Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

by Everitt, Anthony

  Once the lands encircling the Mediterranean basin were in Roman hands, the same principle was applied. More and more men from the provinces with not a single Italian gene became citizens. This made the empire a shared enterprise in the success of which those who might otherwise have opposed an occupying power had a common interest. The custom was that a man took on the nomen of the distinguished Roman who had granted him citizenship. Thus a Corinthian who was the son of Laco and the grandson of Eurycles added Gaius Julius to his Greek names, implying enfranchisement by Julius Caesar or Augustus; Gaius Julius Severus was a proud “descendant of kings and tetrarchs” in the Middle East and went on to become a senior Roman official and governor of Achaea (mainland Greece). Nothing is more expressive of someone’s personal identity than how he or she is called, and the fact that throughout the empire everyone of any importance had a Latin name was a vivid assertion of Rome’s unifying authority.

  The long era of peace, the pax Romana, that Augustus had introduced after his victory over Antony and Cleopatra showed no sign of coming to an end a century later. We should not allow this to mislead us. The Romans were fundamentally belligerent. Since the Republic’s earliest days they had been more or less continuously at war. As has been seen, their politicians also acted as military leaders. To be Roman was to place a high value on individual valor and state violence.

  In theory the Senate condemned aggressive war, but it was usually not too difficult to devise a sufficiently plausible casus belli. And once they were in the field the legions obeyed few conventions. The remote Britannia offers a textbook example of imperial ruthlessness. The island was invaded and annexed in A.D. 43, but at the outset only England and parts of Wales fell under Roman control. Over the following decades, further campaigns led to the reduction of most of the island except for the far north. Although a patriot, Publius Cornelius Tacitus, an older contemporary of Hadrian and one of Rome’s greatest historians, could see an enemy’s point of view. In his biography of his father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, who campaigned in Britannia, he puts a passionate speech into the mouth of a Caledonian leader, Calgacus—so passionate that it must have reflected the historian’s real if not openly acknowledged feelings. It is an indictment of empire builders that rings true even today:

  Robbers of the world, [the Romans] have exhausted the land by their indiscriminate devastation, and now they ransack the sea … They are unique in being as violently tempted to attack the poor as the wealthy. Robbery, butchery, rapine, the liars call empire. They make a desolation and they call it peace [in Tacitus’s unforgettable Latin, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant].

  IV

  CRISIS OF EMPIRE

  The modern age opened for Hadrian a few years before his birth, with the emperor Nero and the catastrophe that engulfed him in A.D. 68. A revolt by provincial generals led to his suicide at the early age of thirty-two, and with that the dynasty founded by his great-great-grandfather Augustus came to an end. For most Romans Nero became a type of the bad emperor: he had murdered his mother, decimated the Senate, and been (mistakenly) accused of burning down his capital city. He displayed an unhealthy, an un-Roman obsession with poetry and the arts. Where was the austere virtus of his ancestors to be found?

  Among philhellenes, though, Nero was celebrated as a martyr and his memory stayed evergreen for many years. His biographer, Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, noted, “There were people who would lay spring and summer flowers on his grave for a long time, and had statues made of him, wearing his fringed toga, which they put up on the Speaker’s Platform in the Forum.” A well-known observer of the contemporary scene remarked: “Even now everyone wishes [Nero] to be alive, and most people think he really is.” Indeed, pretenders emerged in the Greek east to cause brief trouble from time to time.

  There was a straightforward explanation for this abiding popularity. Nero, who assumed the purple when he was only seventeen, had been as much of a Graeculus as Hadrian a generation later. As a boy he developed an interest in the arts, dashing off verses with facility; unusually, music was part of his childhood curriculum. The adult Nero aspired to be a great poet, musician, and performer. His aesthetic and sporting interests were essentially Hellenic: he drove a chariot at Olympia, the home of the Olympic Games, and he founded a Greek-style festival, the Neronia, in which musicians, orators, poets, and gymnasts competed for prizes. He visited Greece, where he took part in musical, literary, and dramatic contests.

