3. The Builder
Only one thing remained—to make Rome, too, more beautiful than before. The artist in Hadrian was ever competing with the governor; he rebuilt the Pantheon while reorganizing Roman law. No other man ever built so plentifully, no other ruler so directly. The structures erected for him were sometimes designed by him, and were always subject to his expert inspection as they progressed. He had a hundred edifices repaired or restored and inscribed his name on none of them. Rome in all quarters benefited from his rare union of wisdom with power. Si jeunesse savait et vieillesse pouvait was in him a riddle solved.
His most famous reconstruction was the Pantheon—the best-preserved building of the ancient world. The rectangular temple reared by Agrippa had been destroyed by fire; apparently only the frontal Corinthian portico remained. North of this remnant Hadrian had his architects and engineers raise a circular temple, in the most indigenous of Roman styles. His Hellenic tastes inclined him to prefer Greek to Roman forms in the architecture of his capital. The new temple did not form with the portico a harmonious whole; but the interior—a circle 132 feet in diameter, with no impeding supports-gave a sense of space and freedom equaled only by the Gothic cathedrals. The walls were twenty feet thick, of brick externally faced in the lower section with marble, in the rest with stucco relieved by pilasters. The ceiling of the portico was of bronze plates so thick that when they were removed by Pope Urban VIII they sufficed to cast 110 cannon and to form the baldachin over the high altar in St. Peter’s.29 The massive bronze doors were originally covered with gold. Seven niches were cut into the lower section of the windowless interior wall and were adorned with lofty marble columns and entablatures; once these niches served as alcoves for statuary, now they are modest chapels in a magnificent church. A higher section of the wall was plated with panels of costly stone, separated by pillars of porphyry. The coffered dome, rising inward from the top of the walls, was the supreme triumph of Roman engineering. It was erected by pouring concrete into ribbed sections and letting the whole congeal into one solid mass. Its monolithic character did away with lateral thrust, but to make security doubly sure the architect built buttresses into the walls. At the top of the dome an opening (the oculus, or “eye”), twenty-six feet in diameter, gave the interior its sole and sufficient illumination. From this majestic dome, the largest in history, an architectural lineage descends through Byzantine and Romanesque variations to the dome of St. Peter’s, and to that of the Capitol in Washington.
Probably Hadrian himself designed the double-apsed temple to Venus and Roma which rose opposite the Colosseum, for legend tells how he sent his plans for it to Apollodorus and had the old architect put to death for returning a scornful comment.30 The temple was notable in several particulars: it was the largest in Rome; it had two cellas, one for each of its gods, who sat back to back on incommunicative thrones; and its vaulted roof of gold-plated bronze tiles was among the most brilliant sights of the city. For himself the Emperor built a yet ampler home—the villa whose remains still draw visitors to the pleasant suburb known to him as Tibur, to us as Tivoli. There, in an estate seven miles in circumference, rose a palace with every variety of room, and gardens so crowded with famous works of art that every major museum in Europe has enriched itself from the ruins. The designer showed here the usual Roman indifference to symmetry; he added building to building as need or fancy prompted, and made no greater attempt at harmony than we find in the architectural chaos of the Forum; perhaps the Romans, like the Japanese, were tired of symmetry and pleased with the surprises of irregularity. Besides porticoes, libraries, temples, a theater, a music hall, and a hippodrome, the profuse architect added small replicas of Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, and Zeno’s Stoa—as if the Emperor, amid all this vain wealth, would make some amends to philosophy.
The villa was finished in the last years of Hadrian’s life. We do not know that he found happiness there. The revolt of the Jews in 135 embittered him; he put it down without mercy and fretted that he could not end his reign without war. In that same year, still only fifty-nine, he was stricken with a painful and wasting illness—akin to tuberculosis and dropsy—which slowly crushed his body, his spirit, and his mind. His temper became sharper, his manner querulous; he suspected his oldest friends of conspiring to kill and replace him; at last—perhaps in an illucid interval, and how justly we cannot say—he ordered that several of them should be put to death.
To end the war of succession that was forming in his court, he adopted as heir his friend Lucius Verus. When, soon after, Lucius died, Hadrian called to his bedside at Tibur a man with an unblemished reputation for integrity and wisdom, Titus Aurelius Antoninus, and adopted him as his son and successor. Looking far ahead, he advised Antoninus to adopt in turn, and educate for government, two youths then growing up at the court: Marcus Annius Verus, then seventeen, and Lucius Aelius Verus, then eleven, respectively the nephew of Antoninus and the son of Lucius Verus. The title of Caesar, heretofore borne by the emperors and their agnatic descendants, was conferred by Hadrian upon Antoninus; and thereafter, while the emperors kept for themselves the title ofAugustus, they granted the name Caesar to each heir presumptive to the throne.
Hadrian’s sickness and sufferings had now increased; blood often gushed from his nostrils; and in his distress he began to long for death. He had already prepared his own tomb beyond the Tiber—that huge mausoleum whose gloomy remains are today the Castel Sant’ Angelo, still reached by the Pons Aelius that Hadrian built. He was impressed by the example of the Stoic philosopher Euphrates, then in Rome, who, weary with illness and old age, asked Hadrian’s permission to kill himself and, receiving it, drank hemlock.31 The Emperor begged for poison or a sword, but no attendant would accommodate him. He bade a Danubian slave stab him, but the slave fled; he commanded his physician to poison him, but the physician committed suicide.32 He found a dagger and was about to kill himself when it was taken from him. He mourned that he, who had the power to put anyone to death, was not himself permitted to die. Dismissing his doctors, he withdrew to Baiae and deliberately fed on foods and drinks that would hasten his end. At last, exhausted and maddened with pain, he died (138), after sixty-two years of life and twenty-one of rule. He left behind him a little poem that expressed like Dante the sadness of recalling in grief the days of our happiness:
Animula vagula, blandula,
Hospes comesque corporis,
Quae nunc abibis in loca,
Pallidula, rigida, nudula,
Nee ut soles dabis iocos?
Soul of mine, pretty one, flitting one,
Guest and partner of my clay,
Whither wilt thou hie away—
Pallid one, rigid one, naked one,
Never to play again, never to play?33