Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome (54 page)

It was a near-disastrous setback. Hadrian himself was failing; he was looking emaciated and suffered from dropsy. A new succession plan was urgently needed. On January 24, his sixty-second birthday, he summoned leading senators to his sickbed, from which he addressed them.

This time Hadrian’s choice had fallen on someone entirely unexceptionable. He confessed later: “I made my decision even when Commodus was alive.” His successor was to be Titus Aurelius Fulvius Boionius Arrius Antoninus. He was a middle-aged senator of great wealth and with impeccable antecedents. He was orphaned as a child and his grandfather Titus Arrius Antoninus had brought him up. An amiable friend of Pliny, an intimate of Nerva, and a skilled versifier in Latin and Greek, Arrius was a senator of the old school who held the consulship “with the dignity of a bygone age.”

The adoption of Arrius Antoninus’ grandson as the new Caesar was an astute move on Hadrian’s part, for it symbolized the entente between the two parts of the ruling class—those who were willing to collaborate with the emperors and traditionalists, including survivors of the Stoic opposition, still in mourning for the Republic. This entente had been Nerva’s great achievement, and Antoninus was an assurance of its continuance into the future.

Good-natured and distinguished in appearance, Antoninus was an excellent public speaker. From Hadrian’s point of view he had the overriding advantage of being a man of peace. He had no military experience of any kind and so there was little chance of a return to military aggression and imperial expansion.

The emperor had privately contacted Antoninus immediately after Aelius Caesar’s death, but the senator asked for time to consider the invitation before accepting it. Perhaps he had something of Arrius in him and feared that the attractions of power were overrated. Also, Hadrian’s offer came with conditions. Antoninus was to adopt Marcus, his
verissimus
, now seventeen years old, along with the dead Commodus’ little son—probably confirmation that the boy had been the emperor’s preferred choice all along. His solution was not without risk: Antoninus might disregard the adoptions after his death, or die before Marcus was old enough to take over. But if all went well, the empire would be in the
hands of two competent and well-intentioned rulers for another couple of generations. It was a bet worth taking.

After due thought, Antoninus accepted the emperor’s offer. He insisted on retaining his
cognomen
and was known as Titus Aelius Hadrianus Antoninus. Marcus became Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus; today we call them Antoninus Pius
(pius
means “loyal” or “dutiful”) and Marcus Aurelius.

The end was near. The emperor suffered from bad dreams; in one of them he asked his father, fifty years dead, for a sleeping draft. On another occasion he was overcome by a lion, a distorted memory perhaps of his last hunt with Antinous in the sands of Libya. He was no longer really in a fit condition to attend to affairs of state, but he insisted on trying to do so. In practice, Antoninus, officially endowed with proconsular
imperium
and
tribunicia potestas
, very soon found himself in charge of the government machine.

The emperor still placed confidence in “charms and magic rituals” and he received temporary relief from his dropsy, but his limbs soon filled up with fluid again. It would seem that Hadrian had contracted congestive (that is, fluid-retaining) heart disease, a condition that could have lasted for a couple of years or so. As has been seen, he may also have been suffering from chronic erysipelas.

It is impossible to assign a definite cause at this distance in time, but one clear possibility is reduced blood flow to the heart through the coronary blood vessels. If reports of Hadrian’s heavy drinking with Trajan are correct and reflect a long-standing habit, this may have led to alcoholic cardiomyopathy, a weakening of the heart muscle or a change in its structure. Cardiac failure means that the heart’s function as a pump to deliver oxygen-rich blood is inadequate to meet the body’s needs. This in turn reduces the kidneys’ normal ability to excrete salt and water. As a result the body retains more fluid which descends to the legs when the sufferer is standing or sitting. Hence the symptoms of dropsy.

Hadrian would have found temporary relief by lying down, but that risked fluid gathering in the lungs and shortness of breath. Sometimes he
would have awoken at night, gasping for air. He may have had to learn how to sleep seated upright. Excess fluid also prompts increased urination, especially at night, and when it accumulates in the liver and intestines causes nausea, stomach pain, and a loss of appetite.

The emperor felt as if he were dying every day, and came to long for an immediate end. He asked for poison or a sword, but nobody would give them to him even if he promised money and immunity from prosecution. The curse of Servianus had come to pass.

