Hadrian

Publius Aelius Hadrianus was born on January 24, 76 CE. Ancient sources disagree about the place: the biography in the Historia Augusta names Rome, while his family seat was Italica, a Roman town near modern Seville in the province of Hispania Baetica, and many historians connect his origins to that settlement ^[1]. His family belonged to the provincial elite of Italica, descended from Italian colonists who had settled in Spain centuries earlier. His father, Publius Aelius Hadrianus Afer, held senatorial rank and served as a praetor; his mother, Domitia Paulina, came from Gades, the old Phoenician port city on the Atlantic coast of Spain ^[2].

Both parents died when Hadrian was about ten years old. Guardianship of the boy passed to two men from the same Spanish milieu: Publius Acilius Attianus, a Roman knight, and Marcus Ulpius Traianus, a distinguished soldier and senator who would later rule as the emperor Trajan ^[1]. This connection determined the course of Hadrian's life. He received the standard education of a Roman aristocrat, and his enthusiasm for Greek literature was so marked that he earned the nickname Graeculus, the little Greek, a taste that never left him ^[3].

As a teenager Hadrian spent time at Italica, where he reportedly devoted himself to hunting with an intensity that drew comment. Trajan recalled him to Rome, and from that point the young man's career followed the conventional ladder of offices open to a senator's son, though with the enormous advantage of kinship to a rising general ^[1].

Hadrian's early career mixed civilian magistracies with military tribunates in the legions, including postings on the Danube frontier. When the emperor Nerva adopted Trajan as his heir in 97, Hadrian was chosen to carry the army's congratulations to his kinsman in Germany, a small errand with large implications for his visibility ^[1]. After Trajan became emperor in 98, Hadrian advanced steadily: quaestor in 101, tribune of the plebs, praetor, and legionary commander during the Dacian wars, in which he served with distinction ^[2].

His position at court was strengthened by marriage. Around the year 100 he wed Vibia Sabina, Trajan's grandniece, a match promoted by the empress Plotina, who consistently favored Hadrian's interests ^[2]. He went on to govern Lower Pannonia, hold a consulship in 108, and serve as archon of Athens in 112, an honor that reflected his standing in the Greek world he admired ^[3].

During Trajan's great eastern campaign against Parthia, Hadrian was entrusted with the governorship of Syria, which placed him in command of the strategic rear of the entire war effort. When Trajan, gravely ill, died at Selinus in Cilicia in August 117, the succession was announced in circumstances that contemporaries found suspicious. Adoption papers naming Hadrian appeared only at the very end, signed, some alleged, by Plotina rather than the dying emperor ^[1]. Whatever the truth, the armies in Syria proclaimed Hadrian emperor on August 11, 117, and the Senate confirmed him. Early in the reign four senior senators of consular rank were executed for alleged conspiracy, killings Hadrian blamed on the Senate and the prefect Attianus but which shadowed his relations with the aristocracy for the rest of his life ^[2].

The defining decision of the reign came at its start. Hadrian abandoned Trajan's conquests in Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Assyria, judging them indefensible, and pulled the frontier back to the Euphrates ^[2]. Among the most consequential Hadrian achievements was this shift from expansion to consolidation: the empire would now be defined, fortified, and administered rather than endlessly enlarged. He backed the policy with relentless attention to the army, tightening discipline, inspecting camps in person, and drilling troops even in peacetime ^[1].

The most famous product of this frontier policy is Hadrian's Wall in northern Britain. Begun around 122 after the emperor's visit to the province, the wall ran roughly 73 modern miles (80 Roman miles) from the Tyne to the Solway Firth, studded with milecastles, turrets, and forts. It regulated movement, projected Roman power, and marked the physical edge of the empire; today it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the best-known Roman monument in Britain ^[4].

Hadrian was also one of antiquity's great builders. In Rome he rebuilt the Pantheon, giving it the vast concrete dome, still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world, that has survived nearly intact for almost nineteen centuries ^[5]. He designed the double Temple of Venus and Roma, began the enormous mausoleum on the Tiber that later became Castel Sant'Angelo, and outside Rome created the sprawling villa complex at Tivoli, a landscape of pools, pavilions, and libraries that quoted places he had seen on his travels ^[5]. In Athens he completed the colossal Temple of Olympian Zeus, begun more than six centuries earlier, and founded the Panhellenion, a league of Greek cities centered on Athens ^[3].

His administration matched his architecture in ambition. Hadrian ordered the jurist Salvius Julianus to produce a definitive edition of the praetor's edict, a landmark in the history of Roman law, expanded the imperial civil service using trained equestrians, and showed sustained concern for provincial welfare, remitting debts and funding public works across the Mediterranean ^[2].

No emperor before him had seen so much of the empire he ruled. Anyone asking who was Hadrian in the 120s would most likely have found him on the road. He spent well over half his reign outside Italy, in two long tours: the first, from 121 to 125, took him through Gaul, the German frontier, Britain, Spain, Asia Minor, and Greece; the second, from 128 to 132, through Africa, Greece again, Egypt, and Syria ^[1]. He traveled bareheaded in all weathers, marched with his soldiers, and inspected accounts, walls, and granaries with a bureaucrat's eye ^[2].

