CHAPTER VIII

III.

THE POSITION OF HADRIAN

Hitherto Hadrian had mastered everything with notable certainty: his usurpation had been lost in the bright glory of being son to two divi; the policy of renouncing war had been transformed into sympathetic care for the well-being of the masses; the countries devastated by the revolt had been pacified and were now being restored; the danger along the north-eastern frontier had been exorcised; the alleged attack of the irreconcilables had been crushed with the harshest measures and the guilt transferred to other shoulders; in barely a year and a half the new ruler became the great mediator of divine blessing, the selfless lavisher of well­being, the moderate mild just pious brave Augustus, who cared only for the prosperity of the people and the world. Everyone thought he knew him, for he behaved to all simply and, as it seemed, openly, to Senators and to knights alike, and invited even freedmen to his table. He visited the sick, helped those who had fallen into distress, seemed gentle and kindly and yet suddenly spread death round him. He associated with intellectuals as one of themselves, rivalled them, showed enthusiasms, then suddenly proved that in his sobriety and strength of will he could live in such a way as to give soldiers an example of the strict discipline of their service, as if for his frame such work alone existed. Who among men had such wide interests, who was so many-sided and mobile, who thought so quickly, knew so much, surprised even those who stood nearest to him by his knowledge of their most secret thoughts? Who was in everything so supple and yet hard as steel, who so cold in calculation and determined in action? He felt the longing of men and gave it fulfilment in philosophical formulae, ideologies, and illusions, but also in deeds, so that they greeted him with exultation where he appeared. Thus he could divert their attention from that which he had to do, but could yet inspire them again with enthusiasm as soon as his new work had matured.

Hadrian understood war, was master of its conduct and means, relentlessly risked everything where the situation demanded it, and was cruel up to the moment of victory; in the Jewish war of the years 130-135 580,000 men fell in battle and there were countless others whom hunger, fire, sickness destroyed; over 1000 strongholds and villages were destroyed, and a whole nation banished and scattered. But just as out of the ruins a new and wholly different life arose, so it was everywhere: war was not fought for the sake of war, but only for the sake of peace, that is to say, on behalf of Graeco-Roman culture. The Spaniard understood the Romans, touched their inmost instincts, satisfied them, but was not a Roman. He understood and loved the Greeks, showered on them a thousand proofs of his Imperial favor, exalted them higher than even the Romans. But he was not a Greek. He did not seek the men or the curiosities of his lands to form himself by them. Since, in his abrupt rise, he had given proof of his uncanny powers, and the Senate had publicly recognized that he was divinely favored, he was bound, now that he had become the centre of all activity, to take hold of and to irradiate the whole world of the Empire with his strength, in order to form it in accordance with his thoughts, to awaken and enhance its energies, in order that the world might become the image of his own being, all and yet one. He was worshipped and honured as no other Emperor, a god on earth to all people. To some he appeared mighty as Zeus, beneficent as Asclepius, radiant as Helios; others feared him like Mars or the god of the Underworld himself. As he united all contrasts in himself, so he desired to compel the contrasts of the world to unity through restless activity, through being present everywhere and understanding everything, through harshness, where it averted distress, through the prodigal richness of his giving, where he had to banish death, create life, conjure up splendor and glory. His despotic striving towards the divine in all the world, the self-enhancement of his mysterious power, its setting forth for show in the image of the highest god of the Greeks and Romans, tokens of his intoxicating illusionism, offspring of his mystically dark imaginings, like his restless sweeping around the world, dissipated themselves at last in an outbreak of insanity. When he grew calm again, he found that light pleasure in trivial pursuits, that self-irony and scepticism towards all human activities and human life which wholly alienated him, lonely though worshipped as he was, from men. But no one realized that in a tragic life he had experienced in advance an example of what awaited all his people.

Hadrian, when they first got to know him in Rome, had pointedly taken as his model the image of Augustus, sacred to all. To this pattern he held fast: he literally seemed to grow into that role, wearing it with wonderful certainty as a mask. The preservation of moderation was to be his highest law, where his position in the State was concerned; he was the complete altruist on behalf of humanity. The official titulature of the inscriptions gives the names and titles of the emperor in the usual way down to the end of his reign, whereas on the countless honorific inscriptions of Greek cities variations are often to be observed. But the central coinage of the Empire, these highly significant pieces of evidence for the history of the time, show the official titulature only in the first year. Then from time to time occur important alteration : first 'imperator' and even the name Caesar disappear; only the office of pontifex maximus, the tribunicia potestas, the third consulate of the year 119, are given down to 123. From AD 123 to 128 he wished the coinage to reveal him as nothing more than Hadrianus Augustus, to be compared without presumption in his personal eminence with Caesar Augustus. From 128 on appears the somewhat more comprehensive and expressive formula Hadrianus Augustus pater patriae consul tertium. Modest in the number of his consulates, when compared with the great Augustus, since many of the higher officials of the Empire had held as many, he yet stood higher than all his contemporaries; and in that he was now equal to the august ruler following whose precedent he did not assume the title pater patriae till late in life when he had deserved it by the multitude and greatness of his achievements.

But there was more than that: this Spaniard, thanks to his virtus the first of the citizens, was now, as the exalted father of the great family of Rome, the root, centre, crown, of Rome's power, its representative towards the world, whose glance everyone who was banished from Rome's sight must avoid. Was not the stretch of road which he had traversed, to the very limits of humanity, not already almost unbearably great? A few months later he took the last step, became in Athens Zeus Olympios, the Zeus of all the Greeks. While to Rome he was to be princeps, Augustus, pater patriae, this new name was seized upon with intoxication by the world of enthusiastic Greeks: countless monuments testify to the zeal of the towns to celebrate the new Olympian. All this proves only that the boundaries between humanity and divinity were becoming shadowy, that heaven and earth were coming into contact again, that he understood the deepest longing of the world. In such images he enchanted the world, as he interpreted and covered his own activity with repeated pointings to the greatness of the past, or trimmed it with philosophical maxims. He might pose as one conscious that the common property belonged to the people, but the controller of the State, the first servant of his people, was really its master. His word was all-powerful, his word was a final decision.

