Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome (44 page)

The piglet squealed and wriggled as it tried to escape from Hadrian’s arms. They were on the seashore near Athens and it was his awkward task to wash the pair of them in the water. Once he had accomplished this, the emperor took the young animal and offered it up for sacrifice to Demeter, goddess of the earth’s fertility and provider of grain. Its death was intended to stand in place of his own.

Then followed a ritual of purification. Wearing a blindfold, the emperor sat down on a stool covered with a ram’s fleece. A winnowing fan was waved over him and then a flaming torch brought close to him. In this way he was cleansed by air and fire.

Hadrian was now a
mustes
, a novice whose initiation would be complete only when he took part in the Mysteries, at the small harbor town of Eleusis in Attica. This religious ceremony took place every year in the autumn month of Boedromion, the first in Athens’ calendar year. The emperor had arrived in Greece from Rhodes in the late summer, to ensure he was in time for his spiritual induction.

In the prehistory of the world, Zeus and his fellow deities lived and schemed against one another on the snowy peaks of Mount Olympus in northern Greece. One day the goddess Demeter’s beautiful daughter, Persephone, disappeared. She had been kidnapped by Zeus’ brother, Hades, lord of the underworld, but her mother had no idea where she was. So Demeter roamed the earth looking for Persephone. Eventually she learned of the abduction and was shocked to discover that the king of the gods had approved the crime in advance. She abandoned her divine status and disguised herself as an old Cretan woman. Eventually
she arrived at Eleusis, where she got a job as nanny to a local chieftain’s son.

At night when everyone else was asleep Demeter anointed her infant charge with ambrosia, a cream which with repeated use conferred immortality, and put him into the hearth-fire, where he lay unharmed. Unfortunately the boy’s mother spied on her once and screamed when the flames touched his body.

An incensed Demeter resumed her full divine form and demanded that a temple be built in her honor. There she would teach people her special rituals—and, just as usefully, the art of agriculture. With that promise she vanished. Meanwhile the earth began to undergo a great famine, for Demeter refused to let the seeds grow. A compromise solution was agreed among the gods: Persephone would spend one third of the year in the underworld and nature would temporarily stop work, but for the rest of her time she would return to her mother and the copious earth.

So the fundamental myth of Eleusis was the death and rebirth of growing and flowering things. But the huge popularity for more than one thousand years of the Eleusinian ceremonies was less that they guaranteed the safely turning seasons than that they offered initiates the promise of a happy afterlife. Becoming an adept of Demeter was an attractive insurance policy to ensure a prosperous posthumous future. Men and women, slaves and freedmen, all were entitled to become initiates (provided only that they could speak Greek). Murderers burdened with blood guilt were excluded. Upper-class Romans, weary of the arid superstitions of their state religion, often participated in the Mysteries at Eleusis. Cicero believed that the Mysteries helped to civilize his rough-and-ready compatriots. “We have learned from them the beginnings of life, and gained the power not only to live happily, but also to die with a better hope.”

Initiates were sworn to perpetual secrecy, on pain of death, about what they saw, heard, and experienced. Luckily, some disrespectful Christian apologists revealed what they knew, or thought they knew. The broad shape of the ceremony in which Hadrian took part is understood, although significant details can only be guessed.

On the fourteenth day of Boedromion, 124, a band of young men collected the
hiera
, or “sacred things” (ritual utensils of some kind), from Eleusis, and deposited them at a small shrine at the foot of the Acropolis. Usually they carried knives during religious ceremonies, but Hadrian had learned his lesson by now about the danger of allowing armed men into his presence, and this year weapons were banned.

On the nineteenth of the same month a multitude of people formed a procession and proceeded along the Sacred Way, the road that ran for twenty-one miles from Athens to Eleusis. Priestesses carried the sacred things in closed hampers. As well as Hadrian and the other
mustai
, there were the more numerous
epoptai
, those who had already been initiated and witnessed Demeter’s secrets at Eleusis at least once before. A rhythmic shout,
Iakh’ oIakhe
, was repeated again and again, perhaps referring to a boy god, Iakchos, in Demeter’s service. The crowd danced itself into a state of euphoria and waved bundles of branches in the air.

At a certain point on the road masked figures mocked the passing
mustai
, shouting and making obscene gestures. This commemorated an old woman who met Demeter when she was mourning her daughter and offered her a refreshing drink. On being rebuffed, she had pulled aside her skirt and “uncovered her shame, and exhibited her nudity.” The goddess had “laughed and laughed”—and swallowed the drink after all.

The procession crossed a new bridge over the river Kephisos, about a mile from Eleusis. A couple of years previously a flood had swept away its predecessor and Hadrian had commissioned a replacement. He would have been pleased with the result: 165 feet long and 16 wide, it was built of well-cut limestone blocks and has survived in good condition to the present day, although the river itself silted up in modern times.

At last twilight fell and the stars appeared. Once they had arrived at Eleusis, the
mustai
were allowed to break their fast. Hadrian and the rest drank down (just as the goddess had once done) a beverage called
kukeon
, which consisted of barley meal and water mixed with fresh pennyroyal mint leaves. Some modern scholars believe that the barley was contaminated naturally with ergot, which causes hallucinations (among
other more distressing symptoms), or that some other intoxicating ingredient was added to the potion.

