Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

by Anthony Everitt

  Hadrian had believed that the death of Antinous would cure him of his chronic ailment. Perhaps he had benefited for a time from this most selfish of placebos, but, of course, the truth was otherwise. By the time he celebrated his sixtieth birthday, on January 24, 136, and doubtless long before, it was obvious that the magic had failed. Mumbo jumbo was mumbo jumbo and Hadrian was sicker than ever. A portrait study from sometime in the 130s from Diktynna in Crete shows a weary, disillusioned face. The loss of his beloved had been for nothing.

  The emperor’s state of mind grew irritable. Some thought that the stress released an innate cruelty. He began to throw over old friends and allies for reasons that are now obscure, but do not appear to be altogether rational. He dropped Aulus Platorius Nepos, who had probably accompanied him on his visit to Britannia and who, as governor, had organized the building of the wall. He now held him “in the greatest abhorrence,” writes the Historia Augusta. “Once, when he [Platorius Nepos] went to see him when he was ill he refused him admittance.”

  Saddest of all, Quintus Marcius Turbo, who had been a centurion with the legion II Adiutrix when Hadrian was a military tribune in his first army posting, fell from favor about now. Turbo had had a glittering career, quashing the Jewish uprising in 117 and serving with distinction in Dacia. One of the emperor’s closest advisers and confidants, he had been Praetorian prefect since 125. Dio Cassius reports that

  he spent the entire day near the palace and often he would even go there before midnight, when other people were just going to bed.

  Turbo was never to be found at home during the daytime, even when he was unwell. Hadrian once asked him to calm down and live a quiet life; he replied, adapting Vespasian’s famous last words: “The prefect ought to die on his feet.”

  Turbo was removed from office and replaced. A strong link to the past was broken.

  Hadrian only just survived a major hemorrhage in the villa at Tibur, perhaps another unstoppable nosebleed. He realized that he was approaching the end of his life, and that it was time to think of the succession. Among his relatives, Servianus was much too old. A quarter of a century previously Trajan had once considered him worthy of the purple, but his time had passed. Anyway, Hadrian disliked him. What, then, about Pedanius Fuscus? The young man harbored great expectations, and so presumably thought himself to be in favor with the emperor.

  However, for some reason, now impossible to ascertain, Hadrian disregarded his claim. Instead, he chose as heir someone who could hardly have been less suitable for the imperial throne. The political world was amazed when during the second half of 136 the emperor unexpectedly announced that he was adopting as his son Lucius Ceionius Commodus. He was renamed Lucius Aelius Caesar (from now on the word caesar ceased being an ordinary cognomen, but became the title of the nominated successor to the throne).

  The Historia Augusta asserts that “his sole recommendation was his beauty.” His pleasures were “not discreditable but somewhat unfocused”: he enjoyed sex (with women, for a change) and kept by his bedside copies of Ovid’s book of naughty poems, “My Love Affairs” (Amores). Frivolity went hand in hand with poor taste; apparently Martial was his Virgil. On the face of it, there was little to choose between him and Pedanius Fuscus. That said, Ceionius Commodus was now a man in his late thirties and was running a successful political career. This year he was consul and, although the appointment was in the emperor’s gift and could have had a personal rather than a political significance, he seems to have commanded a certain competence.

  It is possible that Lucius had been Antinous’ predecessor as eromenos, albeit with a significant difference. If he was an attractive boy, he was also a freeborn Roman citizen of high status. A love affair on the traditional Greek model was feasible, but any sexual expression of affection would have necessarily been conducted with restraint. By the same token, the imperial erastes would have been expected to train his noble boyfriend for public life. Once Lucius had grown up, the relationship should have matured into philia, a deep and loyal friendship. Perhaps this was the background to his surprising promotion.

  It is relevant to note that two or three years later, young Marcus Annius Verus and his tutor Marcus Cornelius Fronto exchanged letters about their love for each other. Fronto, holding back, says, “So far as I am concerned you shall be called [‘beautiful,’ usually applied to victorious athletes] and not [eromenos, or ‘beloved’].” Marcus objects: “You shall never drive me, your lover, away.” There is something artificial about the correspondence, but even if Marcus and Fronto were only playing at having an affair it does strongly suggest that Greek love was a respectable and accepted convention at court.

