Some twelve years after the famous rescript of Trajan to the Proconsul Pliny on the subject of the treatment of Christians formally accused before a State tribunal, another rescript was issued from the Imperial chancery by Trajan's successor in the Empire, Hadrian, on the same subject. The evidence for the genuineness of this second rescript has been carefully sifted, and the opinion of most competent scholars is practically unanimous in pronouncing it an authentic document. It is quoted in full by Justin Martyr in his first "Apology" addressed circa A. D. 140-5 to the Emperor Antoninus Pius; and it is mentioned by Melito, Bishop of Sardis, in his Apology addressed to Marcus Aurelius some thirty years later.
The occasion which called forth Hadrian's rescript was a letter addressed to the Emperor by Silvanus Granianus, proconsul of Asia, dwelling upon the injustice of yielding to popular clamor and condemning Christians who were guilty of no crime, simply because they were Christians, on the information of irresponsible and prejudiced informers; similar remonstrances seem to have been made by other provincial governors to Hadrian. The letter of Granianus was written circa A. D. 123-4, and the Emperor's reply was sent in the following year to Minucius Fundanus, who had succeeded Granianus in the government of the province of Asia. It would seem on first thoughts that there was scarcely occasion for any provincial governor to consult the Emperor anew on a question which had been definitely settled about twelve years before by Trajan's rescript addressed to Pliny. But in truth the situation had considerably changed in the interval The Christian communities were steadily increasing; popular jealousy and discontent had grown too; and in some districts the popular unrest had evidently attained to disturbing proportions. It is clear, also, that some of the more just and generous among the Roman magistrates were grieved at having to yield to a popular clamor which called upon them to persecute and to harry innocent, law-abiding persons. Hence their fresh inquiries addressed to the Emperor to learn his will in the matter. The Emperor Hadrian—whose character will be presently briefly discussed—the Olympian god who roamed over the Empire looking into every religion, initiated into various mysteries, was quite alive to the fact that the State religion was probably a sham, and looked at as a religion was a failure; but he knew also that it was the keystone of the Imperial policy, and he could not, or would not, face the task of altering it. He leaves the religious question quite open, and lets the religious sects fight it out for him to watch. In this ordinance about a religion, he never alludes to the idea of religion. No other person could have written such a rescript, and without any evidence we might have identified it as Hadrian's.
The Imperial document followed pretty closely the rescript of Trajan, but it changed some of the directions, and the changes were on the lines suggested by the proconsul to whose query it was the formal reply. So far it improved the position of the Christians. It required, in the case of a Christian prosecution, definite evidence, and further it ordered that if the prosecutor failed to prove his case he should be exposed to severe punishment. The whole rescript was studiously vague, leaving much to the magistrate's discretion. The original principle, however, was still left in Hadrian's rescript, viz. that if the governor was satisfied that the accused was a Christian, his plain duty was at once to direct his execution.
Still the discouragement of mere popular clamor, and the severe penalty to which an informer might be subjected if his accusation could not be clearly proven, for a time made the position of the followers of Jesus in the Empire more tolerable, especially in those provinces where a just and generous governor bore sway. It seems probable that at one period of Hadrian's reign the mind of the Emperor was somewhat influenced in their favor. But the gleam of Imperial favor was, as we shall see, but transitory.
It will be worth while to give a brief sketch of the career and character of this master of the Roman world from A. D. 117 to A. D. 138; twenty-one of those momentous years when the foundation stories of the Christian Church were being laid in all the provinces of the Empire by the early builders—with much anxiety, often in suffering, but always in sure hope. Hadrian in many respects was a typical Roman of the highest class; and his conduct towards the Christian sect, which in his days had already expanded into a somewhat important community in the Empire, was a fair example of the general policy of the Imperial chancery in its dealings with Christians all through those years of the second century when a kindly, well-disposed Emperor was on the throne. How quickly, without apparent provocation, the benevolent, kindly feeling which showed itself in a partial toleration of an unlawful religion, which it must be remembered Christianity ever was, could change for the worse, is shown in the harsh persecuting policy which broke out in the closing years of this Emperor's reign.
