Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

by Everitt, Anthony

  The gesture seems to have been appreciated. He received the Senate’s reply a few weeks later, in September. They had voted unanimously to deify the optimus princeps and added numerous other honors. So far as Hadrian was concerned, they offered him the high title of pater patriae, father of the people. He declined, taking Augustus’ view that this was one honor that had to be earned; he would defer acceptance until he had some real achievements to his credit.

  He was also awarded a Triumph—to mark Trajan’s victories. He declined the offer, but because the pretense of success had to be preserved, Hadrian authorized one for the late princeps. Instead of the man himself, an effigy would, unusually, preside over the celebrations and ride in the triumphal chariot.

  Coins were quickly issued to disseminate an image of benevolent continuity. One gold piece showed Trajan handing a globe to Hadrian, signifying the transfer of the rulership of the world. In another appears the image of the phoenix, the wonder bird of Egyptian legend. When it dies it burns itself on a pyre and from its ashes its successor arises, which then buries its parent’s remains. The phoenix was an image of continual renewal—and Hadrian the new link in an eternal chain. A third coin from early in the reign reprises the phoenix theme, adding the more ambitious claim that the “Golden Age” had returned.

  The dowager empress and Hadrian’s mother-in-law, Matidia, received a due reward in the coinage; they share a splendidly preserved aureus (in the British Museum’s collection) in which a bust of Plotina is partnered by one of Matidia. The message was clear: Trajan’s women were going to remain key members of the imperial household.

  Perhaps the most remarkable is a coin with two obverses—that is, one side carries a head of Trajan and the other of Hadrian, both laureled. What was unprecedented was the latter’s short-cut beard. Those who met him from day to day were familiar with this artful innovation; as he well knew, in civilian dress it made him look like a Greek, and when wearing armor, like a down-to-earth soldier. Until his accession, emperors’ faces, whether in statuary or on coins, had been clean-shaven. Now the fashion changed: men in every corner of the empire looked at their money and discarded their razors.

  The elderly Attianus was fiercely protective of his onetime ward and wrote to him from Selinus warning of enemies who would do their best to ensure that the new reign was stillborn. In its abbreviating manner, the Historia Augusta provides a less-than-helpful précis:

  [He] advised him by letter in the first few days of his rule to put to death [Quintus] Baebius Macer, the prefect of the city, in case he opposed his elevation to power, also [Manius] Laberius Maximus, then in exile on an island under suspicion of designs on the throne, and likewise [Caius Calpurnius] Crassus Frugi [Licinianus].

  Laberius carried substantial political weight. A senior figure, he made his name under Domitian and had distinguished himself in Trajan’s Dacian wars. He was that increasingly rare thing in a multicultural court, an Italian, and more than that—a true Latin from Lanuvium, an ancient city near Rome in the Alban Hills. Nothing is known of his plotting, but he may have been implicated in the disgraces of Palma and Celsus. Also a banished man, Crassus labored under the dangerous disadvantage of an ancient aristocratic name. He appears to have been a serial conspirator, against Nerva as well as Trajan.

  Emperors often removed favorites or relatives who had fallen from grace to one or other of the many tiny islands that lie off the Italian coast. Expelled from the Senate, these isolated and impotent captives seldom returned to public life. Why Attianus should have particularly feared this pair is unclear; as guard prefect in attendance on the emperor he would have seen secret reports on suspicious activity by dissidents, but perhaps he was being overcautious.

  Baebius Macer was a different matter. He was praefectus urbi, prefect of the city of Rome; a combination of chief of police and mayor, the praefectus was responsible for law and order and had jurisdiction in criminal matters. He was of a scholarly disposition and a stickler for what he saw to be right. He was not only in a powerful position, but was likely to take a dim view of any constitutional irregularities as a new regime tried to establish its authority. Attianus had reason to fear a man without the moral flexibility for which the times called.

  Hadrian disagreed. Whatever the guilt or innocence of those accused, this was not the moment for a ruler who had not yet established himself to put senior politicians to death. It was too soon to judge loyalties, and he turned down Attianus’ request. To make his position clear publicly, he wrote again to the Senate. Among many high-minded sentiments,

  he swore that he would do nothing against the public interest, nor would he put to death any senator, and he invoked destruction on himself if he should violate these promises in any way.

  The prefect complied with the emperor’s decision—or at least gave the appearance of doing so. Crassus unwisely left his island, so the official story went, and his keeper had him put to death. The emperor’s writ did not yet run reliably.

  Plotina and Matidia, accompanied by Attianus, boarded ship with Trajan’s body and set sail to Antioch and the new emperor. Hadrian went out to meet them, probably at Seleucia, and viewed the remains. These were then cremated and the imperial party took ship for Rome. They carried the ashes with them and eventually they were laid to rest in the small burial chamber at the foot of Trajan’s Column.

  As autumn set in, embassies began arriving at Antioch bearing letters of congratulations from municipalities across the empire. Each needed a written answer, which would be taken home and proudly reproduced in stone in every main square. The princeps wrote, in formulaic mode, to the Youth Association of Pergamum:

  Noting from your letter, and through the ambassador Claudius Cyrus, the great joy you openly feel in our succession, I consider such sentiments to be indicative of good men. Farewell.