  It is also worth observing that Ceionius Commodus had been the stepson of Avidius Nigrinus, one of Hadrian’s four consular victims in the opening weeks of his reign—the crime for which the Senate had never quite forgotten. Could it be, wondered contemporaries, that a dying emperor was seeking to make amends by this remarkable adoption?

  The real problem had nothing to do with favoritism or lack of outstanding ability, but with health. The new caesar was very ill, more so indeed than his adoptive father. He was known to cough up blood and, so far as we can tell, was suffering from tuberculosis. He was too ill even to appear in the Senate to offer his thanks to the emperor for the adoption.

  Nevertheless, great celebrations were held. His health improved enough to allow Aelius Caesar to preside over games in the Circus Maximus, and he handed out lavish donatives to the People (that is, citizens living in or near Rome) and to the legions. He was designated consul again for 137 and was given the tribunician power that was an essential ingredient of imperial authority. Deciding that his heir needed a military grounding, Hadrian sent him to the Danube as governor of the two Pannonian provinces.

  Pedanius Fuscus nursed a grievance. His hopes of succeeding Hadrian had been dashed, and he staged a coup. A second-century horoscope of the emperor claims that he nearly died when he was sixty-one years and ten months old, namely November 137. To be technical, “the degrees of the Horoscopos and the moon in Aquarius come into quartile to Saturn, which, however, is not destructive because Venus is in aspect to it (Saturn) also the second time.” This was presumably a reference to Pedanius’ plot. It failed, and it was the great-nephew who lost his life, not the emperor.

  A horoscope of Pedanius reports him as coming “of an illustrious family of the highest level—I speak of his father and mother, both of high repute.” The document continues (minus planetary data): “Having been born with great expectations and thinking he was coming into the imperial power, he was given bad advice and fell from favor about his twenty-fifth year. He was denounced to the emperor and was destroyed along with a certain old man of his own family, who was himself slandered because of him. In addition, all members of his family because of him were done away with in a lowly manner.”

  The “certain old man” was Servianus. Whether or not he was implicated in the conspiracy, it was unsafe to let him live once Pedanius had been removed. He was either executed or (so the Historia Augusta says) instructed to commit suicide. The alleged offense was ambition for the throne, presumably on his grandson’s behalf rather than his own. The evidence, such that we have, smells of prosecutors making the most of little: the charge sheet noted that “he gave a feast for slaves in the royal household, sat in a royal chair placed close to his bed, and, though an old man of ninety, used to go out and meet the soldiers on guard duty [at the palace].”

  Before he died, Servianus asked for fire with which to burn some incense. As he made the offering he exclaimed: “That I have done nothing wrong, you gods know very well. As for Hadrian, this is my only prayer, that he may long for death, yet be unable to die.”

  Two literary sources claim that “many others” or “many from the Senate” were also put to the sword, either openly or by subterfuge. However, they name no names, and the accusation may be false—a malicious lie, an exaggeration of a purge of officials, or a simple m
istake. If there is truth in it, though, the deaths were doubtless related to the Pedanius affair. To many they echoed the scandalous executions of 117, and the Senate’s old resentment against the emperor returned.

  At about this time (or perhaps in the following year) another illustrious death occurred—that of the empress. A late source reports that “his wife, Sabina, while she was nearly being incapacitated by servile affronts, was driven to a voluntary death.” A forced suicide is possible, but improbable. Although the husband and wife cordially loathed each other, the emperor took great pains to ensure that Sabina was treated with respect. She accompanied him on many of his travels and received all the honors due to an empress. Hadrian immediately had his late wife deified, enabling her to join her mother, Marciana, and Plotina on Olympus. Her apotheosis was recorded on an aureus, on the reverse of which she is shown seated on a flying eagle.