  Nero once remarked: “The Greeks alone are worthy of my efforts; they really listen to music.” His enthusiasm was not entirely artistic, but had a political dimension. During his first of two Hellenic tours (probably in 67) he made the astonishing decision to liberate the province of Achaea—namely, mainland Greece up to Macedonia in the north.

  The emperor announced his decision in a clumsy and pretentious speech (we have its text because it was taken down verbatim and carved onto a marble stele). “Other leaders,” he said, “have liberated cities, only Nero a province.” Greek opinion was delighted, and one of his critics, praising with a faint damn, remarked that the decree earned Nero reincarnation as a singing frog rather than as a viper. However, the boasted liberation did not last, for a later emperor soon rescinded it.

  We do not know Hadrian’s opinion of Nero, but, when he came to learn the history of his times, he must have been sympathetic to this attempt to rehabilitate the culture of Greece and to place the descendants of Pericles and Plato on something approaching level terms with their Roman masters. When many years later he found an opportunity to advance the same cause, he did not hesitate to seize it.

  Two other significant events that took place in the years before Hadrian’s birth molded his world and had serious consequences both for him and his contemporaries. The first of these was a military crisis toward the end of Nero’s reign, which offered Hadrian food for thought as he looked back more than half a century later, with all the advantages of hindsight.

  In A.D. 66 Judaea rose in revolt against Rome.

  The Jews had long been the most awkward and annoyingly rebarbative of the conquered peoples, and the imperial authorities had never been certain how best to handle them, veering unpredictably between toleration and repression, ruling Judaea sometimes indirectly through a client king such as Herod the Great and sometimes directly as a province. Of an empire of about 60 million souls, a census conducted in A.D. 48 recorded some 6,944,000 Jews, not counting the many thousands still in Babylonian exile and living under Parthian rule. Perhaps 2.5 million lived in or around Judaea. Many had settled elsewhere in the empire, in Rome and especially in the eastern provinces; in an exodus in reverse, a million Jews lived in Egypt, and were a majority in two of the five districts of the city of Alexandria, second only to the imperial capital in economic importance and a learned center of Greek culture. At about 10 percent of the total subject population, they were numerous enough to create difficulties.

  Although many Jews of the diaspora were willing to Hellenize themselves like everyone else in the eastern half of the empire, serious obstacles stood in the way of integration. Believing as they did in one invisible God, Jews abjured the multitude of overlapping divinities in whom both their Roman masters and their Greek-speaking neighbors confided their trust. However, respectful of their religious scruples, the emperor intermittently forgave them the duty of sacrificing to his well-being, allowed them freedom of worship, and exempted them from military service. They had the right to send an annual tax to Jerusalem for the upkeep of the Temple, splendidly rebuilt by Herod the Great, and to coin money without the emperor’s head on it, or any other image.

  Toleration was not accompanied by tolerance. For most citizens of the empire monotheism was a kind of atheism. While grudgingly admiring their obduracy, both Roman and Greek despised and distrusted Jews. Tacitus exemplifies the general opinion, in which falsehood and fact, unexamined prejudice and sharp perception jostle. He knew about Moses and the escape from Egypt, noting drily that they proc
eeded to “seize a country [Canaan], expelling the former inhabitants,” an early case of ethnic cleansing.

  Critics usually failed to specify what was wrong with the Jews. Tacitus remarks that they abstained from pork, buried rather than burned their dead, and avoided sex with non-Jews. The worst he could come up with was the (entirely fictional, so far as we know) erection in a shrine of the statue of a donkey, which “had enabled them to put an end to their wandering.”

  There were, in fact, two real, underlying difficulties—one of which marked a collision with Roman imperialism and the other with Greek cultural values. Jews’ sense of themselves as the chosen people and the exclusiveness of their religious beliefs and practices led, among true believers, to an antagonistic nationalism, which prevented or at least hindered them from joining the Roman imperial enterprise.

