Before Trajan died, however, he had one more ambitious military campaign in him, one more figure to measure up to. Having quite spectacularly outstripped the career of his father, he now wanted to emulate none other than Alexander the Great. To do that he turned his gaze east. The territory of the rich Parthian state stretched from Turkey and the border of Roman Syria all the way across Iraq (Mesopotamia) and into Iran and Afghanistan. A war against Rome’s great nemesis would thus take Trajan too on a road of conquest in the direction of the limit Alexander reached: India. The excuse justifying war was a familiar one. The Parthian ruler was interfering once again in Armenia, the buffer-state-cum-client-kingdom loyal to Rome. The balance of power on Rome’s eastern frontier was again in jeopardy. Action was urgently required.
In 114 Trajan and his army marched east. The king of Armenia quickly capitulated, and his kingdom soon became a Roman province; so too did northern Mesopotamia, the land en route to a Roman foray into Media (the north of modern Iran). By 116 Trajan was again expanding Roman control and breaking new ground. In that year he reached the westernmost nook of the Persian Gulf, stopped at the shore and stared out to sea. He was looking towards the iconic land he had thus far only imagined. Were he a younger man, he said despondently, he would have followed Alexander’s footsteps to India.2Now, exhausted by two years of campaigning in the unforgiving heat of the Arabian deserts, he had to concede that the Greek conqueror was the greater man. Nonetheless, there were extraordinary achievements to note. In his dispatches back to the Senate in Rome the long list of incomprehensibly named peoples whom he had conquered en route was translating into the prospect of an unprecedented glut of triumphs in the metropolis. Trajan, however, would not live to celebrate even one of them.
The collapse of Trajan’s achievements happened even faster than their accomplishment. The further east he had ventured, the more exposed and difficult to retain became those places he had already subdued. In 117 Trajan fell ill. His entourage and a column of soldiers made a sombre, mournful retreat back to Italy. By August the supine emperor had reached Selinus on the coast of southern Turkey. There he suffered a stroke and died. He was in his early seventies and left behind no children. He did, however, leave an heir.
That, at least, was the story circulated immediately by those at Trajan’s bedside – his wife Plotina and his niece Matidia – the ink of their signatures still wet on the official document specifying the succession. Trajan’s adopted son and nominated successor, they announced, was the then Roman governor of Syria. That man was by turns Trajan’s cousin, a close companion of Plotina, and the husband of Matidia’s daughter Sabina.
A NEW DIRECTION
When the army recognized Trajan’s nominee and hailed him emperor, Hadrian’s claim to the throne was, if not exactly impeccable and unrivalled, certainly solid. Just to make sure, however, a pragmatic safety measure was required. Although Hadrian denied any involvement to the end of his days, four men in Rome – all influential, able senators and ex-consuls – were murdered within days of the announcement of the new emperor’s accession. A story went around that they had been plotting to overthrow Hadrian; according to Dio, however, it was the threat which their wealth and influence posed that was their real undoing.3 Hadrian’s inauguration took place in the Syrian capital of Antioch on 11 August 117.
With his position secured as supreme leader of the vast Roman world, Hadrian took his time journeying from the province of Syria to the capital of what was now his empire. The man who travelled in imperial splendour was fifty-one years old, tall and cut a novel figure for an emperor. Like Trajan, Hadrian’s family background was highly unusual. He came not from Rome or even Italy, but from an old, moneyed Italian family who lived in southern Spain near Seville. His ancestors were Roman colonists who had settled there during the Roman conquest of Spain at the turn of the third and second centuries BC. They had invested their money in agriculture and the local silver mines, and the fortunes they made set them up as the bedrock of the wealthy local Roman élite. Hadrian’s parochial origins were evident in his voice. When he spoke Latin he did so with a heavy provincial accent, a fact of which he was embarrassed. As Trajan’s speech-maker earlier in his career, he had been laughed at whenever he uttered a word. There was also the matter of his beard.
