Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

by Everitt, Anthony

  At about this time Hadrian’s great-great-great-grandfather, a certain Aelius Marullinus, was the first member of the family to become a senator. He was more astute than his compatriots, for the promotion can only have been at the victorious Caesar’s behest, a reward for loyalty.

  Hadrian’s father—like him, named Publius Aelius Hadrianus Afer—was born a century later and married a woman from Gades, Domitia Paulina. Gades had been founded and colonized by Phoenicians from Tyre and Sidon on the Palestinian coast, just as Carthage had been. Some passing member of the great Roman clan of the Domitii must have conferred Roman citizenship on an ancestor, but Paulina’s origins were most likely to have been Punic (a Roman term for Carthaginian). The couple had two children, Hadrian and an elder daughter.

  Aelius Hadrianus was among the growing number of wealthy Baeticans who decided to pursue political ambitions in Rome. Little has come down to us about his career, but he was evidently intelligent and able. He served in the senior post of praetor, probably in the year of his son’s birth. The authorities must have thought well of him, for he was probably only about twenty-nine or thirty years old, the minimum qualifying age for the praetorship. As praetor he either acted as a judge in Rome or received a commission to command a legion. This may have been followed by a provincial governorship (possibly in Baetica itself).

  The Aelii were friendly with the Ulpii, another of Italica’s leading clans. The historian Dio Cassius, writing in the third century A.D., claimed dismissively that the Ulpii were of Spanish origin; they did not even have Italian or Greek blood from southern Italy in their veins, let alone Roman. But they, too, were probably among the town’s first settlers and originated from Tuder (today’s Todi), a hill town in northern Umbria, in those days celebrated for its martial valor.

  Hadrian’s paternal grandfather married an Ulpia. This was an excellent match, for her brother was Marcus Ulpius Traianus (the cognomen doubtless derived from a marriage with one of the Traii, a Baetican clan with an interest in the mass production of amphorae). Traianus had once been governor of Baetica, and at the time of Hadrian’s birth was serving as governor of Syria, one of Rome’s most senior provincial posts. He had with him on his staff his talented and affable son—in the Roman way, also Marcus Ulpius Traianus, whom we know as Trajan.

  The Ulpii were rich and grand, and Traianus was not the first member of his family to enter the Senate, the necessary but not sufficient qualification for which was a fortune of at least 1 million sesterces. Access to the Senate lay in the emperor’s hands, and conferred membership of the senatorial class, or ordo senatorius, on a man’s male offspring. It has been estimated that there were only at most four hundred active senatorial families throughout the empire, so a place such as Italica that boasted several was fortunate indeed.

  The Aelii and Ulpii boasted no aristocratic Roman forebears in them. They were “new men,” the condescending phrase that the great and ancient families who had governed Rome for centuries applied to unknown politicians from outside their magic circle. They had exploited the economic opportunities that fertile Baetica offered, and were now determined to make their mark in Rome itself.

  The baby Hadrian was in great peril. This was because the most life-threatening period of anyone’s life in the ancient world was that from birth to seven or eight years of age. Medical science was in its infancy, and while some doctors were pragmatists who encouraged healthy lifestyles and prescribed treatments that had been seen to work, others regarded medicine as a branch of philosophy or of magic, and allowed theory, often of the most bizarre kind, to replace observation.

  Having managed to survive his arrival in the world, Hadrian was not yet accepted as being completely alive. Like other Roman newborn boys, he received his praenomen, or personal name, only on the ninth day after his birth, the delay reflecting the fact that many infants perished in the first week or so of life. The most common fatal diseases were gastric disorders—diarrhea and dysentery. The latter remained a threat throughout early childhood.

  One of the consequences of the high rate of infant mortality was that upper-class parents took care not to become too attached to their children until they were reasonably confident that they would live. Mothers tended to avoid breast-feeding (despite the fact that this accelerated their liability to conception), and Paulina was no exception.

