Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome Read online

  Titus returns from the east

  June

  Jewish Triumph

  71–75

  Banishment from Rome of

  astrologi

  and

  philosophi

  72

  Annexation of Commagene Armenia Minor added to Cappadocia

  73 or 74

  Fall of Masada

  74

  Grant of Latin rights to Spain

  c. 75

  Trajan

  tribunus laticlavius

  with legion in Syria Birth of Domitia Paulina, Hadrian’s sister

  75

  Banishment of Helvidius Priscus

  76

  January 24

  Birth of Publius Aelius Hadrianus Afer (Hadrian)

  c. 77–84

  Agricola governor of Britain

  c. 77

  Trajan transferred as

  tribunus laticlavius

  with legion in

  Germany

  c. 78

  Trajan marries Pompeia Plotina

  78

  Death of Gaius Saloninus Matidius Patruinus, the husband of Trajan’s sister Marciana; she goes to live with Trajan and Plotina

  79

  June 24

  Death of Vespasian Accession of Titus

  August 24

  Eruption of Vesuvius; destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum Fire at Rome

  80

  Dedication of Colosseum Destruction of temple of Capitoline Jupiter by fire Dedication of Arch of Titus

  81

  September 13

  Death of Titus Accession of Domitian

  82

  December 7

  Dedication of restored temple of Jupiter on the Capitol

  83

  Domitian’s triumph over the Chatti

  83–84

  Increase of legionary pay

  85

  Domitian

  censor perpetuus

  85 or 86

  Hadrian’s father dies; Trajan and P. Acilius Attianus are appointed guardians

  85–88

  Dacian war

  86

  Inauguration of Capitoline games Trajan praetor

  c. 87

  Trajan

  legatus legionis

  VII Geminae

  89

  Rebellion of L. Antonius Saturninus

  90

  January

  Trajan takes the VII Geminae to Moguntiacum against Saturninus

  90

  Edict against

  astrologi

  and

  philosophi

  Hadrian comes of age, and visits his Spanish estates

  91

  Trajan

  consul ordinarius

  93

  Pliny praetor Trials of Baebius Massa, Herennius Senecio, Helvidius Priscus, Arnulenus Rusticus

  93–120

  Vindolanda tablets written

  94

  Hadrian enters public life:

  decemvir stlitibus iudicandis, sevir

  turmae equitum Romanorum

  , and

  praefectus urbi feriarum Latinarum

  95

  Philosophers expelled from Italy Flavius Clemens put to death Hadrian

  trib. militum legionis

  II Adiutrix Pia Fidelis in Pannonia

  96

  September 18

  Domitian assassinated Accession of Nerva Trajan defeats the Suebi

  October 25

  Adoption of Trajan Hadrian

  trib. militum legionis

  V Macedonica in Lower Moesia

  98

  Trajan

  consul

  (2)

  ordinarius

  with Nerva

  99

  January 28

  Death of Nerva

  February

  Hadrian brings news of Nerva’s death to Trajan at Colonia Agrippinensis Accession of Trajan

  spring

  Trajan inspects Danube frontier Hadrian

  trib. militum legionis

  XXII Primigeniae Piae Fidelis in Upper Germania Tacitus,

  Agricola

  and

  Germania

  99

  autumn

  Trajan enters Rome

  100

  Trajan

  consul

  (3)