Finally, Hadrian sent for Mastor, the captive tribesman from the Iazyges, who had acted for years as his hunting assistant. According to Dio Cassius,

Antoninus was informed of what was happening and went to see Hadrian, taking the guards and city prefects with him. He begged the emperor to endure the course of his illness with equanimity. Now that Antoninus was his adopted son, he would be guilty of patricide if he allowed him to be killed. Hadrian lost his temper and ordered the whistle-blower to be put to death (Antoninus ensured that the sentence was not carried out).

He now drew up a will. Somehow he acquired a dagger, but the weapon was taken from him. He instructed his doctor to give him poison, and the doctor committed suicide to avoid having to administer it.

Two eccentric visitors called, both of them claiming to be blind. First, a woman said she had been told in a dream to coax Hadrian from suicide, for he was destined to make a full recovery. After meeting the emperor, she recovered her sight, or so he was assured. Then an old man turned up when Hadrian was suffering from a fever. He touched the patient, whereupon he saw again and the fever vanished. The emperor’s biographer, Marius Maximus, believed that these were benevolent hoaxes. The court knew its Hadrian, and his penchant for magic.

Hadrian enjoyed periods of remission, or at least quiescence, for he managed to muster the energy to write an autobiography during these last months, almost certainly in the form of a letter to Antoninus. A fragment of a copy on papyrus of its opening lines has been found at Fayum in Egypt. It reads like an indirect apology for attempting to do away with himself (at some point about now he asked those close to him to keep a suicide watch). He wrote:

His mind turned to his birth father, who, he calculated, “fell ill and passed away as a private citizen at the age of forty, so that I have lived half as long again as my father, and have reached nearly the same age as my mother.”

He also wrote a poem, a short address to his soul as it quits its body and sets out for the unknown. It is a fine piece of work, allusive, adroitly opaque—and owing more to Hadrian’s favorite, Ennius, than to fluent, smooth Virgil.

The failing emperor retreated from Rome to an imperial villa at the seaside resort of Baiae. He abandoned his medical regimen and ate and
drank whatever he liked. This precipitated a final crisis and he lost consciousness after shouting out loud: “Many doctors killed a king.”

On July 10, 138, the man who entered life as Publius Aelius Hadrianus left it as Imperator Caesar Divi Traiani filius Traianus Hadrianus Augustus. His next name was due to be Divus Hadrianus, Hadrian the God. But he very nearly failed to make the grade.

Although by any objective standard he had been a successful ruler, Hadrian never won over the Senate and the ruling class. He was widely believed to have been innately cruel, and to have hidden his true nature beneath an affable veneer. An opposing view came from someone who had no reason to be kind, being a cousin of one of the former consuls Hadrian had killed at the beginning of his reign. He wrote that the emperor “mixed justice with kindheartedness in accordance with the care he took when making decisions.”

Dio Cassius gives a levelheaded summary:

A generous epitaph was written near the end of the reign by the emperor’s friend, the historian, administrator, and general Arrian. Quoting Terpander on the virtues of the Spartans, he writes:

The army (the “spear”), the arts (the “Muse”), and holy justice can indeed be seen as the three foci of Hadrian’s life’s work.

Antoninus conveyed Hadrian’s remains to Rome and arranged his burial “in the gardens of Domitia.” This park was the location of the late emperor’s mausoleum. The building had not yet been completed, for it was dedicated the following year; perhaps a temporary interment took place nearby. We know that eventually Hadrian lay in the grandiose tomb he had built for himself and his successors, for Antoninus’ memorial stone has been found there.

The Senate, remembering its embittered relationship with Hadrian, did not wish him to deify him, but Antoninus insisted (hence perhaps the
cognomen
Pius). The consecration ceremony was modeled on the obsequies of Augustus. An artificial body, made from wax and wearing the costume of a
triumphator
, a general at a triumph, represented Hadrian and lay in state in the Forum Romanum. Here it repeated symbolically the dying of the already deceased emperor; for some days doctors examined the “patient” and issued bulletins. Then, when death had eventually been acknowledged, Antoninus delivered a eulogy after which a long procession of dignitaries headed by the Senate made its way to the Campus Martius. Here the effigy was placed on a tall, richly decorated multistory pyre. The consuls set light to it and an eagle, caged on the top tier, was released, which signified Hadrian’s spirit flying up through the flames to join the immortal gods.