CHAPTER VIII

II.

THE ACCESSION OF HADRIAN

P. Aelius Hadrianus (born on January 24, 76) sprang from a family which had emigrated in the time of the Scipios from Hadria in Picenum to southern Spain and was established in Italica (near Seville). This family had acquired a mixture of Iberian blood, but, like the Ulpii Traiani, who had likewise made themselves a home there, had loyally preserved the memory of their Italic origin. An Aelius, from whom Hadrian was directly descended, had become, the first of his line, a Roman senator in the late Caesarian period, no doubt because he was a partisan of the dictator. Hadrian himself was the son of a man of praetorian rank and of a mother whose home was in Gades: the name of the mother, Domitia Paulina, which was passed on to Hadrian's younger sister, attests the pro-Roman attitude of her family too; he was also a son of Trajan's cousin, we do not know whether on the paternal or maternal side. It is probable that his father, the origin of whose second cognomen, Afer, remains u­explained, owed his rise to the praetorian rank to Ulpius Traianus, who was in close association with Vespasian and Titus at a critical period and was made a patrician in AD 73: similarly, Hadrian himself owed his whole rapid career to that Trajan's son. In a space of 250 years Spain had received a multitude of energies from Rome and Italy; since the days of Caesar and Augustus the romanizing of the country had made rapid progress; and now, for a generation past, this Spain had been returning to Rome and the Empire in increasing measure what had grown out of those energies. Writers like the Senecas, Lucan, Martial and Quintilian, officers and administrative officials, amongst whom the Ulpii, Aelii, and Annii were by no means unique. Trajan and Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius (from the family of the Annii) and his son Commodus, were not merely Romans: in them the Iberian strain of their families can be seen working itself out; the devotion of Trajan to the gods of Gades, above all to Hercules Gaditanus, the attitude of Hadrian and of the others proves clearly that these 'Romans' of the provinces were other than the rulers of the Julian or even the Flavian dynasty, who had grown up in the Italic homelands of the Empire.

But the decision of Trajan to have his nephew Hadrian, early left an orphan, educated in Rome and then to set him on the career of an official, was to have great consequences. He and his fellow-countryman, the knight Acilius Attianus, afterwards Prefect of the Guard to both monarchs, had taken over the tutelage of Hadrian, who later became Trajan's nephew by marriage with his great-niece. On this relationship and education depend in the last resort Hadrian's rule, the fundamental direction of his policy, even his own decision to regulate the succession. Aelius Caesar, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Verus and Commodus, too, would not have been what they were without this decision. And of these, only Aelius Caesar and his son, Verus, were members of an Etruscan house, while the other three, who were immensely more important, were sprung from families in the provinces of the Roman Empire, namely the Aurelii Fulvi from Nemausus, and the Annii from Uccubis in southern Spain, and had become further interrelated among themselves. All this is the outward sign of the supersession of Italic strength by provincial elements.

The boy Hadrian was introduced to Greek education and took it up with enthusiasm. Returning to his home in 90—1 he gained early training in arms in the company of the youth of the town and became madly devoted to the chase. About AD 93 Trajan summoned him to Rome a second time. Now, like every one in a similar position, he began his career as an official and as a soldier from the lowest positions: in the course of his military career, as Tribune of three legions in 95-7, he came to know Lower Pannonia, Lower Moesia, and the Rhine, that is, the whole North Front of the Empire. When the childless Trajan became Emperor, his only nephew, now almost 22 years old, entered his circle; ambitious as he was, the star of secret hopes begins to rise. In AD 101, as the Imperator's quaestor, he took part in the First Dacian War on Trajan's staff; in the Second Dacian War, having now already become praetor, he commanded a legion; as an ex-praetor he became governor of Lower Pannonia and fought successfully against the Sarmatians of the plain of the Theiss. At the age of thirty-two he was consul suffectus; a few years later in his capacity as nephew of the Emperor he was a member of high-priestly Colleges and Archon of Athens, the only private Roman citizen who attained such distinction. A direct development leads from the first studies of the 'Graeculus', as he was already called when a boy, through this dignity, which the town conferred on the most suitable person, to Hadrian's panhellenic policy, the centre of which was his beloved Athens, in which the Spanish 'Roman' became a Greek. He enjoyed the favor of Plotina, the wife of his uncle, and acquired a circle of close friends. When he went to the Parthian War in the autumn of 113 as chief of the general staff of the Emperor, in whose train was Acilius Attianus, the Prefect of the Guard and formerly Hadrian's guardian, the world of the East in its whole breadth unfolded itself before him. So, before he himself became princeps, he acquired a clear oversight over most of the European and Asiatic territories of the Empire, over its energies and the tasks which the Northern and the Eastern Fronts imposed.