  ordinarius Alimenta

  schemes initiated

  September

  Pliny the Younger,

  Panegyricus

  c. 100

  Hadrian marries Vibia Sabina

  101

  Trajan consul (4) Hadrian

  quaestor

  Matidia joins imperial household

  101

  March 25

  Trajan leaves for first Dacian war

  102

  Hadrian

  tribunus plebis

  102

  December

  Trajan returns to Rome; voted Dacicus Trajan holds Dacian Triumph

  103

  Trajan consul (5) Reconstruction of Circus Maximus

  c. 104

  Withdrawal from Scotland

  105

  Hadrian praetor

  105

  June 4

  Trajan leaves for second Dacian war Creation of province of Dacia

  after 105

  Marciana, Trajan’s sister, appointed Augusta

  106

  Legatus

  of the legion I Minervia Pia Fidelis in Lower Germania

  early July

  Reduction of Sarmizegetusa

  September/October

  Death of Decebalus

  106–11

  Creation of province of Arabia

  107

  Hadrian praetor Hadrian organizes first games celebrating Dacian victory Hadrian

  legatus Augusti pro praetore Pannoniae inferioris

  107–8

  Dedication to Mars Ultor of monument at Adamklissi

  108

  Hadrian

  consul (1) suffectus

  c. 108

  Tacitus,

  Histories

  c

  . 109–12

  Pliny governor of Bithynia-Pontus

  c. 110

  Death of Licinius Sura

  112

  January

  Trajan consul (6); dedication of Forum Traiani

  112–13

  Hadrian archon at Athens

  113

  Death of Marciana, Trajan’s elder sister; deified

  October 27

  Trajan sets off from Rome for Parthian war Trajan’s Column completed

  114

  January 7

  Trajan enters Antioch

  summer

  Trajan deposes Parthamasiris Title

  Optimus

  , the Best, added to Trajan’s names Annexation of Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Assyria

  115

  Capture of Ctesiphon

  December 13

  Trajan almost killed in Antioch earthquake

  115–17

  Revolt of Jewish diaspora

  116

  General revolt against Rome in the east

  117

  Hadrian

  legatus

  of Syria

  July

  Trajan sails for Rome

  by August 9

  Death of Trajan

  August 11

  Accession of Hadrian

  118

  Hadrian

  consul

  (2) Execution of four consuls

  July 9

  Hadrian enters Rome Trajan’s new provinces, except Armenia, given up

  c. 118–28

  Rebuilding of Pantheon

  119

  Hadrian

  consul

  (3) Matidia dies Hadrian tours Campania

  120

  Antoninus

  consul

  c. 120

  Tacitus,

  Annales


  121–25

  Hadrian’s first provincial tour

  121

  Hadrian visits Gallia, Germania superior, Raetia, Noricum, Germania superior

  121–22

  Plotina dies

  122

  Hadrian visits Lower Germania, Britannia (where he commissioned the wall that bears his name), Gallia, Hispania (Tarraco) Second Moorish revolt

  123

  Hadrian visits Mauretania (?), Africa (?), Libya, Cyrene, Crete, Syria, the Euphrates (Melitene), Pontus, Bithynia Probably meets Antinous Visits Asia

  124

  Hadrian visits Thrace, Asia, Athens and Eleusis, Achaea

  125

  Hadrian visits Achaea, Sicily, Rome

  c. 126

  Death of Plutarch

  c. 127

  Four regions in Italy established, governed by consular legates

  128

  Hadrian visits Africa, Rome, Athens

  129

  Hadrian visits Asia, Pamphylia, Phrygia, Pisidia, Cilicia, Syria, Commagene (Samosata), Cappadocia, Pontus, Syria (Antioch)

  130

  Hadrian visits Judaea (founding of Aelia Capitolina, to replace Jerusalem), Arabia, Egypt (Nile trip; drowning of Antinous; Alexandria)

  October 30

  Antinoopolis founded

  131

  Hadrian visits Syria, Asia, Athens

  131–32

  Inauguration of Panhellenion Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens completed

  131–33

  Jewish revolt, led by Bar Kokhba

  131–37

  Arrian governor of Cappadocia

  132

  Hadrian in Rome

  134

  Hadrian visits Syria, Judaea, Egypt (?), Syria (Antioch) Hadrian in Rome

  135

  Dedication of temple of Venus and Rome

  136

  Hadrian adopts L. Ceionius Commodus Deaths of Lucius Julius Servianus and Pedanius Fuscus

  136 or early 137

  Death of Sabina

  138

  February 25

  Hadrian adopts T. Aurelius Fulvus Antoninus, who acts as joint emperor

  July 10

  Death of Hadrian

  139

  Dedication of Hadrian’s mausoleum

  140

  First consulship of Marcus Aurelius

  161

  Death of Antoninus Accession of Marcus Aurelius

  180

  Death of Marcus Aurelius; accession of his son Commodus

  INTRODUCTION

  This is the loveliest of places—and also among the most mysterious.