  Celebrations were staged all over the Roman world, some of them elaborate. But in Antioch, merrymaking was the last thing on Hadrian’s agenda. Fresh and insecure on the throne, he impulsively had the Castalian springs in the pleasure gardens of Daphne blocked up with a huge mass of stone; he did not want anyone else to receive the same message from the oracular waters that he had.

  The empire was breaking up. Everywhere the enemies of Rome could not resist exploiting the tempting coincidence of an imperial military setback and an imperial death. The Historia Augusta summed up the situation:

  The nations that Trajan had conquered began to revolt; the Moors, too, were on the attack, and the Sarmatians were waging war, the Britons were running out of Roman control, Egypt was hard pressed by riots, and finally Libya and Palestine were showing the spirit of rebellion.

  Within a few days of assuming power, the emperor took the two most important, and bitterly controversial, decisions of his entire reign. One of them was tactical and the other strategic. Neither was improvised, but must have been the product of hard thought.

  Long imperial frontiers required a large standing army, and paying for this was extremely expensive, and new provinces meant new garrisons. The army was the state’s largest single cost. There was also a limit to the available manpower that could be safely withdrawn from economically productive activity. The technology of warfare, the logistical difficulty of maintaining extended supply chains, and the slowness of long-range communications placed limits on the size of territory that a central government would find manageable. It is true that Rome ruled with a light touch and expected local elites to manage the day-to-day affairs of provincial towns and cities. However, government business seems to have grown inexorably.

  In addition, it was not at all obvious that the benefits, the profits, that would accrue from new conquests would make the effort entailed worthwhile, at least in the medium term. Much of the land contiguous with the empire was ecologically marginal and, with the exception of the Parthian and Dacian empires, economically unrewarding—neither worth the trouble of annexing nor the expense of administering. What, one might ask, would be the point of taking o
ver little-populated Scotland?

  The historian Appian, who lived through the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian, made the point well.

  The Romans have aimed to preserve their empire by the exercise of prudence rather than extend their dominion indefinitely over poverty-stricken and profitless tribes of barbarians.

  Emperors, needing to balance their books, settled for the minimum military establishment consistent with safety. They felt they could not afford a mobile reserve ready to meet crises as and when they occurred. (Such a reserve, when unemployed, would also present them with a potential threat to their own power.)

  This parsimony had two main consequences. First, any military defeat would create a hole in the empire’s defenses that would be difficult to plug—as Augustus had found when three legions were destroyed on the Rhine frontier in A.D. 9. Domitian had been forced to withdraw troops from Britannia to meet trouble in Dacia. Second, aggressive war, even when victorious, was just as dangerous to imperial stability. Trajan had raised additional legions during his Dacian campaigns (bringing the total establishment up to thirty); however, for his Parthian expedition, he still had to order legions from Pannonia to join him in the east, imperiling the Danube frontier. Once the expedition had been seen to fail, enemies of Rome on every side had seized the opportunity for rebellion. In fact, just to maintain the status quo was almost too much for the legions.

  So military and financial reality argued against further enlargement of the empire. Intermittently, emperors recognized this. Augustus, who had been an out-and-out expansionist for most of his career, advised his successor, Tiberius, to stay within existing frontiers. Tacitus’ Annals, a savage but authoritative study of the early empire, had recently appeared (perhaps published between 115 and 117, but possibly some years later). He reports that the aged Augustus produced a list of the empire’s military resources very near the end of his life; the document was “all catalogued by Augustus in his own hand, with a final clause … advising the restriction of the empire within its present frontiers.” Hadrian may well have seen a copy of, even read, the historian’s masterpiece. In any event, he must have known of the policy. The first princeps being a man whom he greatly admired, he accepted his century-old advice without hesitation. Beneath the rhetoric of attack, Domitian, too, seems to have recognized the dangers of endless advance.

  It was against this background that Hadrian issued orders to immediately abandon his predecessor’s three new provinces—Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Assyria—and to regroup permanently behind Rome’s traditional border, the Euphrates. Although this decision came as a great shock, it is evident that the dying Trajan, the aggressive warrior, had himself realized that a pull-back was inevitable. Hadrian deposed Trajan’s puppet king, and as a polite compensation installed him in Osrhoene, from which Abgarus and son had been ejected. The emperor explained his decision by quoting from one of his favorite old Roman authors—Cato the Censor. In 167 B.C. Rome defeated the Macedonians with some difficulty and the Senate was considering what it should do about them. Cato pronounced: “Because it is impossible to keep them under our care, they will have to be left independent.”

  The emperor also meant to abandon Dacia, for the conquest of which many Roman lives had been sacrificed, but he was persuaded to reconsider. The original population had been killed or dispersed and their place taken by immigrants from the Roman empire. It would be unacceptable to hand them over to the untender mercies of their barbarian neighbors.

