EPICTETUS: As you can a donkey. That is not governing men.
Govern us as rational beings by pointing out what is useful to us and we will follow you. Point out what is useless, and we will turn away from it.
Epictetus’ final remarks suggest that for him the ideal wielder of power was very much like a philosopher whose task was to guide human beings down the path of reason.
We can take it that Hadrian was aware of Epictetus’ political opinions. He may have attended a version of this lecture. Whether or not he agreed with everything he heard is immaterial; what matters is that Hadrian had an opportunity to meditate on the nature of government and to take seriously the concept of emperor as a philosopher-king.
After the short ride from Piraeus—or possibly walk, for he enjoyed exercise—Hadrian arrived at his destination. Once through the city gates, Hadrian found himself in a broad avenue, the Panathenaic Way; on either side were colonnades, with statues of famous men and women along their front, as the street passed through an industrial district, the Kerameikos, or Potters’ Quarter, and led into the Agora, or marketplace.
Originally a triangular square planted with plane trees, the Agora once had been bisected by a racetrack for athletes. For the rest of the year it had been populated with traders’ stalls. Here had been the beating heart of classical Athens. However, the Romans had arrived, with their passion for building. They constructed a new marketplace, the Roman Agora dedicated to Julius Caesar and Augustus, a large square courtyard surrounded by colonnades on all four sides, not dissimilar to a monastic cloister. And in the middle of the old Agora, Marcus Agrippa built a huge new multistory concert hall, which it completely dominated. It was a fine example of arrogance masked as generosity.
Hadrian was well aware that Athens had long lost its political importance, but it was a cultural center with a thriving intellectual life: a rough modern analogy would be Paris in the first half of the twentieth century. This was what appealed to him. Civic buildings also contained countless works of art. In the Propylaea, the grand (and still very beautiful) marble gateway up to the Acropolis, there was a picture galley. On every corner there were shrines, temples, statues, and altars. It was as if the city was a vast open-air museum celebrating the achievements of Greek civilization.
The rich and well connected did not expect to stay at the various inns and hostels that could be found in most cities. A local worthy—perhaps a friend or acquaintance—or government official would offer generous hospitality. The name of Hadrian’s host at Athens has not survived, but we can make a guess. One possibility is Gaius Julius Antiochus Epiphanes Philopappus. He was one of a breed of rootless multimillionaires in whom Greek, oriental, and Roman cultural attitudes mingled.
His name contains his history: “Gaius Julius” signifies Roman citizenship, but he was of Asiatic origin, being the grandson of Antiochus IV, the last king of Commagene, a region of ancient Armenia just to the east of Cilicia. Although one of the wealthiest of Rome’s tributary kings, Antiochus was not the most nimble of politicians. In 72 he wisely supported Vespasian when he made his bid for the purple and sent forces to help Titus during the siege of Jerusalem; but he was then found to be conspiring with Rome’s great enemy in the east, the Parthians.
The new emperor had no time for slippery loyalties and promptly deposed him. Antiochus withdrew to Sparta, once a great power and Athens’ rival but now a quiet tourist backwater. Then, presumably after mending some bridges with the Flavian regime, he settled in Rome, where he lived with his two sons and was generally regarded with great respect.
His grandson was evidently fond of him, for his cognomen Philopappus means “lover of his grandfather.” He spent most of his time in Athens, where he became an Athenian citizen and a member of the Besa deme, or district. A generous patron of the arts, he funded cultural and athletic events. Philopappus took care to keep his lines open to senior government officials; he became a Roman senator and was a suffect consul in 109.
This was a man who enjoyed living lavishly and prominently—as his other cognomen, Epiphanes, or “illustrious,” indicates. He became a celebrity in the modern sense of the word, famous for nothing in particular except for conspicuous expenditure. The Athenians nicknamed him King Philopappus. Hadrian became a good friend of his and Sabina made much of his sister, a poet and bluestocking, Balbilla. The siblings will have been of special interest to him, for magic had been a family tradition: two of their ancestors were celebrated astrologers, the onetime prefect of Egypt Tiberius Claudius Balbillus and his father, Thrasyllus of Mendes, who survived holding the dangerous post of official astrologer to the emperor Tiberius.
