Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome (22 page)

Neratius Priscus was an interesting choice, for he was essentially a nonpolitical figure. By nominating him, Trajan knew that he was not giving momentum to a serious candidate for the purple. A very capable man, Neratius worked his way through the honors race, ending up as a suffect consul in 97 and then with his governorship. But his real passion was the law, to which he devoted himself for the rest of his life after his return home from the Danube. He became a well-known jurist, a legal adviser who offered opinions on points of law and on specific court cases to private parties as well as to elected officials and the emperor himself. His textbooks, notes, and responses were much cited by later experts.

We do not know whether the
legatus
of the I Minervia was disappointed that he had been overlooked. His clairvoyant interest in his imperial prospects is well enough attested, but at this stage they were not taken seriously by anyone else. Perhaps he was too busy to care. So far as we can tell he did not scheme against the emperor or seek to assemble a faction to support his claim; he remained loyal and got on with his career more or less as if he were just an ordinary member of the ruling class.

Decebalus, having failed to shortcut the war by an assassination, now tried another trick. He offered to negotiate without preconditions with a Roman commander north of the Danube, the former consul Cnaeus Pompeius Longinus, who had been successfully beating the Dacians back to their rocky heartland. Longinus incautiously made his way to the king’s camp for the talks, where he and an accompanying escort of ten soldiers commanded by a centurion were immediately placed under house arrest and then interrogated in public about Trajan’s plan of campaign. Longinus kept his counsel and said nothing.

Decebalus sent an ambassador to Trajan, asking for the restoration of all his lands north of the Danube and the payment of war reparations. A careful response was prepared, calculated to create the impression that Longinus was neither very highly nor very slightly valued. Trajan wanted to prevent his being put to death, or handed back on excessive terms. He succeeded, for the Dacian king could not make up his mind what to do next and temporized.

It was Longinus who bravely broke the stalemate. He made friends with one of Decebalus’ Dacian freedmen and obtained some poison from him. He then promised the king that he would win Trajan over and in pursuit of this wrote the emperor a letter. He arranged for the freedman to deliver it in person and, in order to ensure the man’s safety, he asked the emperor to treat him well.

Longinus hoped that Decebalus would not guess his true intentions and so not keep a very strict watch over him. That was how matters fell out, and one night after the freedman had left for the Roman headquarters Longinus took the poison and died. This was a fine example of self-sacrifice: for a leading Roman statesman or commander, suicide was recognized to be a courageous, even a noble, act in the event of
desperata salus
, of no hope of rescue or recovery.

The king refused to admit defeat and dispatched the captured centurion to Trajan, promising to send back Longinus’ body and the escort in return for the freedman. The emperor refused, commenting that the freedman’s safety was “more important for the dignity of the empire than the burial of Longinus.” An honorable position to adopt, one
might think, if one overlooks the fact that it left the escort out on a limb. The emperor evidently cared more for a dead general than ten other-rankers. History does not record their fate.

The reduction of Dacia now proceeded with little opposition from the enemy. The legions followed a direct route to Decebalus’ capital via the Vulcan Pass, more than 5,300 feet high. The Dacians lost heart: the column shows members of the Dacian court pleading with their king to come to terms. Decebalus refused and retreated into the mountains with his family and bodyguard, to form a resistance movement. Meanwhile, Sarmizegetusa, for all its impregnable appearance, fell without a fight. It was looted and burned to the ground.

Some of the nobility decided to collaborate, and one of the king’s companions revealed the secret location of Decebalus’ treasure to Trajan. According to Dio Cassius,

Alaric, king of the Visigoths, borrowed the idea three hundred years later and was buried with his spoils beneath a river in southern Italy. But while his resting place has never been discovered, the Dacian treasure was dug up. It turned out to be of almost unbelievable value—about 500,000 pounds of gold and 1 million of silver.

And what of the king? Years afterward a proud cavalryman commissioned a gray marble inscription that recorded a long career of distinguished service in the army. A carved relief depicts the high moment of his life. We see him galloping on his horse and on the ground the prostrate
trousered figure of Decebalus, a bearded man in a Dacian cap. The curved sword with which he has just cut his throat falls from his hand. The legend below reads that he captured the king, who killed himself moments before his arrest, and that he delivered his head to Trajan (it was later sent to Rome and was ceremonially thrown down the Scalae Gemoniae, a flight of steps that led up to the Capitol, where the bodies of executed criminals were exposed for a time).

The war was over. The victory was as complete as victory could be. Just as Titus in 70 had expelled the Jewish population from Judaea, so Trajan ethnically cleansed Dacia. Many thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Dacians were dispersed, some to appear as gladiators in the emperor’s postwar celebrations and others to be sold into slavery. Colonists were imported to take their place and a new capital city was built in the name of the emperor’s clan, Sarmizegetusa Ulpia. Dacia became Rome’s first new province since Claudius had annexed Britannia in 43.