  Hadrian went much further than pulling out of Parthia. So far as we know no formal announcement was made; it was unnecessary, and would have been incautious, to do so. However, a new long-term strategy can be inferred from his pacific behavior throughout the rest of the reign: Rome was to abjure military expansion of any kind in the future. Negotiation was to replace ultimatum. Trajan’s eastern adventure had been the last straw, showing that while it was possible to project military power temporarily beyond the frontiers of the empire, it was difficult to preserve territorial gains.

  The withdrawals are evidence of Hadrian’s clear-sightedness and political courage, but they deeply angered many senior personalities. Opinion in Italy had fed on a diet of victories and as yet had no clear idea that Parthia had not, after all, been conquered. And even though Trajan’s failure was common knowledge in leading circles, the ethos of aggression was too ingrained to accept that the days of imperium sine fine were over.

  A contemporary observer summed up the conventional view. Publius Annius Florus was a poet and rhetorician from northern Africa and the author of a brief sketch for schoolboys of Roman history, largely drawn from Livy. In it he compares Rome to a human individual as it grows up, reaches maturity, and subsequently attains old age. So he identifies childhood with the rule of kings, the conquest of Italy with its youth, and manhood with the late Republic.

  From the time of Caesar Augustus down to our own age there has been a period of not much less than two hundred years, during which, owing to the inactivity of the emperors, the Roman people, as it were, grew old and lost its potency, save that under the rule of Trajan it again stirred its arms and, contrary to general expectation, again renewed its vigor—with youth, as it were, restored.

  And now the next princeps was reverting to the unacceptable and passive norm, or so the elites angrily regarded his actions. As often happens, military adventures abroad lend stability and popularity to governments at home—provided that they bring victory. Lack of success in this regard helped seal the fate of Domitian. Would it do the same for Hadrian?

  The emperor was too busy for hypothetical questions. The indispensable Marcius Turbo was bringing the Jewish revolt to a victorious conclusion in Egypt and Cyrene. But now the Greek community in Alexandria started rioting against the defeated Jews.

  The emperor replaced Trajan’s governor with a more competent and energetic figure, Quintus Rammius Martialis. It says much for his rapid decisiveness that Rammius was in his post on or before August 25, just over a fortnight since the news of Trajan’s death had reached Antioch.

  Hadrian himself probably paid a quick visit to Egypt. There was great economic distress in the country, and he rapidly produced generous and carefully thought-out measures that provided tax relief for tenant farmers. From now on assessments would be made on the actual agricultural yield rather than land value (the tributum soli). It was far more in character for him to investigate this situation directly, rather than rely at a distance on the recommendations of advisers.

  It would have been too provocative to visit Alexandria, but he sent a Greek intellectual in his service who was known for his shrewdness and sharpness of wit, Valerius Eudaemon, as procurator, or financial director, for the city’s local administration; his task was to be the emperor’s eyes and ears.

  Somewhere in Egypt—perhaps the border town of Pelusium or Heliopolis, at the southern head of the Nile delta—Hadrian presided over the trial, or at least some kind of official inquiry or hearing, of some hotheaded Alexandrian Greeks, led by a spokesman called Paul. A Jewish delegation was also present. From the reported proceedings it is possible to suppose the following savage sequence of events. After the failure of the Jewish revolt, many Jews were imprisoned and the triumphant Greeks put on a satirical stage show lampooning the rebel “king,” Lukuas. Some of them sang songs criticizing the emperor for deciding to resettle Jewish survivors of the revolt in an area of the city from which they could easily launch new attacks on the native population.

  The irritated governor (Rammius’ predecessor) ordered the Greeks to produce their “opera-bouffe monarch.” Unfortunately this “bringing forth” also brought many Greek rioters onto the streets. A Jewish witness asserted an unprovoked attack on a defeated community. “They dragged us out of prison and wounded us.” Charges and countercharges followed. The Jews said of the Greeks: “Sire, they lie.”

  Hadrian was inclined to agree. He told the Greeks that the prefect was right to ban the carrying of weapons and that he disapproved
of the satire on Lukuas. He advised the Jews to restrict their hatred to their actual persecutors and not to loathe all Alexandrian Greeks indiscriminately. This evenhanded treatment came as a pleasant surprise to the defeated insurgents.

  At about the same time Hadrian dismissed the governor of Judaea. This was Trajan’s mysterious and ferocious favorite, Lusius Quietus, who was also removed from command of his Moorish cavalry. According to the Historia Augusta, “he had fallen under suspicion of having designs on the throne,” but this was an unlikely ambition for a tribal chieftain now an old man. More probably, he was feared as a potential “kingmaker” for a serious rival to Hadrian.

  Lusius had been sent to Judaea to help suppress the Jewish revolt, for the Jewish community there had recovered, at least partially, from the destruction wrought by the Romans almost fifty years previously. He came to the task fresh from butchering the Jews in Mesopotamia, and his removal delighted the diaspora.

  Hadrian was rewarded. In some anti-Roman oracular verses, originating among the Jews of Alexandria and widely read in the eastern Mediterranean, an emperor received a rare compliment.

  And after him shall rule

  Another man, with silver helmet decked;

  And unto him shall be the name of a sea;

  And he shall be a man the best of all

  And in all things discreet.