Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

by Everitt, Anthony

  Hadrian now set off on a tour of the Peloponnese, taking Sabina with him. Wherever the imperial court went, ancient cities received the emperor’s largesse. Sometimes this was practical, at others extravagantly useless. Not far from the uninhabited ruins of Mycenae stood a great shrine to Hera, queen of the gods, at which Hadrian dedicated “a peacock in gold and glittering stones, because peacocks are considered to be Hera’s sacred birds.”

  In return, names were changed to honor the donor, statues were erected, and temples dedicated. The small town of Megara, for example, received the full force of the emperor’s benevolence; a brick temple was rebuilt in stone and a road widened to allow chariots to drive past each other in opposite directions. Grateful inscriptions hailed Hadrian as their “founder, lawgiver, benefactor, and patron,” and the empress was enrolled as a “New Demeter.” However, Megara remained an impoverished backwater. According to Pausanias, second-century author of a guidebook to Greece, “not even the emperor could make the Megarians thrive: they were his only failure in Greece.” This implies there was more to the emperor’s munificence than self-aggrandizement. It had a practical purpose—economic development.

  Hadrian visited the obvious tourist destinations—among them, austere Sparta, where boys were still whipped until the blood flowed to prove their bravery (and to entertain visitors), and Corinth, systematically devastated by the Romans in 146 B.C. and resettled by Julius Caesar.

  But at Mantinea, Hadrian’s personal feelings were engaged. On a plain four miles or so south of the town a great battle was fought in 362 B.C. between Thebes, then the leading power in Greece, and an allied army of other city-states. The brilliant and charismatic general Epaminondas led the Thebans and won the day. However, he and his eromenos, or beloved, were mortally wounded. They were buried at the roadside. A pillar with a shield on it engraved with a serpent, denoting his clan, marked the spot. Hadrian was touched by the fate of these tragic lovers and wrote a poem about them, which he inscribed on a memorial stone by the tomb (it has not survived).

  The walled city of Mantinea also had a special significance, being the reputed origin of the Greek settlers at Claudiopolis, Antinous’ birthplace. We do not know of the boy’s whereabouts at this time. However, more than a year had passed since they had (probably) first set eyes on each other. If Antinous did go to Rome for training at the Paedogogium, he would surely have graduated by now and been ready for service at court. If we speculate that the couple were together, princeps and pais will have enjoyed researching the latter’s family tree.

  Although there is not a jot of evidence, it is hard to believe that Hadrian failed to visit Xenophon’s farm near Olympia, thirty miles or so from Mantinea. When the Greek adventurer and huntsman Xenophon bought the estate he built a small temple to Artemis (the Greek Diana), for having helped to save him from the Persians, and he held an annual celebration in her honor. The goddess will have been delighted, for the hunting on his land was excellent. Nothing much had changed over the centuries. Hadrian encouraged Antinous to hunt, and here was ideal country, rich in game, for the young man to learn the art of the chase.

  The emperor made sure that he was back in Athens in time for the great theater festival of the Dionysia in March 125 (which he had first attended in 112). He presided as its agonothetes, or president, and made a good impression on the locals. Dio Cassius reports: “He wore local dress and carried it off brilliantly.”

  His hosts during his stay were the international Romanized super-rich. One of these had been Philopappus, whom Hadrian met during his first visit to the city, but he had died in 116. His sister, Balbilla, built a grandiose monument for him near the Acropolis, decorated with statues of Philopappus and his ancestors, kings of Commagene. Courtesy of Balbilla, Hadrian may well have billeted himself at the family town house or a villa in the countryside.

  Another successful Greek was Gaius Julius Eurycles Herculanus Lucius Vibullius Pius, to give him his complete nomenclature. He was of Spartan stock and descended from a Eurycles who had fought on Augustus’ side at Actium and had enthusiastically albeit fruitlessly chased after Antony and Cleopatra as they sped away by sail to Egypt and their doom. A Roman senator and former praetor, he was a senior member of the imperial elite. Plutarch knew him well and dedicated an essay to him (tongue in cheek?) entitled, “How to Praise Oneself Without Incurring Disapproval.”