How much of the credit for the victories in Armenia and Mesopotamia should be ascribed to him can hardly be determined. But he was at the nerve-centre of all action. When preparing to return home, Trajan, who had now fallen sick, left his nephew behind in Antioch as governor of Syria with orders to carry on the war as commander of the troops. There was meanwhile a furious revolt raging from Cyrenaica far into Mesopotamia: even the victory over the Parthians and all the conquest of territory were jeopardized. This was the situation in which Hadrian, now forty-one years old, took over gigantic responsibilities. Trajan undoubtedly valued highly his capabilities as a general and his activity. But why at this moment, when he felt his health failing, did he not give him more comprehensive powers, as Augustus, Tiberius, Vespasian had done in quite different circumstances? Why did he not summon him to a share in his power, in order to secure for him in any event the expectation of the succession if anything should happen to himself? Nothing of the kind was done. At the beginning (perhaps on the 4th) of August 117 the Emperor left Syria, and on the 9th at the latest he died suddenly, his sickness having taken an abrupt turn for the worse, in the small town of Selinus on the Cilician coast. When, on the 1tth, the news of his death reached Antioch, the Syrian army proclaimed Hadrian as his successor. This day is his 'dies imperii'. It was but slowly that the news reached Rome that Trajan had adopted his nephew while actually on his deathbed, and that the latter had been informed of his adoption on August 9. Amid general excitement people weighed the reasons which supported this surprising fact against the much weightier ones which showed Trajan as a rigorous upholder of the Augustan conception of the Principate; and the doubts were not, and have never been, dissipated. One thing is certain: Trajan had not, up to that point, taken any step which justified the conclusion that he would propose Hadrian to the Senate as the 'best citizen'. Even assuming that at the last he had adopted him, the strict doctrine of the Principate no more entitled Hadrian than it had entitled Tiberius to regard the death of his father as the beginning of his own rule. Hadrian excused himself before the Senate, whose privilege it was to elect the 'optimus', by saying that 'the army had proclaimed him Imperator overhastily, because the Commonwealth could not be without an Imperator'. The secret of Selinus, kept by Plotina, by Hadrian's mother-in-law Matidia, and by the Prefect of the Guard Attianus, the persons most nearly concerned in it, cannot be discovered; the only man who might have spoken unguardedly about it, the dead ruler's personal servant, died suddenly on the 11th of August. Whether or not he died by his own hand cannot be determined beyond doubts.

