Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome (40 page)

The great cavalcade that was the imperial court gathered itself together and moved on. The next stage in the emperor’s travels was a return to Gaul, then Spain and North Africa.

Florus ribbed Hadrian for his inability to stay still and sent him a few satirical verses, detailing his movements so far in reverse order.

“Scythia” was a poetic way of referring to the wild Danubian provinces. The emperor was amused and composed a good-humored but sharp reply.

As we have seen, Florus did not agree with what he saw as the emperor’s do-nothing foreign policy, although he did remark that “it is harder to hold on to new provinces than to create them”—a dig at Trajan, one must suppose, which coincided with Hadrian’s opinion. In a number of respects, the two men had prejudices in common. A couplet by Florus on the nature of women may well have won the concurrence of Sabina’s husband.

However, consistency is not everything. Plotina’s adopted son simultaneously cherished an affectionate opinion of the opposite sex. It depended on the woman in question. Some time about now, the news came from Italy of the much-cherished dowager empress’s death. As Dio Cassius put it bluntly, she had been “the woman through whom he had secured the imperial office because of her love for him.”

So far as we can tell, this love was platonic. The Augusta had run the oddest of happy households. At its center was a sexually uninterested emperor. Husband and wife liked and trusted each other, but they had no children, and probably no sex. Relations with the other senior ladies at court, Trajan’s sister Marciana and her daughter Matidia, were harmonious. In fact, at the eye of the storm of power they lived lives of Epicurean calm, and present themselves as a high-minded, slightly monochrome sorority.

The empress was never accused of interfering in politics until the intestate Trajan’s dying hours. On that occasion she did the state some service. She may have staged the less-than-convincing charade in Trajan’s darkened bedroom, but the outcome had been worth the deceit.

Hadrian was very upset by her passing, for (says Dio) he “honored her exceedingly.” He wore black for nine days and wrote some hymns in her honor (they are lost). In due course he arranged for her deification. He remarked of her: “Although she asked much of me I never refused her anything.” By this he meant that he never
had
to refuse her anything, for her requests were always reasonable.

Plotina came from Nemausus (today’s Nîmes, in southern France), capital of the Narbonesis province. The Pont du Gard, part of its aqueduct, and an extraordinarily well-preserved temple, now called the Maison Carrée, survive to the present day, but not the basilica “of marvelous workmanship” that Hadrian built in the empress’s memory.

Hadrian retained his youthful passion for hunting. He had become so skillful that he famously brought down a huge boar with a single spear
thrust. On one occasion, he broke his collarbone and on another suffered a leg injury that came close to crippling him.

When he visited Vindolanda during his tour of the Britannic frontier, he would have found to his delight that the sport was part of the garrison’s culture. Presumably he made full use of the opportunities there to ride out with horses. And so he did in Gallia, too. We know of one particular hunt that came to a sad end. The Gallo-Roman town of Apta Julia (today’s Apt, in Provence, some thirty miles or so from Aix) stood on the via Domitia, which led down to Spain, and so was on Hadrian’s itinerary (Hannibal had traveled along it in the opposite direction on his march to Italy). There is mountainous hunting country nearby, and it is no accident that five dedications to the god of huntsmen, Silvanus, have been found in and near Apt.

The emperor’s favorite horse, Borysthenes, died here, and the emperor prepared a tomb with an epitaph for him. The epitaph is a short poem of praise of little artistic worth, which must have been quickly scribbled by the bereaved, versifying owner.

It is a private tribute. Something amusing or un toward must have happened at a tumulus in Tuscany, but the author does not trouble to tell us what it was. He goes on to claim that no boar ever gored Borysthenes, so that cannot have been the cause of his death at Apta. Perhaps the horse fell and broke a leg, and had to be put down. In any event,

Hadrian was very fond of animals, and Borysthenes was not the only creature to be buried with honors. According to the
Historia Augusta
, he
loved his horses and dogs so much that he provided tombs for them all when they died.

The saddened emperor continued his journey south, spending the winter of 122 at the capital of the province of Hispania Tarraconensis. This was Rome’s oldest foundation in Spain, Tarraco (today’s Tarragona)—or to call it by its proper title, Colonia Julia Urbs Triumphalis Tarraco. A walled city built on terraces on high ground, it stood on the coast but lacked a safe harbor. It was well appointed with all the appurtenances of the civilized life.

According to the poet Martial, who, out of favor for his excessive flattery of Domitian, spent his last years in his native Hispania, Tarraco had much to recommend it, especially to a keen huntsman like his friend Licinianus.