  Hadrian was fond of the twenty-four-year-old Lucius Vibullius Hipparchus Tiberius Claudius Atticus Herodes Marathonios (Herodes Atticus, for short). He was an Athenian aristocrat, and fabulously wealthy. His grandfather was reputed to be the richest man in the Greek world. Both he and his son were generous patrons of the arts and architecture, and more than happy to cooperate with the emperor on the beautification of Athens.

  Self-interest mingled with the cordiality. Both sides, Romans and Greeks, were aware that there was latent hostility among provincials to the empire. Pliny, writing earlier in the century, warned a prospective governor of Achaea (the province of Greece) that tact was essential when dealing with the locals.

  Do not detract from anyone’s dignity, independence, or even pride … To rob [Athenians and Spartans] of the name and shadow of freedom, which is all that now remains to them, would be an act of cruelty, ignorance, and barbarism.

  But however discreetly the Roman rulers conducted themselves, the reality of Greek subordination was clear enough to the intelligent observer. Plutarch, who admired and liked Romans, argued that anyone entering public office should recognize this, but avoid unnecessary subservience. “Those who introduce the emperor’s opinion into every decree, committee debate, act of patronage, and administrative act, force emperors to have more power than they want.”

  Well, perhaps not in Hadrian’s case; it was in his nature to interfere and he loved to consume detail. But was he sensitive to the underlying Hellenic reservation? He was too intelligent not to recognize it, but he did not value it. As deeply as he respected Greek culture, he was not a sentimental naïf like Nero, who believed that he could free all the famous city-states and return to them their ancient liberties. That experiment had failed, and Hadrian had a different idea, which was not to liberate Greece from the empire but to make it equal to Rome inside the empire.

  There was nothing new in appointing men such as Philopappus and Eurycles to the Senate and other high positions in the government, but it was a growing trend that the emperor happily fostered. However, he wanted to do more than promote meritocrats. His extended stay in Athens witnessed an astonishing expenditure on new buildings. The result, which gradually became apparent during the years of construction, was the transformation of an ancient, slightly dusty “university town” into a new metropolis. Where Rome remained the center of government, Athens was to be the empire’s spiritual capital.

  Hadrian’s coup was to complete the enormous temple of Olympian Zeus, which stood about one third of a mile southeast of the Acropolis. The foundations had been laid as long ago as about 520 B.C., the original plan being to outdo the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the world. The project was soon abandoned and, although work on it briefly recommenced in the second century B.C., since then nothing had been done. Hadrian now brought matters to a successful, if extremely expensive, conclusion. In the temple, he installed a colossal sculpture of Olympian Zeus. The temple was enclosed by a marble-paved precinct filled with statues of Hadrian, each dedicated by a Greek city.

  Other developments included an aqueduct, a pantheon, a gymnasium, and, in Pausanias’ eyes best of all, a cultural center and library, which had a “hundred columns, walls and colonnades all made of Phrygian marble; and pavilions with gilded roofwork and alabaster.”

  A statue has survived, an official portrait of the emperor in ceremonial armor, which expresses in visual form Hadrian’s view of the relation between Athens and Rome. The breastplate shows in relief the goddess Athena, patron of Athens, being crowned by divine personifications of victory. She is standing on a
she-wolf suckling the baby boys Romulus and Remus—the traditional symbol of Rome. It is almost as if Rome were not the conqueror, but had itself been conquered.

  Hadrian cast himself as the unifier; after all, it was on his breastplate that images of the empire’s two cultures were brought together. As a boy he had incorporated in his own personality a passion for all things Hellenic and at the same time a deep admiration for the old-fashioned moral fiber of the Roman Republic. That balance he now applied, this time in political terms, to the empire of which he was the head.

  Four years had passed since Hadrian had last seen Rome, and it was time to go home. He needed to meet the Senate again and check that discontent was not simmering unseen. More excitingly, the villa complex at Tibur was, if not complete, ready for habitation. In the spring of 125 the emperor left Athens and set off northward to the Adriatic port of Dyrrachium (today’s Durrës, in Albania).

