Hadrian

Hadrian was Roman emperor from 117 to 138. The cousin and successor of Trajan, he gave up his predecessor's eastern conquests and turned the empire towards consolidation, fortifying its borders, most famously with the wall across northern Britain. He spent much of his reign travelling through the provinces, was a passionate admirer of Greek culture and a prolific builder, and brutally crushed the last great Jewish revolt in Judaea. Contemporaries found him brilliant, restless and difficult, and his reputation has remained mixed.

Publius Aelius Hadrianus was born on 24 January 76. Most modern historians accept that he was born at Italica in southern Spain, near today's Seville, the home town of his family and of Trajan's, although the Historia Augusta, a late and unreliable collection of imperial biographies, places his birth in Rome. His father, a senator, was Trajan's cousin, and when he died in about 86 the ten-year-old Hadrian became the ward of Trajan and of a Roman knight, Publius Acilius Attianus. He was a keen student of Greek literature, so keen that as a youth he was nicknamed "Graeculus", the little Greek, and he loved hunting.

Hadrian followed a standard senatorial career, serving as a military tribune in three legions on the Danube and Rhine. When Trajan became emperor in 98, Hadrian rode to bring him the news, and around 100 he married Vibia Sabina, Trajan's grandniece, a match said to have been promoted by Trajan's wife, Plotina. He served in both Dacian Wars, became consul in 108 and in 117 was governor of Syria, with the main eastern army behind him.

When Trajan died in Cilicia in August 117, Plotina announced that he had adopted Hadrian on his deathbed. Even in antiquity there were rumours that the adoption had been staged after the emperor's death, and the truth cannot now be known. Hadrian immediately abandoned the new provinces of Mesopotamia, Assyria and Armenia, which were in revolt and could not easily be held, and returned the frontier to the Euphrates. The decision was sensible but unpopular with those who admired Trajan's conquests. Soon afterwards four senior senators, all former consuls, were executed on charges of conspiracy without trial. Hadrian claimed that the Senate had acted without his approval, but the affair poisoned his relations with the senatorial class for the rest of his reign.

No emperor before Hadrian spent so long away from Rome. Between 121 and 125, and again from 128 to about 132, he toured almost every part of the Roman Empire: Gaul, the Rhine frontier, Britain, Spain, North Africa, Asia Minor, Greece, Syria and Egypt. He inspected the army in person, insisted on hard training and shared the soldiers' rations, and founded or rebuilt cities wherever he went.

In Britain, in 122, he ordered the building of the wall that bears his name, running about 117 kilometres from the Tyne to the Solway, with forts, milecastles and a ditch, to control movement across the frontier. In Germany a timber palisade marked the border. These works reflected his policy of defending the existing empire rather than expanding it, which kept it largely at peace. Hadrian's Wall is now a World Heritage Site and one of the best-known Roman monuments in the United Kingdom.

Hadrian's love of Greek culture shaped his reign. He was the first emperor to wear a full beard, in the manner of a Greek philosopher, and he was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries. In Athens he completed the vast Temple of Olympian Zeus, begun more than six centuries earlier, built a new quarter of the city and founded the Panhellenion, a league of Greek cities centred there. He enjoyed the company of intellectuals, and is said to have known the Stoic teacher Epictetus, though the evidence is slight.

Probably around 123, though the sources do not say when or where, Hadrian met Antinous, a young man from Bithynia in Asia Minor, who became his companion and lover. In October 130, during a journey up the Nile in Egypt, Antinous drowned. Whether his death was an accident, suicide or something stranger was debated even in antiquity. Hadrian's grief was intense. He founded the city of Antinoöpolis on the river near the spot, and Antinous was declared a god. Statues of him were set up throughout the Greek East, and hundreds survive, making his face one of the most recognisable of the ancient world. Hadrian's marriage to Sabina was childless and seems to have been unhappy.

In Judaea, still scarred by the destruction of Jerusalem in 70, Hadrian decided to refound the city as a Roman colony, Aelia Capitolina, with a temple to Jupiter. Ancient writers also mention a ban on circumcision, although whether it came before the revolt or after is disputed. In 132 a rebellion broke out under Simon bar Kosiba, known as Bar Kokhba, "son of the star", whom some followers saw as the messiah. The rebels held much of the province for over three years. Hadrian brought in legions from across the empire under his best general, Julius Severus, and the revolt ended in 135 or 136 with the fall of the fortress of Betar. Cassius Dio puts the Jewish dead at 580,000, a figure that cannot be verified, and says many hundreds of villages were destroyed. Jews were forbidden to enter Jerusalem, and the province was renamed Syria Palaestina. In the history of Judaism Hadrian is remembered as one of its worst persecutors.

Hadrian was a gifted amateur architect. In Rome he rebuilt the Pantheon, with its great unreinforced concrete dome, still standing today, and built the Temple of Venus and Roma, said to follow his own design. At Tibur (Tivoli) he created a huge villa with buildings recalling places he had seen on his travels. Under his direction the jurist Salvius Julianus fixed the text of the praetors' edict, an important step in the development of Roman law.

In his last years Hadrian was seriously ill and increasingly suspicious. In 136 he adopted Lucius Ceionius Commodus as his heir, and he forced his elderly brother-in-law Servianus and Servianus's grandson Fuscus to die, apparently to remove rivals. When Commodus died at the start of 138, Hadrian adopted the respected senator Antoninus, on condition that he in turn adopt the young Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. Hadrian died at Baiae, on the Bay of Naples, on 10 July 138, after composing a short poem addressed to his soul. The Senate was reluctant to deify him, but Antoninus insisted, earning the name Pius. Hadrian's great mausoleum in Rome survives as the Castel Sant'Angelo.

Later Romans counted Hadrian among the five "good emperors" of the second century, a period that the historian Edward Gibbon called the happiest in human history, and his reign was a time of peace and prosperity for most of the empire. His policy of fixed, defended borders set the pattern for his successors. Yet he was also capable of great cruelty, and his treatment of the Jews of Judaea was devastating. He has fascinated modern writers, above all Marguerite Yourcenar, whose novel Memoirs of Hadrian (1951) imagined his life in his own voice.