CHAPTER VIII

V.

LEGAL AND SOCIAL POLICY. THE JOURNEYS

Hadrian's activities in the spheres of law, economics and social life in Rome, Italy, and the empire, can only be briefly touched upon. The principles which he proclaimed at the beginning of his rule remained decisive in all that he did. He fulfilled the ruler's duty to be the supreme lord of justice often and willingly, not only in Rome, but also at many places upon his journeys, displaying the many-sided industry which characterizes his nature. And the great number of his legal decisions of which we know shows how fruitful his activity was. His decisions were famous for their clear and homely wording, pertinent pronouncements were collected and circulated in writings of his own, and the later books of law cite many of his legal interpretations and decisions. In these he created new law, in his capacity as highest tribunal of law in many matters; and the appointment of eminent jurists to be Praetorian Prefects, and so to preside over the consilium principis, shows what stress he laid upon the principle that his representative on this body also should be in a position to serve authoritatively and fully the idea of justice.

Often enough in Hadrian's decisions are seen the motives which determine him. Humanity, natural equity and a justice which proceeds from deep ethical sources must be the judge's supports. Not caprice, but objectivity must rule; human nature must be respected, the will and state of mind of the doer investi­_gated. Knowledge of mankind, the personal impression of the individual case and the judge's own conscience are to determine the judgment and the measure of the punishment, not merely formal points of view and the judge's knowledge of law. In difficult cases _philosophers or doctors are referred to as authorities. And for Hadrian the slave, tool isahurnan being: he is only partially excepted from the protection of ordinary law; the master has to respect his humanity, must not arbitrarily torture or kill him, prostitute him, sell or mutilate him for an unworthy purpose, and the judge must not condemn him if he is deserving. As he himself in the consilium principis laid the greatest emphasis on authoritative legal counsel, so too, in other respects, he encouraged the eliciting of expert opinions, did what he could to bureaucratize the consilium of the judge, extended the legal authority of individual higher officials, and, by giving instructions to judges, the activity of the monarchy itself. The final redaction and codification of the Praetorian Edic by the jurist Salvius Julianus, which he then made the Senate raise to be a norm, also shows that he desired, in legal matters as in the organization of the Statei, to make the creative will of the ruler prevail.

Hadrian's restless activity had its effect on the countless towns throughout the length and breadth of the empire. He spurred on their ambition and granted them relief: he gave them temples, baths, games, festivals, aqueducts, fountains, gymnasia: he supported in them education, instruction, theatres, furthered their autonomy, granted many of them the right to issue their own coins, strengthened their communal constitutions, gave them town regulations, looked after their budgets, and caused them, where their finances had got into disorder, to be watched over by controlling officials. Here he extended their possessions, there he increased their size by incorporating new communities within them; he founded entirely new towns or parts of towns; to many in the West he gave the ius Latii, to others in the East the Greek city-constitution. He took part in their life, he even became, in cities of Italy, Spain, or the Greek East, their highest honorary official or priest, did homage to their gods and often on his journeys he was himself honoured by many as their own god. He was truly solicitous for their material well-being and splendor. With him, the urbanization of the Empire reached its final heights; and was well on the way to conquer and annex economically even the most distant corners—districts hitherto closed to town-culture, survivals of primeval village-civilization in Europe and Africa, districts with widely-extended land-ownership in Asia Minor.

It is the impression of Hadrian's work that moves the panegyrist of Rome to say some twenty years later, that the world has become a democracy, guided by its best citizen as leader and orderer, a single city-state, in which the best men, sons of all provinces, are citizens and therefore called to rule over the masses. Thanks to these rulers and the general organization of the officials, of the armies, who are Roman citizens and all together represent the Empire, from which they derive, war only prevails now on the edges of the world; and everywhere else there is peace, prosperity, happiness, so that those who live outside are to be pitied. Rome has opened all the gates of the world; the whole earth is at work; festival on festival can be celebrated; everyone is inspired to be as noble and excellent as possible. Rome has given laws in common to all and even new gifts: all dwell in one house as members of one family...