  However, her disappearance just when the regime was undergoing a painful succession crisis is odd. The empress was still only in her late forties or early fifties and, in the normal course of events, should have expected another ten or twenty, even thirty, years of life. If there really was a Hadrianic bloodbath, it is conceivable that Sabina would have joined the other victims, should the emperor have suspected that she would scheme against his settlement when he was gone. The Historia Augusta mentions a rumor that he poisoned her, but there is no other evidence for this. Apart from the mysterious scandal during the visit to Britannia when Suetonius lost his job as imperial secretary for lèse-majesté, Sabina had no more recorded involvement in politics than Plotina had as Trajan’s consort. The timing of her departure is most likely to have been merely a coincidence of fatalities.

  Marcus Annius Verus was fifteen in April 136, by which time he had come of age and exchanged the red-striped toga praetexta of the child for the adult’s plain toga virilis. As had been the case with the teenage Hadrian, the consuls appointed him to the honorary, and highly honorific, post of prefect of the city, praefectus urbi (not to be confused with the official of the same name who was in charge of the city’s administration). The prefect, a boy from an aristocratic or imperial family, was left nominally in charge of the city of Rome when all the officeholders from the consuls down processed to the Alban Mount a few miles outside Rome and celebrated there the Feriae Latinae.

  Marcus was still the apple of Hadrian’s eye. He won golden praises for his ceremonial performance as prefect, and at banquets given by the emperor. He loved boxing and wrestling, running and fowling: he was a huntsman and an excellent ball player. However, he remained a studious youth. According to the Historia Augusta,

  His enthusiasm for philosophy led him away from all these pursuits and made him an earnest and serious-minded person. Yet it never completely took away a certain personal warmth … he was austere but not unreasonably so, reserved but not shy, serious but not depressive.

  It was at the emperor’s express wish that Marcus had been betrothed to Ceionia Fabia, one of Ceionius Commodus’ daughters. This may provide a clue of Hadrian’s real intention when deciding on the adoption. Aware of the man’s poor health, he only wanted him to keep the seat warm for Marcus until he was old enough to assume the purple (as a matter of fact, Ceionius had a son of his own, but he was no more than seven years old and perhaps only five, young enough to be disregarded). Augustus’ efforts to plan for the long-term succession of a grandson provided a precedent, although not a happy one as things turned out. He had expected Tiberius, a capable general and administrator, to govern the empire until young Gaius Caesar was ready to hold the reins of power. Tiberius refused to play the part allotted to him, and both Gaius and his younger brother Lucius died prematurely.

  Once again, the fates put an end to an emperor’s hopes. Hadrian had not originally realized just how ill Aelius Caesar was, but he came to see that the prognosis was poor. He repeatedly used to say, “We have leaned against a tottering wall and have wasted the four hundred million sesterces which we gave to the people and the soldiers on the adoption of Commodus.”

  Aelius Caesar spent less than a year on the Danube, where he had by no means been a failure as a commander. Before the end of 137 he was back in Rome. He was due to deliver an important speech before the Senate on January 1, but on the preceding night he collapsed. He took an overdose of some medicine, and his condition deteriorated further. He hemorrhaged badly and lost consciousness, dying on New Year’s Day. The emperor forbade mourning, so as not to prevent the annual vow-taking ceremony for the safety of the state. The adoption had been greeted with “universal opposition,” and there was no question of deification.

  It was a near-disastrous setback. Hadrian himself was failing; he was looking emaciated and suffered from dropsy. A new succession plan was urgently needed. On January 24, his sixty-second birthday, he summoned leading senators to his sickbed, from which he addressed them.

  My friends, I have not been permitted by nature to have a son, but you have made it possible by legal enactment … Since Heaven has bereft us of Lucius [Aelius Caesar], I have found as emperor for you in his place the man whom I now give you, one who is noble, mild, tractable, prudent, neither young enough to do anything reckless nor old enough to neglect anything.

