Hadrian wrote, perhaps in his lost autobiography, that Antinous fell into the Nile, and that was that—an accident. But the emperor would have to deny suicide, because Egyptian practice denied immortality to suicides, and Hadrian and his spin doctors wanted nothing less than immortality for the dead lad. Other ancient writers disagreed. Some say that Antinous sacrificed himself nobly and unselfishly in order to guarantee Hadrian a long life, while others say that Antinous committed suicide in despair because Hadrian insisted on continuing their love affair past the age of seemliness. These are guesses, if not malicious gossip. Neither Greeks nor Romans were in the habit of giving up their lives as a magical way of extending someone else’s life, but perhaps Antinous was just a mixed-up teenager. We will never know why he drowned.
Hadrian soldiered on, with the imperial party continuing down the Nile as if nothing had happened. They visited a famous colossal statue of an Egyptian pharaoh, whom the Greeks thought of as the legendary Ethiopian king Memnon. The statue was famous for emitting an unusual, high-pitched sound, especially at dawn, which was probably the result of evaporation of dew in the rock. There, Sabina’s traveling partner, Julia Balbilla, a noblewoman of mixed Greek and Roman ancestry and a poet, recited four poems. The poems commemorate both Hadrian and Sabina as visitors to the statue. The poems were inscribed later on the statue’s left foot and ankle, the prime position for viewing. Sabina herself left four lines of Greek prose on the same place. She wrote:
Sabina Augusta,
wife of the Emperor Caesar
Hadrian, heard Memnon
twice within the hour . . .
Short and formal as it is, it is invaluable, and the rarest of things. For once, the emperor’s wife spoke. She proclaimed her rank and her achievement. If she felt any emotion over the death of Antinous, she kept it to herself.
No doubt Hadrian mourned Antinous, but no emperor would let a tragedy go to waste. Just as Augustus created a religious cult in memory of Caesar, so Hadrian created a religious cult in memory of Antinous. Augustus claimed that the sighting of a comet proved Caesar’s immortality, and Hadrian claimed that the sighting of a new star did the same for Antinous.
The new god Antinous received temples and priests. Games were held in his honor in Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt, and Italy. His tomb in Antinoopolis was a shrine, and he had a temple at Tibur too. More than a hundred statues of Antinous have survived today, as well as coins and sculptural reliefs, and surely there were once others. It is said that more images of Antinous have been identified than of any other figure from classical antiquity except Augustus and Hadrian himself. Although people worshipped Antinous at first to please Hadrian, the new god was genuinely popular.
Paulina, Hadrian’s sister, died around the same time as Antinous but had little to show for it in terms of honors. He commemorated her with the name of one of the ten tribes (or, roughly, wards) in Antinoopolis.
Some Romans ridiculed the new religious cult. They resented Hadrian’s deification of a dead Greek youth more than they had his love affair with a living one. Some complained that Hadrian “cried like a woman” over Antinous.
But the new cult was no mere act of sentimentality on Hadrian’s part. He understood that the world was changing and that the Greek East offered a cultural model for the future.
The self-confident Hadrian would not have been surprised that the Roman world eventually came to believe as he did in a new savior god offering the promise of resurrection. He would have been shocked, however, to learn that it chose the obscure, Jewish-inspired sect of Christianity rather than the reawakened glory of Greece. Jesus died almost exactly a century before Antinous, but, in the unlikely event that Hadrian or his theologians had Jesus in mind when they promoted the idea of Antinous’s saving power, they might not have admitted it even to themselves. Hadrian did not hunt down Christians any more than Trajan had, but he remained willing to execute those who openly refused to worship the emperor.
Things didn’t work out as planned. Hadrian offered Athens, but eventually the empire chose Jerusalem. Yet, as far as Hadrian was concerned, Jerusalem no longer existed. In fact, he was intent on giving it a decent burial.