  One of the abiding symbols of being a Greek was the gymnasium and the wrestling ground, or palaestra. Here men and boys stripped naked (the Greek word for naked was gumnos, whence gymnasium) and exercised themselves. They ran, jumped, and leaped, boxed or wrestled, as well as taking part in two-person tugs-of-war or, less energetically, playing ball games in a special building or covered court. While nudity was completely acceptable to Greeks, it was taboo to reveal the tip, or glans, of the penis, and for this reason they found circumcision to be repugnant.

  Gymnastics presented the Hellenizing Jew with a particular challenge. Since the beginning of their story, the Israelites stressed the importance of circumcision as a visible sign of the historic covenant with their sole and fiercely jealous God. According to the historian Josephus, Hellenizing Jews as long ago as the second century B.C. “hid the circumcision of their genitals, that even when they were naked they might appear to be Greeks. Accordingly, they left off all the customs that belonged to their own country, and imitated the practices of the other nations.”

  “Hiding” circumcision may have been essential, but it was painfully difficult. A Jew whose foreskin had been cut off in the first days of life had somehow to re-create it. This could be done by surgery. What was left of the prepuce was cut round with a scalpel; then the skin of the penis was pulled down as far as its base and then stretched back to cover the glans. The probability of inflammation and infection was high, and there was a nonsurgical alternative, albeit an equally unappealing procedure: weights could be attached to the skin of the penis to extend it over the glans.

  True believers remained fiercely opposed to any reform or compromise. It was said: “Cursed be the man that rears a pig and cursed be those who instruct their sons in Greek wisdom.” Paul Johnson sums up the position:

  The great Jewish revolts against Roman rule should be seen not just as risings by a colonised people, inspired by religious nationalism, but as a racial and cultural conflict between Jews and Greeks. The xenophobia and anti-Hellenism which was such a characteristic of Jewish literature … was fully reciprocated.

  No record exists of Hadrian’s attitude to Judaism, but we can be certain that, as a fully committed Hellenist, he felt nothing but scorn for this unruly community, the only one in the empire whose ideologues openly resented Roman rule and resisted the universal appeal of the Hellenic idea.

  Jerusalem was a marvelous sight. It was larger than today’s Old Jerusalem, with a population perhaps of 100,000. From a distance travelers were known to mistake the city for a snowcapped mountain peak, for it perched on two hilltops above which towered the Temple to the one true God with its walls of gleaming white marble. Gold and silver decorations flashed in the sunlight and on a bright day forced onlookers to avert their gaze.

  Built on an eminence extended by massive vaults, the Temple occupied a rectangular courtyard, thirty-five acres in area and a mile in circumference, and was lined with long, double-pillared colonnades in the Greek manner. In the center stood a tall building with turreted walls, which only Jews were allowed to enter. Here was a courtyard for women from which a flight of steps led through an arch into an area reserved for men, where they could witness sacrifices on a great altar. Beyond rose the Temple itself, a magnificent keeplike structure, one hundred feet high. Its façade was pierced by a great entranceway. Golden doors were shielded by a veil made from Babylonian tapestry of linen embroidered in blue, scarlet, and purple.

  Inside was the Holy Place. This large room contained three fine works of art—a seven-branched lampstand, a table, and an altar for burning incense. The seven lamps represented the planets; twelve loaves on the table the circle of the zodiac and of the year; thirteen fragrant spices for the altar signified that all things were of God and for God. A small, lightless inner recess, measuring fifteen feet square, was screened in the same way as the outer entrance by a veil. According to Josephus,

  In this stood nothing at all. Unapproachable, inviolable, invisible to all, this was called the Holy of Holy.

  The original Temple had been destroyed in the sixth century B.C. when the Jews were exiled to Babylon, but was rebuilt on their return. Augustus appointed to the throne of Judaea a Hellenizing client king, Herod the Great, who commissioned a wholesale reconstruction on a much enlarged scale. This was one of the great construction projects of antiquity, and only now in the 60s A.D. was the new Temple finally approaching completion.