There had been no emergency—political, military, or personal—forcing Hadrian to take to sea during the perilous winter months, so we may assume that he traveled in late spring—say, from May onward. He was well received, for almost immediately the Athenians offered him citizenship, which he accepted without demur, and, as with Philopappus, made him a member of the Besa deme. They then awarded him their highest honor, appointing him archon, or chief magistrate: only a handful of leading Romans had been so distinguished, among them Domitian, who, with typical tactlessness, appointed himself by imperial fiat and held the post in absentia. The official year ran from summer to summer and Hadrian took office immediately.
The new archon was soon hard at work, helping to ensure that the Panathenaic Games of 112 were a success. Philopappus was doubtless on hand to offer support (we know he was interested, for at some stage in his career he was appointed agonothetes, or games producer). The games were held every four years in the year preceding an Olympiad, in the height of the summer. Both body and mind were tested to the extreme.
As well as athletic contests, competitors in poetry competitions spoke or chanted excerpts from the works of Homer. Musical contests—solo lyre and flute performances and singing to one’s own lyre or flute accompaniment—were held in one of the most curious of buildings. This was the Odeion, in the shadow of the Acropolis: a vast square structure with a roof supported by a forest of columns, it was a copy in stone and wood of the spectacular tent of the Persian king of kings, Xerxes, which he had had to abandon after his failed invasion of Greece in the early fifth century B.C.
Every year at the height of summer a great celebration, the Panathenaea, was staged in honor of the city’s tutelary goddess, Pallas Athene. Priestesses, official seamstresses, and four specially selected little girls made a new tunic, or peplos, to clothe an archaic statue of Athena, housed in the little temple on the Acropolis, the Erechtheum. A great procession gathered at the Dipylon Gate, as depicted in the Elgin or Parthenon Marbles. Charioteers, horsemen, musicians, elders, resident aliens, three sheep and a bull for sacrifice, and girls carrying bowls and jugs for libations walked through the Agora and up to the Acropolis, where the peplos was handed over. The brilliantly painted marble frieze high up on the outside walls of the temple’s sanctuary, or cella, showed the Olympian gods in benevolent attendance at the ceremony.
As archon, one of Hadrian’s first duties on taking office was to select two deputies and some administrators to plan the following March’s Great Dionysia. At this religious festival in honor of Dionysus, god of wine and ritual madness, patron of agriculture and theater, three days of drama were presented in the theater of Dionysus; built against the southern slopes of the Acropolis, this seated fifteen thousand to seventeen thousand spectators. Each day a playwright presented three tragedies, based on well-known legends, and a raucous farce, a so-called satyr play. Comedies and choric odes were also performed.
Originally all these were new works, but by Hadrian’s day audiences preferred revivals of masterpieces by authors such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Judges were elected by lot and awarded a prize of an ivy wreath to the producer of the best show, the choregos. Hadrian sat ex officio in the front row of the auditorium alongside the judges and other dignitaries.
If we may believe the Epitome de Caesaribus, he devoted e
very spare moment from his duties as archon to cultural pursuits (the author flatters, for Polycleitus and Euphranor were celebrated old masters).
He devoured the pursuits and customs of the Athenians, having mastered not merely rhetoric, but other disciplines too, the science of singing, of playing the harp, and of medicine: [he was] a musician, geometrician, painter, and a sculptor from bronze or marble who was next to Polycleitus and Euphranor [in artistry]. Indeed, like those things in a way, he, too, was refined, so that human affairs hardly ever seem to have experienced anything finer.
Now in his mid-thirties, Hadrian was in the prime of life. He was tall and very strongly built, but elegant in appearance, with carefully curled hair. According to Dio Cassius, he was “a pleasant man to meet and possessed a certain charm.”
His features were reasonably good-looking, with a strong nose, high cheeks, and puckered eyebrows. He looked about him with an alert, even suspicious gaze. Flatterers said that his eyes were “languishing, bright, piercing and full of light,” signs of a true Hellene and Ionian. One may suspect that this was exactly what Hadrian liked to hear (just as his revered Augustus prided himself on his clear, bright eyes). He had a way of compressing his mouth, with the lower lip projecting slightly forward. The overall impression he gave was of inquiry, decisiveness, and sharp, sometimes acid judgment. This was a self-confident man used to giving orders—but with few illusions that they would necessarily be carried out efficiently.
