Hadrian

Hadrian

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Hadrian [Traianus Hadrianus] (AD 76 138), Roman emperor, was born on 24 January AD 76 into a senatorial family which had its roots at Italica on the lower Guadalquivir near Seville in southern Spain. His father was Publius Aelius Hadrianus Afer, a leading member of the city who had reached the rank of praetor in the senate; he died when Hadrian was ten years old. His mother’s name was Domitia Paulina, and his own name until he became emperor was Publius Aelius Hadrianus.

Birth, early career, and accession as emperor

It is not certain that the future emperor was born at Italica. One tradition speaks of Rome as his birthplace. One of the original settlers at Italica in the third century BC was an ancestor of Hadrian, from Hadria on the east coast of Italy. The emperor-to-be was thus a provincial who possessed an ancient link with Italy, and his interests and policies as emperor owed much to these features in his ancestry. Italica was also the home of Marcus Ulpius Traianus (Trajan), Hadrian’s second cousin and predecessor as emperor. Early in his life Hadrian acquired as his guardians Trajan and another prominent citizen of Italica, Acilius Attianus. Much of his youth was passed in Rome where he first developed his deep admiration for Greek culture, another leitmotif of his reign. As a member of a senatorial family, he embarked on the customary career towards the senate, holding posts as a military tribune on the Danube and Upper Rhine between AD 95 and 97, tribune of the people in 105, and the praetorship in 108. But he also enjoyed less usual distinctions. He served on Trajan’s staff in Dacia and in the east. When Trajan was adopted by the emperor Nerva as his son and successor, it was Hadrian who carried the congratulations of the Danube legions to him. Hadrian held the command of a legion, exceptionally, before his praetorship and he governed the Danubian frontier province of Pannonia before his election as consul (in 108), again unusually. Eventually, in 117, he was allotted one of the most senior of all provincial commands, the governorship of Syria. These exceptional features in Hadrian’s cursus honorum naturally spring from the fact that he was Trajan’s closest male relative and had married, in AD 100, the emperor’s closest female relation, Vibia Sabina. Trajan’s adoption of Hadrian on his deathbed in 117 was not therefore wholly unexpected. But gossip in Rome, stemming from suspicious circumstances surrounding the event, hinted at darker purposes, and specifically at the involvement of Trajan’s wife, Plotina, on Hadrian’s side. The truth did not emerge but it is possible that the adoption was engineered from within palace circles rather than issuing directly from Trajan’s own wishes.

On his accession, Hadrian was careful to pay respect to senatorial opinion. His immediate position was secure: he had been acclaimed by the army. But in the early months of the reign a conspiracy involving ex-consuls and other adherents of Trajan was detected and quashed by the execution of four of the alleged ringleaders. Thereafter, Hadrian was not quite able to shake off a reputation for cruelty and his relations with the senate remained uneasy.

Hadrian’s views on the extent of the empire and its external relations were made manifest at an early date. Disturbances in Mauretania Tingitana (Morocco) and Britain were promptly suppressed and mounted nomads were prevented from attacking the Danube provinces. But forward movement from existing frontiers was not to be countenanced. It was even reported that he considered abandoning the trans-Danubian province of Dacia, only recently added to the empire by Trajan. External wars were avoided throughout the reign. The concomitant of this strategic policy was the planning of strong frontiers, clearly demarcated and well garrisoned. The classic instance is the great barrier of stone and turf which was constructed across northern Britain from about 122: Hadrian’s Wall. Another decisive step was taken in Upper Germany, where a series of frontier works had been under development from about AD 90 onward. Under Hadrian a more coherent frontier was brought into being, consisting of a timber palisade set in front of pre-existing watch-towers and a communication track. In north Africa, too, measures were taken to guard the main routes through the desert fringes, without disrupting the economics of native life.

Hadrian’s Wall

Hadrian’s frontier solution in Britain took the form of the most elaborate frontier work of any date in the empire. In the original plan this was to be a stone wall running from Segedunum (Wallsend) on the Tyne to the River Irthing and a rampart of turf and clay from the Irthing to the Solway Firth. At every Roman mile there was to be a fortlet (milecastle) and between each pair of fortlets two evenly spaced towers (turrets). Garrison forts were to lie to the rear, supplying auxiliary units to patrol the frontier and operate beyond it as necessary. Immediately in front of the wall lay a great ditch, while to the rear another ditch and accompanying mounds (the vallum) were designed to close off the frontier to unauthorized personnel. Lateral communication was to be supplied by a road running behind the wall (the military way). The terrain traversed by Hadrian’s Wall is diverse. On the eastern and western flanks the ground is low lying. In the centre the volcanic outcrop of the Whin Sill offers a magnificent northward-facing scarp, along the top of which the wall was to run. The exposed western flank on the Cumberland coast was seen as vulnerable and was covered by a series of fortlets and towers, echoing those on the wall itself.

The building of this immense work was begun in the governorship of Hadrian’s ally, Aulus Platorius Nepos (122 5), and may well be a direct result of Hadrian’s visit to Britain in 122. The coherent structure of the frontier in its first form bears all the hallmarks of a single organizing mind and it is most likely that that mind was Hadrian’s own. Its purpose was not in the first instance tactical. A wall 80 miles long is not the most obvious or effective means of defence, particularly for an army trained and habituated to open warfare. Hadrian’s Wall defined the limits of the Roman empire in Britain, but it did more. In the words of Hadrian’s fourth-century biographer, it separated Romans from barbarians, one of the few recorded statements on the role of Roman frontiers and one which may be traced back to Hadrian’s own thought.