  En route he took the opportunity to explore central and western Greece. Once more he was the indefatigable tourist, calling in at Delphi, home of the classical world’s most celebrated oracle. The aged Plutarch served as high priest of the shrine and had dedicated a statue of the emperor; if he was still alive, Hadrian would have held discussions with him. In any case, he adjudicated a complicated dispute concerning the membership of the Amphictyonic League, an association of neighboring city-states, the aim of which was to protect and administer the temple of Apollo at Delphi, where the oracle was based.

  As usual, wherever he went, Hadrian busied himself with resolving long-standing local disagreements and deciding on development projects. The town of Coronea disputed grazing rights with its neighbor Thisbe and local tax dues with Orchomenus. The emperor made his judgments, but the vendettas outlived him, and were eventually to trouble his successor on the imperial throne.

  Whenever Hadrian’s emotions were captured, he wrote a poem to mark the event. His visit to Thespiae was such an occasion. This town in Boeotia was dedicated to sexual love, as personified by the boy god Eros, Aphrodite’s attractive, mischievous son. Every four years the Erotidia, a “very magnificent and splendid” festival of love, was held.

  The love most admired here was that between the erastes and his eromenos, but heterosexual romance was celebrated too. In his dialogue On Love, Plutarch tells the story, ostensibly a true one, of a merry widow at Thespiae who arranged the kidnap of a handsome ephebos and then married him—much to the annoyance of his male admirers. And Heracles was remembered at a sanctuary in his honor for sleeping with forty-nine women, all daughters of the same father, during a single night. A fiftieth daughter declined the honor, and the angry demigod sentenced her to be his virgin priestess for life. Her latest successor still managed the sanctuary.

  During his stay, the emperor went hunting on nearby Helicon, the most fertile mountain of Greece, writes Pausanias, where wild strawberry bushes offered delicious fruit for goats. This was the home of the Muses, and “the people who live there say that not a single herb or plant can harm human life; even the venom of snakes is weakened.”

  Animals were less fortunate: the emperor downed a bear and dedicated it to Eros, accompanied by a short poem in Greek. He asked the god:

  … be gracious, kindly receive

  the best parts of this bear from Hadrian,

  the one he killed with a blow from horseback.

  You, of your own accord, in recompense let grace be

  breathed soberly on him by Aphrodite Urania.

  How are we to interpret this prayer? Antinous is not mentioned by name, and, if he was absent, this may simply be a lonely emperor’s plea for love. But an alternative and more plausible hypothesis may be hazarded. “Urania” means heavenly or spiritual, so Hadrian was seeking the blessing of nonphysical love. On the assumption that Antinous was with him in Greece at this time, the emperor, as a responsible erastes, was seeking relief from sexual passion and its transcendence by something more honorable—a love that, as Plutarch puts it, leads “the soul from the world below to truth and the fields of truth, where full, pure, deceitless beauty dwells.”

  XXI

  HOME AND ABROAD

  As the darkness lightened and the stars went out, rosy-fingered dawn materialized, looking her most delightful. Although he was covered in black volcanic dust and exhausted, Hadrian’s spirits lifted as he gazed across from the summit of Mount Etna at the brightening horizon.

  He had decided on a long, risky night climb so that he could see the sunrise, which, according to the Historia Augusta (quoting doubtless from the emperor’s autobiography), was “many-colored, it is said, like a rainbow.” He had done exactly the same at Mount Casius in Syria, just before his accession, and his nocturnal ascent had culminated in a storm. He had nearly been struck by lightning. This time the danger was even greater, for he was ascending a live volcano.

  Etna stands about nine thousand feet above sea level, and the emperor and his party grew light-headed as they climbed and the oxygen thinned. They found their way up to the crater by torches. The mountain was restive; not long before, in 122, its entire crest had been blown off in a violent explosion. Ash, cinders, and volcanic blocks had fallen from the air for miles around and many roofs in the nearby town of Catania had collapsed.

  The countryside had not yet recovered, and the beautiful sunrise revealed desolation all around. It must have been much the same scene as after the eruption of Vesuvius, about which Hadrian had learned, horrified and fascinated, as a little child, with its evocation of the end of the world.