Hardly any ruler of Rome pursued the cult of the past as did Hadrian. In this too he followed the example of Augustus, but he far surpassed him in energy, and his efforts no more embraced only the revival of old-Roman forms and ideas of life, but the whole of what was Greek, and they set in motion the new emergence of the manifold forces of the Provinces. Hadrian knew what tradition meant for the State and was on his guard against altering the old forms. But these forms received ever fresh content. The 'Good fortune' of the Roman People, that every spring was to celebrate the birthday of Roma aeterna, was promised, and the new age was to bring it to pass. The People believed in it and in the fair fiction that the State belonged to it; but, as the masses of the world-capital and their standard of life had little left in common with the Republican period, so in this State they had no more power to command.

Hadrian left the Senate unassailed. Almost to the last he kept his oath to respect its right to judge senators; he honored it and its members, allowed it to be active and so far won it to himself that for almost twenty years it gave its assent to all his edicts, and acts of State, though none the less he limited its effectiveness even in Italy. But the Senate had now changed. The men who were prominent in it, like himself, were no longer Romans; hardly three of the old Roman families were still to the fore. Spaniards, Gauls, Africans, natives of Asia Minor, who were rich and established, and possessed a strong following, composed the assembly of the illustrious, who were no longer a reflection of Rome, but a reflection of a new upper class of the Empire, divergent in their interests, worldwide in their horizon, united by the influence of a uniformly political and intellectual culture. In this Senate was concentrated the power of the provincials, made fruitful by Rome's tradition, and this power had effect on all the parts of the Empire. The Senate seemed to continue to play its old role, but was almost wholly a pliant tool. It may be significant that Hadrian seems only to have promoted two men to match his own tenure of a third consulship, and these his nearest relatives, Julius Servianus, the husband of his beloved sister, and the rich patrician Annius Verus, the southern Spaniard, his friend, grandfather of the boy whom he cherished, as once Augustus had cherished his Gaius, to secure him the succession. He too kept his following together: the Spanish coterie ruled Rome's Empire more strongly even than under Trajan; it was not till Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus that it disappeared. The extrusion of the Italic element from the highest class of the Empire and the victory of the powers of the provinces proceeded unchecked, thanks to his temperament and his attitude.

Hadrian did not efface the differences between the Orders and their functions in the State as a matter of principle. But the tasks which he set his 'equestrian' friend Marcius Turbo at the beginning of his reign, and the latter's career up to the post of Prefect of the Guard, already show the tendency towards the new state of affairs. Gradually the process of amalgamation began: more often than formerly a man passed over from the equestrian to the senatorial career. The rigid organization of the 'equestrian' career in the civil service was completed, and this career now became open to the bourgeoisie, no longer of Italy alone, but of the whole empire. 'Knights' now received high posts in the administration. Their career was regulated by means of a scale of rank and salary and a fixed course of promotion. Civil and military careers now take their course abreast of each other. The two praefecti praetorio, commanders of the Guard and highest equestrian officers, whose title by itself reveals that they are the deputies of the ruler, now take part in the reorganized consilium principis (crown council), which had the duty of advising the ruler in questions of law and administration: here they sit alongside the senators who are called to be members of it, and one of them, now always an eminent jurist, presides over the body. The departments of the ruler's cabinet, the offices of the court administration, once in the hands of freedmen, those of the domains and mines, of the fiscal administration, of the post, now taken over by the State, of the provincial administration, in a word all the departments to which the career of a knight gave access, from the humblest procurator up to the Prefect of the Praetorian Guard, attracted the ability of those who were entitled to pursue them. These entered the service of the ruler and, unlike the senatorial magistrates, were dependent in everything upon his will alone. In doing this Hadrian logically gave a new meaning to the idea that the res publica was the property of the populus: as princeps, as trustee for this res publica, he desired to avoid any appearance of seeking to withdraw from the State and of making into his own servants alone this multitude of the ruler's officials, which was acquiring a greatly increasing power over the organization of the Empire, or of making that Empire his property or the monarchy into a hated absolutism. All the departments of the State-administration were, at least in theory, placed afresh under the 'sovereign' Populus Romanus.

The new order of things, in the creation of which Hadrian carried the reforms of Augustus a long step further, clarified the construction of the whole organization, and gave the bourgeoisie of the Empire a greater share than ever before in the general administration. In continual action and reaction that order of things enhanced the participation of the bourgeoisie in the work of government and its introduction into the prevailing form of life of the Empire. Thereby it furthered the work of resolving the contrasts of the provinces in the interest of the Empire as a whole. But it also forcefully strengthened the bureaucratic system. For it demanded a State bureaucracy which remained in effect bound to the ruler. And Hadrian trained up this bureaucracy in the principles of loyalty, fulfilment of duty, and justice, and kept it under the closest control; on his far-reaching journeys he tried to make real the theory of the ruler's omnipresence. He issued edicts in which the legal position of the civil service was further developed; he paid his officials, rewarded them, distinguished them, in order to spur on their initiative. He simplified and unified the administration, and the whole gained in clearness and continuity. But the new order of things effected in everything the opposite of that which it seemed to effect: in the hand of strong rulers it became the counterweight to the traditional powers of the aristocratic Senate, and through that weight the power of such rulers over Rome and the empire was enhanced.

  IV.

THE FRONTIERS AND THE EMPIRE