“If you and your children are in health” Dio 69 14 3.
“sent against [the Jews] his best generals” Ibid., 13 2.
Severus was not in overall command Regarding the Roman response I follow Eck.
“the First Year of the Redemption of Israel” For example, Sherk 151 E.
“Soumaios to Ionathes, son of Baianos” Ibid., 151 C.
“Shim’on Bar Kosiba” Yadin Bar-K, p. 128.
“And if you shall not send them” Ibid., p. 126.
“In the present war it is only the Christians” Justin First Apol 31 5–6.
“Barcocheba, leader of a party of the Jews” Jer Chron p. 283.
prophecy that the Messiah breathed fire 4 Ezra 13 9–11.
“fanning a lighted blade of straw” Jer Contra Ruf.
“When military aid had been sent him” Euseb Ch Hist 461.
“I am honored” See Birley, p. 273.
“he would catch missiles” Midrash Rabbah Lamentations 24.
“In comfort you sit, eat, and drink” Yadin Bar-K, p. 133.
Well-to-do families Jer In Esaiam 2 12 17.
A fragmentary letter evokes the despair Yadin Bar-K, p. 139.
“the rebels were driven to final destruction” Euseb Ch Hist 463.
Bar Kokhba’s head was taken to Hadrian According to Midrash Rabbah Lamentations 2 2–4.
forbidden to enter the district around Jerusalem Euseb Ch Hist 464.
still in place more than a century later Jer In Esaiam 129.
a marble sow was erected Jer Chron p. 283.
“May his bones rot!” For example, Midrash Rabbah Genesis 78 1.
XXIV. NO MORE JOKES
Chief literary sources—Historia Augusta and Dio Cassius
the fullest record of the Roman army in the field Arr Alan.
Other coins from this time BMC III p. 325f, p. 329.
“allowed to dispense with attendance at schools” Marc Aur 1 4.
“not to side with the Greens or the Blues” Ibid., 1 5.
“set my heart on the pallet bed” Ibid., 1 6.
“not to give credence to the claims of miracle-mongers” Ibid.
a bust of him in his teens MC279 Musei Capitolini, Rome.
“get back to your drawing exercises” Dio 69 4 2. Literally, “get back to drawing your gourds.” These were plants like pumpkins or squash and resembled domes being built at the time.
“ought to have been built on high ground” Ibid., 4 4–5.
the emperor’s huge mausoleum For a fuller description see Opper, pp. 208f.
The text on the obelisk See H. Meyer, Der Obelisk des Antinoos: Eine kommentierte Edition, Munich, 1994.
A portrait study from … Diktynna in Crete The bust is in the Archaeological Museum of Chania, Crete. See illustration in photo section.
an innate cruelty Dio 69 18 3.
He now held him “in the greatest abhorrence” HA Hadr 23 4.
“he spent the entire day” Dio 18 1–2.
Turbo was removed It is conceivable that he was somehow caught up in the Pedanius Fuscus plot—see below.
The Historia Augusta asserts The Life of Aelius is largely fiction, but the details quoted in this paragraph are plausible: see HA Ael 5 3 and 9.
“his sole recommendation was his beauty” HA Hadr 23 10.
“not discreditable but somewhat unfocused” HA Ael 5 3.
their love for each other Fronto, On Love, 5; Marc Aur to Fronto 1, Epist Graecae 7.
he staged a coup It is possible that Pedanius acted before the public announcement of the adoption: that is the order of events in the Historia Augusta.
“the degrees of the Horoscopos” CCAG No. L 76, 90–91.
“of an illustrious family” Sherk 159.
instructed to commit suicide HA Hadr 23 8. 313 “he gave a feast for slaves” Ibid., 8–9.
“That I have done nothing wrong” Dio 69 17 2.
“many others” HA Hadr 23.
“many from the Senate” Epit de Caes 14 9.
A late source reports that “his wife, Sabina” Ibid., 14 8.
Her apotheosis Smallwood 145 b.
a rumor that he poisoned her HA Hadr 23 9.