From Hadrian's attitude towards the Greek idea of the right of the city-state to freedom, autonomy, and self-sufficiency in its life, from the very idea of justice standing in opposition to might, to which he stubbornly held fast, new life was awakened in the fair fiction that the countless city-states are members, possessing equal rights, of a mighty league under Rome's selfless leadership; that consequently no one of them can be robbed of its own life, but that all together, in the organization of the Empire which stands above them, are members of the body, feel themselves one as in the 'family', the 'house', and thus wish to be the civilized world as opposed to barbarism. Not this dualism alone, but in real truth those panhellenic ideas and fictions further the process of unifying the whole Empire; on the other hand, they also accelerate the strengthening of the provincials' self-consciousness: the claim put forward by these provincials to a greater share in the government of the Empire does not disappear, but grows quickly. But alongside and above this fiction of the league of the city-states there come to greater prominence than ever before the primeval groups of peoples, now comprehended in the Empire, the nationes, who at the Emperor's vicennalia pay him harmonious tribute on the Empire coins as fair symbols of his activity on their behalf. It was to local provincial spirit and cohesion that Hadrian's adoptive father Trajan, and thus Hadrian himself, owed the lord­ship over the world; this spirit was everywhere still alive, and it will grow ever stronger and stronger dressed in Roman forms of life; in struggle with 'Rome' it will continually give the latter new powers, but will also transform it. And so the State organization as a whole appears almost only as the outward shell, the form for the ordering of life; the army appears as the protecting, the bureaucracy as the regulating power; but all these three are taken possession of with ever increasing sureness, from now on, by these nationes. But if one believes the panegyrist, there arises the impression that the 'masses' in the country are only an 'object' made use of by the ruling classes, by the caprice of the officials: in reality the first beginnings of the new régime show that Hadrian, in accordance with his principles, did not overlook them either. The allotment of arable land to the Egyptian fellaheen, the fragments of his legislation concerning agricultural land, the statute concerning the African domains, and everything else which we hear, prove that he wished to prevent the land from becoming barren, to open up new areas to cultivation, to protect the small peasants from oppression and to further their prosperity. He settles them on domain-lands, where they are to be free and to earn enough to be able to exist.

In this empire of material prosperity industry and trade flourished, thanks to internal peace and to the security on all routes. Each was dependent on the other. Industry satisfied the needs of the local market, but also created enough goods for export in small and great concerns, in the manufactories owned and run by the great estates of the temples in the East, on the rapidly growing domain-lands. In this way industry was at the same time drawn from the confines of the cities also into the country. But the State, in many respects the owner of the raw materials, which for the most part carried on the production of metals, precious stones, marble, as its own monopoly, but also permitted private persons to engage in these trades, did not yet damage private trade by its own excessive power; on the contrary, it made use of private enterprise in deliveries for State undertakings. And private enterprise can hardly ever have been so powerfully stimulated during these centuries as it was by Hadrian, whose initiative spurred on the rich to imitate him, whose great building activity created work, and thereby caused money to be earned, in all the territories through which he passed; even though it may be said of him that he banded together builders of all classes in cohorts according to military practice, took them with him on his journeys, and set them to work on the erection and the decoration of walls. But trade, whether local or regional, and now for the first time really universal, was in full swing; and great distances were overcome by it, remote provinces were captured, the northern and the south-eastern frontiers of the empire were left further behind than ever before. The economic opening-up of the younger provinces, in North Africa, in the East, in the Danube area, along the Rhine, and even in such remote areas as Britain, made rapid steps forward; and in Gaul especially new forces were active and creative forces developed. Oriental trade, however, with great energy, won elbow-room in the countries of the West. From all this there results a new orientation of the driving forces in the empire: Gaul especially, but also the Rhinelands, Britain, Spain and Africa, having adopted for generations the technical achievements and the taste of Italian handicraft, and the forms of its products, drove out Italian competition from the markets of their interior territory and provided for those markets themselves. Gaul, above all, actually became Italy's competitor in other provinces and in Italy. It is true that in doing so it had given up its old native forms of goods and adapted Italian taste to its own uses, thereby deliberately contributing to the process of unifying all exterior forms of life in the empire; but in Gaul too, and not in Britain alone, the Celtic spirit was to be found, while in Africa and Spain the spirit of the old nationes still survived. And the East, which only needed to continue that which it had practised for thousands of years and had practised most of all in the centuries since the beginning of 'Hellenism', betrays in everything that it had no mind to give up its own native ways. So in the economic world, too, is revealed the same picture which the political activity of Hadrian had brought about. Hadrian knew the whole empire: in efforts continually renewed he observed on his journeys the losses, the needs and wishes of the countries, towns, villages, estates, and of the men in them: everywhere he intervened in a creative spirit. His name is writ large on every region of the Roman world.