  This time Hadrian’s choice had fallen on someone entirely unexceptionable. He confessed later: “I made my decision even when Commodus was alive.” His successor was to be Titus Aurelius Fulvius Boionius Arrius Antoninus. He was a middle-aged senator of great wealth and with impeccable antecedents. He was orphaned as a child and his grandfather Titus Arrius Antoninus had brought him up. An amiable friend of Pliny, an intimate of Nerva, and a skilled versifier in Latin and Greek, Arrius was a senator of the old school who held the consulship “with the dignity of a bygone age.”

  The adoption of Arrius Antoninus’ grandson as the new Caesar was an astute move on Hadrian’s part, for it symbolized the entente between the two parts of the ruling class—those who were willing to collaborate with the emperors and traditionalists, including survivors of the Stoic opposition, still in mourning for the Republic. This entente had been Nerva’s great achievement, and Antoninus was an assurance of its continuance into the future.

  Good-natured and distinguished in appearance, Antoninus was an excellent public speaker. From Hadrian’s point of view he had the overriding advantage of being a man of peace. He had no military experience of any kind and so there was little chance of a return to military aggression and imperial expansion.

  The emperor had privately contacted Antoninus immediately after Aelius Caesar’s death, but the senator asked for time to consider the invitation before accepting it. Perhaps he had something of Arrius in him and feared that the attractions of power were overrated. Also, Hadrian’s offer came with conditions. Antoninus was to adopt Marcus, his verissimus, now seventeen years old, along with the dead Commodus’ little son—probably confirmation that the boy had been the emperor’s preferred choice all along. His solution was not without risk: Antoninus might disregard the adoptions after his death, or die before Marcus was old enough to take over. But if all went well, the empire would be in the hands of two competent and well-intentioned rulers for another couple of generations. It was a bet worth taking.

  After due thought, Antoninus accepted the emperor’s offer. He insisted on retaining his cognomen and was known as Titus Aelius Hadrianus Antoninus. Marcus became Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus; today we call them Antoninus Pius (pius means “loyal” or “dutiful”) and Marcus Aurelius.

  The end was near. The emperor suffered from bad dreams; in one of them he asked his father, fifty years dead, for a sleeping draft. On another occasion he was overcome by a lion, a distorted memory perhaps of his last hunt with Antinous in the sands of Libya. He was no longer really in a fit condition to attend to affairs of state, but he insisted on trying to do so. In practice, Antoninus, officially endowed with proconsular imperium and tribunicia potestas, very soon found himself in charge of the government machine.
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br />   The emperor still placed confidence in “charms and magic rituals” and he received temporary relief from his dropsy, but his limbs soon filled up with fluid again. It would seem that Hadrian had contracted congestive (that is, fluid-retaining) heart disease, a condition that could have lasted for a couple of years or so. As has been seen, he may also have been suffering from chronic erysipelas.

  It is impossible to assign a definite cause at this distance in time, but one clear possibility is reduced blood flow to the heart through the coronary blood vessels. If reports of Hadrian’s heavy drinking with Trajan are correct and reflect a long-standing habit, this may have led to alcoholic cardiomyopathy, a weakening of the heart muscle or a change in its structure. Cardiac failure means that the heart’s function as a pump to deliver oxygen-rich blood is inadequate to meet the body’s needs. This in turn reduces the kidneys’ normal ability to excrete salt and water. As a result the body retains more fluid which descends to the legs when the sufferer is standing or sitting. Hence the symptoms of dropsy.

  Hadrian would have found temporary relief by lying down, but that risked fluid gathering in the lungs and shortness of breath. Sometimes he would have awoken at night, gasping for air. He may have had to learn how to sleep seated upright. Excess fluid also prompts increased urination, especially at night, and when it accumulates in the liver and intestines causes nausea, stomach pain, and a loss of appetite.

  The emperor felt as if he were dying every day, and came to long for an immediate end. He asked for poison or a sword, but nobody would give them to him even if he promised money and immunity from prosecution. The curse of Servianus had come to pass.

  Finally, Hadrian sent for Mastor, the captive tribesman from the Iazyges, who had acted for years as his hunting assistant. According to Dio Cassius,