The classical temples, buildings and monuments he inaugurated (not just in Athens, but in places as far apart as Smyrna in modern Turkey and his family’s town of Italica in Spain) were branded with the emperor’s name and an inscription. In response, the leading town councillors of the imperial cities that Hadrian had endowed repaid the compliment with the erection of statues, shrines and busts of the emperor. They were to be found in houses, temples and marketplaces. In his beloved Athens there was a statue of Hadrian erected in the Theatre of Dionysus. Even in those places that fell outside Hadrian’s favour, the leading citizens honoured the cult of the emperor god. It was a way of demonstrating their loyalty, improving the standing of their community in the emperor’s eyes, and putting the emperor under an obligation to help them. Through these symbols of the imperial cult the high profile of the emperor was sustained, even in places where his fondness for travelling did not take him. The same can also be said of the coins, stamped with the emperor’s image, that changed hands across the breadth of his empire.
CIVILIZATION AND SLAVERY
Hadrian’s Wall, then, encompassed at a northerly point an empire not just of common currency, but of common languages and a classical Greek-Roman civilization. Inside its boundaries the Romans spoke Latin and Greek; outside was the ‘bar-barbar’ of the barbarians. (The Greeks had long ago given this name to those outside their civilization because of the incomprehensible sounds they made, and the Romans had followed suit.) The 270,773 adult citizen males of Rome in 234 BC, the era of the first great revolution in Roman history with which this book started, had boomed in Hadrian’s time to a staggering figure 320 times greater. With short life expectancy and low population growth, the life of the empire depended on new blood and the critical willingness of the Roman state to absorb new peoples.
In Britain, for example, Tacitus painted a jaundiced picture of how his father-in-law Agricola had ‘Romanized’ the sons of the British élite. Under his energetic governorship, Britons had, he said, learnt to speak the language of the Romans, to adopt the toga ‘frequently’ and had become seduced by the Roman ‘vices’ of bathing, relaxing under colonnades and attending dinner parties. The Roman culture was in fact nothing more than slavery by another name, said Tacitus. The new ‘civilization’ had a price tag.10 By contrast in the east ‘Romanization’ was really ‘Hellenization’: men from the eastern élites used their education and the legacy of Greek philosophy, oratory, letters and art to win political power in Rome. That Greek-Roman civilization belied, however, a world of barbaric cruelty and harsh contrasts.
The civilized, cultured Hadrian, for example, was also an avid hunter. His taste for the ancient aristocratic sport was translated into popular form in the spectacular, bloody games he held during his reign. On the occasion of his birthday in January 119, the Romans celebrated by witnessing the killing of a hundred lions and a hundred lionesses. At the high point of the empire the bar for thrilling audiences at Roman games was always being raised in an unending cycle of one-upmanship. The peg holes marking where the bar rested were set to a sliding scale of exotic wild animals provided for metropolitan amusement from the extremely varied geography of Rome’s provinces.
Lions and tigers, for example, came from Syria and the Roman east, wild boars from Germany and Gaul, bulls from Greece, horses from Spain, camels and rhinos, leopards, wild asses, giraffes and gazelles from North Africa. Trajan had a fondness for crocodiles from Egypt, and once flooded the Colosseum so that gladiators could do battle with them. There was no end of opportunities for such extravaganzas: under Hadrian, the Roman empire enjoyed more holidays than at any other time in its history. At the end of his birthday games there was a final flourish to the bloodthirsty spectacle: in the theatre and the Circus Maximus he organized a lottery. Hopeful men and women went home clutching their tickets in the shape of small wooden balls.11
Other stark contrasts of the time were of a much more sobering nature. Hadrian’s prosperous, peaceful empire was, above all, one of extremes of inequality. For example, slaves significantly outnumbered citizens, and this simple fact made the latter nervous. If slaves could organize, they could become a powerful collective force. Another fault line was property. The massive polity primarily served and protected the interests of landowners rather than the peasants who worked the land. While the rich few exploited the well-worn trade routes of the Mediterranean and wowed their friends at dinner parties with a menu of peacock from Arabia, the majority of the poor lived meagrely on what could be produced locally. The rights of citizens too set apart the haves from the have-nots; those without Roman citizenship could earn it, but for most that meant a lifetime of military service in the Roman army.
The empire might have enjoyed a long period of peace, but it remained a dangerous, precarious world too. Away from the big cities and local town councils many areas of life were unpoliced and unpoliceable. The mechanics of Roman justice did not help. The system favoured those with money; redress was produced mainly for advantaged people who had the ability, time and resources to pursue their case. This reality found its way into the Roman code of law. Under Hadrian a disturbing two-tier justice system now began to develop, which distinguished between two kinds of people. The legal punishments of, for example, flogging, torture, beheading, crucifixion and deportation were reserved only for the propertyless ‘humble’ citizens; more ‘respectable’ army veterans, town councillors, knights and senators were, by contrast, protected from the sharp edge of Roman law.12 This divide would become only more acute with time.
In other ways too the golden age of Hadrian’s empire had by no means shaken off the rigorous social hierarchy characteristic of the old Roman republic of two hundred years earlier. Despite the homogeneity of language spoken across it, the majority of the Roman world was illiterate. While many had the necessary knowledge for handling army records or an artisan’s business accounts, and city dwellers evidently had sufficient understanding to write graffiti and find it amusing, the ability of the minority to write and communicate fluently in the empire’s currency of letters gave them a significant advantage over others. However, a closer inspection of the social hierarchy offers surprises. The wealthy élite prided themselves on their private libraries. To cultivate them, slaves were often required to copy texts and act as secretaries. As a result, the unfree were sometimes far more educated and skilled than the millions of poor but free Roman citizens. Cicero’s secretary Tiro was one such person; he became a close friend of the Roman senator, held an influential position in his house and was eventually freed. Under Hadrian, some 150 years later, there were many more wealthy ‘Ciceros’ – not new men from the Italian provinces of Rome, but from her empire-wide territories. Each would have had a small coterie of well-educated ‘Tiros’.
The end of Hadrian’s reign was marked by sadness. While travelling with Antinous in Egypt in 130, his young lover drowned in the Nile in a mysterious boating accident. To assuage his grief, Hadrian marked the death of the love of his life by founding a city there called Antinoöpolis and by announcing the young man’s deification. Henceforth Antinous was worshipped as a god across the empire. Hadrian’s travels came to an end in 132. Thereafter he retired to his sumptuous new villa complex at Tivoli, 25 kilometres (15 miles) outside Rome. It was a fitting place to see out his reign. Exquisitely, playfully, artistically its layout forms a grandiose map of the places he had visited in his life. Here there were some buildings called the Academy, after Plato’s philosophy school in Athens; there one might while away the hours at a place called Canopus, a sanctuary in Alexandria. The religious afterlife, which fascinated Hadrian, was represented too in places that he named after the domains of the underworld: the ‘Elysian Fields’ and ‘Hades’. In addition, the complex boasted a Greek theatre, a colonnade, some baths, a lavishly endowed private library and a fish pond that housed colourful and novel specimans from across the empire. No expense had been spared in its construction, and this at least 100-hectare (250-acre) retreat had taken as long to complete as his wall in Britain.