His face possessed one remarkable singularity. For centuries Romans of the ruling class had been clean-shaven (no painless task in the days before the invention of soap and tempered steel for razors)—that is, in civilian life, for they often let their beards grow when on military campaign, as the reliefs of Trajan’s Column clearly show. The fashion had been set at the beginning of the second century B.C. by Scipio Africanus, the charismatic young general who defeated Hannibal. The lower classes did not bother to follow suit. Romans had a way then as today of kissing each other socially, and Martial writes disgustedly of the “bristly farmer with a kiss like a billy-goat’s.” In the twilight of the Republic gilded young men sported goatees to irritate their elders; Cicero called them barbatuli (“beardy boys”), but the tradition of beardlessness persisted into the empire.
Hadrian decided to follow his own taste and grow a beard. The Historia Augusta claims that he wanted to cover some natural blemishes, but, if true, that will not have been his only motive. Doubtless he listened to Epictetus, who had something to say on the subject. He posed a question to his students: “Can anything be more useless than hairs on the chin?” and immediately replied to himself in the negative. Facial hair, he claimed, was nature’s sign for distinguishing men from women, and was more beautiful than a cock’s comb or a lion’s mane. “So we ought to preserve the signs which God has given. We ought not to throw them away. We ought not, so far as we can, confuse the sexes which have been distinguished in this way.”
By implication Epictetus was advising a Roman, not a Greek. This was because Greek adult males usually wore short, trimmed beards as a matter of course, and these were an easy means of ethnic identification. The new archon of Athens did not wish to appear as a smooth-skinned imperialist in a toga and, although we do not know when he gave up shaving, it is very plausible that he did so now—as a gesture of solidarity with the city that had given him so warm a welcome and as a visible sign of his Greekness.
These months in Athens were a high point in Hadrian’s life. He was a member of the Roman establishment and in no way did he resile from that; but, at least temporarily, he had become a leader of the culture he so greatly admired. He could imagine himself to be a true Hellene, an heir of Pericles and the great men of old.
After years of peace the thoughts of the optimus princeps were turning again to war. The enemy he had in mind was the Parthian empire. Onetime nomads from northeastern Iran, the Parthians defeated and expropriated the Seleucid empire, founded by Seleucus, one of Alexander the Great’s Macedonian officers. At its height their realm stretched from today’s Pakistan to the river Euphrates. Little is known in detail about them, for they left behind no written records, but they governed loosely, allowing a good degree of local autonomy to their vassal provinces. A coin issued by Chosroes, the present king, in about 110, hailed the ancestral founder of his dynasty as “Friend of the Greeks”; so it is evident that he had no wish to halt, reverse, or subvert the Hellenization of the Middle East.
The nobles were striking to look at. They always seemed to be on horseback, whether fighting or dining, traveling or relaxing. They wore long beards, used cosmetics, and elaborately styled their hair. Plutarch recalls how Roman soldiers were once thoroughly put out by the misleadingly effeminate appearance of an opposing Parthian commander with his “painted face and parted hair.” He was as fierce a fighter as they had ever met.
Although militarily they could be most effective, the Parthians were greatly weakened by their eccentric constitutional arrangements. The king of kings was an absolute ruler and had to be a member of the Arsacid clan; however, he was elected by two councils. One represented the nobility—in effect, the Arsacids and their cadet branches, in other words all his relatives—and the second was drawn from the Magi, or “wise men,” a priestly tribe responsible for religious and funerary arrangements. At any time, these committees could elect a new king. The succession was never undisputed and primogeniture often yielded to fratrigeniture, and a dispossessed elder son would contest his uncle’s throne.
It was hard to see, even at the time, why Trajan was meditating an expedition against the Parthians. He had demonstrated his soldierly prowess against the Dacians, but in that case had been responding to a real military threat. In general, he presented himself as a man of peace.