The initiates passed through two columned gateways into a large walled enclosure. After uttering an enigmatic password, they walked on and found themselves in front of a square, windowless building with a columned porch, like a blind temple. This was the Telesterion, or hall of mysteries. Inside its dark interior were rows of columns and stepped benches along the walls, from which thousands of participants watched the proceedings. Hadrian, like the other new initiates, was accompanied by a guide and was not allowed to see all the sights (he probably wore a veil).

What took place now is known only approximately. In the center of the Telesterion was an oblong stone construction with a doorway opening onto a piece of natural, unhewn rock, the Anactoron. Dreadful, ineffable things took place by flickering torchlight, possibly reenacting the story of Persephone’s abduction and all that followed.

On top of the Anactoron, which functioned like an altar, a fire blazed. Perhaps there was some sort of apotheosis by fire, recalling the unharmed boy in the flames. Perhaps animals were killed and burned. The officiating priest, or Hierophant, announced: “The holy Brimo [‘the raging one,’ a name for Demeter] has been delivered of a holy son, the Brimos.”

When the drama came to an end, the priest withdrew through the Anactoron doorway, and then reemerged with the sacred things, a great light shining out when the door opened. This was the culminating revelation, and we have no idea today of what it consisted. A Christian source claimed that it was “an ear of corn in silence reaped. [This was] considered among the Athenians to constitute the perfect enormous illumination.”

The religious authorities were well aware of the presence of their illustrious guest. The female partner of the Hierophant, who helped induct Hadrian into the rites, wrote a poem honoring the

The emperor did not reveal what the experience of initiation meant to him. At one level he was merely treading in the footsteps of many Roman predecessors, among them Augustus. But the fact that the
Historia Augusta
mentions the initiation at all suggests that for Hadrian it was more than a routine experience. He was committed to religion as a transcendent experience, and had been fascinated since childhood by magic and astrology. For someone of this cast of mind Eleusis conveyed a powerful spiritual meaning. On a point of detail, the example of the piglet whose life had been sacrificed to secure his own survival may have lodged in his mind, to be exploited when future occasion demanded.

However, Eleusis was also important for reasons of state. Oddly, the
Historia Augusta
claims that the emperor was following the example of Alexander the Great’s father, Philip of Macedon, a reference that must derive from a statement in Hadrian’s memoirs. Presumably (although there is no direct evidence for it) the king had taken part in the Mysteries, and for some reason Hadrian had wanted to draw attention to the association. But why?

Philip had brutally extinguished Greek liberty at the famous battle of Chaeronea in 338
B.C
., and was the last man the emperor would have been expected to cite as a distinguished forerunner. But the message Hadrian wished to convey was that the Macedonian monarch united all the disputatious Greeks under his leadership, and that he had done so by force was less telling than that he was a Panhellene. He had seen Greece as a single entity—an ideal very close to the emperor’s heart.

For Hadrian, the Mysteries at Eleusis, which bound together all initiates of whatever nationality and class, were the religious dimension of this single entity. It is no accident that an inscription found at Eleusis, carved after his death, refers to “Hadrian, god and Panhellene.”

When he was at Eleusis, Hadrian characteristically kept his eyes open. He noticed, or was informed, that locally caught fish were being sold at an inflated price during the busy period of the Mysteries, and that supply
failed to meet demand. He soon discovered that professional retail merchants bought the catch from the fishermen, or from first purchasers, and then sold it to the public with a steep markup. He published a letter to the authorities forbidding this practice and exempting anyone selling fish from the regular purchase tax. He ruled: “I want the vendors to have been stopped from their profiteering or else a charge to be brought against them.”

Hadrian now set off on a tour of the Peloponnese, taking Sabina with him. Wherever the imperial court went, ancient cities received the emperor’s largesse. Sometimes this was practical, at others extravagantly useless. Not far from the uninhabited ruins of Mycenae stood a great shrine to Hera, queen of the gods, at which Hadrian dedicated “a peacock in gold and glittering stones, because peacocks are considered to be Hera’s sacred birds.”

In return, names were changed to honor the donor, statues were erected, and temples dedicated. The small town of Megara, for example, received the full force of the emperor’s benevolence; a brick temple was rebuilt in stone and a road widened to allow chariots to drive past each other in opposite directions. Grateful inscriptions hailed Hadrian as their “founder, lawgiver, benefactor, and patron,” and the empress was enrolled as a “New Demeter.” However, Megara remained an impoverished backwater. According to Pausanias, second-century author of a guidebook to Greece, “not even the emperor could make the Megarians thrive: they were his only failure in Greece.” This implies there was more to the emperor’s munificence than self-aggrandizement. It had a practical purpose—economic development.

Hadrian visited the obvious tourist destinations—among them, austere Sparta, where boys were still whipped until the blood flowed to prove their bravery (and to entertain visitors), and Corinth, systematically devastated by the Romans in 146
B.C
. and resettled by Julius Caesar.