  Having sailed south from Dyrrachium, the emperor’s flotilla probably put in at the great harbor of Syracuse, which was not far from Etna. After his volcanic ascent and a brief inspection of western Sicily, he resumed his journey to Rome.

  The emperor’s arrival in the capital had been heralded by public prayers for his safety. Coins were struck celebrating his impending reditus. The bloodstained events of 117 still rankled, but it was now clear that he was no Domitian. While ruling decisively, he consistently acted as a princeps, a first among equals, not as a dominus. There had been no more executions of senior senators. The settlement between the supporters of the imperial regime and the Stoic opposition that Nerva had struck was holding firm.

  There was much building work for Hadrian to inspect. Best of all, the Pantheon was ready. An architectural masterpiece, it is one of the very few Roman buildings that has survived complete to the present day (in the guise of a Christian church). Approached from the front, the building has the appearance of a conventional temple, with three rows of columns supporting a pediment with a pitched roof. Visitors pass through bronze doors (the originals, although repaired in the sixteenth century) and find themselves in a round space surmounted by a great coffered dome, with a circular opening through which the sky can be seen. The exterior of the dome was covered in gold leaf.

  The Pantheon retained its dedication by the man who commissioned the original structure, Augustus’ friend and partner in rule, Agrippa. Hadrian had a rule of not having his name inscribed on buildings he commissioned; but he made one exception, the newly completed majestic temple of Trajan and Plotina, which he dedicated parentibus suis, to his adoptive father and mother.

  An even more tempting architectural treat awaited the emperor outside the city—the villa complex at Tibur. He intended to stay there for some time, and it cannot reasonably be doubted that Antinous was now living with him.

  A senator or ambassador summoned to Tibur to enjoy the emperor’s hospitality was driven in a carriage up a long hill from the plain below. To his left he looked across gardens to a stone theater and a circular temple of Venus. The road skirted a high, colonnaded terrace about 250 yards long; supporting it was a long multistory block of tiny rooms, quarters for the service staff—the cooks, cleaners, gardeners, engineers, builders—who made the villa function. It has been estimated that as many as two thousand people—slaves, servants, officials, and guests—could occupy the villa at any one time.

 
The distinguished visitor stepped down from his conveyance and walked up some steps into a large vestibule where there was a shrine to Hadrian’s beloved Matidia. He was guided to his quarters, or directly to a presence chamber, through a labyrinth of halls, banqueting suites, columned porticoes, baths, peristyles and atria, covered walkways and formal gardens.

  First impressions were overwhelming. The place was garishly multicolored. Public rooms were decorated with frescoes and marble of every hue, and bright mosaics covered their floors. A phrase on an inscription, which may have been Hadrian’s own words, speaks of “the Aelian villa with the colorful walls.” In niches or on plinths, indoors and out, everywhere there were groves of statues, all of them, as was the convention, painted in brilliant colors.

  Another, equally ubiquitous feature of the villa was water. It spurted, fell, or flowed in monumental fountains, ran along sluices, or stood still and glassy in rectangular pools. Martial spoke approvingly of rus in urbe, or the countryside in the town. The Romans had a pronounced taste for intermingling nature with urban artifice. In Hadrian’s villa, greenery was civilized by statuary and architecture set off by a touch of nature, of the wild. As much space was given over to gardens and fields as to buildings.

  The Historia Augusta reports that the emperor

  built his villa at Tibur in wonderful fashion, and actually gave to parts of it names of provinces and places there, and called them, for example, the Lyceum, the Academy, Prytaneum, Canopus, Poecile, and Tempe. So that he might omit nothing, he even made a Hades.

  In this memorial nomenclature, Hadrian was not original. For generations wealthy Romans had built country villas on much the same lavish principles as he applied to what he liked to call, modestly, his “house at Tibur.” They took pleasure in naming features after admired originals, usually Greek; so Cicero had his “Academy” a century and a half before Hadrian established his. The difference was one of scale and scope. Even Nero’s famous Domus Aurea, or Golden House, a luxuriant mix of town and country in the heart of Rome, occupied only between 100 and 200 acres to Hadrian’s 250 or more.