If one includes the first journey, mentioned already, from the East to Rome (117-8), and the journey to the scene of the Jewish War (134-5), Hadrian dedicated some twelve out of the twenty-one years of the reign to restless wanderings through the empire. He first spent only two years in Rome and Italy (July 118 until the middle of 120); from 121 until 125, then again from 128 until 133 he was on the move, beginning with the West, Gaul, Germany, Raetia, Noricum, hastening through Britain and western Gaul, visiting Spain and fighting in Morocco. Travelling eastwards along the African coast he visited Africa, Cyrenaica, hurried by way of the islands and Asia Minor to the Euphrates; returned through the lands of northern Asia Minor, passed through the Balkan lands as far as Pannonia and Dalmatia, then and then only turned to Greece, in order at last to return to Rome after five years of wandering. He only remained there for just three years; in 128 he crossed again to Africa, spent the winter in Athens, passed through the territories of southern Asia Minor, Syria, Phoenicia, Arabia and Palestine, Egypt as far as into the upper Nile valley and once again Asia Minor, as far as up to the districts of the Black Sea, to betake himself to Athens for a third time in 132. He returned to the capital, perhaps not until some time in the year 133; from late summer 134 to 135 he spent time in Palestine; the last two and a half years were given to Rome and its neighborhood.

Only about four years of his period of wandering were given to the West and the Danubian regions: the Greek-speaking East greatly predominates. He wished to convince himself everywhere by his own observation, by seeing and experience, how the arrangements of the State were standing up to usage, and to convince men that the forces of the past and present sufficed to create a strong future. He did not go on his travels in order to show himself to men as sovereign; he wished to win their hearts and their enthusiasm through his presence and activity, he inspected the officials and the troops, pronounced justice and visited the frontiers, arranged their defence and the allotment of the troops in their garrisons, held parades, exercises, manoeuvres. He heard the petitions of the provincials, granting what and where he could. He gave water-systems and bridges, laid out roads, indeed systems of road-networks, in order to open up still more the inner regions of provinces like Africa, Spain, Galatia. He rebuilt destroyed cities, founded fresh ones in the vicinity of military camps, at important points; he raised the old centres of the districts of Syria, Phoenicia, Arabia, to be capital cities, in order to strengthen what were once the seats of independent rulers, as the backbone of culture, and to avoid all-too-stringent centralization. From the Euphrates and the Arabian desert to Upper Egypt, to Mauretania, Britain and the Crimea, his helping hand raised up this town-culture in Graeco-Roman form. Countless buildings arose everywhere in the towns—temples, halls, baths, town-walls and gates; in this way work was created; his example found emulation in foundations of the competing parts of the empire. Gods were honored, and among them the ruler, in the West as in the East—most of all in the latter, where life blossomed anew as if by magic. Here he honored a great man of the past, there he competed in intellectual conversation with philosophers, artists and scholars, but he also climbed Mt Casius near Antioch and Etna, to enjoy the miracle of the sunrise.

As was said already, the Greek Polis is once again victoriously exalted as the form of the community, and that in the East; even in the Egyptian countryside there arises at his command a new town, Antinoopolis, which, colonized by veterans of Greek blood from Egypt, glorified in the names of its tribes and demes a skilfully artificial system, the house of the ruler, the divine forms in which he appeared and his relations to Eleusis and Athens. That is no mere chance. For his thoughts and endeavors were directed towards Athens, towards the salvation of the Greek world, the centre of which Athens must remain.

