III. HADRIAN

1. The Ruler

Probably we shall never know whether the most brilliant of the Roman emperors won his throne by amorous connivance or by Trajan’s conviction of his worth. “His appointment,” says Dio Cassius, “was due to the fact that when Trajan died without an heir, his widow Plotina, who was in love with Hadrian, conspired to secure him the succession.”¹² Spartianus repeats the story.¹³ Plotina and Hadrian denied the rumor, which nevertheless persisted to the end of his reign. He settled the matter by distributing a generous donative among the troops.

Publius Aelius Hadrianus traced his cognomen and family to the town of Adria, on the Adriatic coast; thence, said his autobiography, his ancestors had migrated to Spain. The same Spanish town, Italica, that had seen the birth of Trajan in 52 saw that of his nephew Hadrian in 76. When the boy’s father died (86) he was placed under the guardianship of Trajan and Caelius Attianus. The latter tutored him and instilled in him so warm a fondness for Greek literature that the youth was nicknamed Graeculus. He studied also singing, music, medicine, mathematics, painting, and sculpture, and later dabbled in half a dozen arts. Trajan called him to Rome (91) and gave him his niece in marriage (100). Vivia Sabina, as preserved in portrait busts that may have idealized her, was a woman of distinguished and conscious beauty, in whom Hadrian found no lasting happiness. Possibly he loved dogs and horses too keenly, and spent too much time hunting with them, and building tombs for them when they died. Perhaps he was unfaithful, or seemed so. In any case, she bore him no children, and though she accompanied him on many of his travels, they lived in lifelong estrangement. He showed her every favor and courtesy, and gave her every kindness but affection. When Suetonius, one of his secretaries, spoke disrespectfully of her he dismissed him.

Hadrian’s first decision as emperor was to revise the imperialistic policy of his uncle. He had counseled Trajan against the Parthian expedition as too great an expenditure of men and means so soon after the Dacian Wars, and as promising, at best, gains difficult to hold; and Trajan’s generals, eager for glory, had never pardoned his opposition. Now he withdrew the legions from Armenia, Assyria, Mesopotamia, and Parthia, made Armenia a client kingdom instead of a province, and accepted the Euphrates as the eastern boundary of the Empire; he played Augustus to Trajan’s Caesar, and consolidated with peaceful administration as much as he could of the unprecedented realm that reckless arms had won. The generals who had led Trajan’s forces—Palma, Celsus, Quietus, Nigrinus—thought this policy cowardly and unwise; to cease to attack, they felt, was merely to defend, and merely to defend was to begin to die. While Hadrian was with his legions on the Danube the Senate announced that the four generals had been detected in a conspiracy to overthrow the government and had been executed by the Senate’s orders. Rome was shocked to find that the men had received no trial; and though Hadrian, returning hurriedly to Rome, protested that he had had nothing to do with the matter, no one believed him. He vowed to put no senator to death except at the Senate’s bidding, distributed a gift of money among the people, amused them with abundant games, canceled tax arrears to the amount of 900,000,000 sesterces, publicly burned the tax records in a fiscal auto-da-fé, and for twenty years governed with wisdom, justice, and peace. But his unpopularity remained complete.

His ancient biographer describes him as tall and elegant, with hair curled, and “a full beard to hide the natural blemishes of his face”;¹⁴ thenceforth all Rome wore beards. He was strongly built and kept himself in vigor by frequent exercise, above all by hunting; on several occasions he killed a lion with his own hands.¹⁵ So many elements were mingled in him that description is baffled. We are told that he was “stern and cheerful, humorous and grave, sensual and cautious, hard and liberal, severe and merciful, deceptively simple, and always in all things various.”¹⁶ He had a quick, impartial, skeptical and penetrating mind, but he respected tradition as the connective tissue of generations. He read and admired the Stoic Epictetus, but he sought pleasure with shamelessness and taste. He was irreligious and superstitious, laughed at oracles, played with magic and astrology, encouraged the national faith, and sedulously performed the duties of pontifex maximus. He was courteous and obstinate, sometimes cruel, usually kind; perhaps his contradictions were merely adaptations to circumstance. He visited the sick, helped the unfortunate, extended existing charities to orphans and widows, and was a generous patron to artists, writers, and philosophers. He was a good singer, dancer, and harpist, a competent painter, a middling sculptor. He wrote several volumes—a grammar, an autobiography, poems decent and indecent,¹⁷ in Latin and Greek. He preferred Greek to Latin literature, and old Cato’s simple Latin to Cicero’s smooth eloquence; under his example many authors now affected an archaic style. He organized the state-paid professors into a university, paid them well, and built for them a magnificent Athenaeum to rival the Museum of Alexandria. It delighted him to gather scholars and thinkers about him, to puzzle them with questions, and laugh at their contradictions and disputes. Favorinus of Gaul was the wisest of this philosophic court; when his friends rallied him for yielding to Hadrian in argument, he answered that any man with thirty legions behind him must be right.¹⁸

Along with these multiple intellectual interests went an unerring sense for the practical. Following Domitian’s lead, Hadrian reduced his freedmen to subordinate functions, chose businessmen of tried ability to administer the government, and formed from them and senators and jurists aconcilium to meet in regular sessions for the consideration of policies. He appointed an advocatus fisci, or Attorney for the Treasury, to detect corruption or deceit in the payment of taxes, with the illuminating result that while taxes remained as before, revenues were decidedly increased. He himself kept watch on each department and, like Napoleon, astonished its heads by detailed knowledge of their field. “His memory was vast,” says Spartianus; “he wrote, dictated, listened, and conversed with his friends, all at the same time”¹⁹—though the frequency of this tale invites suspicion. Under his care, and with the help of an extended civil service, the Empire was probably better governed than ever before or afterward. The price of this zealous order was a swelling bureaucracy, and a “mania of regulation” that moved the principate still closer to absolute monarchy. Hadrian observed all the forms of co-operation with the Senate; nevertheless, his appointees and their executive orders encroached more and more upon the functions of what had once seemed “an assembly of kings.” He was too close to his problems to foresee that his efficient but proliferating bureaucracy might become in time an unbearable burden upon the taxpayers. On the contrary, he believed that within the framework of law and ordinance which his government had established every person in the Empire would find career open to talent and any man could rise rapidly from class to class.

His clear and logical mind resented the chaos of accumulated, obscure, and contradictory laws. He commissioned Julianus to co-ordinate the enactments of past praetors into a Perpetual Edict, and encouraged further codifications that paved the way for Justinian. He acted as a supreme court both in Rome and on his journeys, and earned the reputation of a fair and learned judge, always as lenient as the reign of law would permit. He issued innumerable decrees, usually in favor of the weak against the strong, the slave against the master, the small farmer against the large estate, the tenant against the landlord, the consumer against the deceptions of retailers and the multiplication of middlemen.²⁰ He rejected accusations for maiestas, refused bequests from parents, or persons unknown to him, and ordered a tolerant application of the laws against Christians.²¹ By his own example on state lands he encouraged the practice of emphyteusis (“implanting”), by which owners rented rough acres to tenants to be planted with orchards and remain rent-free till fruit grew. He was not a radical reformer; he was only a superlative administrator seeking, within the limits and inequalities of human nature, the greatest good of the whole. He preserved old forms, but he quietly poured new content into them according to the needs of the time. Once, when his passion for administration flagged, he refused audience to a petitioning woman with the plea, “I haven’t time.” “Don’t be emperor, then,” she cried. He granted her a hearing.²²