Whether the adoption was a fiction or not, Hadrian publicly stood by it and held fast to it; for it associated him with his predecessors in the Principate, the divus Nerva and Trajan, who on his motion was soon promoted to be divus; and this gave him, as son and grandson of two gods, as it had once given to Tiberius, a tremendous authoritarian superiority over all other mortals. But neither the adoption nor Trajan's death give the date for his reign, which runs from August 11, when the acclamation of his army, and that alone, conferred power on him, as on Vespasian, a fact which the Senate could not but recognize and implement. And after all, as nearest of kin, he was of the blood of the 'best citizen', and the Senate had often enough made legitimate the succession of relatives. More than that, the armies which could assess his exploits better than the Senate had agreed to see in him the 'best citizen' himself. The Senate was confident that the new ruler would perform the task of winning back lost Mesopotamia. The Senate recognized him as the inheritor of a divine grace, as the son who secured for his father the divine honors that were his due, as the accomplisher of his father's will, who proclaimed with determination peace, justice and harmony at home; and it desired to transfer to the living man those triumphal titles which belonged to the dead. But Hadrian modestly and reverently retired behind the greater figure who, though dead, still celebrated his Parthian triumph; and refused the title 'pater patriae' becaus, he said, 'Augustus had only received it late in life'.

Then it was soon perceived that he had no mind to continue his adopted father's policy. The friends and helpers of Trajan, among them the Moorish chief Lusius Quietus, were soon replaced by the circle of his own friends; and from the moment when, after Attianus' return, Rome was securely in his hands, an entirely new state of affairs was revealed. It was a matter of course that the revolt of the Jews in the Eastern provinces of the Empire should be suppressed with relentless rigor : his friend Marcius Turbo, above all, quickly accomplished the task set him. In Palestine, Egypt, Cyrenaica, calm was restored. But in Britain, too, in Mauretania, and on the Lower Danube, troubles arose or war threatened. Yet for the sake of the security of the Empire peace had to prevail. Hadrian, therefore, determined to risk all for the future of the Empire against the resistance of Trajan's supporters and of the thorough-going imperialists, left the territory that had been acquired by his predecessor to its inhabitants to look after; these latter, because the Romans were not able to hold the land, were made into client-States and commissioned to defend it. To Greater Armenia he gave back its king, the pretender whom Trajan had set up as King of Parthia he compensated with other territory, and only the pressure of his friends induced him to abandon the idea of giving back Dacia because the process of pacifying and romanizing it was so far advanced and because it was indispensable to the defence of the Empire.

In all this he was at first only doing what Augustus too had dared to do in a critical situation and Tiberius had logically carried out. To silence all resistance to this policy, he appealed to secret instructions of Trajan, of which no one knew, but which equally no one could dispute. But there was more in his decision than that: with the erection of protective rule over the client-States all was not sacrificed, the claim of Rome was maintained, the possibility of their complete annexation was only postponed to a more propitious occasion; now peace was necessary, and for the future a clear maintenance of the fundamental principle of war which, in Roman doctrine, was only possible when just. There was to be world-wide peace, the end of aggressive wars, of battles, of all piracy and all rebellion, security on all paths of the land and the sea from sunrise to sunset, as the philosopher understood it, prosperity for mankind. War should only be waged where the defence of the Empire demanded it.

He separated the farther East from the Empire, directing the Empire's energies to its own inner tasks. For the Romans could not protect the farther East: the power of the Empire had been over-strained; in the towns and in the country the masses were struggling for their existence and groaning under the burdens and the pressure of the bureaucracy. And he won the masses. To Italy he remitted entirely the sums due on the change of emperor, and reduced them for the provinces: to the small tenant farmers in Egypt, whose fate depended on Nile, sun, and desert, he made over arable land from the public or domain estates under new conditions; he released philosophers, rhetoricians, grammarians, doctors, from all the burdens which the State, the provinces, the towns imposed upon them, as upon all citizens; he began to make good the damage which the Jewish revolt had wrought in Cyrenaica, in Egypt, in Alexandria and in Cyprus, and granted relief to all who brought their problems to him. These are chance scraps of information taken at random concerning measures of the first days of his reign which show which way the wind was blowing. If Trajan was the victorious acquirer of the Empire, as Hadrian himself had called him, he decided to be its preserver, the awakener of its forces, its social ruler and the bringer of prosperity.

