Ten Caesars

by Barry Strauss

  Hadrian left his name off the Pantheon, labeling it simply “Agrippa son of Lucius built this in his third consulship.” It was immodest modesty because it borrowed the prestige of one of the founding fathers of the empire.

  Hadrian did give his name to Hadrianopolis, Hadrian City, founded on the site of an earlier village (today, Edirne, Turkey). It was one of eight places in the empire called Hadrian City and the only one still with an echo of the emperor in its name today. (Edirne comes from Hadrianopolis.) Located in European Turkey, close to the borders with Bulgaria and Greece, it sits on a historic crossroads. Beginning in the era of Constantine and continuing down to the twentieth century, it has been the site of no fewer than sixteen major battles, including the Roman Empire’s most devastating defeat in 378. The late military historian John Keegan called this Hadrianopolis “the most frequently contested spot on the globe.” The soldier-statesman Hadrian might have enjoyed that honor for the city in his name.

  One of Hadrian’s “constructions” involved the law. He empowered a brilliant young jurist to codify the praetor’s edict, the annually issued declaration of the principles of Rome’s laws. Although in theory a new praetor could start over each year, in practice, most praetors made few changes in the inherited tradition. But inconsistencies accreted over the years. Now, thanks to Hadrian, it was all consolidated and codified into a clear and rational whole. It would be known afterward as the perpetual edict. It marked a major reform for Rome and, indeed, for the history of law.

  But law rarely excited Hadrian as much as construction did. Tiberius and Nero had their pleasure palaces, but Hadrian outdid them. What we know of today as Hadrian’s villa was, in fact, a royal enclave, like Versailles. The “villa” contains thirty major buildings spread out more than three hundred acres—twice the size of Pompeii—in a lush river valley at Tibur (Tivoli), about eighteen miles from Rome, from where it was a three-hour ride on horseback.

  Work began at Tibur probably at the start of Hadrian’s reign and continued throughout. Materials were brought there from all over the empire to create a sense of the empire’s variety and of Rome’s power. The campus was filled with art and sculpture and with gardens, pools, canals, and fountains. Hadrian designed some of the structures himself. Not only were there his beloved “pumpkins”—domes—but also the first-known use of reverse curves in architecture; that is, the sinuous alternation of concave and convex walls. The overall plan of the campus was subtle, as complex and unusual as Hadrian himself. No other emperor did more to create a place where art and nature combined to provide inspiration. The villa also symbolized the imperial elites that Hadrian considered important. The architecture was overwhelmingly Roman, but it was filled with Greek art. Egyptian themes were prominent as well, for Egypt was to play a major role in Hadrian’s life story. A multitude of slaves kept the villa going. Roman officials and soldiers were present throughout.

  The villa had everything. Besides a palace, there were dining pavilions, libraries, baths, temples, a theater, and even an arena. There were heated buildings for winter use and cool northward exposures for summer. It was a retreat for Hadrian and a place for him to impress and entertain visitors, but it was also a place where he might lose touch with reality.

  Tibur was Hadrian’s Neverland. It was Alternate Rome; a Rome without the senate or the people; a combination of one of Hadrian’s adored military bases and a Greek polis. From here he could govern Rome without having to enter the city and travel without having to leave home. Here Hadrian remained a wanderer.

  HADRIAN’S TRAVELS

  No emperor since Augustus traveled the provinces as much as Hadrian, and, in the end, he covered even more territory than his predecessor. Hadrian reigned for twenty-one years, making his the longest reign since Tiberius. He spent about half of those years on the road. During his prime years between ages forty-four and fifty-five, from 120 to 131, he was rarely in Rome. In the years 121 to 125, he made a great swing through Rome’s northwestern provinces and then turned east to Greece and Asia Minor. A few years later, starting in 128, he visited Sicily, North Africa, Egypt, and other eastern Mediterranean lands, especially Greece. Then came a trip to Judea to deal with urgent business there.

  It wasn’t a hungry heart that made Hadrian travel but a desire to remake the empire from the ground up. It was also a way to escape Rome, with what he saw as a needy and insatiable Senate and people.