Once again, Hadrian had distinguished himself. Army life suited him and the I Minervia performed well. As so often, the detail of what he did is missing, but according to the
Historia Augusta
, “his many remarkable deeds won great renown.”

Trajan began to blow hot again, after cold. He was so pleased with his former ward’s successes that he presented him with a diamond he himself had received from Nerva. The intention seemed obvious, at least to Hadrian, who repolished his hopes of being acknowledged the emperor’s official successor. People were reminded of the famous occasion when a seriously ill Augustus passed his signet ring, bearing the head of Alexander the Great, to his friend Marcus Agrippa to mark the transfer of authority. But the two events were not really comparable; a jewel was no official ring, and a healthy and triumphant Trajan was not transferring anything except a valuable gift. Whatever Hadrian liked to think, the diamond was a token of the emperor’s esteem rather than the talisman of his power.

Of more practical value than a jewel was the emperor’s decision to promote Hadrian again, after only twelve months as commander of the I Minervia, to provincial governor—a clear demonstration of his usefulness in the field. As the campaign against Decebalus drew to its climax during the summer of 106, Trajan divided Pannonia into two jurisdictions, Upper and Lower. The latter was the smaller part, with only a single legion as garrison, and this he allocated to Hadrian. The wheel had come full circle, for the new province’s capital was Aquincum, the fortress town on the Danube where the young military tribune had had his first real experience of army life ten years previously.

It was not the grandest of appointments and one of its consequences was that Hadrian probably missed the culminating excitements of total victory. But it was some compensation that the post was no sinecure. Lower Pannonia looked across the Danube to the Hungarian plain, home of the fierce, unmastered Sarmatian Iazyges. This tribe adjoined the western frontier of the Dacian kingdom; they were nervous of Decebalus’ expansionist policy and unsurprisingly supported Trajan’s invasion. According to the
Historia Augusta
, the new governor “held back the Sarmatians.” We can take it that they had not chosen this unlikely juncture to turn on their victorious Roman friends, but were seizing the opportunity to grab or at least to raid defenseless Dacian territory. What they failed to grasp quickly enough was that Rome already regarded Dacia, no longer just
victa
but
capta
, or “taken,” as its own property and did not welcome unfriendly incursions.

Dealing with the Sarmatians, probably by negotiation (for there is no report of fighting), by no means consumed all of Hadrian’s energies and, for the first recorded occasion, his taste for intervention (or, his critics
would argue, for interference or meddling) was given full rein. Archaeological evidence suggests that Hadrian had an impressive new governor’s palace built: if so, this was his first opportunity to indulge in what was to become a lifelong passion for commissioning art and architecture and investing in what the French
call grands projets
. Ever the autodidact, Hadrian convinced himself that he had a talent for design that made him the equal of professional practitioners.

One of the more ingenious characteristics of the imperial system was a division of powers at the provincial level. A governor, a former praetor (as in Hadrian’s case) or consul and a leading member of Rome’s political elite, was responsible for the general administration of the province and the command of its garrison army. Alongside him, one or more procurators were charged with financial management and reported directly to Rome, not to the governor; their chief task was to collect taxes and other sources of revenue and to transmit this income to the
fiscus
, or exchequer, in Rome or to the emperor’s privy purse (it can be presumed that these were sometimes in whole or in part paper transfers, with the actual cash being spent locally). By removing from him control over finance, this made it far more difficult for a discontented governor to mount an armed challenge to the emperor.

Although procurators enjoyed multiple opportunities for malfeasance, it was a brave governor who pried into their affairs. But, self-confident as ever, Hadrian did not hesitate to do so; no details have come down to us, but, according to the
Historia Augusta
, he “restrained the procurators, who were overstepping too freely the bounds of their power.” One would like to know more, but what can be understood is that he took risks by acting
ultra vires—
and survived them. If he was wise, he would have cleared his plans with Trajan first, and there is evidence that the emperor would have strongly backed him.

The
Epitome de Caesaribus
claims that during Trajan’s reign some procurators were disrupting the administration of the provinces by launching false accusations.

The incident is undated, but when we recall how close Hadrian was to the empress, it could be that it coincides with his governorship and that Plotina was preparing her husband’s mind for the inevitable procuratorial complaints about Hadrian.

The governor was also the
legatus
of his legion, the II Adiutrix. He knew the men well, seeing that he had served with them as military tribune. One of the challenges facing commanders of troops on frontier duty was to find ways of keeping them at a high pitch of battle-readiness when they spent much of their time not doing anything very much apart from boring guard duty. This absorbed much of Hadrian’s attention, and the
Historia Augusta
reports that he “maintained military discipline.”