THE JEWISH WAR
Hadrian incited a new, massive Jewish revolt against Rome, lasting from 132 to 135. The proximate cause was probably his decision to refound Jerusalem as a Roman city. Hadrian also banned circumcision, a fundamental Jewish practice, but maybe only as a punishment for rebellion; the chronology is unclear. We might think of Jerusalem as a wasteland after Titus destroyed the city in 70, but, in fact, it was still inhabited. In ancient times, a small number of people often continued to live in “destroyed” cities. So, not only was a legion based in Jerusalem, but also Jews continued to live there. Although the temple had been destroyed, there were seven synagogues.
Both Trajan and Hadrian hinted at first at friendlier policies toward Jews, even possibly allowing the temple to be rebuilt. But the plans for Aelia Capitolina, announced in 130, put an end to all that. The new city would be thoroughly Roman, laid out on a grid plan, and named after both Hadrian (Aelius) and Jupiter (Capitolinus, after Capitoline Jupiter).
The revolt, when it came, was violent and dramatic. The rebels prepared carefully by forging weapons and using caves as both fortresses and refuges. They declared independence and made it stick. They took a large part of Judea away from the Romans and governed it for three years. They passed laws, issued coins, and above all, ran a war.
Unlike in the revolt of 66 to 70, the Jews were united. Their leader was a charismatic, ruthless, and effective man who acquired the nom de guerre Simon Bar Kokhba, Simon, Son of a Star. This may refer to a biblical prophecy, to the new star that Hadrian’s astrologers saw after Antinous’s death, or to both. Bar Kokhba acquired the title of Prince of Israel, and his coins advertised liberty and redemption. Jews hoped that he was the Messiah. Romans saw a security challenge requiring a major response, especially when rebel attacks caused Roman losses leading to the disbandment of one and possibly two legions.
Hadrian might have considered the rebels ingrates who rejected his liberation from their backward beliefs. Before deciding to build Aelia, perhaps he spoke to Hellenized Jews who assured him that most Jews would embrace Hellenism with open arms. Alas, a very different reality lay ahead. Hadrian was neither the first nor the last Western statesman to underestimate the degree of resistance to outside reformers in the Middle East.
Hell hath no fury like an emperor scorned. Hadrian took emergency measures. He rushed troops to Judea from other provinces and levied soldiers in Italy, an unpopular policy that emperors tried to avoid. He sent in his best general, Sextus Julius Severus, the governor of far-off Britain. Hadrian probably even visited the front in person, which shows the seriousness of the situation. Roman strategy was a long, hard counterinsurgency campaign against the rebels in their caves. When the time was right, the Romans laid siege to Bar Kokhba’s stronghold in the town of Betar, just southwest of Jerusalem. Its fall in late 135 marked the end of organized resistance, more than three years after the outbreak of the rebellion. Bar Kokhba lay dead, his head allegedly sent to Hadrian. Mopping-up operations in Judea continued.
Unlike Adolf Hitler, Hadrian did not set out to annihilate the Jews. Yet the most civilized of Roman emperors unleashed perhaps the worst massacre in Jewish history until the Holocaust, with sources claiming that 580,000 Jews were killed. As usual, that number should be taken with a grain of salt, but the losses were surely great, with additional numbers sold into slavery.
After the revolt, Jews were a minority in Judea—now renamed Syria Palestina. Jews were prohibited access to Jerusalem and surrounding areas except for one day a year: the anniversary of the destruction of the temple, when they were allowed to come mourn.
And yet, by no means did Hadrian destroy the Jews’ life in their country. Bolstered by refugees from Judea, Jewish numbers remained robust in Galilee and other northern areas, while even Judea continued to have a smal
l number of Jews. Hadrian’s persecution targeted leading rabbis, but it also made martyrs. The Talmud considered this martyrdom to be “sanctification of God’s name,” and hence it strengthened the people of Israel.
Meanwhile, Judaism as a religion thrived through synagogues and teachers. The Romans allowed Jews freedom of assembly, and Hadrian’s successor eventually relaxed the ban on circumcision. But the new city of Aelia made it hard to think the temple would be rebuilt soon. No wonder that the rabbinic tradition cursed Hadrian, saying of him, “May his bones rot!”