  Hadrian’s traveling entourage, complete with imperial secretaries, bureaucrats, hangers-on, servants, and his wife and her staff, was the second Rome; the government on the move. It was the Air Force One of the ancient world. It must have been quite a sight to see him and his train on the go, but not everyone was daunted. An old woman once tried to stop Hadrian as he passed by, to hand him a petition. When he said that he had no time for that, she said that in that case he should cease being emperor. He granted her a hearing.

  Wherever Hadrian went, he headed for one of Rome’s military bases. His policy of nonexpansion required maintaining the military in a state of absolute readiness. One ancient author comments, “Though more desirous of peace than of war, he kept the soldiers in training just as if war were imminent.” Besides which, Hadrian loved the army.

  Hadrian was a he-man whose heart beat for the military camp. When he visited a legionary garrison in North Africa, for example, he watched a series of maneuvers, and declared to the assembled troops afterward, “The outstanding manhood of that noble man, my deputy, Catullinus [that is, Quintus Fabius Catullinus, the legion’s commander], shows itself in you, the men who are serving under him.” Then there was the time that Hadrian’s Horse Guards swam across the Danube fully armed under his admiring eyes.

  In 121, after visiting Rome, Hadrian headed north to Germany, where he faced the harsh winter with aplomb. The empress Sabina and such important figures as the commander of the Praetorian Guard and the chief secretary accompanied him. The secretary is better known today as a writer: Suetonius, author of The Twelve Caesars, biographies of imperial rulers. Suetonius’s access to the imperial archives provided unparalleled documentary riches. He began his work with Julius Caesar in 100 BC and ended it with the death of Domitian in the year 98. Anything more recent was too dangerous to touch.

  Hadrian’s motive in going to Germany was to erect a new border for the empire. It was a continuous wooden palisade replacing the network of forts and watchtowers established by his predecessors. It stood perhaps ten feet high and stretched approximately 350 miles across parts of what are today southwestern Germany, Alsace, and Switzerland.

  This was the start of the famous Roman limes, or frontier. At its height in the second century, the limes extended more than 3,000 miles, from northern Britain to the Red Sea. It consisted of walls, towers, forts, ditches, and roads, but it was hardly systematic. If the limes represented fixed frontier defense, it also bore witness to the limits of Rome’s power.

  In Germany and elsewhere, the limes served as a checkpoint but not a serious obstacle to a concerted invasion effort. Its primary purpose was symbolic. The limes showed where the empire began and ended. It also showed that Rome was done expanding.

  A case in point is Hadrian’s next stop after Germany and the most famous part of the limes built in his reign: Hadrian’s Wall, in Britain.

  HADRIAN’S WALL

  Hadrian’s Wall undulates across the northern English landscape. Extending for a distance of seventy-three miles, from the River Tyne near the North Sea to Solway Firth on the Irish Sea, it is one of the world’s icons of Roman imperialism and rightly attracts millions of visitors. Yet ancient reality belies the modern image.

  Hadrian and his entourage traveled to Britain, probably for the groundbreaking for the wall. It served the emperor’s glory, offering an effective engineering counterpart to Trajan’s bridge over the Danube. At the eastern end was a bridge, named after Hadrian, and a network of towers and forts stretched westward across the island, much of the new work gleaming in the sun. It symboliz
ed Rome’s power, but, as in Germany, the wall served only a limited military purpose. Perhaps the most important one was to separate various British peoples who had earlier formed an alliance and risen against Rome. On Hadrian’s accession in 117, there had been a rebellion in northern Britain. The details are obscure, but we know that it was serious, and it may have even destroyed a legion.

  The wall represented a triple set of defenses, including a double dike to the north and a road to the south as well as the wall itself. It would keep large numbers of enemies from getting through, but the wall was too narrow to serve as a fighting rampart.

  Although the wall looked imposing from a distance, up close it was sloppy and often of inferior quality, constructed by poorly trained men. It was built more for effect than utility and required large-scale rebuilding under a later emperor. The unimpressive turf wall built farther to the north by Hadrian’s successor was much more practical. It’s hard not to wonder if some of the funding for Hadrian’s Wall found its way into private purses, skimmed off the top by Roman officials or local contractors.