There was no real opposition, however, to his succession, and his reign was singularly free from all plots and rebellions. We except, of course, the great Jewish revolt which happened far on in the peaceful and prosperous reign. Hadrian was an exceptionally brilliant genius; comparatively little has come down to us from Pagan chronicles respecting his inner life, but we are told that he was at once painter and sculptor, musician, poet, and grammarian. The number of cities which bear his name in different provinces of the Empire demonstrate the truth of the assertion that he was an enthusiastic builder; an antiquarian, too, who prided himself on his genius for research. After making all allowances for the too flattering estimate of his abilities, which naturally would be made by the contemporaries of an all-powerful sovereign, there is no doubt of the real powers of the Emperor Hadrian, powers which he loved to exercise generally for the public weal. His government was distinguished by innumerable acts of public munificence; countless cities were beautified and adorned by such works of utility as aqueducts and baths. History relates how other great princes in different ages spent a considerable portion of their lives in travel. But while the distant foreign expeditions of Alexander the Great and Caesar, of Charlemagne and Saint Louis, of Charles V. and the great Napoleon, were solely for the purposes of war, the Emperor Hadrian is, perhaps, the solitary example recorded in history of a sovereign spending fifteen years in visiting his vast dominions solely in the interests of peace. Memorials of this strange reign of Imperial travel can be traced in Britain, Gaul, Africa, Egypt, and those wide provinces of Asia which in the great days of Italian supremacy were under the rule of Rome.
His character was made up of strange and startling contrasts. Usually almost an ascetic in the rigorous plainness of his private repasts, he was famous, too, in that age of self-indulgence and luxury for the wild excesses of his public banquets. Again, he prided himself on his knowledge of philosophy and his powers of philosophic argument, and yet we find him dabbling in occult and hidden mysteries, filling the position of high Pontiff as well as of an Arval brother, of one who was initiated into the mysteries of Eleusis and the secrets of the life to come.
HADRIAN. In the British Museum.
Hadrian was the author and inspirer of much wise and benevolent legislation; more especially the sad lot of the vast slave class, the curse of Rome, was sensibly ameliorated by his wise and merciful laws; yet the sovereign's private life was disfigured with shameless, even with nameless, immorality. Again, it is difficult to pronounce whether or no mercy or cruelty were the special features of Hadrian's complex character. The assassination of prominent personages who might have proved formidable competitors for the purple at the outset of his reign shocked and dismayed Rome, and at first fears were entertained in the metropolis that the age of the tyranny of a Nero or a Domitian was about to be repeated. But many years of a comparatively gentle and just rule followed this first burst of reckless bloodshed, and the early cruelties which disfigured the beginnings of his rule were in time forgotten. Then in the last years of his brilliant reign the cruel spirit seemed once more to awaken in the failing Emperor, circa A. D. 134-5, or a little earlier. The shock of the Jewish war and its dreadful slaughter; failure of strength, accompanied with ever increasing pain and weariness; have been pleaded as excuses for this changed and sombre spirit which overshadowed the three or four years preceding the Emperor's death. A long list of proscriptions in which some of the noblest of the Romans perished, among whom some of his own kinfolk were included, alarmed and disturbed the public mind; no one was safe from the jealous suspicions of the sick tyrant, to whose insane and baseless terrors the highest and the lowest in their turn would fall victims. It was a melancholy close to a very brilliant and generally prosperous rule. His many good deeds were completely forgotten in the gloomy reign of terror of the closing years, and he passed away amidst the execrations of the people over whom he had long ruled wisely and well. The Senate even wrote publicly to condemn his memory, and would have indignantly refused to grant him the usual posthumous divine honors paid to a dead Emperor, had not the devoted piety of his adopted successor, known in history as Antoninus Pius, disarmed their wrath, and induced them very reluctantly to give him his place among the gods of Rome.
It was during this melancholy period that his conduct towards the Christians completely changed, and the bitter persecution of which we shall presently speak was directed against those quiet and ever loyal subjects of the Empire; adding not a few to the long list of martyrs and confessors of the faith, some of whose names have been preserved in the Church's Martyrologies.