The simple life without luxuries in the countryside appealed to generations of world-weary urban Romans. This could be little more than a literary trope, and often meant lounging around in comfortable rural villas. But Hadrian had a genuine taste for roughing it in the company of ordinary, unpretentious folk. It was one of the delights that hunting guaranteed.

Hadrian would have known Tarraco. It had been the hometown of his dead patron and promoter, Licinius Sura, and was a regular stopping-off point for travelers from Baetica in the south as they made their way by the safe if slow land route to Italy.

Among the city’s amenities were some gardens. They were probably those which, according to an inscription, a certain Publius Rufius Flavus left during his lifetime to four of his manumitted slaves. The legacy was to honor the “perpetual memory” of his dead wife, and the gardens could not be sold by the heirs or their successors, so we can deduce that they were to be a public park under the management of his freedmen and freedwomen.

It was here that the emperor took a stroll one day. According to the
Historia Augusta
,

The attempt had no political implications—except that the emperor’s calm and clement reaction won him widespread admiration.

Hadrian somewhat tarnished his popularity by announcing a recruiting drive for the legions. Roman citizens of Italian origin were not used to signing up in the army, and good-humoredly (but probably unsuccessfully) objected. It is a curious, and perhaps not unrelated, fact that on his journey south through Spain he failed to revisit his hometown of Italica, despite investing heavily in public buildings there over the years. His fellow citizens may have been preparing to submit a request to raise their town’s municipal status, but they were disappointed. Any petition had to be put in writing, and the emperor merely promised to speak to the subject when next in the Senate.

Urgent matters were calling for the emperor’s attention. While he was still in Britannia, reports had arrived of a renewed rebellion in Mauretania and riotous disturbances in Alexandria. It was only four years since the civil strife between rebellious Jews and the Greek community had been suppressed by Marcius Turbo (now the praetorian prefect in
Rome). But this time the trouble came from the native Egyptians in the form of a found bull.

According to their cosmogony the universe was dreamed of and then created by the god Ptah; in another epiphany he was Osiris, the murdered deity who rose from the dead and was the redeemer and merciful judge in the afterworld. Ptah’s incarnation or messenger on earth was a sacred bull, Apis. The bull was recognized by special markings on his forehead, tongue, and flank, and was housed in Ptah’s temple at Memphis. He was given a harem of cows and worshipped. On his death, he was interred alongside his predecessors in a huge sarcophagus in a necropolis known as the Serapeum.

A new Apis bull had recently been identified and coins minted in Alexandria welcomed the happy event. However, a dispute broke out; according to the
Historia Augusta
, different communities put in a claim to look after the Apis bull, and widespread disorder ensued. The nervous prefect of Egypt sought the emperor’s presence.

The North African phase of Hadrian’s travels is very poorly documented. We must assume that the Mauretanian problem was not as large as supposed; if there had been a major war and the emperor had had to intervene personally, we would have heard something about it. The provincial governor may have dealt with the matter before his arrival in the region, or the very fact of his arrival may have calmed angry breasts.

So far as Alexandria was concerned, good advice was at hand. Suetonius’ successor as
ab epistulis
was very probably a Gallic intellectual, Lucius Julius Vestinus. A cultured man, he had been director of the imperial libraries and, germanely, had held the top academic post in the ancient world. He had been head of the Mouseion, a scientific research institution and literary academy in Alexandria with a celebrated library, which the ruling Ptolemies founded in the third century
B.C
. So Vestinus had direct knowledge of the Egyptian way of life, and was well placed to counsel his employer on the best course of action.

For the time being, Hadrian contented himself with a stern letter of reproof, which had the surprising effect of immediately stopping the rioting. Once again, the knowledge that he was slowly but inexorably journeying toward Egypt may have concentrated minds.

Hardly had these passing crises died away than a new and larger one loomed. Parthia was stirring. The emperor forwent a full inspection of the African provinces, probably setting sail for Antioch and arriving there in June 123. His aim was to meet the Parthian king, whichever member of the royal family happened to be on the throne for the moment, and dissuade him from aggression.

The city had not yet fully recovered from the devastating earthquake of eight years previously, and Hadrian scattered cultural largesse about him. He seems to have cherished an affection for the morally dubious gardens at Daphne and remained grateful to the clairvoyant Castalian springs there which had predicted his accession to the purple. He founded a “festival of the springs” to be held there every June 23, as well as commissioning a “theater of the springs” and a shrine of the nymphs. Although there is no record of the fact, presumably he removed the stones with which he had fearfully blocked the source in the first days of his reign.