  Judaea was an unhappy place at this time. The economy was weak and there were tensions between rich and poor. Political opinion was sharply divided and religious sects were at one another’s throats—among them the Sadducees, who monopolized the Temple management; the Pharisees, who were willing to render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s; and the ascetic Essenes, who believed that the end of the world was at hand and that Israel would be rescued from tyranny by a militant savior, or messiah.

  The province was small, and Rome sent out only the incompetent or (at best) the third-rate as junior governors, or procuratores. A dispute about the civic status of the town of Caesarea led to disturbances. Heavy-handed measures in an attempt to restore order only made the situation worse. In May or June the young captain of the Temple (a post junior only to that of the high priest) persuaded the authorities to halt the then regular sacrifices for the emperor’s well-being. Gang warfare between opposing factions broke out. Leaders of those wanting to avoid war with Rome were killed. The rebels seized city and Temple and a small Roman garrison was massacred.

  When the governor of the neighboring province of Syria heard the news of the revolt, he decided on a show of strength and marched down to Jerusalem with a sizable army. But after some indecisive skirmishing he saw that he did not have the resources to take the high-walled, well-defended city, and withdrew. The rebels harried his columns and a retreat became something approaching a rout.

  For the first time since the Babylonian captivity, Judaea was a free state.

  In Rome, Nero was nervous. The Jewish revolt had to be put down firmly, but whom should he appoint to accomplish this? He was fearful of his generals and provincial governors: the larger the number of legions they commanded and the greater the luster of their victories, the more he suspected them of designs on the throne.

  Nero found just the man he needed to recapture Judaea in Titus Flavius Vespasianus, or Vespasian. He had a number of useful qualifications. Most important of all, at fifty-eight he was approaching the end of a successful but not brilliant career. His family background was reassuringly humble and he would pose no political threat if victorious.

  By June 67 Vespasian was in Ptolemais (today’s Acre or Akko) at the head of three legions. One of them was commanded by his son Titus, a dashing and handsome twenty-eight-year-old. Another was led by Marcus Ulpius Traianus, the father of the man who was to become Hadrian’s guardian in twenty years’ time. Young Trajan was around fourteen at the time, and probably accompanied his father on the campaign.

  Vespasian proceeded south without undue speed toward Jerusalem, methodically capturing and securing every town and strongpoint in his way. A military incident from this time throws light on why the Spanish clan of the Ul
pii were doing so well in the slippery world of Roman politics. Traianus was dispatched with a thousand horse and two thousand foot to reduce the large fortified village of Japha. This was not only in a naturally strong position, but was protected by a recently erected double ring of walls.

  Luckily for Traianus, some of the inhabitants came out to offer battle, and the Romans charged and routed them. The rebels fled back into the first enclosure, closely pursued by Traianus’ legionaries, who followed them inside. In order to prevent a further break-in, the defenders in the inner enclosure closed the gates, but had to shut out not only the Romans but also their own people. A swarming, desperate crowd banged on the gates and begged the sentinels by name to let them back in. Cooped up and huddled together, they were butchered to the last man. Josephus reports that, abandoned by their friends, they did not even have the heart to resist.

  Traianus saw that Japha would soon fall, but instead of proceeding to an easy victory, he paused. He sent a message to Vespasian asking him to send his son to complete the siege. Titus arrived with reinforcements, and the place was captured in short order. Little wonder that father and son valued the services of a man who combined military expertise with the tact of a courtier.

  The course of the campaign in Judaea was halted by the second great event that shaped Hadrian’s age. It was an upheaval that shook every part of the empire. A new civil war broke out, imperiling the stability of the entire grand enterprise.

  Nero’s worst fears were eventually realized in 68. When some provincial governors rose against him, it was not merely he that was destroyed, but the dynasty too. If he had put up a fight, he might have won the day, but, too soon fearing the worst, he brought on the worst. Anathematized by the Senate and abandoned by all but a few followers, he fled. Suicide was his best option, but, although his pursuers were almost in sight, he could not bear to kill himself. He kept saying, “What an artist the world is losing!” Someone had to help Nero drive a dagger into his throat.