2. The Wanderer

Unlike his predecessors Hadrian was as interested in the Empire as in the capital. Following the wholesome precedent of Augustus, he decided to visit every province, examining its conditions and needs and alleviating them with the expedition and resources available to an emperor. He was curious, too, about the ways and arts, dress and beliefs, of the diverse peoples in his realm; he wished to see the famous places of Greek history, to steep himself in that Hellenic culture which was the background and adornment of his mind. “He loved,” says Fronto, “not only to govern, but to perambulate, the world.”²³ In 121 he set out from Rome, accompanied not by the pomp and trappings of royalty, but by experts, architects, builders, engineers, and artists. He went first to Gaul and “came to the relief of all the communities with various acts of generosity.”²⁴ He passed into Germany and astonished everyone by the thoroughness with which he inspected the defenses of the Empiretagainst its future destroyers. He reorganized, extended and improved the limes between the Rhine and the Danube. A man of peace, he knew the arts of war and was resolved that his pacific temper should neither weaken his armies nor misguide his enemies. He issued severe regulations to maintain military discipline and obeyed these rules while visiting the camps; there he lived the life of the soldiers, eating their fare, never using a vehicle, walking with full equipment twenty miles on a march, and showing such endurance that no one could have guessed that he was at heart a scholar and a philosopher. At the same time he rewarded excellence, raised the legal and economic status of the legionaries, gave them better weapons and ample supplies, and relaxed the discipline of their free hours, merely insisting that their amusements should not unfit them for their tasks. The Roman army was never in better condition than in his reign.

He now traveled down the Rhine to its mouth and sailed across to Britain (122). We are not informed of his activities there, except that he ordered a wall built from the Solway Firth to the mouth of the Tyne “to divide the barbarians from the Romans.” Returning to Gaul he passed leisurely through Avignon, Nimes, and other towns of the provincia, and settled down for the winter at Tarragona in northern Spain. While he was strolling alone in the gardens of his host a slave rushed upon him with drawn sword and tried to kill him. Hadrian overpowered him and quietly handed him over to the servants, who found that he was insane.

In the spring of 123 he led some legions against the Moors of northwest Africa, who had been raiding the Roman towns of Mauretania. Having defeated them and driven them back into their hills, he took ship for Ephesus. After wintering there he visited the cities of Asia Minor, listening to petitions and complaints, punishing malfeasance, rewarding competence, and providing money, designs, and workmen for municipal temples, baths, and theaters. Cyzicus, Nicaea, and Nicomedia had suffered a severe earthquake; Hadrian had the damage made good by imperial funds, and built at Cyzicus a temple that was at once ranked among the seven wonders of the world.²⁵ He pushed eastward along the Euxine to Trapezus, ordered the governor of Cappadocia—the historian Arrian—to examine and report to him the condition of all the ports on the Black Sea, moved southwest through Paphlagonia, and spent a winter at Pergamum. In the fall of 125 he sailed to Rhodes and thence to Athens. He passed a happy winter there and then turned homeward. Still curious at fifty, he stopped in Sicily, and climbed Mt. Etna to see the sunrise from a perch 11,000 feet above the sea.