  And yet the people who built and manned the wall are a source of wonder even today. They lived in a series of fortified camps along the wall’s length. Not long ago, archaeologists found an intact series of wooden tablets, preserved in the mud, that opens a window into camp life: from military maneuvers, to dealing with contractors, to an invitation to a birthday party—the latter possibly the oldest surviving document in Latin written by a woman. The letter states:

  “I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me by your arrival . . . I shall expect you, sister.”

  The soldiers came from around the empire—from Batavia (the Netherlands) and Pannonia, from Syria and Arabia—and often married and had children with locals. They worshipped hybrid gods and no doubt spoke bastardized Latin. They formed the most multiethnic community that Britain would see until the late twentieth century.

  Before Hadrian left Britain, he dealt with a scandal. He dismissed Suetonius, the commander of the Praetorians, and other officials because they were more familiar with Sabina than court etiquette allowed. As always, Caesar’s wife had to be above suspicion. The sources, if they are to be believed, say that Hadrian was of half a mind to divorce Sabina. If only we had her side of the story!

  So Hadrian behaved in regard to the empress. When it came to his own life, however, he tolerated a little sassiness. The poet and historian Publius Annius Florus, for instance, sent Hadrian a ditty, most of which has survived, mocking the emperor’s travels:

  I don’t want to be a Caesar,

  Stroll about among the Britons,

  Lurk about among the . . .

  And endure the Scythian winters

  Hadrian responded with good humor:

  I don’t want to be a Florus,

  Stroll about among the taverns,

  Lurk about among the cook-shops

  And endure the round fat insects.

  THE POLITICS OF DEATH

  Hadrian’s mother-in-law, Matidia, died in 119, only two years after he became emperor. He honored her by giving the oration at her funeral. He put on gladiatorial games in her memory, had her deified, just as her mother, Marciana, Trajan’s sister, had been, and built a temple to the two women in Rome—the first for any deified woman within Rome’s city limits. Hadrian may have been the first man in history to deify his mother-in-law. But his motive was not simply family loyalty. He strengthened his legitimacy as emperor by making himself the son-in-law of a goddess, a fact recalled by every Roman who walked past Matidia’s temple. The honors for her mother surely pleased Sabina too, but she knew that Hadrian had another woman.

  His surrogate mother, Plotina, remained close to the man she helped put on the throne. She never asked too much of him, because she didn’t have to. She was a wealthy woman with a comfortable life. She received respect from Hadrian, whose coins showed her with the legend “Plotina, Augusta of the Divine Trajan.” And Plotina was nothing if not shrewd. On the rare occasions when she asked a favor, she aimed for something close to Hadrian’s heart: for instance, appointing a new head for the Epicurean school in Athens, for which she sought and got the emperor’s help. Hadrian appreciated her discretion and praised her for it after her death.

  When Plotina died in 123, Hadrian wore black for nine days. He had her deified too, like Matidia, and rededicated the temple he had built for Trajan to the Divine Trajan and Divine Plotina. (One wonders if Plotina’s name was in Trajan’s original plan for the structure.) Hadrian arranged for Plotina’s ashes to be placed next to Trajan’s in the base of Trajan’s Column. He also had a large public building built in her memory in her hometown of Nemausus. Men began referring to the late Plotina as Hadrian’s diva mater: his “deified mother.”

  There’s no reason to doubt Hadrian’s attachment to Matidia and Plotina, but he was running a dynasty, not a fan magazine. “We are family” might have been his motto—but the family in question was Trajan’s, leaving no doubt about Hadrian’s right to the throne. In addition, by frequently referring to Augustus and Agrippa, Hadrian suggested that he was a rightful heir to the family of the first emperor too.

  Hadrian’s politics of death had taken a peculiar turn in 122, the year before Plotina’s passing. It was then that he lost his favorite hunting horse. The steed was probably a gift from a barbarian king, a man with whom Hadrian negotiated a peace agreement in 117. It may have been then that he received the magnificent animal he named Borysthenes (another name for the Dnieper River) after its breeding grounds on the steppes. When Borysthenes died in southern Gaul, Hadrian gave him a proper tomb with a gravestone inscribed with verses that Hadrian probably wrote himself. It was over the top, but Borysthenes’s tomb served a political purpose by reminding Hadrian’s subjects that far-off barbarian tribes gave their emperor magnificent and manly gifts.

