. The papyrus warned that the procedure should not be used rashly and only in the case of “dire necessity.”

  Pachrates knew how to lay on a good performance. He cast the spell, which was credited with never failing: one victim fell sick in two hours and, apparently, another died in seven. Hadrian received dreams “as he thoroughly tested the whole truth of the magic.” Deeply impressed, he doubled the magician’s fee.

  What was the emperor’s purpose in making this consultation? Curiosity is a likely enough motive, for Egyptian magic was an exotic mix of spells and remedies drawn from Greek and Jewish as well as indigenous religious traditions. But, one wonders, did he also have anyone in mind whom he wished to fall ill, or even die? Did he anticipate a “dire necessity”? The questions are relevant, for some days later an astonishing death did occur.

  A few miles south of Heliopolis, Hadrian, Antinous, and their entourage toured Memphis, founded more than three thousand years previously and the original capital of the old kingdom of Egypt. They inspected the pyramids and the Sphinx. Then the imperial party sailed on upriver and moored at Hermopolis (Egyptian Khemennu). Situated on the border between Upper (or southern) and Lower Egypt, this was a populous and opulent city, with a famous sanctuary of Thoth, god of magic, heart and tongue of Ra, arbiter of good and evil and judge of the dead.

  On October 22 the festival of the Nile was celebrated—usually a happy celebration of the renewed fertility that the river’s annual inundation brought about, but on this occasion a glum affair, one suspects, for it was the second year when there had been a disastrously poor flood. Then two days later came the anniversary of the death of Osiris and worshippers chanted for his yearly rebirth, analogous with the rise and fall of the river.

  Opposite Hermopolis the riverbank curved and the current strengthened. A small, impoverished settlement of mud huts lay along the shore and close by stood a modest temple of Ramses the Great, Egypt’s most famous pharaoh (1298–1235 B.C.). One day during the last week of the month, here or hereabouts, the lifeless body of Antinous was recovered from the river. He had drowned.

  Hadrian broke down. The Historia Augusta noted, disapprovingly, that he “wept for the youth like a woman.” He declared that he had seen a new star in the sky, which he took to be that of Antinous. Courtiers assured him that the star was new and had indeed come from Antinous’ spirit as it left his body and rose up into the heavens. The emperor decided that Antinous was to be deified. Dead, he was to be reborn as a god.

  From the point of view of Roman convention, such a thing was unheard of. Emperors, and wives or close relatives, received divine honors by approval of the Senate—but not boyfriends of no political or social significance. Hadrian did not even trouble the Senate with the matter, for “the Greeks deified him at Hadrian’s request.” What precisely this means is unclear, but there was a long-standing tradition in the eastern Mediterranean of potentates declaring themselves gods, and in the popular mind the boundary between the human and the divine was porous.

  As it happened, there was a local precedent for the conferral of divine honors. A drowning in the Nile had magical properties. When Pachrates’ spell called for a mouse and beetles to be drowned in the Nile, the actual word he used was “deified.” This was because many believed that the Nile conferred immortality on anyone it took to itself by drowning. (Importantly, suicides were excepted.) Only the priests could touch the corpses and these were buried at the public expense. Two brothers, Petesi and Paher, who drowned in Roman times even had a temple devoted to them. In the second-century tomb of a girl, Isidora, who drowned in the river, a funerary poem has her father say: “O my daughter, no longer will I bring you offerings with lamentation, now that I know that you have become a god.”

  So Antinous joined the immortals—but how did he come to die in the first place? This is difficult to ascertain, for nothing is known about the exact circumstances. In his memoirs Hadrian asserted that the death was an accident, but the ancient sources were not so sure. Three texts give accounts of what happened—Dio Cassius, the Historia Augusta, and Aurelius Victor. They were written long after the event, are not altogether reliable, and (some say) betray signs of malice. According to Dio, the best of the bunch,

  Antinous … had been a favorite of the emperor and had died in Egypt, either by falling into the Nile, as Hadrian writes, or, as the truth is, by being offered in sacrifice. For Hadrian, as I have stated, was always very curious and employed divinations and incantations of all kinds.