DEATH COMES FOR THE EMPEROR
By 134, Hadrian was back in Rome—or, rather, in his Tibur villa. He was already a sick man. Besides consulting doctors, astrologers, and magicians, the emperor continued to take care of the empire’s business, often lying on his couch. By 136, the most pressing item on his agenda was the succession. Hadrian did not intend to leave matters until his deathbed or to others after his death, as Trajan had done.
In 136, after he suffered a near-fatal hemorrhage, Hadrian named Lucius Ceionius Commodus as his successor and adopted him as his son. The elite expressed universal opposition to this move, as Ceionius, who was thirty-five, had little to recommend him other than being one of the good-looking young noblemen Hadrian liked to have around.
No one objected more than Hadrian’s great-nephew Pedanius Fuscus, grandson of his sister, Paulina, who had expected to be named to the succession. Hadrian found Pedanius’s displeasure threatening—so much, in fact, that he had Pedanius executed. Once again, Hadrian expressed his tendency to tyranny. In addition, Hadrian turned on Pedanius’s grandfather for having supported the ambitious young man. This was none other than Servianus, Hadrian’s old rival. Servianus was influential enough to serve as consul in 134 but not so powerful as to be able to defy the emperor with impunity. Although he was ninety years old, Servianus was forced to take his own life. Before dying, he uttered a curse that Hadrian be so sick that he would wish he could die but couldn’t.
As it happened, it was Sabina who died next, late in 137. She was about fifty-two years old. Predictably, gossip says that Hadrian poisoned her or drove her to kill herself. His reaction to her death hardly suggests that he wanted her out of the way. Sabina’s ascent to heaven—Hadrian had her deified—is recorded in a sensitive marble relief that shows him watching her brought above by a winged female. It is a polished and moving scene. Coins and a sculpted relief also record Sabina’s deification and her ascent to heaven.
And all was not well with Hadrian’s successor, Ceionius. In fact, he was dying of tuberculosis, and he passed away on New Year’s Day 138. Now Hadrian chose a mature man to succeed him, fifty-one-year-old Aurelius Antoninus—later the emperor Antoninus Pius, who would rule from 138 to 161. But Hadrian did not want to leave the empire in the hands of a man who was nearly as old as he was. So he insisted that Antoninus adopt two young men. One was Lucius Verus, son of the late Ceionius Commodus. The other was Marcus Annius Verus, Antoninus’s nephew by marriage and a distant relative of Hadrian. The sixteen-year-old was talented and promising and shared Hadrian’s intellectual interests. It was an elaborate plan, but many think that the emperor had his eye on Marcus all along; that Ceionius and Antoninus were placeholders, with Lucius Verus a spare.
If Hadrian modestly left his name off the new Pantheon, he made up for it with his tomb, Hadrian’s mausoleum. Augustus’s mausoleum was closed, so, like the Flavians and Trajan, Hadrian found a new resting place, and he did it in style. He built a grandiose tomb across the Tiber River on the Vatican Fields, not far from where St. Peter’s Basilica would rise one day. A new bridge led to the tomb, offering the traveler a marvel. The tomb was a vast and complex structure, with two stepped, cylindrical rings rising on a square base lined with the finest marble. Its form recalled the stepped shape of an imperial funeral pyre. The similarity may have called to a Roman’s mind the funeral ceremony by which an emperor’s soul rose to the gods. In its grandeur, Hadrian’s mausoleum rivaled Augustus’s, of which it had a direct view about a half mile across the Tiber. Hadrian’s mausoleum still stands today. Now it is known as the museum of Castel Sant’Angelo, having been used for centuries by Popes and Roman nobles. The ancient core is still visible.
The mausoleum was ready for Hadrian’s final illness in 138. Even in the comfort of his magnificent country estate, he had trouble breathing. The emperor was hemorrhaging blood from his nose and accumulating fluid in his legs and feet, the result of hardening of the arteries and heart disease. As his condition got worse, he tried magic and charms. When they came to nothing, Hadrian reached the conclusion that death would be a release. The man who described his soul as his body’s “guest and comrade” was ready to let go. He begged his servants to kill him, but even though he promised money and immunity, they all refused. He was, after all, the Roman emperor—and who would be willing to kill the emperor?
