Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome (3 page)
Read Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome Online
Authors: Anthony Everitt
Tags: #General, #History, #Autobiography, #Historical, #Biography & Autobiography, #Biography, #Historical - General, #Political, #Royalty, #Ancient, #Hadrian, #Monarchy And Aristocracy, #Ancient Rome - History, #Hadrian; 117-138, #Ancient - Rome, #Hadrian;, #76-138, #Rome, #Emperor of Rome;, #Emperors, #Rome - History - Hadrian; 117-138, #Emperors - Rome
This is the loveliest of places—and also among the most mysterious.
After walking half a mile uphill into countryside, you will arrive at a great but ruined wall, some thirty feet high. A wide opening gives onto a long pool beyond which lies a calm vista of hills and valleys. Cypresses abound, together with holm oaks, beeches, hornbeams, and ancient olive trees. Maritime pines spread their lofty canopies like bursts of frozen green fireworks.
The twenty-first century dissolves into the second, for everywhere among the trees stand Roman ruins—broken colonnades, collapsed apses, steps up to higher terraces, steps down to underground tunnels, stretches of water and broken fountains, the surviving columns of a circular temple, a grassed-over open-air theater.
Here is what remains of one of the wonders of European architecture, the villa of the emperor Hadrian near Tivoli, less than twenty miles from Rome. It was an inspiration to Renaissance architects seeking to learn the secrets of the ancient world, and as well as stealing its ideas they stripped the walls of their marble facings and the floors of their mosaics. Every statue they could find they removed for their brand-new palazzi. At least 250 have been identified, and there were certainly many more around every corner in the villa’s heyday.
Among the portraits of emperors and images of gods, forty or more memorial statues of the emperor’s doomed lover, a young Bithynian called Antinous, looked down from niches and plinths, an inescapable, ubiquitous presence.
The word
villa
is a misnomer. This was no single building, but a township or a campus: more than thirty-five structures of one kind or another have been counted over an area of at least three hundred acres. It is a mark of its scale that, after being looted for centuries as if it were a city captured by drunken soldiery, so much remains.
The emperor did not commission a rural retreat for a tired autocrat; he had in mind a working and ceremonial center of government, hence the extraordinary number of banqueting rooms and reception halls. But, if we leave aside its practical uses, the most curious feature of the complex is that it was a representation in miniature of the Roman world as Hadrian saw it—or, more precisely, those parts of it that held most meaning for him. It was his metaphor in brick and stone for the empire itself.
Greece took pride of place. Here was a version of the Painted Porch of Athens, famous for its wall paintings and its association with the Stoic philosophers; and over there the Academy, the olive grove where the great Plato taught. The real Vale of Tempe is in Thessaly, land of sorceries and enchantment: it was here that Apollo, god of the sun, came after slaying a dark chthonic power, the Python, a serpent that guarded the center of the earth at Delphi, and replaced it with his famous oracle. This luxuriant gorge was evoked at the northern end of the villa.
Elsewhere, in a dip of the grounds a long rectangle of water was flanked by colonnades and statues, and was reportedly inspired by the Canopus, a canal and popular tourist trap outside Alexandria. At one end of the pool was a monumental half-domed open-air dining room, backed by a cooling display of fountains and falling water. In the pool lurked a marble crocodile, and marble images of Egyptian gods looked down benevolently on the emperor’s summer-evening parties.
“And in order not to omit anything, Hadrian even made a Hades,” writes an ancient historian, referring to the underworld where the dead eked out a gloomy half life. We do not know where this was located. One of the villa’s most remarkable features is that beneath the grand edifices where the emperor and his guests took their leisure or held their assemblies was a subterranean network of tunnels, storerooms, and windowless sleeping areas where servants and slaves lived and labored—out of sight, out of hearing, and out of mind—to provide all the necessary services for those upstairs in the light. But these utilitarian spaces were unlikely to have been the Hades that Hadrian had in mind.
Another possibility suggests itself. Toward the far end of the imperial estate rises a high upland, with few buildings on it, where Hadrian and his companions could ride and hunt. However, below rough fields one of the villa’s most astonishing features is to be found—four uniform passages, half a mile long in all and wide enough for a chariot to clatter along, join to form a rough rectangle or trapezium. A huge amount of labor went into their creation: 26,000 cubic yards of rocks had to be cut out and removed. Vents in the ceiling let in light and air at intervals. These long, dim corridors look and feel much as they did in Hadrian’s time. The atmosphere in them is chilly even on hot days.
They present an enigma, for they can be entered only from one end, the northern side of the rectangle. So what were they for? Perhaps here we find an allusion to the afterlife, a disorienting space for religious rituals where the living were able to reencounter the shades of great ancestors, and even lost lovers.