It is worthy of note that he could leave his capital for five years and trust to his subordinates to carry on; like a good manager, he had organized and trained an almost automatic government. He stayed in Rome something more than a year. But the lust for travel was in his blood, and so much of the world remained to rebuild! In 128 he set out again, this time to Utica, Carthage, and the flourishing new cities of northern Africa. Returning to Rome in the fall, he left soon afterward and spent another winter in Athens (128-29). He was made archon, presided happily at games and festivals, and enjoyed being called Liberator, Helios, Zeus, and Savior of the World. He mingled with philosophers and artists, imitating the graces, without the follies, of Nero and Antony. Distressed by the free chaos of Athens’ laws, he commissioned a corps of jurists to codify them. Always skeptically interested in religion, he had himself initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries. Finding Athens beset with unemployment, and resolved to restore the city to the splendor of Periclean days, he summoned architects, engineers, and skilled artisans, and began a building program more extensive than his public works in Rome. In a square enclosed by an extensive colonnade his workmen raised a library with marble walls, 120 columns, a gilded roof, and spacious rooms sparkling with alabaster, paintings, and statuary. They built a gymnasium, an aqueduct, a temple to Hera, and another to Zeus Panhellenicos—god “of all the Greeks.” The most ambitious of these architectural undertakings was the completion (131) of the Olympieum—that lordly temple to Zeus the Olympian which Peisistratus had begun six centuries before and Antiochus Epiphanes had failed to finish. When Hadrian left Athens it was a cleaner, more prosperous, and more beautiful city than ever before in its history.²⁶

In the spring of 129 he sailed to Ephesus and traveled again in Asia Minor, spawning buildings and cities as he went. He sallied into Cappadocia and reviewed the garrisons there. At Antioch he provided funds for an aqueduct, a temple, a theater, and public baths. In the fall he visited Palmyra and Arabia, and in 130 he journeyed to Jerusalem. The Holy City was still in ruins, almost as Titus had left it sixty years before; a handful of destitute Jews lived in lairs and hovels amid the rocks. Hadrian’s heart was touched by the desolation; and his imagination was moved by the empty site. He had hoped, by his restoration of Greece and the Hellenistic East, to raise higher than before the barriers between Greco-Roman civilization and the Oriental world; now he dreamed of transforming Zion itself into a pagan citadel. He ordered that Jerusalem should be rebuilt as a Roman colony and renamed Aelia Capitolina in memory of Hadrian’s gens and Jupiter’s Capitol in Rome. It was an astonishing error of psychology and statesmanship in one of the wisest statesmen in history.

He passed on to Alexandria (130), smiled tolerantly at its disputatious populace, enriched the Museum, rebuilt Pompey’s tomb, and then, surpassing Caesar, abandoned himself to a leisurely sail up the Nile with his wife Sabina and his beloved Antinoüs. He had come upon the young Greek some years before in Bithynia; he had been stirred by the youth’s rounded beauty, soft eyes, and curly head; he had made him his favored page and had formed for him a tender and passionate attachment. Sabina made no protest that has come down to us, but the gossip of the cities assumed that the boy played Ganymede to the new Zeus; possibly, however, the childless Emperor loved him as a heaven-sent son. Now, at the height of Hadrian’s happiness, Antinoüs, still but eighteen, died—apparently by drowning in the Nile. The monarch of the world “wept like a woman,” says Spartianus; he ordered a temple to be raised on the shore, buried the lad there, and offered him to the world as a god. Around the shrine he built a city, Antinoöpolis, destined to be a Byzantine capital. While Hadrian returned sadly to Rome, legend began to remold the story: the Emperor, it said, had learned by magic divination that his greatest plans would succeed only if that which he loved most should die; Antinoüs had heard of the prophecy and had gone voluntarily to his death. Perhaps the legend formed soon enough to embitter Hadrian’s declining years.

Back in Rome (131), he could feel that he had made the Empire better than he had found it. Never before, not even under Augustus, had it been so prosperous, and never has the Mediterranean world reached that fullness of life again; never has it again been the home of so advanced a civilization so widely spread and so deeply shared. And no man had so beneficently ruled it as Hadrian. Augustus had thought of the provinces as a lucrative appendage to Italy, to be husbanded for Italy’s sake; now for the first time the ideas of Caesar and Claudius reached fulfillment, and Rome became not a tax collector for Italy, but the responsible administrator of a realm in which all parts alike received the care of the government, and in which the Greek spirit ruled the East and the mind as openly as the Roman spirit ruled the state and the West. Hadrian had seen it all and had made it one. He had promised that he “would manage the commonwealth as conscious that it was the people’s property, not his own”;²⁷ and he had kept his promise.