When at last, in October 117, the Emperor started from Antioch, to pass by easy stages along the great military road through the lands of Asia Minor, accompanied by detachments of the armies of the West, he knew that the Senate was desiring his return home, but that it was powerless against his new policy. He did not hurry for provincial affairs kept him busy. He spent the winter in Asia Minor, while Marcius Turbo crushed the rising of the Moors. In the spring he imposed peace on the Lower Danube through negotiations with the king of the Roxolani, and also reduced to quiet the Sarmatians of the plain of the Theiss by a resolute converging attack from the Danube and from Dacia. The general who had led out the armies, had taken over the administration of Dacia, had made preparations for war, but had died in the midst of his activities, one highly honored in Trajan's time, received also a triumphal burials; but Marcius Turbo finished off this war too. Hadrian had a helper, and success with his new policy. Confidence came. Then he journeyed hastily to Rome, arrived on the 9th of July 118, eleven months after he had taken over the rule. Anger had broken out at Rome because he had permitted four men of consular rank to be executed simultaneously' friends of Trajan of merit, Palma, Celsus, Nigrinus and Lusius Quietus, who, as was stated in Hadrian's circle, had been preparing to assassinate him. The Senate, all too credulous, pliable, blindfolded, had pronounced sentence upon them; the warrant for their death in the hand of the executioners and their instigators (above all Attianus) had been fatal to all four of them before Hadrian intervened. He was formally in the right, when he laid the responsibility upon the Senate itself; he even denied that it had been done in accordance with his will; but the reproach that he had not prevented the execution, a reproach serious enough and yet mitigated by his absence, caused him to appear quickly, in order to refute the harsh judgment on his behavior.

With extraordinary bounties he bought the favor of the people; he swore to the Senate that he would only punish senators on the ground of a sentence pronounced by the senatorial court; soon afterwards, the first and only one of all principes to do so, with unexampled generosity he made not only his contemporary fellow-citizens but their descendants, too, free of debt: for he wrote off 900 million sesterces, which were owed to the Imperial treasury, sums of unknown but certainly not small extent, debts of provincials, debts too to the senatorial treasury, the accumulations of fifteen years, ordering the debt records to be burnt. Almost directly afterwards followed the renewal and extension of Trajan's charitable work for the poverty-stricken youth of Italy, charitable bounties for impoverished senators or for women who were in distress through no fault of their own. A few weeks later Rome witnessed gladiatorial games and wild beast hunts on the largest scale. Every effort was made to obliterate the memory of his 'guilt', to free from apprehension and to lull men's fears, to be able to secure and to celebrate the return of the old libertas. He desired to be a citizen among citizens, a senator among his peers and took his place in the business of the Senate, even execrated those principes who had curtailed its rights. Playing on Cicero's fundamental formula, he based his actions on the principle, which he often repeated before the People and the Senate, that 'he would manage the common property as conscious that it was the property of the people, not his own'.

He had reckoned boldly and had been right: the sums which the war would have devored were free at the critical moment—ostensibly for the people and the world of the Empire, in reality for the final securing of his rule; and simultaneously he called to life the recollection of the status felicissimus, the optimus status civitatis, in which Augustus had only been the first and best of the citizens. The effect was not lacking: the Senate bowed before this selflessness, did homage to the man whose position they had only lately disputed, 'who had restored and enriched the circle of the earth', who was called, thanks to the providence of the gods, to work for the prosperity of the State and of the world. But in the midst of these rejoicings the rumour suddenly went round that Hadrian desired to have the Prefect of the Guard, Attianus, murdered. Only a short time before, he had given the ornamenta consularia, the highest gift he could bestow, to his former guardian, his most faithful helper from the elder generation; did he now perhaps feel himself endangered by his preeminence and his presumption? Actually, he only compelled him to retire, and Marcius Turbo became his successor; the other Prefect of the Guard, too, was replaced by a friend. Now, and only now, with his power fully secured, Hadrian had a free course.

III.

THE POSITION OF HADRIAN