Equally enigmatic was the man who brought this wonderland into being. His villa raises more questions than answers about the strange personality of one of Rome’s greatest rulers, and to understand him fully we must visit the scenes of his life.
INVADERS FROM THE WEST
This is a tale of two families and an orphaned boy.
The Aelii and the Ulpii had the usual share of irritations and friendships, marriages and estrangements, and their influence on the child lasted for his entire life. He was called Publius Aelius Hadrianus Afer, and he was born on the ninth day before the Kalends of February in the year when the consuls were the emperor Vespasian and his son Titus—that is to say, January 24,
A
.
D
. 76. Hadrian (for this is the English version of his name) first saw the light of day in Rome, but his hometown was far away, on the extreme edge of the Roman empire.
Andalusia, in southern Spain, is well sited, for it is the bridge between Europe and Africa and its coastline joins the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. For many centuries it has been among the poorest regions of Europe. Farm laborers there are still among the worst paid in the Continent.
Barren lands and snowcapped mountains alternate with fertile fields watered by the Guadalquivir River, which rolls down the wide valley it wore away from rock through prehistoric millennia and pours itself into the main. A few miles upstream of the fine city of Seville is the undistinguished little settlement of Santiponce. Here, way below tarmac, apartment buildings, and roadside cafes, below the feet of its more than seven thousand inhabitants, lie hidden from view the unexcavated remains of Roman Italica. The population then was about the same as that of today, and the Aelii were among the leading families of this provincial backwater. This was little Hadrian’s
patria
, his place of origin.
On an eminence overlooking Santiponce, the splendid ruins of New
Italica, added on to the original town by the adult Hadrian much later in his life, bake in the sun. Wide avenues, lined with the footings of vanished shady colonnades, crisscross a vast scrubby field, once an opulent and busy urban center but now populated only by a few dusty, undecided butterflies. Along a main street are the foundations of a public baths complex and the mosaic floor, displaying the signs of the zodiac, of a rich man’s villa. Through tall trees, the visitor glimpses one of the empire’s largest amphitheaters, all of it still in place except for some fallen upper arches.
Today’s Andalusia is beginning to recover its long-vanished prosperity, thanks to a revived democracy and membership in the European Union. From a viewing platform over which a nude statue of the emperor Trajan presides, new, snaking motorways look as if they are tying a knot around the ancient monuments; and nearby yet another Italica, this time “Nueva,” is rising from the ground. Blinding white high-rises and empty streets await their first occupants.
Two thousand years ago the region was among the wealthiest of the Roman empire. The Latin name for the Guadalquivir was the Baetis, and the province was called Baetica after it. The great geographer Strabo, writing in the first quarter of the first century
A
.
D
., had little time for most of Spain, which he found rugged, inhospitable, and an “exceedingly miserable place to live.” But Baetica was a different story.
Turdetania [another name for Baetica, after its aboriginal inhabitants] is marvelously blessed by nature; and while it produces all things, and in large quantities, these blessings are doubled by the facilities for exporting goods, [including] large quantities of grain and wine, and also olive oil, not only in large quantities, but also of the best quality.
Olive oil sold exceptionally well. A staple of the ancient world, it was part of everyone’s diet as well as being used for indoor lighting, cosmetics, soap equivalents, and medicine. Demand from a large city such as Rome was huge (perhaps as many as 5 million gallons a year were consumed), and Baetican landowners sold as much as they could produce.
Evidence for this is provided by the largest rubbish dump of the classical world, Monte Testaccio in Rome—an artificial hill 165 feet high
and 1,100 yards wide composed entirely of broken-up amphorae, or earthenware storage jars, perhaps 45 million in all. They were often stamped with their contents and exporters’ names; most of those from Baetica contained oil, and it has been estimated that 130,000 of them, having contained not less than 2 million gallons, were deposited on the hill every year. Among the largest oil producers of southern Spain were the Aelii.
An Aelius first came to Italica when it was founded during Rome’s second long war with the merchant city-state of Carthage; strategically located on the coast of what is now Tunisia, in northern Africa, Carthage had dominated trade in the western Mediterranean for centuries.
For a long time the struggle went very badly. Hannibal, the Carthaginian general and one of history’s great commanders, spent more than ten years marching up and down Italy, winning battle after battle. At the time southern Spain was a Carthaginian colony, and the twenty-four-year-old Publius Cornelius Scipio led an expeditionary force there. After a masterly campaign, the young commander provoked a battle a few miles from Italica. Despite being outnumbered, he won a complete victory, interrupted only by a downpour. The battered and drenched Carthaginians tried to escape, but Scipio followed after and butchered them. Only six thousand men survived from a force of more than fifty thousand.