Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome (23 page)

It is uncertain how long Hadrian stayed in his post at Aquincum, but he may still have been there when he reached the apex of a Roman’s political career. In 108, two years or less after starting his governorship, he was awarded a consulship. According to the
Historia Augusta
, this was in recognition of his successful record in Lower Pannonia, evidence that his interventions had been met with approval. He was only thirty-two. The general rule, dating back to the days of the Republic, fixed the minimum age for holding the state’s senior post at forty-two, but since the reign of Augustus this had been reduced to thirty-one for patricians and members of consular families.

Hadrian was neither, so the early appointment was a compliment. But, as ever, what Trajan gave with one hand he contradicted, or at least contraindicated, with the other. Instead of being one of the two
consules ordinarii
, who launched the year in January and gave their names to it (officially a year was referred to as “during the consulships of so-and-so and so-and-so”), Hadrian was simply a suffect or replacement consul, who probably took over in May.

Hadrian’s great friend at court, Trajan’s close adviser and companion Licinius Sura, was still putting in good words for him, to considerable effect according to the
Historia Augusta
.

Sura’s years of power opened with the accession of Nerva, and from that point onward he was the empire’s éminence grise. Dio Cassius claims that he acquired “great wealth and pride,” as well as numerous enemies who schemed to undermine Trajan’s confidence in his loyalty. They lost their labor.

The private man seems to have been more agreeable than the statesman. If we can draw conclusions from two letters Pliny wrote to him, he enjoyed being asked to address abstruse conundrums. One of these concerned a spring at Pliny’s villa on the shore of Lake Comum (today’s Como), which had the curious property of intermittently filling and emptying a pool in an artificial grotto. It can still be found at the sixteenth-century Villa Pliniana near Torno and has puzzled great minds down the ages, including such disparate figures as Leonardo da Vinci and the poet Shelley. In fact, water is siphoned off variably according to atmospheric pressure, but Sura’s reply does not survive, so we cannot tell whether he proposed the correct solution.

During the year of Hadrian’s consulship Sura let his protégé know that he was to be adopted by Trajan. This information was widely leaked
and led to a new friendliness on the part of onetime critics and enemies, including members of the imperial
consilium
. “He was no longer despised and ignored by Trajan’s
amici.”

This anecdote is hard to interpret. It very probably derives from Hadrian’s autobiographical apologia, and so should be treated with caution. One indubitable fact undermines it: the emperor took no steps to implement his resolution. Did Sura or Hadrian simply make the story up? Unlikely; it would be risky to spread a false report at the time, which might well find its way to the emperor; if it was invented later, former members of the imperial entourage would have been able to deny knowledge of it.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that the reported incident took place not long before the death in about 110 of Sura, who may have been making one last attempt to reinforce Hadrian’s position before quitting the stage. His passing brought a remarkable career to a close. As we have seen, he shared Trajan’s sexual tastes. According to the
Epitome de Caesaribus
, it was through Sura’s “zeal that he had secured
imperium.”
The strong implication was that he negotiated persuasively with Nerva, or (some speculate) threateningly, on behalf of his friend, then absent in Germania. Sura was appointed suffect consul in the crucial year of 98 when Trajan inherited the throne from Nerva; and, a rare honor, twice as consul
ordinarius
in 102 and 107. He served in Dacia and was appointed to lead an embassy to Decebalus—a move that came to nothing because of the king’s fear for his own safety. Trajan’s regard for Sura remained undiminished until the end and after. He awarded him a state funeral and erected a statue in his honor. He also named some splendid new baths on the Aventine Hill after his friend, built near or perhaps on the site of Sura’s house; they remained in use for more than two hundred years.

An interval of peace followed the Dacian wars. After his governorship, Hadrian returned to Italy, and he did not hold further public office for some years. It is instructive that the emperor showed no interest in sharing the workload of empire with his now mature and experienced relative; Augustus had had Marcus Agrippa and Tiberius as nearly coequal partners, and Vespasian had worked very closely with his son Titus.

So far as we can tell, Hadrian betrayed no signs of disappointment or resentment. He remained loyal and patient. For a politically inexperienced aspirant to the purple, who had spent the last ten years—that is, most of his adult career—in the field rather than at Rome, he now enjoyed a front-row view of Trajan’s performance as a civilian ruler. There were lessons to be learned.

The first of these concerned the limits of absolute power. Communications were slow; nobody could travel faster than a horse and journeying by ship was extremely dangerous in the winter months. Even an urgent correspondence took weeks to conduct and complete.

The state played a far more limited role than in today’s world. Economic and social theory were little understood, and seldom translated into public policy. Military spending was by far the largest item in the imperial budget. However, the army, with its thirty legions, was hard put to guard the empire’s borders along the Rhine and the Danube, in the sands of Mesopotamia and the Sahara, and in the rocky, contested landscape of northern Britannia. Rome could afford to defend its frontiers but, with a few notable exceptions such as Judaea, not to police heavily or “occupy” its domains as well.