Trajan, the first ‘Spanish’ emperor, was a classic martial hero. As a result, like Julius Caesar, Augustus and all the Roman emperors before him, he was close-shaved, and his hair, combed forward, was a neatly cropped cap. Hadrian’s hair, by contrast, was soft and wavy – a more casual style than that of his predecessors. But it was his facial hair that suggested a clean break with the past regime. Some might have thought it suggested a lack of discipline, the mark of a poor soldier, but that was not the case. In Dacia he had excelled as a commander and had twice been decorated with the highest military honours. He was at ease in conversation and mixing with fellow soldiers of all ranks. His relaxed, open manner was a quality he would carry into his rule, though it was said that this disguised ‘a harsh, jealous, libidinous temperament’.4 Even as emperor he continued to enjoy a military diet of cheese and bacon, he disliked soft mattresses and had an impressive ability to drink copious amounts of alcohol, a talent he had honed on campaign in Trajan’s inner circle.
Still, the beard would come to say something different about this man’s complex character and the new direction in which he would take the Roman empire. It hinted not at Roman war and conquest, but the culture, the learning and the reflective, intellectual life of the ancient Greeks. Hadrian’s aristocratic education paved the way for the passions of his life. He wrote poetry, and he was proud of his skill in playing the lyre and the flute, but above all he enjoyed geometry and sculpture. As a young man, Hadrian had studied in Athens and earned the nickname ‘Little Greek’. Like Nero, however, he would take his Hellenistic interests way beyond the standard considered acceptable for an educated Roman aristocrat, let alone a future emperor.
His drive to excel and his inquisitive mind made him, for example, an accomplished, experimenting architect. The building of a temple to Venus would be the very first mark he would make on the city, the first imprint of his reign. He drew up the plans himself. When Apollodorus, the most famous architect of the day, criticized the proportions of the columns on the drafts that, in deference, the emperor had sent to him for approval, the quick-tempered, unforgiving Hadrian promptly had him killed. The criticism did not deter him; rather, it drove him on. The most innovative building that he sponsored was the Pantheon in Rome, an ambitious rebuilding of the structure first erected by Agrippa in the reign of the emperor Augustus. The idea of a temple dedicated not just to one god but to all the gods of the Roman empire was a thoroughly Roman piece of one-upmanship. That same spirit was reflected in the building’s spectacular architecture too, made possible by the Roman invention of concrete. This liberated Hadrian, allowing him to break new ground and experiment with new, non-classical forms. In overseeing the creation of the temple’s dome – even greater than that of St Peter’s in the Vatican – he outstripped the founding father of the Roman empire. Even today the Pantheon is the most complete of the buildings of ancient Rome to survive. As we shall see, the empire at large was also to benefit from Hadrian’s inventive love of architecture.
In his personal life Hadrian lived too as if in imitation of the ancient Greeks. Sexual norms in the ancient world were not the same as our own. For example, there was a strong Greek tradition that a relationship between an older man and a boy on the threshold of manhood was acceptable (the peak of attractiveness was considered to be the moment when the down appeared on a young man’s cheek). By contrast, a homosexual relationship between men of equal age and status was not deemed acceptable. The philhellenic Hadrian took the Greek role of the older lover to heart. During his years in Trajan’s inner circle, Hadrian was known to be passionately fond of the young men who made up the junior staff in the imperial entourage. Later, in the seventh year of his own rule, Hadrian was travelling with his wife Sabina in Turkey when he met the young, good-looking Antinous. The emperor was smitten. Antinous joined his entourage and for the next seven years, much to the embarrassment of many Romans, never left his lover’s side. (The sex was not the problem; it was rather the fact that the emperor seemed so completely devoted to the young man.) Although thirty years his junior, Antinous shared Hadrian’s Hellenic loves; they debated in the Museum of Alexandria, and while there together, they visited the tombs of Alexander the Great and Pompey the Great.