Arrian, a friend of Hadrian as we have seen and a competent public official and historian, was absolutely certain that Trajan, while mindful of the dignity of the empire, did all he could to avoid war with Parthia. Dio Cassius (albeit in a late summary) takes the opposite view: he is explicit that the emperor went to war on a pretext and that his true motive “was a desire to win glory.”
In the light of the fragmentary state of the surviving evidence, it is impossible to decide definitively between the two opinions, but there are enough clues to suggest that Dio was right.
In 112 the emperor celebrated fifteen years of power. On January 1 he entered on his sixth consulship and formally dedicated his magnificent new forum and basilica. Coins were issued featuring the emperor’s kindly wife, Plotina, and his much-loved sister, Marciana. For the first time each woman is named as Augusta, or “revered one.” Sadly, Marciana died in August; her brother arranged for her deification and promoted Matidia to Augusta. Sabina was now the grandaughter of a Diva and the daughter of an Augusta.
Festive coin types in the same mintage celebrate Trajan’s father, onetime holder of triumphal honors, ornamenta triumphalia, over the Parthians when he governed Syria, and deified by his son. Another shows Trajan himself with the curious legend “May fortune return him safely,” fort[una] red[ux]. This signified that the emperor was planning a profectio, an imperial expedition, of some kind; combined with a tribute to the last Roman to have beaten the Parthians, it could be interpeted by the Roman equivalent of Kremlinologists as a hint that battle was to recommence. Other coins of the period have a markedly martial flavor—with images of Mars, the god of war, of the emperor on horseback trampling on his fallen enemies, and of legionary eagles and standards.
The Historia Augusta remarks, but infuriatingly fails to date the event precisely, that Hadrian was appointed legatus to the emperor “at the time of the Parthian expedition.” Dio reports that he “had been assigned to Syria for the Parthian war.” This may mean that he traveled on from Athens sometime during 113 to Syria, the province that shares a frontier with the Parthian empire, and began to assemble an invasion army. In that case it would seem likely that he received the emperor’s confidential instructions before
setting off for Greece in early 112, and made preliminary preparations during his stay there.
So such particular evidence as there is suggests a long-planned intention only awaiting an opportunity. More generally, though, there was a traditional pattern in the relations between the two powers. The Parthians were usually too preoccupied with their internecine court politics to plot aggressive war; and their statesmen must have recognized that their system of governance would not readily permit them to manage a larger territory. However, from the perspective of a Roman general ambitious for glory (for example, Crassus, Julius Caesar, and Mark Antony), they were a tempting if often indigestible prey. It is reasonable to regard Trajan as the inheritor of this tradition.
The longed-for casus belli eventually presented itself in Armenia, a bone of contention for more than a century. Both parties saw the kingdom as falling within their legitimate sphere of interest. Long ago Augustus had negotiated a face-saving arrangement, confirmed by Nero: the Parthians nominated a Parthian prince to the throne of Armenia, but the Romans confirmed the choice and conducted a coronation in Rome. By and large this double-lock system had assured an uneasy but durable stalemate.
For some years, though, Parthia had been divided by two rival kings. During the second half of 113, the leading contender for the throne, Chosroes, self-confidently deposed the Armenian ruler, a nephew of his, and replaced him with the king’s older brother, a certain Parthamasiris. Nothing particularly unusual here—except that Chosroes foolishly failed to consult Trajan. This certainly meant a loss of face for Rome, but no fundamental imperial interest was at risk. A rational response would have been to follow in Augustus’ footsteps and send out a high official (say, Hadrian) to negotiate an acceptable settlement.
Trajan made it clear, though, that negotiation was the last thing on his mind. Public opinion was enthusiastically behind him and, amici cheering crowds, he set out from Rome for the east, accompanied (according to a late source) by a “large force of soldiers and senators.” He probably chose for his departure the date of his adoption by Nerva, October 25. Chosroes panicked and sent an embassy, which met the emperor at Athens; it presented gifts and begged Trajan not to make war on him. Trying to make up for his earlier mistake, the king of kings asked that Armenia be given to Parthamasiris and requested that Rome send him the royal diadem as a token of endorsement. He had deposed his nephew, he claimed, for being “satisfactory neither to the Romans nor to the Parthians.”
Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome Page 18