  Hadrian was not always so generous when it came to posthumous honors. When his sister, Paulina, died in 130, for instance, he was notably stingy. That same year, however, a different death would have a profound effect on Hadrian.

  THE YOUNG GREEK

  In late October 130 a twenty-year-old drowned in the River Nile about 210 miles upstream of Cairo. Whether it was an accident or a suicide—and if a suicide, whether it was an act of love or of despair—remains uncertain. What followed, however, is perfectly clear. Suddenly and improbably, the youth was declared a god. He became the focus of a new religion that erected a city in the desert, that inspired devotion, temples, festivals, games, and masterworks of Greco-Roman art from the eastern Mediterranean to Italy, and that lasted for centuries before Christianity put an end to it. It was one of the final flowerings of classical art and of state-run Greco-Roman paganism. And in an eerie and unintended way, it pointed to the road ahead.

  The young man in question was named Antinous. He came from Claudiopolis (Bolu, Turkey, about 150 miles east of Istanbul), a provincial city in the same Bithynia from which Pliny wrote to Trajan about the Christians. Antinous was very good-looking, and he shared Hadrian’s love of hunting. Otherwise, nothing is known about him. We don’t know how the two met, although the likeliest possibility has Hadrian passing through Claudiopolis in 123, when Antinous was thirteen. Nor do we know if Hadrian and Antinous had a physical relationship. But that the emperor loved the young man is beyond doubt.

  Like Mark Antony, Hadrian fell in love with a Greek. Antony had Cleopatra, and Hadrian, Antinous. In both cases, the infatuation took them to Egypt. Hadrian arrived in Egypt around August 130. He was only the third emperor to visit the country, following Augustus and Vespasian. Hadrian planned to inspect Rome’s wealthiest province and to strengthen the Greek presence by establishing a new Greek city in the mid–Nile Valley. It is possible that his health was another reason for the trip. A later and admittedly hostile source says that Hadrian went to Egypt because he was ill. Perhaps Hadrian had a respiratory illness; perhaps the early stage of the chronic i
llness that ultimately killed him. Egypt had a reputation as a place for respiratory cures. But this is speculation, and if the emperor had health problems, they were not serious enough to keep him off his feet in Egypt.

  Upon reaching Egypt, Hadrian visited the tombs of Pompey and Alexander the Great. In Alexandria, he took part in debates in the Museum, the city’s great institute of learning. Hadrian loved debating (read: beating) sophists; those oratorical, itinerant intellectuals of the age. One of them, Favorinus, explained neatly why he let Hadrian win their back-and-forth conversation: “Who could contradict the lord of thirty legions?”

  It appears that Hadrian and Antinous enjoyed a getaway together in a resort outside Alexandria. It’s certain, at any rate, that they both took part in a lion hunt in Egypt’s Western Desert. Antinous was in the hunting party, and Hadrian supposedly saved him from the lion and killed the beast, if we believe official art and poetry.

  Hadrian traveled with a large entourage of followers, including various officials, scholars, poets, hangers-on—perhaps as many as five thousand people. Records survive of the strain on Egyptian towns preparing food for their visit. Not only was Antinous with him but also Sabina. At least two years earlier, Hadrian had given her the honorific title of Augusta. This strengthened his legitimacy as emperor and also served as a gesture of respect to his spouse, perhaps even a gesture of love. The imperial party went on a cruise down the Nile. Along the way, as well as visiting the pyramids and other tourist attractions, Hadrian consulted priests and magicians about matters of life and death.

  On October 22 Egypt celebrated the annual festival of the Nile. October 24 marked the anniversary of the death of the god Osiris in the Nile. According to Egyptian belief, Osiris triumphed over death and brought fertility and immortality to the land. It was around this time, possibly on the precise day, that Antinous drowned, and in the part of the Nile Valley where Hadrian planned to build his new city. Within a week, by October 30, Hadrian declared that the city would be laid out on the very place where Antinous’s body had washed up to shore. No doubt he originally planned to call the town Hadrianopolis, but it now received a different name: Antinoopolis, or Antinous City.