  So a wet nurse had to be found. It was essential to recruit the right type of woman. According to a leading gynecological textbook of the period, the Gynaecologia of Soranus, she “should be not younger than twenty and not older than forty years, who has already given birth twice or thrice, who is healthy, in good condition, of large frame of a good color. Her breasts should be of medium size, lax, soft, and unwrinkled.” In addition, she should be “self-controlled”—that is, she should abstain from sexual intercourse and alcohol.

  Paulina appointed a woman called Germana to this essential task, and we may suppose that she fulfilled the job specification. Her name suggests that she was a slave who originated in northeastern Europe. She was evidently a success, for she was later given her freedom and, in the event, reached a considerable age, outliving her charge.

  Little else is known for certain of Hadrian’s infancy. His father, being a senator, was obliged by law to live in or near Rome, unless on a foreign posting. No doubt the family had a town house, and also a place in the country within striking distance of the capital. A colony of well-to-do Spaniards built or occupied villas at Tibur (today’s Tivoli), and the Aelii will surely have been among them. This fashionable resort about eighteen miles east of Rome was built on the lower slopes of the Sabine Hills, at the end of a valley through which the river Anio (today’s Aniene) passes. The town stands at the point where the valley narrows to a gorge.

  The river rushes past with spectacular cascades and makes a loop around the town, and eventually joins the Tiber. Tibur was noted for an abundance of water and its cool, refreshing climate. Wealthy Romans escaped there from the suffocating summer heat of the capital, and sometimes lived in or near the town all year round. Their villas were often of great splendor. The fashionable author Statius wrote a eulogy of one palatial residence, a villa Tiburtina, in its wooded park by the banks of the rushing Anio. Hadrian must have visited it and marveled.

  Should I express wonder at gilded beams,

  or Moorish citrus wood for all the doorposts,

  or shining marble shot with colored veins,

  or water piped to flow through all the bedrooms?

  The poet went on to describe every appurtenance of luxury, the mosaics, the works of art in ivory and gold, the gemstones, the statuary.

  Hadrian probably spent much of his childhood in this enchanted spot, for which he harbored a lifelong affection.

  For his first eight years Hadrian was left in the charge of his mother. Then, in 84 or thereabouts, Hadrian became the direct responsibility of his father and his formal schooling began. It is uncertain whether he was educated by a home tutor or sent to school. The leading educationist of the day, Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (in English, Quintilian), was worried that the typical family no longer offered reliable role models. Children were corrupted by kindness and were excessively spoiled (“they grow up lying around in litters”); he recommended the “broad daylight of a respectable school” in preference to the solitariness and obscurity of a private education. The Aelii may well have taken his advice.

  Elementary school classes were usually held in a rented shop with an open frontage, like a porch, in a main square. The day started at dawn or earlier and ended in the afternoon with a visit to the baths. Teaching methods were both brutal and boring, testing memory rather than intelligence. Hadrian and his fellow pupils learned the names of letters before their shapes. They sang them forward and backward from a to x (there were no y or z in the Latin alphabet) and x to a. They then memorized groups of two or three letters and finally graduated to syllables and words. The basics of practical mathematics were also taught, to enable a R
oman to act confidently in the daily to-and-fro of buying and selling, and of managing his money.

  The schoolmaster, or ludi magister, guided Hadrian’s hand over his tablet when learning to write. Later he gave his students sentences to copy with their styluses on waxed tablets or with a reed pen and ink on papyrus or cardboard-thin wooden sheets. They had an abacus for counting and recited their multiplication tables in chorus.

  In 85 or 86, when Hadrian was about ten years old, an event took place that transformed his world. His father died unexpectedly at the age of forty. A promising career near the summit of imperial politics was cut short. The cause of death has not been recorded, but he was most likely to have succumbed to one of the numerous epidemics in the ancient world, which struck impartially at rich and poor alike.