“His enthusiasm for philosophy” HA Marc 4 9–10.
he had by no means been a failure HA Ael 3 6.
“universal opposition” HA Hadr 23 11.
“My friends, I have not been permitted” Dio 69 20 2.
“with the dignity of a bygone age” Pliny Ep 431.
bad dreams HA Hadr 26 10.
affairs of state Ibid., 24 11.
“charms and magic rituals” Dio 69 22 1.
congestive … heart disease The suggestion that diagonal creases in earlobes, as seen in some portrait busts of Hadrian, are an indicator of heart disease (e.g., see Opper pp. 57–59) is now discounted by cardiac specialists, according to Philip Hayward (see Acknowledgments).
“partly by threatening him” Dio 69 22 2.
He now drew up a will HA Hadr 24 12–13.
a suicide watch Ep de Caes 14 12.
“I want you to know” Smallwood 123.
owing more to Hadrian’s favorite, Ennius Lines 3–4 in Hadrian’s poem recalls Ennius’ evocation of the underworld as “pallida leto, nubila tenebris loca.”
animula vagula blandula HA Hadr 25 9.
“Many doctors killed a king” Dio 69 22 4.
XXV. PEACE AND WAR
“mixed justice with kindheartedness” Smallwood 454b 7–8.
“Hadrian was hated by the people” Dio 69 23 2.
“The following words, it seems to me” Arr Tact 44 3.
T. Bergk Terpander, Poetae Lyrici Graeci, 4th ed., Leipzig, iii 12 frag 6.
The army … the arts … and holy justice I owe this elegant observation to Alexander, p. 175.
“in the gardens of Domitia” HA Ant 5 1. HA is confusing, for elsewhere it claims that Antoninus “built a temple for [Hadrian] at Puteoli instead of a tomb” (HA Hadr 27 3). Why would he have commissioned a new building, with the mausoleum at Rome nearing completion? Perhaps the allusion is to a temple in Hadrian’s honor.
The consecration ceremony See Opper, pp. 209–10; Suet Aug 100 for Augustus’ apotheosis; Dio 75 4–5 and Herodian 4 2 for two later emperors, Pertinax and Septimius Severus.
omnium curiositatum explorator Tert Apol 5.
“diverse, manifold, and multiform” Ep de Caes 14 6.
“Do not be upset” Marc Aur 8 5.
“I wished to appease and propitiate” Fronto ad M Caes 2 1.
“saw Hadrian to his grave” Marc Aur 8 25.
Chabrias and Diotimus Ibid., 8 37.
“Even today the methods” Dio 69 9 4.
“The sea is not a hindrance” Ael Arist Rom 59–60.
“immeasurable majesty of the Roman peace” Pliny NH 27 3.
“Wars, if they once occurred” Ael Arist Rom 70.
“He can stay quietly where he is” Ibid., 33.
SOURCES
ANCIENT HISTORY
The prime challenge facing the biographer of Hadrian is the inadequacy of the leading literary sources.
The first of these is the Historia Augusta, an abbreviation of its traditional title, “The Lives of Various Emperors and Tyrants from the Deified Hadrian to Numerianus, Composed by Various Hands.” The names of six authors are listed, and a number of references suggest that the book was written in the early fourth century after the abdication of Diocletian and before the death of Constantius. However, other allusions and anachronisms do not fit with this dating.
The mystery was solved by a German scholar in the nineteenth century who convincingly argued that in fact the book was the product of one writer only, and had been written nearly a century later than previously thought, toward the end of the fourth century.
The strangeness of the Historia Augusta does not cease with its authorship. The text itself is mendacious, mixing historical fact with fantasy and citing bogus sources. Fortunately, the
life of Hadrian, the first in the series, is more or less free of base matter, although the same cannot be said of the brief account of his adopted son, Aelius Caesar—and indeed of many of the later lives.
We will never know who wrote the Historia Augusta, and what he was thinking of when he did. Maybe he was a hoaxer, sharing some kind of private joke with a coterie of friends.