He showed more favor to that city than to any other town. As architect, refounded, renewer of its cults, even of its laws, he, whose image received a place in the Parthenon, entered upon a bond of alliance with Athena; he became Zeus Olympios, the lord of the Olympieion, at last completed; having become an initiate of Eleusis he was raised to be a hero in the cult; he became Zeus Pan­hellenios, who summoned all the Greeks in the world to remember their race, to act in the consciousness of being Greek. From Pontus and Syria as far as to their old mother-country the Greeks joined together into a union of Panhellenes, avowing their friendship to Rome, their gratitude to the ruler, pointing to their ancestry and their Greek blood. Hadrian was in person the originator of a Greek renaissance of the gods, of their cults and mythology, of art and learning, of the whole of life. The initiator of this new humanism, who now more than ever praised Rome as a Greek town, who spoke of the noble mind of the Greek, of his glorious language, of the charm of the barbarian, he it was who holds his hand over the towns, sets them up, makes free and autonomous the Best, those who have led for ages, leads the others with great consideration and care, educates the barbarians to mildness. He made the nations conscious of their national life, in order to incorporate that life in the world of the Empire and wholly to permeate it with the Greek form, a federalist and a 'European' at the same time.

After these beneficent manifestations of his divinely-appointed power, Hadrian, broken by the death of his favorite Antinous, raised that Bithynian youth to godhead as Pan, as youthful Hermes, as the good god pure and simple, the bestower of fertility, the mediator between heaven and earth; he exalted him as the principle of youth and of the beauty of Greek form, caused him to be honored in the wide circle of his Panhellenes as the symbol of his aesthetic-humanistic ideal and enthusiasm. Once in his beloved Athens one of the leaders of the still young Christian religion handed to this same Emperor a treatise which used the methods of Greek thought to refute the reproaches leveled by the world against his religion and which proclaimed the victorious truth of the new belief. The great wonder-worker and enthusiast passed it by. It never revealed itself to him in all its depths. That is strange enough, since in the end he did not close his eyes to the magic world of oriental religious images and thoughts. He had seen the sanctuaries of the gods of Asia, he knew the Alexandrian god Sarapis, honoured the Egyptian goddess Isis, listened to Egyptian thaumaturges, did honor to magi, received and accepted the pantheistic teaching of the astrologers. He shattered the fanatical fury of the new Jewish Messiah and his people; he built the Pantheon in Rome and that in Athens, in both of which his struggle to attain the divinely universal assumed shape. In his huge villa at Tivoli, as in a museum, he united the remembrances of notable places of the earth, the vale of Tempe, Canopus, Athens—an Academy, a Lyceum, a Prytaneum, a Poecile Stoa—and with them an Orcus and anElysium.

One ponders vainly why he did not point the way to domination to the new religion of the Christians. Was it because it emanated from the Jewish area? Did he overlook the limitations of the effective power of his own ideal, of his new youthful god?< Must the god-ruler first bow in humility before the new god? Did everything come too late to him, who indeed himself, in co­tradiction to his Panhellenic policy, permitted marriages between Greeks and Egyptians to the inhabitants of Antinoopolis, and in the spirit of Trajan's policy of toleration rejected accusations against Christians, unless they were based on acts punishable under the criminal code?

The last great impression which Hadrian received was that of the fanatical struggle of the Jews. His harshness in crushing the eternal rebels, which made a shattering impression on the world, and his unrestrained fury against his Roman circle, friends and senators, all this shows that his powers were exhausted, his ideal had paled. Men and the world passed from his ken; madness overpowered him. The constant seeker after god, who had himself become a god, the proclaimer of the new divinity, the rejecter of him who was to conquer, was himself smitten by the deity. At times he busied himself with the duties of the day; then he relapsed again, harsh towards men and the world, into brooding and trifling.