The journeys were not tourism. Cities across the provinces received temples, aqueducts, and grain funds; the coinage of the reign celebrated the provinces by name as members of a shared commonwealth rather than trophies of conquest ^[2]. Athens benefited most of all, gaining a library, an aqueduct, and an entire new quarter, and the grateful city set up the surviving Arch of Hadrian to mark his contribution ^[3].

The travels also produced tragedy. In October 130, while the imperial party sailed up the Nile, Hadrian's young Bithynian favorite Antinous drowned in the river under circumstances never fully explained. Hadrian's grief was extraordinary and public: he founded the city of Antinoopolis near the spot, and Antinous was deified, his image multiplying in sculpture across the empire on a scale otherwise reserved for emperors and gods ^[6].

Hadrian's marriage to Vibia Sabina lasted nearly four decades but was, by the accounts that survive, distant and childless. The ancient biographies report mutual coldness, and Hadrian is said to have remarked that he would have divorced her had he been a private citizen ^[1]. Sabina accompanied him on his travels and appeared on the coinage as empress; she died a year or two before her husband and was deified ^[2].

The central emotional attachment of his life, so far as the sources allow us to see, was Antinous. The relationship followed a recognizably Greek model of an older man and a youth, and Hadrian made no attempt to conceal it. After the drowning in the Nile, the cult of Antinous spread rapidly through the eastern provinces and beyond, one of the more remarkable religious phenomena of the second century ^[6].

The emperor's character puzzled contemporaries. The Historia Augusta describes him as severe and genial, stingy and generous, cruel and merciful, always changeable. He wrote poetry in Latin and Greek, argued with professional scholars, sang, painted, and took a serious interest in astrology and architecture ^[1]. A short poem addressed to his own departing soul, beginning animula vagula blandula, is attributed to his final days and remains among the most quoted verses to survive from any Roman emperor ^[1].

The last decade of the reign was darkened by war in Judaea. Hadrian's decision to refound Jerusalem as a Roman colony named Aelia Capitolina, with a temple to Jupiter on the site of the destroyed Jewish Temple, together with reported restrictions on circumcision, helped ignite the revolt led by Simon Bar Kokhba in 132 ^[7]. The war lasted until 135 or 136 and was fought with terrible ferocity. Cassius Dio records enormous casualties and the devastation of Judaea, after which the province was renamed Syria Palaestina and Jews were barred from Jerusalem ^[7]. The losses on the Roman side were heavy enough that Hadrian, reporting to the Senate, is said to have omitted the customary formula that he and the army were well.

His health collapsed in the mid 130s, apparently from a long cardiovascular illness that left him in constant pain. The succession consumed his final years. In 136 he adopted the senator Lucius Ceionius Commodus, renamed Lucius Aelius Caesar, but the heir died on the first day of 138. Hadrian then adopted the respected senator Aurelius Antoninus, the future Antoninus Pius, on the condition that Antoninus in turn adopt the young Marcus Annius Verus and Lucius Verus, thereby arranging the succession for two generations: the elder boy would rule as Marcus Aurelius ^[2].

The same period brought fresh bloodshed at the top of society. Hadrian forced the deaths of his aged brother-in-law Servianus, then about ninety, and of Servianus's grandson, suspecting them of designs on the throne ^[1]. Racked by illness and reportedly asking for poison or a blade that his attendants refused to supply, Hadrian withdrew to the seaside resort of Baiae on the Bay of Naples, where he died on July 10, 138, at the age of sixty-two ^[2].

The Senate, remembering the executions at both ends of the reign, was reluctant to deify Hadrian, and only the insistence of Antoninus Pius secured his consecration, an act of loyalty that reportedly helped earn the new emperor the name Pius ^[1]. Hadrian's ashes were eventually placed in his great mausoleum by the Tiber, the building later transformed into the papal fortress of Castel Sant'Angelo ^[5].

Historians count him among the so-called Five Good Emperors, the sequence from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius under whom the empire reached a peak of stability and prosperity, a judgment made famous by Edward Gibbon ^[2]. Any serious Hadrian biography must weigh the contradictions: a philhellene aesthete who waged one of Rome's most brutal wars, a restless traveler who fixed the empire's borders in stone, an emperor hated by senators and honored by provincials. The basic Hadrian facts, the wall in Britain, the Pantheon's dome, the deliberate halt to expansion, all describe a ruler who chose maintenance over glory and made that choice look like strength ^[4].

The physical record of the reign remains unusually vivid. Visitors today can walk the line of Hadrian's Wall, stand under the Pantheon's oculus, and wander the ruins of the villa at Tivoli, itself a World Heritage Site ^[5]. Few rulers of any era can still be encountered so directly through the things they built ^[4].