The original conception of this frontier, whether or not it sprang fully formed from the emperor’s mind, did not come to fruition. Modification was quickly found necessary. In particular, the garrison bases lay too far to the rear and by 125 or 126 forts were being established on the line of the wall itself. The width of the wall was reduced as building proceeded westward, presumably to diminish the scale of the task. The western flank was further protected by a number of outposts north of the wall, perhaps revealing the region from which raiding was expected. These were major changes, and there were to be others, but the wall remained largely Hadrian’s in concept and execution. Although raided for its stone in subsequent centuries, considerable sections of the wall remain, and Hadrian’s Wall is Britain’s most substantial and best-known Roman structure.

The visit of Hadrian to Britain in 122 was followed by a renewed stimulus to urban development as an essential feature of the Romanization of the province. Several cities either built or rebuilt public buildings in Hadrian’s reign, including several which lay close to the zone of military control. The splendid inscription set up in 129 by the civitas (citizen body) of the Cornovii in dedication of the new forum at their centre of Viroconium (Wroxeter) occurs in precisely the kind of setting that would have caught Hadrian’s attention.

The emperor’s care for the provinces went far beyond the defence of their frontiers. When his position was wholly secure, in 120 21, he embarked on several years of travel, inspecting provinces and their armies. Of the sixteen years from 117 to 133, more than twelve were devoted to journeys across the empire. Hadrian left his mark where he travelled. In Gaul he ordered and consecrated a temple to Plotina at Nemausus (N mes). In Spain he brought together provincial representatives to examine a scheme for troop levies. In Mauretania he directed a military operation of some kind. But most of his travelling was done in the Greek provinces of the east. Here there were no military preoccupations and few of a pressing administrative kind. Hadrian’s deep admiration for Greek culture was to find full expression during his long sojourn in Greece and Asia Minor. The city populations there responded to his progress with immense enthusiasm. In a second series of journeys he visited north Africa, inspecting the army and its works. His detailed interest in military training and effectiveness is attested by a remarkable inscription found at Lambaesis, which provides extracts from addresses given to the troops, praising and encouraging them and their commanders. In 129 Hadrian passed through the Levant and visited Jerusalem, ordering that city to be rebuilt as Aelia Capitolina, thereby unwittingly laying the foundations for the great Jewish revolt of 132. Later in the year the emperor’s entourage moved into Egypt, where Hadrian’s beloved boy Antinous drowned in the Nile. The emperor’s reaction was one of uncontrollable grief. Statues of the youth were carved in their thousands and near the scene of the fatality the city of Antinopolis was founded. The cult of the deified Antinous now inaugurated was honoured not only in Egypt but across the empire.

Most of the rest of the reign was spent amid peaceful pleasures in Rome. As well as literature, art, and philosophy, Hadrian was devoted to architecture and spent both time and money on buildings in Rome and Athens. In Rome, the temple of Venus and Roma was completed in his last years. The Pantheon, one of the greatest surviving works of Roman architecture, had been built early in the reign, replacing a building of Marcus Agrippa. But the most characteristic creation of this complex man was the vast private villa which he laid out at Tibur (Tivoli), close to Rome. This was an architectural ensemble which reproduced many of the buildings and places seen and admired by Hadrian on his journeys, among them the Canopus and Serapeum in Egypt, and the Academy, the Stoa Poikile, Lyceum, and Prytaneium in Athens. In Rome itself, on the Tiber bank below the Janiculum Hill, he built his own great mausoleum in the form of a brick drum; it survives as the Castel Sant’ Angelo. There his remains were duly laid, after two years of increasing infirmity ended at Baiae (modern Baia, west of Naples) on 10 July 138. It is reported that he died with a valedictory verse to his own soul on his lips.

Sources

A. R. Birley, Hadrian: the restless emperor (1997) D. Magie, ed. and trans., Vita Hadriani , Scriptores historiae Augustae, 1 (1921) Dio’s Roman history, ed. and trans. E. Cary, 8 (1925), lxix [epitome] [Eutropius], Eutropi Breviarium ab urbe condita, ed. H. Droysen, MGH Auctores Antiquissimi, 2 (Berlin, 1879), 138 40 H. Mattingly and E. A. Sydenham, eds., Vespasian to Hadrian (1926), vol. 2 of The Roman imperial coinage, ed. H. Mattingly and others (1923 94) P. Strack, Die r mische Reichspr gung des zweiten Jahrhunderts, 2 (1931) A. Piganiol, Histoire de Rome, 5th edn (1962) A. Garzetti, From Tiberius to the Antonines (1974) E. Nash, Pictorial dictionary of Rome (1962) G. W. Bowersock, The sophists in the Roman empire (1969) B. W. Henderson, The life and principate of the Emperor Hadrian, AD 76 138 (1923) D. J. Breeze, Hadrian’s Wall, 3rd edn (1987) J. Skinner, Hadrian’s Wall in 1801: observations on the Roman wall, ed. H. Coombs and P. Coombs (1978)

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Hadrian