In the summer of 136, as his sickness grew worse, Hadrian suddenly arranged for the succession. He made a survey and said, at a gathering of his friends, that they should name to him the ten best men, but turned away from the suitable persons. His fate was tragic enough: he compelled his own brother-in-law, Servianus, aged 90, of whom he himself at that gathering had first thought as his successor, to die, and also Servianus' grandson, the only representative of the blood of the Hadriani; with mind darkened and unstable in judgment, even if he only desired to make him the place-keeper for a boy, he chose out and adopted, to the disappointment of all, one of the consuls for the year 136, L. Ceionius Commodus, a man of Etruscan family, who had given no proof of his suitability as 'optimus' nor, so far as we know, was related to Hadrian, and moreover was a sick man. Was it a sign of madness or is it an invention that he declared his beauty to commend him to his choice? As a matter of fact, however, he only regarded him as one to keep the place warm for his favorite Annius Verus, since to this latter, who was just fifteen years old, he betrothed Ceionius' daughter. He designated Ceionius for a second consulship in 137, entrusted him with the administration of both Pannonias with the imperium proconsulare, lavished great sums on soldiers and people and games, and nevertheless only leant, as he was bound to see on the 1st of January 138, 'against a fragile wall'. For when he returned from the provinces and was on that day about to deliver his speech of thanks to Hadrian in the Senate, L. Aelius Caesar, as he was called as presumptive heir, collapsed and died of a haemorrhage. Disappointments without end marked Hadrian's way; his bitterness broke out when he forbade that the dead man should be mourned, when he even lamented that he had spent so much money for nothing.

In the summer of 137, after twenty years of his reign, Senate and People and world praised him as the giver of blessings. In a demonstration without equal, reference was made to the peoples, the armies, the countries and towns, which, taken all together as the Empire of this ruler, had enjoyed the good-fortune of his advent, had been blessed by his activity in the re-establishment of their powers. Thanks were given to the gods who protected him and helped him to maintain peace for the world, to bring the earth into equipoise and security, who had given the Golden Age, the time of good-fortune for Rome and its world. And, now that he generously lavished presents and reported what he had done, and asserted that, with Rome's freedom secured, loyalty would continue between ruler and people, while the Senate praised him as a new Romulus, as a peaceful ruler over land and sea, he could not help seeing that at last he was wholly understood in Rome too. But now he had pleasure in nothing.

He was a tragic lonely figure in his last year of life. His hope was centred on the boy Annius Verus. He overcame the disappointment which the death of the Caesar had caused him, but preserved for the son of that Caesar his rights. When on his last birthday (January 24, 138) Hadrian, already mortally ill, summoned the most honored senators to himself, he announced his intention of adopting the consular T. Aurelius Fulvus Boionius Arrius Antoninus, a member of his council, a long-standing friend of his house, perhaps related to Plotina, and through his wife uncle of the young Annius Verus. Four weeks later, on February 25, 138, when Antoninus, whose own two sons had died young, had adopted the young Verus and the son of the dead Aelius Caesar, and had also acquiesced in Hadrian's resolve, Hadrian took him as his son. He called himself, from now until the death of Hadrian, Imperator T. Aelius Caesar Antoninus trib. pot. cos.': for he received the imperium proconsulare and the tribunicia potestas, as had once Tiberius, and moreover, the first to do so, the title Imperator to be borne as praenomen. With this last act of the sick man the succession was regulated for two generations, since Hadrian (like Tiberius in former years) had intended to secure it for the two boys as well. Herein he would, like Augustus, bend the future to his will. Augustus remained, too, his model for death. He desired to die as serenely as had Augustus, after he had tried, in desperation and in vain, to lay violent hands on himself. Half mocking verses stole from his lips about his 'wandering, pleasing little soul, that now descends into the pale, cold, naked, underworld, and jests no more....' Hated by all, according to his biographer, he died in Baiae, and lay in State first in Cicero's villa at Puteoli. Thanks to the energy of his adopted son, the dead man was placed in his monument on the far side of the Tiber, built after the model of the Mausoleum of Augustus, and still unfinished; and, in spite of the opposition of the Senate, which at first was violent, he also entered, as divus, into the Heaven of the Roman State.