Although the life of Hadrian does not include much fantasy, it is poor-quality history. Written in the manner of Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars, it is clumsily put together and dully written. It is sometimes difficult to disentangle the order or dating of events, and incidents are described with obscure brevity.
All of that allowed, the Historia Augusta contains much useful information, often confirming and usually being consistent with evidence from other sources.
By contrast, the Roman History of Dio Cassius is a serious, if uninspired, work. A leading imperial politician who flourished around the turn of the third century, a onetime consul and provincial governor, Dio wrote a history of Rome in eighty volumes, beginning with the Trojan prince Aeneas’ landfall in Latium after the fall of Troy and ending with the year A.D. 229. The difficulty in his case is that much of the narrative, including everything concerning the events of Hadrian’s lifetime, survives only in fragments and an inadequate summary by an eleventh-century monk, John Xiphilinus.
Two fourth-century texts, one attributed to Aurelius Victor and the other by an unknown hand, offer minibiographies of emperors, each the length of a substantial paragraph—helpful if handled with care. Bits and pieces can be gleaned from Christian writers such as Jerome and Eusebius, especially on Christian and Jewish matters.
Invisible in the shadows stand two lost books that underpin much of what has survived. These are Hadrian’s own autobiography, written in the last months of his life, and The Caesars (Caesares), a continuation of Suetonius by Marius Maximus; like Dio a leading senator of the Severan dynasty, he wrote in the early years of the third century. His quality as a historian is debated, but he was a substantial author and, it is supposed, influenced both Dio and the Historia Augusta.
Of Hadrian’s contemporaries, few writers have anything to say explicitly about him; however, they fill in much of the background to his life and times. He lived out his childhood and teen years under the Flavian dynasty, covered by Suetonius’ lives of Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian. The invaluable correspondence of Pliny the Younger, a senator of moderate views connected to the Stoic opposition, shows how Nerva and Trajan arrived at a concordat with Rome’s estranged ruling class—a concordat that Hadrian as emperor endorsed, but placed under severe strain.
The Histories, by the great historian Tacitus, deals with the period from the fall of Nero and the Year of the Four Emperors up to the death of Domitian. Only the first four books and part of the fifth survive; this is fortunate, for they describe Rome’s most serious crisis since the civil wars of the first century B.C.; it haunted imperial politics for many years afterward, and avoiding a repetition was a preoccupation of the ruling class. Tacitus’ Agricola is useful for observations on Domitian; taken with the Germania, it also reveals much of Roman attitudes to the tribal peoples of northern Europe. The Annals, which covers the Julio-Claudian era after the death of Augustus, sometimes comments allusively on later events.
Specialist authors of various kinds cast light on aspects of the age. They include the great biographer and essayist Plutarch; Hadrian’s friend, the soldier and administrator Arrian, who wrote on hunting, military matters, and the philosophy of Epictetus, all of them topics dear to the emperor’s heart; the poets Martial and Statius, evocative flatterers of Domitian; Juvenal, excoriator of Roman decadence; the engineer and architect Apollodorus, who wrote a textbook on siegecraft; Aulus Gellius, who recorded instructive or curious information he came across in his reading or in conversation; Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists; the homoerotic versifier Straton; three orators—Dio Chrysostom, the valetudinarian Aelius Aristides, and the egregious Polemon; Pausanias, author of the first guidebook to Greece; and the magical-realist storyteller Apuleius. Pliny the Younger’s letters illuminate the values of Rome’s upper class, from which Hadrian and his colleagues in government sprang. Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations reveals much about the boy whom Hadrian singled out to be his ultimate successor to the throne; and Marcus’ mentor Fronto offers an insight into contemporary judgments of Hadrian. Strabo’s Geography, although written in the days of Augustus, is a mine of topographical data.
