In fact, the world over which Hadrian was supreme ruler was largely Greek. The culture of the Romans had grown partly out of ancient Greek culture, partly as a reflection of Greek culture and partly in opposition to Greek culture. In ancient literature there could have been no Aeneid by Virgil without the epic Odyssey and Iliad by Homer. Without the Stoic school of philosophy, the philosophical works of Cicero and Seneca would have lacked their inspiration. Without Epicurus (Hadrian’s favourite philosopher) there would have been no Lucretius. Indeed, half the Roman world (the eastern half) spoke Greek, not Latin, as their first language. Now a different kind of man was in charge of this Greek-Roman empire. He was a successful commander, a soldier’s soldier and highly popular with the army. He had legitimacy, an undisputed claim to the throne, and he took his Hellenistic leanings seriously. Indeed he had an obsessive desire to be the best. Under this man’s rule the old idea that war and conquest alone shaped the Roman world was unceremoniously dumped.
The start of the change was apparent at the very beginning of his reign. Hadrian abandoned Trajan’s eastern campaigns. Their failure had discredited the policy of Roman expansion, and the change in direction fitted harmoniously with the mood of the Senate. The priority now was not conquest, but staying within the existing frontiers and reinforcing them. In 121 Hadrian set out from Italy and went to the Rhine frontier. Its strategic importance was reflected in the large number of legions manning it – eight in Germany alone. After arriving on this northern border, Hadrian spent the rest of the year ensuring that the Roman forts, ramparts and watchtowers were strengthened, and that the legions on this and the Danube frontier were drilled to a high standard of military discipline. A determination for the same strategy to be deployed in the empire’s most northerly frontier next took Hadrian to Britain in 122. While there it is possible that he initiated the construction of the impressive Pons Aelius, the Roman bridge named after him, which straddled the broad estuary at Newcastle. On the northern side of the river he stood at the site of the future World Heritage landmark, the great symbol of Roman containment that bears his name today.
FRONTIERS
The sheer scale and ambition of Hadrian’s vision still staggers. Running 118 kilometres (70 miles) across country, from the North Sea to the Irish Sea, the frontier wall he authorized took ten years to build. Its construction was supervised by the new governor of Roman Britain, Aulus Platorius Nepos. Although just under two-thirds of the wall was made of stone, the last (easternmost) third was originally made of turf and timber. The proportions were as bold as its length. The stone section was 3 metres (10 feet) thick and 4.2 metres (14 feet) high; the turf section matched the stone part for height, but was 6 metres (20 feet) thick. About twenty paces to the north of the wall, and running parallel with it, was a V-shaped ditch 8 metres (26 feet) wide and 3 metres (10 feet) deep. On top of the wall itself was a walkway defended by a crenellated parapet. A Roman soldier walking it would have come across a towered, fortified gateway every Roman mile (approximately 1.5 kilometres), and in between, at every third of that mile (0.5 kilometres) an observation turret. Servicing the wall, as well as forming part of it, were sixteen forts.
One historical summary of Hadrian’s rule says simply that the wall divided ‘the Romans and the Barbarians’.5 Touring the wall today, it’s tempting to see it as a powerful, entirely defensive structure against an amorphous barbaric enemy. That, however, was not Hadrian’s intention, as recent historians have emphasized. A comparison with another Roman feat of engineering is revealing. Hadrian’s predecessor Trajan had dammed the river Danube and then built a spectacular bridge across its broad expanse. This became his neat little stepping stone into Dacia. (In the east he even intended to build – but never did – a canal between the Tigris and the Euphrates of Mesopotamia in order to ferry his fleet between the rivers.) Like Julius Caesar’s bridge across the Rhine, Trajan’s structure in Dacia imposed Roman will on the landscape to make it serve the empire. In the methodical, stately language of architecture and engineering, it loudly proclaimed Roman power.
Hadrian’s Wall should perhaps be seen more accurately as his attempt to bellow a similar message of his and Rome’s power.6 Other evidence too suggests that it is misleading to regard the wall as a purely defensive structure. It could, for example, be deployed aggressively; as well as being a sophisticated and powerful bulwark, the wall could also be a starting point for northward attacks and forays. The wall was not just a barrier but a road too, an important line of communication connecting it with a wider network of roads and stopping-off points that scored the breadth of the Roman empire. The administration and domination of the Roman world depended on such lines of communication. As further evidence countering the impression of Hadrian’s Wall as a final frontier, there existed under Hadrian many examples of working Roman forts further north of the wall. At the time of the wall’s construction, the Roman army was on relatively peaceful terms with the native Britons on either side of it. The peoples to the north and south were not easily distinguished as ‘barbarian’ or ‘Roman’; as in many frontier regions today, they were much more culturally mixed than those terms suggest. The idea of defence, then, was only one aspect of a project that was in fact proud, versatile and dynamic.
The wall increased Roman power in one way above all. It gave the garrisons stationed on it the power of observation. From this stemmed the power of controlling who entered or left the commonwealth of the Roman world, the ability to monitor who traded in it, spoke its language and wore its dress, and the means of regulating who paid its taxes and how that tax was spent. In short it emphasized Roman mastery of their world. Only later, in a less prosperous, more unstable time in the future, would the wall shift in significance, as walls have done throughout history. Only then would it become a symbol of containment, a hermetic seal, the vestigial outpost of a once-vibrant entity.
Although the wall is, then, symbolic of the new direction in which Hadrian would take the empire, this was not a simple about-turn. It was erected not in the spirit of vulnerability or retraction, but quite the opposite.
THE MECHANICS OF EMPIRE
What kind of prospering worldwide empire, then, did Hadrian’s Wall enclose at its northernmost point? A thumbnail sketch of the empire at peace might begin with the soldiers inhabiting the barracks close to the wall. The Latin accents and second languages that would have been heard paint a picture of extraordinary fluidity. The soldiers came not only from Britain, but from Belgium, Spain, Gaul and Dacia. Stationed at Arbeia (the fort at present-day South Shields) there was even a naval auxiliary unit from Mesopotamia.7 The beautifully sculpted tombstone of Regina, the British wife of a man called Barates, tells an equally fascinating story. It shows how this man, possibly a soldier or camp follower, came all the way from Palmyra in Syria, fell in love with his female slave from Hertfordshire, freed her and settled down to married life in Britain. His valedictory inscription to his dead wife is written in Aramaic, his native tongue. The name of one Arterius Nepos is similarly revealing. It crops up in records in both Armenia and Egypt, before finding its way to northern Britain.