  After walking half a mile uphill into countryside, you will arrive at a great but ruined wall, some thirty feet high. A wide opening gives onto a long pool beyond which lies a calm vista of hills and valleys. Cypresses abound, together with holm oaks, beeches, hornbeams, and ancient olive trees. Maritime pines spread their lofty canopies like bursts of frozen green fireworks.

  The twenty-first century dissolves into the second, for everywhere among the trees stand Roman ruins—broken colonnades, collapsed apses, steps up to higher terraces, steps down to underground tunnels, stretches of water and broken fountains, the surviving columns of a circular temple, a grassed-over open-air theater.

  Here is what remains of one of the wonders of European architecture, the villa of the emperor Hadrian near Tivoli, less than twenty miles from Rome. It was an inspiration to Renaissance architects seeking to learn the secrets of the ancient world, and as well as stealing its ideas they stripped the walls of their marble facings and the floors of their mosaics. Every statue they could find they removed for their brand-new palazzi. At least 250 have been identified, and there were certainly many more around every corner in the villa’s heyday.

  Among the portraits of emperors and images of gods, forty or more memorial statues of the emperor’s doomed lover, a young Bithynian called Antinous, looked down from niches and plinths, an inescapable, ubiquitous presence.

  The word villa is a misnomer. This was no single building, but a township or a campus: more than thirty-five structures of one kind or another have been counted over an area of at least three hundred acres. It is a mark of its scale that, after being looted for centuries as if it were a city captured by drunken soldiery, so much remains.

  The emperor did not commission a rural retreat for a tired autocrat; he had in mind a working and ceremonial center of government, hence the extraordinary number of banqueting rooms and reception halls. But, if we leave aside its practical uses, the most curious feature of the complex is that it was a representation in miniature of the Roman world as Hadrian saw it—or, more precisely, those parts of it that held most meaning for him. It was his metaphor in brick and stone for the empire itself.

  Greece took pride of place. Here was a version of the Painted Porch of Athens, famous for its wall paintings and its association with the Stoic philosophers; and over there the Academy, the olive grove where the great Plato taught. The real Vale of Tempe is in Thessaly, land of sorceries and enchantment: it was here that Apollo, god of the sun, came after slaying a dark chthonic power, the Python, a serpent that guarded the center of the earth at Delphi, and replaced it with his famous oracle. This luxuriant gorge was evoked at the northern end of the villa.

  Elsewhere, in a dip of the grounds a long rectangle of water was flanked by colonnades and statues, and was reportedly inspired by the Canopus, a canal and popular tourist trap outside Alexandria. At one end of the pool was a monumental half-domed open-air dining room, backed by a cooling display of fountains and falling water. In the pool lurked a marble crocodile, and marble images of Egyptian gods looked down benevolently on the emperor’s summer-evening parties.

  “And in order not to omit anything, Hadrian even made a Hades,” writes an ancient historian, referring to the underworld where the dead eked out a gloomy half life. We do not know where this was located. One of the villa’s most remarkable features is that beneath the grand edifices where the emperor and his guests took their leisure or held their assemblies was a subterranean network of tunnels, storerooms, and windowless sleeping areas where servants and slaves lived and labored—out of sight, out of hearing, and out of mind—to provide all the necessary services for those upstairs in the light. But these utilitarian spaces were unlikely to have been the Hades that Hadrian had in mind.

