Hadrian

Publius Aelius Hadrianus, known in English as Hadrian, was a Roman emperor whose reign lasted from 117 until his death in 138. Ancient tradition, followed by most modern reference works, places his birth at Italica in Hispania Baetica on 24 January 76, though the Historia Augusta states that he was born at Rome to a family long settled in Spain, and the question of the exact birthplace remains disputed among historians. His father, Publius Aelius Hadrianus Afer, was a senator of praetorian rank and a cousin of the future emperor Trajan; his mother was Domitia Paulina of Gades. After Afer’s death, the boy was made a ward of Trajan and of the equestrian Publius Acilius Attianus. He received the usual senatorial education, developed a lasting attachment to Greek language and culture, and advanced through the cursus honorum as military tribune, quaestor, praetor, and provincial governor. Around the year 100 he married Trajan’s grand-niece Vibia Sabina. The marriage, which produced no children, was later described by ancient writers as unhappy.

When Trajan died in Cilicia in 117, Hadrian was legate of Syria. He was proclaimed emperor by the armies of the East; the official story of a deathbed adoption by Trajan was already treated with scepticism in antiquity. His first major act of policy was to abandon Trajan’s newly conquered territories beyond the Euphrates and to return the empire to a strategy of defended, consolidated frontiers. He spent more than half his reign on the road, inspecting provinces from Britain and the Germanies to the Danube, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, and Africa. In Britain he ordered the construction of the wall that still bears his name. In Rome he rebuilt the Pantheon in the form that survives, raised the Temple of Venus and Roma, and began the great circular mausoleum on the right bank of the Tiber. At Tibur (Tivoli) he created an immense villa that reflected the architecture and landscapes of the Greek East.

Hadrian’s philhellenism shaped both culture and politics. He completed the Olympieion at Athens, founded the Panhellenion as a league of Greek cities, and accepted initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries. In Judaea his decision to refound Jerusalem as the Roman colony Aelia Capitolina, together with restrictions on Jewish practice, helped to provoke the revolt led by Simon bar Kokhba (132–135). The war was crushed with extreme severity; Judaea was reorganized as Syria Palaestina. In 130, during a voyage on the Nile, his favourite Antinous, a youth from Bithynia, drowned. Hadrian founded the city of Antinoöpolis in his memory and encouraged a religious cult of the dead young man that spread widely through the Greek world. These episodes, together with executions of senators in his last years—including his aged brother-in-law Lucius Julius Ursus Servianus—left a divided ancient reputation: the cultivated traveller and builder on one side, the suspicious and sometimes cruel autocrat on the other.

Childless, Hadrian settled the succession by adopting first Lucius Ceionius Commodus (Lucius Aelius Caesar) and, after Aelius’s death in 138, Titus Aurelius Antoninus, on condition that Antoninus in turn adopt Marcus Annius Verus (the future Marcus Aurelius) and Lucius Verus. Gravely ill, Hadrian withdrew to Baiae on the Bay of Naples, where he died on 10 July 138. He was buried in the mausoleum he had built at Rome, later known as Castel Sant’Angelo. The Senate, initially hostile, was persuaded by Antoninus to deify him. Hadrian was a pagan emperor, not a Christian bishop or martyr; he has no feast day, no recognized cult as a saint, and no place in the martyrologies. Later ages have remembered him chiefly as the restless consolidator of the Roman Empire, the patron of Greek letters and monumental architecture, and the ruler whose frontier walls and rebuilt Pantheon still mark the landscape of Europe and the Mediterranean.