  Domitia Paulina was in a difficult, but not altogether unusual situation. Women married young, sometimes as early as thirteen years old, soon or immediately after the onset of puberty, whereas their husbands would typically be much older, in their mid-or late twenties as a rule. Despite the high rate of mortality when giving birth, women were more likely to see their children into adulthood than were their spouses; it is estimated that only one third of twenty-five-year-olds had a living father, while nearly half still had a mother.

  Hadrian’s mother or her family advisers considered what was best for the boy. He was heir to a fortune, and it was agreed that masculine guidance was required to keep a watchful eye over him as he grew up and to ensure that the family estate in Baetica was well managed. So two guardians were appointed, both of whom were townsmen of Italica. One was an eques (or “knight,” a member of the business or country gentry class, one rank below that of the political, or senatorial, elite), Publius Acilius Attianus.

  The second was a glamorous and impressive figure—one of the Ulpii, and the son of Hadrian’s maternal great-uncle. He was Trajan, whom we first met in his youth when he served in the army under his father. Now thirty-two, he was proving to be an able soldier. A great admirer of Alexander the Great, he was ambitious for military glory. Tall and well made, “with a noble appearance,” he had a beak of a nose and a wide mouth. He had recently been praetor and had his eye on the crowning glory of a consulship, the public office that was the apex of a Roman’s political career (unless he dangerously aspired to the purple).

  Trajan followed outdoor pursuits and was a keen huntsman. He seems to have been something of a mountaineer, an unusual hobby in his day, who enjoyed “setting foot on rocky crags, with none to give a helping hand or show the way.” He was a heavy drinker, and liked having sex with young men. He was on affectionate terms with his wife, Pompeia Plotina (in full, Pompeia Plotina Claudia Phoebe Piso), whom he married in 78. The union seems to have been a mariage blanc, and there were no children.

  The quality that contemporaries noted and most respected in Trajan was his fair-mindedness. He had a reputation for never allowing his private pleasures to impinge on his public duties, a little-observed quality in the governing elite.

  At the time, the guardianship of a ten-year-old Spanish boy was of little interest except to those directly affected; but, as it turned out, this was the moment when the fortunes of the Aelii and the Ulpii tied themselves together in an inextricable knot, with imponderable consequences for the future of Rome.

  II

  A DANGEROUS WORLD

  Hadrian’s two guardians were busy men and cannot have had much time to supervise their ward’s progress closely; but they shared Domitia Paulina’s ambitions for her son. Hadrian was sent to a secondary school when he was about twelve years old. It was one of the best, or at least best known, in Rome, for its grammaticus, a Latin word meaning both secondary-school teacher and grammarian, was the celebrated Quintus Terentius Scaurus. Author of a manual on grammar and books on spelling and the correct use of prepositions, he was a master of scholarly ratiocination at its driest.

  Grammatical cruxes were popular talking points among educated Romans, and evidently went down well with the bright young student from Baetica; or so we infer, for the adult Hadrian made himself out to be something of an expert on linguistics. He was the author of Sermones, or “Conversations,” two volumes on grammatical topics (sadly, lost), and once engaged in scholarly debate with his former teacher. He challenged Scaurus, still alive and working, on his interpretation of the word obiter—“by the way” or “in passing”; he cited many learned authorities, including a letter Augustus wrote to Tiberius in which the emperor criticized his stepson for avoiding the word. Of course, Hadrian added bumptiously, the emperor was only an amateur.

  Here we have the unmistakable tones of the precocious and competitive teenager who insists on outdoing the expert, and who will never altogether grow up. It was the authentic Hadrian.

  Going to school—or, more exactly, to the grammaticus’s house—was to enter the dangerous world of grown-ups. Well-to-do parents understood this and appointed a paedogogus, a trusted slave who supervised children at home and accompanied them to the classroom. He was all the more necessary as his charges approached puberty and attracted the attentions of men in the street. Boys were more at risk than girls, if only because the latter went out in public less often and were usually educated at home. Unsavory encounters were common, and a handsome bribe could transform the home tutor into a go-between. And it did not take more than a gift or two to persuade an inquisitive child to a fumble.