If the main sources are gravely deficient, then, there is much useful material to offer a rounded view of the Roman world during the late first and early second centuries. And, thanks to the labors of scholars and archaeologists, the physical remains of the past have yielded an almost inexhaustible mine of inscriptions, papyri, and coins. These speak directly to the present-day reader, and mitigate a pervading anti-Hadrianic bias in many of the literary sources. Important letters, decisions, and speeches of emperors were transcribed onto stone reliefs for the public benefit, often recording their verbatim remarks. A vital medium for propaganda, coins reveal an emperor communicating with his subjects (and, of course, placing the best possible spin on events).
Perhaps the most exciting discoveries are documents found in Judaean caves, written by Jewish fighters in the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Romans; and a papyrus describing a magical spell conducted by an Egyptian priest, whom Hadrian consulted shortly before the drowning of Antinous.
Although important items are to be found elsewhere, three invaluable collections assemble much of this material—Harold Mattingly’s magisterial Coins of the Roman Empire in the British Museum, volume 3; J. H. Oliver’s Greek Constitutions of Early Roman Emperors from Inscriptions and Papyri; and (in Latin or Greek only) E. Mary Smallwood’s essential Documents Illustrating the Principates of Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian.
Most of the mainstream ancient authors appear, in both Greek or Latin and English translation, on the Loeb Classical Library’s list (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts). Hadrian’s poetry in Latin is included in Loeb’s Minor Latin Poets, volume 2; so far as I know, his attributed verses in Greek are not collected.
Penguin Classics publishes Ammianus Marcellinus, The Later Roman Empire AD 354–378, trans. Walter Hamilton; Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Martin Hammond; Cicero, Selected Letters, trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, and On Government, trans. Michael Grant; the first half of the Historia Augusta as Lives of the Later Caesars, trans. Anthony Birley; Horace, Satires of Horace and Persius, trans. Niall Rudd, and Complete Odes and Epodes, trans. W. G. Shepherd and Betty Radice; Josephus, The Jewish War, trans. G. A. Williamson, rev. E. Mary Smallwood; Juvenal, Sixteen Satires, trans. Peter Green; Martial, The Epigrams (a selection), trans. James Michie; Pausanias, Guide to Greece: Southern Greece and Central Greece (two volumes), trans. Peter Levi; Odes of Pindar, trans. Maurice Bowra; Plato, The Symposium, trans. Christopher Gill; Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. John F. Healey; Pliny the Younger’s Letters, trans. Betty Radice; Plutarch, Essays (a selection), trans. Robin H. Waterfield, also selected biographies under various titles from Parallel Lives; Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves, rev. James Rives; Tacitus, Annals of Imperial Rome, trans. Michael Grant, Agricola and Germania, trans. H. Mattingly, rev. S. A. Handford, The Histories, trans. Kenneth Wellesley; Xenophon, The Persian Expedition, trans. Rex Warner.
With rare titles, I have directed readers to Web sites, accurate and active at the time of writing.
For works not published by Loeb, the reader may consult the following (where possible in translation).
Aelius Aristides, P. Complete Works, trans. Charles A. Behr (Leiden: Brill, 1981–86)
Apollodorus. Poliorcetica, see Siegecraft, trans. Dennis F. Sullivan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000)
Apuleius. The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura, trans. H. E. Butler (Dodo Press, 2008)
Arrian. Circumnavigation of the B
lack Sea, trans. Aidan Liddle (Bristol Classical Press, 2003)
_______ . Arrian’s Anabasis of Alexander and Indica, ed. E. J. Chinnock (London: George Bell and Son, 1893)
______. The Greek Historians. The Complete and Unabridged Historical Works of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon and Arrian (New York: Random House, 1942)
______. Indica. See http://www.und.ac.za/und/classics/india/arrian.htm
_______. Ars Tactica, trans. Ann Hyland, in Training the Roman Cavalry from Arrian’s Ars Tactica (Alan Sutton: Dover, N.H., 1993)
_______. Order of Battle with Array. See http://members.tripod.com/∼S_van_Dorst/Ancient_Warfare/Rome/Sources/ektaxis.html
Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome Page 43