  Aurelius Victor agrees, reporting that

  when Hadrian wanted to prolong his life and magicians had demanded a volunteer in his place, they report that although everyone else refused, Antinous offered himself and for this reason the honors mentioned above were accorded him. We shall leave the matter unresolved, although with someone of a self-indulgent nature we are suspicious of a relationship between men far apart in age.

  The Historia Augusta takes a similar line, but with less certainty.

  Concerning this incident there are varying rumors; for some claim that he had devoted himself to death for Hadrian, and others—what both his beauty and Hadrian’s excessive sensuality indicate.

  What is intended by this insinuation is unclear; presumably the reader is to infer that Antinous killed himself in order to escape the emperor’s sexual advances.

  The first and most ordinary of explanations is that the emperor’s favorite was drowned by accident, just as Hadrian claimed. A youth, high spirits, unpredictable currents or underwater plants trapping an unwary diver or swimmer—this is a familiar and plausible concatenation of circumstances. But a personage of Antinous’ importance would seldom be alone, and if he went for a swim help would surely have been close at hand.

  A second possibility is that he committed suicide, evading notice and slipping silently into the river, perhaps under cover of darkness. It is not too hard to guess at motives. He was now about twenty, and no longer the pretty lad who had first caught the emperor’s eye. If Hadrian fancied only smooth-cheeked teenagers, then indeed Antinous faced an uncertain future. What use would his patron and lover have for him once he had graduated from puer, boy, to iuvenis, young man?

  There is evidence, though, that Hadrian had catholic tastes. Aurelius Victor claims that “malicious rumors spread that he debauched adult males (puberibus).” While no necessary blame attached to a youthful eromenos for having sex with his erastes and even privately allowing himself to be buggered, it was, as we have seen, shameful for an adult to accept the receptive role. Antinous, having reached manhood, may have been unwilling to go on sleeping with the emperor. In his eyes, if he allowed things to continue as before, he would be little better than a male prostitute. All too credibly, he could imagine himself aging into the superannuated gigolo of Juvenal’s satire.

  Even if there was something to these fears, that one member of the pair was losing interest or that the other was feeling shame, the evidence of Hadrian’s behavior after the drowning points to the passionate sincerity of his love, and so surely mitigates them. That is to say, Antinous could count on the emperor’s continuing affection even if for one reason or another the love affair itself were to end. He had no grounds for anticipating that he would either be discarded or abused.

  We are left with the opinion of the literary sources, although from a modern perspective they propose by far the most implausible of the options. However, the idea of compensatory self-sacrifice was familiar to the ancient world. Euripides’ famous tragedy Alcestis told t
he story of a wife volunteering to hand herself over to death in place of her husband, Admetus, whose time was due. Admetus would be permitted to survive

  if he could find another

  to take his place and join the dead below.

  He asked in turn of all his family,

  his father, and his mother; but found no one

  willing to quit the world and die for him—

  except his wife.

  This account neatly parallels Hadrian’s alleged search for a volunteer, according to Aurelius Victor.

  At some point after 130 or 131, Hadrian’s friend the historian and public official Arrian wrote a guide to part of the Black Sea coastline in the form of a long letter to the emperor. It includes a description of an island called Leuke, deserted except for a few goats. Here, legend had it, the Greek hero Achilles once lived as a boy. Visitors left votive offerings to him and his older erastes, Patroclus, for whose death Achilles had wreaked a terrible vengeance during the siege of Troy before himself being killed. Arrian concluded:

  I myself believe that Achilles was a hero second to none, for his nobility, beauty, and strength of soul; for his early departure from mankind … and for the love and friendship because of which he wanted to die for his beloved.

  Although Hadrian and Antinous are hardly a perfect match for the Greek couple, Arrian was surely linking two doomed eromenoi who, in different ways, put their lives on the line for their lovers. It was a delicate allusion, well judged to touch and comfort his desolate correspondent.

  In sum, then, Hadrian was suffering from a serious illness of some kind; he and Antinous believed that the emperor would recover his health if he, Antinous, gave up his life in his stead. So the verdict of suicide stands, but for religious or magical reasons rather than from private unhappiness.