  It was to ward off this kind of threat that the poet Horace’s father refused to delegate accompanying his son to school.

  … he preserved my chastity

  (which is fundamental in forming a good character), saving me Not only from nasty behavior but from nasty imputations.

  Unfortunately the trouble was not over once a pupil had walked through a grammaticus’s door. If a contemporary of Hadrian, the great poet and satirist Decimus Junius Juvenalis (his full name is uncertain; we know him as Juvenal), is to be believed, the classroom was the scene of much furtive sexual experimentation. Observing that the teacher was expected to act in loco parentis, he wrote that fathers

  require that he take the father’s role in the scrum,

  ensuring that they don’t play dirty games

  and don’t take turns with one another.

  It is no light thing to keep watch on all those boys

  with their hands and eyes quivering till they come.

  Covert sexual abuse was commonly accompanied by overt physical abuse. Masters routinely flogged idle or rebellious or just lively students. A mural at Pompeii reveals a typical scene: the schoolmaster stands sternly on the left, students are seated quietly at their desks, and a boy carries the almost fully stripped culprit on his shoulders. Another grabs his legs. A classroom assistant raises a cat-o’-nine-tails, ready to strike. So central was the experience of corporal punishment to the learning process that an expression for being too old for school was manum subducere ferulae—“to withdraw the hand from the cane.”

  The curriculum Hadrian settled down to study was narrow. The notion of a liberal education that catered to mind and body was little valued. Mathematics and science were not on the syllabus, nor music and the arts, with the sole exception of literature. Gymnastics and athletics were left to the holidays.

  There were, in essence, only two related subjects of study—literature and oratory—and two languages to be learned, Latin and Greek. Hadrian was introduced to the classics of both tongues, foremost of which were the two epics of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, composed by one or more oral poets in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. In Latin he studied masterpieces from the more recent past—the speeches of Marcus Tullius Cicero, “that genius, the only possession of Rome to rival her empire”; Horace; and Publius Vergilius Maro, or Virgil, author of the great national epic, the Aeneid, which celebrated Rome’s eternal empire, imperium sine fine.

  Scaurus and his assistants were not directly concerned with literary criticism, although they did expound the “moral” of every pass
age. Texts were examined in great detail and their meaning explained, their meter and syntax analyzed, as well as the tonal and rhythmic aspects of the spoken word. Hadrian and his fellow students were taught to read aloud with intelligence and feeling. They broke down, or parsed, sentences into their constituent elements—subject, verb, object, and so forth—and scanned verse through a tough system of question-and-answer.

  This could be dreary work, and the classes in oratory were much more fun. For centuries, the art of public speaking had been an essential skill for any upper-class Roman interested in a career as a politician and as an advocate in the courts. To get on in the world it was essential to be able to address large gatherings with confidence and to persuade listeners of the rightness of one’s point of view. Even under the empire, when election to office had largely been replaced by imperial designation, oratory was a highly valued art.

  Scaurus introduced Hadrian’s class to the foundations of rhetoric. Boys learned to retell legends and stories from Rome’s past in their own words. They took epigrams from the poets and developed them into arguments. A more complex task was to compose speeches around imaginary themes. These were either controversiae, exercises based on cases in a court of law, or suasoriae, the giving of advice at a public meeting.

  Pupils spoke on one side of a case or the other. The issue debated, of course, had less to do with the law than with resolving a moral dilemma. This was no accident, for the study of oratory was an essential part of a boy’s ethical molding. As Marcus Porcius Cato, called the Censor, a paradigm of Republican citizenship, observed in the second century B.C.: “An orator, son Marcus, is a good man good at speaking.”