  Another possibility suggests itself. Toward the far end of the imperial estate rises a high upland, with few buildings on it, where Hadrian and his companions could ride and hunt. However, below rough fields one of the villa’s most astonishing features is to be found—four uniform passages, half a mile long in all and wide enough for a chariot to clatter along, join to form a rough rectangle or trapezium. A huge amount of labor went into their creation: 26,000 cubic yards of rocks had to be cut out and removed. Vents in the ceiling let in light and air at intervals. These long, dim corridors look and feel much as they did in Hadrian’s time. The atmosphere in them is chilly even on hot days.

  They present an enigma, for they can be entered only from one end, the northern side of the rectangle. So what were they for? Perhaps here we find an allusion to the afterlife, a disorienting space for religious rituals where the living were able to reencounter the shades of great ancestors, and even lost lovers.

  Equally enigmatic was the man who brought this wonderland into being. His villa raises more questions than answers about the strange personality of one of Rome’s greatest rulers, and to understand him fully we must visit the scenes of his life.

  I

  INVADERS FROM THE WEST

  This is a tale of two families and an orphaned boy.

  The Aelii and the Ulpii had the usual share of irritations and friendships, marriages and estrangements, and their influence on the child lasted for his entire life. He was called Publius Aelius Hadrianus Afer, and he was born on the ninth day before the Kalends of February in the year when the consuls were the emperor Vespasian a
nd his son Titus—that is to say, January 24, A.D. 76. Hadrian (for this is the English version of his name) first saw the light of day in Rome, but his hometown was far away, on the extreme edge of the Roman empire.

  Andalusia, in southern Spain, is well sited, for it is the bridge between Europe and Africa and its coastline joins the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. For many centuries it has been among the poorest regions of Europe. Farm laborers there are still among the worst paid in the Continent.

  Barren lands and snowcapped mountains alternate with fertile fields watered by the Guadalquivir River, which rolls down the wide valley it wore away from rock through prehistoric millennia and pours itself into the main. A few miles upstream of the fine city of Seville is the undistinguished little settlement of Santiponce. Here, way below tarmac, apartment buildings, and roadside cafes, below the feet of its more than seven thousand inhabitants, lie hidden from view the unexcavated remains of Roman Italica. The population then was about the same as that of today, and the Aelii were among the leading families of this provincial backwater. This was little Hadrian’s patria, his place of origin.

  On an eminence overlooking Santiponce, the splendid ruins of New Italica, added on to the original town by the adult Hadrian much later in his life, bake in the sun. Wide avenues, lined with the footings of vanished shady colonnades, crisscross a vast scrubby field, once an opulent and busy urban center but now populated only by a few dusty, undecided butterflies. Along a main street are the foundations of a public baths complex and the mosaic floor, displaying the signs of the zodiac, of a rich man’s villa. Through tall trees, the visitor glimpses one of the empire’s largest amphitheaters, all of it still in place except for some fallen upper arches.

  Today’s Andalusia is beginning to recover its long-vanished prosperity, thanks to a revived democracy and membership in the European Union. From a viewing platform over which a nude statue of the emperor Trajan presides, new, snaking motorways look as if they are tying a knot around the ancient monuments; and nearby yet another Italica, this time “Nueva,” is rising from the ground. Blinding white high-rises and empty streets await their first occupants.

  Two thousand years ago the region was among the wealthiest of the Roman empire. The Latin name for the Guadalquivir was the Baetis, and the province was called Baetica after it. The great geographer Strabo, writing in the first quarter of the first century A.D., had little time for most of Spain, which he found rugged, inhospitable, and an “exceedingly miserable place to live.” But Baetica was a different story.

  Turdetania [another name for Baetica, after its aboriginal inhabitants] is marvelously blessed by nature; and while it produces all things, and in large quantities, these blessings are doubled by the facilities for exporting goods, [including] large quantities of grain and wine, and also olive oil, not only in large quantities, but also of the best quality.