At last, his hunting assistant, a barbarian prisoner of war and a slave known for his strength and bravery, agreed to do it. Hadrian drew a colored line on his skin under his nipple, at the spot where his doctor had advised the blow to be struck, but in the end, even the barbarian refused. Knowing that Hadrian was not done with suicide attempts, his heir, Antoninus, took his dagger from him. Now Hadrian asked his doctor for poison, but the physician refused. At sixty-two, Hadrian was old but not aged; “his old age was still fresh and strong,” an ancient writer commented. But the emperor was wasting away.
Hadrian wished to die, but his desperate efforts to get someone to kill him all failed. So he fulfilled Servianus’s curse. Finally, Hadrian saw the end coming. By now, he had reached a state of philosophical composure.
The failing emperor is said to have composed a short poem, thus:
O blithe little soul, thou, flitting away,
Guest and comrade of this my clay,
Whither now goest thou, to what place
Bare and ghastly and without grace?
Nor, as thy wont was, joke and play.
Animula vagula blandula: the first line of the Latin original demonstrates the poem’s singsong, nursery-rhyme quality, as if the great man were reverting to childhood—but in a carefully wrought way. He displays a certain wry realism; a philosophical detachment about what lay ahead. Or was he whistling in the dark?
On July 10, 138, Hadrian died.
When he passed on, it is said that the people hated him and that many had harsh words for Hadrian, remembering the murders of the ex-consul and of Pedanius and Servianus. He was not buried in his mausoleum in Rome but in a place on the Bay of Naples close to where he died. The new emperor, Antoninus, had to fight with the Senate to get it to agree to Hadrian’s deification. The Senate did not have many powers left, but approving deification was one of them. A year after his death, Hadrian’s ashes were finally laid to rest in his chosen burial place in Rome. In 139 his funeral procession solemnly climbed the spiral ramp through the center of the tomb in a stately march by torchlight and deposited his ashes in an urn in the heart of the complex. There he joined Sabina’s ashes.
LEGACY
In some ways, Hadrian is an example of what not to do as emperor. He exhausted himself by too much travel, when he should have delegated some of it. He possibly made himself sick, either by travel or drinking, although genetic factors or mere chance may have been more important in causing his illness. He meddled in provincial affairs unnecessarily and stirred up a disastrous war in Judea.
Hadrian reached the throne in less-than-aboveboard circumstances and began his reign by murdering four very prominent men, thereby making the Senate hate and fear him. He was more gracious to ordinary people than to his peers, among which group he didn’t suffer fools gladly. He had a tendency to be melancholy, volatile, and competitive.
His critics called him a know-it-all and a show-off who practiced every imaginable activity, from philosophy to painting, and couldn’t stand those who outdid him. The historian Cassius Dio, who came from a provincial family that had rise
n to the Senate, passionately opposed that body’s enemies, such as Hadrian. He wrote of the emperor: “For, inasmuch as he wished to surpass everybody in everything, he hated those who attained eminence in any direction.” What some saw as attention to detail others considered meddling, what some considered discipline others thought of as rigidity, and what some applauded as generosity others decried as officiousness. Yet balanced against all this is a great set of achievements.
Hadrian called himself the new Augustus, a second founder of the empire, and in some ways he was right. Like Augustus, he built up the city of Rome. Both men rationalized, organized, and codified Roman laws and practices.
They both traveled around the provinces and promoted fundamental change. Both offered opportunity to provincial elites, but Hadrian opened the door even more widely than did Augustus. Hadrian promoted Hellenism, while Augustus was fundamentally Roman. Both founded cities, and both made their images ubiquitous around the empire to a degree that no other emperor matched.
In some ways, however, Hadrian was the opposite of Augustus—and to his credit, one might conclude. Although both promoted peace, Augustus advocated “empire without end” (imperium sine fine), and, in his continuing wars of conquest, he showed that he meant it. Like Tiberius, Hadrian considered Rome a satiated power: he withdrew from Trajan’s conquests in the Middle East and eastern Dacia, and he built walls and trenches, signs of a policy of peace within fixed frontiers. Ironically, Augustus was not much of a soldier, while Hadrian loved the military life.
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