Another factor restricting an emperor’s freedom of action was the relatively small number of officials and bureaucrats that helped him administer the empire. In the days of the Republic a consul or other elected
magistratus
brought with him members of his household, usually slaves and freedmen, to help him manage his public business. Also, he depended on friends to advise him. Augustus adopted this model, if on a grander scale. He and his successors gathered around him able freedmen, usually Greek, to run an imperial secretariat. Among the most important were the
ab epistulis
, who handled the imperial correspondence, the
a rationibus
, in charge of the imperial finances, and the
a libellis
, who dealt with petitions.

These men accumulated great power and wealth. They were accountable only to the emperor; this meant they could operate out of the public view and, in the event of any scandal, were expendable. Unsurprisingly, they became so unpopular that emperors began to hire
equites
, men of standing from the business class, in their place.

The princeps
, as the first among supposed equals, needed to maintain the confidence of the senatorial class, and to a growing extent the
equites
. With the support of the army and Rome’s masses, he was in a position to act despotically if he so wished. But if he held all the cards, he needed others willing to play the game with him. As we have seen, the history of the previous century demonstrated only too clearly that if he did not at least go through the motions of working with the Senate he ran a number of unpleasant risks: at worst, assassination or revolt; at best, lack of cooperation.

For all these reasons it was extremely difficult for the center to impose policy on the periphery or to act without consultation, but this did not mean that the center was impotent. It was a reservoir of prestige, authority, money, and law, and Trajan demonstrated how an intelligent
princeps
could get his way with little difficulty.

To senators he behaved with unfailing affability; the contrast with Domitian could not have been plainer. He treated them as personal friends, visiting their houses if they were ill or were celebrating feast days. In turn, he was a lavish host, entertaining them at banquets “where there was no distinction of rank.” Dio Cassius writes:

It was claimed that he “took more pleasure in being loved than being honored,” although this did not deter men like Pliny from lauding him in the most flattering terms. This easygoing social manner was very welcome, even if it was little more than intelligent public relations.

Despite all the difficulties, there was a mechanism by which Trajan was able to make his presence felt throughout the empire. Even if overarching policy interventions in provincial life were rare, Trajan was showered with petitions from all and sundry and requests for action of one kind or another. The imperial government interfered as little as possible in local politics and religion, expecting civic elites to maintain an
orderly administration. Inevitably, though, disputes arose on almost every imaginable topic and Trajan was asked to adjudicate, just as his predecessors had been.

He was seldom governed by personal whim. The emperor stood at the apex of the legal system. Roman jurists wrote, “What the emperor decides has the same authority as the law of the people, because the people have made him their sovereign.” Local jurisdictions retained their validity, but Roman law was applicable throughout the empire and had something of the force that international law has today. Local authorities and individual Roman citizens could appeal to the
princeps
, who acted as a kind of supreme court (Saint Paul was well within his rights about
A
.
D
. 60 when he said to Porcius Festus, procurator of Judaea,
“Appello Caesarem”
—“I appeal to the emperor”).

Experienced jurists bore much of the heavy workload that the preparation of new laws, the promulgation of imperial edicts to clarify points of law, and the judging of particular cases entailed. Trajan was an active reformer; he ruled that defendants condemned in absentia should have the right to a retrial. Also, by banning anonymous accusations laid by
delatores
and the practice of torturing slaves in
maiestas
cases, he brought to an end the political show trials that rulers such as Domitian had used to quash suspected dissent.

Petitions did not only deal with legal matters; they also requested practical help with local building developments. As we have seen, Trajan spent vast sums of money on transforming urban spaces, not just in Rome but throughout the provinces. He made sure that his munificence was acknowledged with grateful inscriptions; even a remote bridge in Numidia proclaimed that it had been erected “with the labor of [Trajan’s] soldiers and from his own money.” So many buildings carried his name that he was nicknamed “the Wallflower.”

The imperial archives are long gone, thrown away or destroyed among all the vicissitudes that beset Rome during its long decline and through the longer centuries of the Dark Ages. But we have the next best thing. Grateful provincials engraved their correspondence with the emperors and their replies on stone or bronze memorials, many of which the
modern archaeologist has recovered from the ruined sites of lost cities. Reading these documents reveals a continuity of governance
from princeps
to
princeps
, with officials evidently looking up past decisions for precedents. Even the decisions of a “bad” emperor such as Domitian were consulted for guidance.

Every now and again something truly original emerges. In 1747 some plowmen in a field near Piacenza unearthed by chance the largest known inscribed bronze tablet of antiquity, measuring four feet six inches by nine feet six inches, the celebrated
tabula alimentaria
. Two others were discovered in southern Italy. The tablets give detailed information about an ambitious and extremely expensive child welfare scheme, funded by Trajan, as it applied to three communities—the modest township of Veleia in the north, which vanished long ago under a landslide, and places in Tuscany and near Beneventum in the south.