Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome (12 page)

It was not the most demanding of jobs, managing a backwater, but the appointment was a useful step up the military ladder. Then fate provided an unexpected opportunity that propelled Trajan to the center of events, and into the emperor’s highest favor.

News arrived that the governor of Upper Germania, Lucius Antonius Saturninus, had raised the standard of revolt on January 1, 89. When the news of this insurrection reached Trajan, he did not hesitate to spearhead a counterattack. On the emperor’s orders, he immediately led his legion on the long march across Gaul to Upper Germania to face down and fight the rebels.

The emperor himself left Rome on January 12, for the same destination. In fact, neither man was required. Saturninus had expected help
from a Germanic tribe that failed to turn up, and a colleague, the governor of Lower Germania, was able to outflank and defeat him. The revolt was at an end by January 25—almost before it began.

Domitian was a conspiracy theorist, and once remarked: “Rulers find themselves in an extremely invidious position, for when they discover a conspiracy no one believes them, unless they are killed.” He was determined that there had been one on this occasion, and held an inquiry, although so far as we can judge, Saturninus acted on his own.

In 91 Trajan received the culminating reward for his services. He was appointed consul
ordinarius—
a high accolade that the Flavians seldom conferred outside the imperial family: the two
ordinarii
entered office at the beginning of the year, which was named after them, and were a cut above the
suffecti
, or substitute consuls, who took their places after a few weeks or months.

Our impoverished literary sources do not specify Trajan’s activities for the next few years after his consulship, but it is possible to make an informed guess. There were eleven imperial provinces, whose governors were directly chosen by the emperor (the others lying in the care of the Senate), and a former consul could expect appointment to one of them. Trajan, having been the junior of the two
ordinarii
, was likely to have found the German provinces open to him. A couple of years or so later he probably moved on to one of the militarily much more challenging Danube provinces, perhaps Pannonia, where Rome was engaged in a difficult conflict with a powerful Germanic tribe, the Suebi.

Hadrian had spent his entire life under Flavian rule, and by his late teens he would have absorbed the history of his times. His guardian was a rising man and this placed him close to the center of power, although too young to have arrived at mature judgments. Indeed, mature judgments came at some risk to life and limb for anyone within range of a suspicious and nervous ruler. Nevertheless, two conclusions were evident to an intelligent bystander, however inexperienced.

First, for it to run sweetly the imperial system depended on its chief executive and its senior management being on reasonably good terms.
For how long could an atmosphere of distrust last without the eventual need for a painful adjustment? Second, it was a brave emperor who abandoned, whether from choice or necessity, the traditional policy of military aggression. In Augustus’ day, Virgil, the poet laureate of Roman power, had sung of an
imperium sine fine
. A century later he still pointed the way to an empire without end and without frontiers.

In
A
.
D
. 93 Hadrian was nineteen years old; it was time for a public career.

Senators’ sons with ambition, such as Hadrian, joined the
vigintivirate
, a college of twenty men who were allocated a variety of duties, some laborious and tiresome and others ceremonial. The most interesting job was usually restricted to those of patrician background; this was appointment as one of the three controllers of the mint, or
tresviri monetales
(only a nonpatrician, or plebeian, who commanded the most powerful political patronage could hope to capture one of these posts). The
tresviri
administered the production and design of the coinage—an important task, for coins were an effective and universal means of publishing state propaganda. We can infer that they worked closely with government officials.

At the other extreme, two boards were responsible for street maintenance in Rome and supervision of basic police duties (arrests, executions, and the collection of fines), and were to be avoided if at all possible.

Hadrian, being a plebeian, failed to win a post in the mint, but at least he was able to avoid the fatigue duty of civic administration. In 94 he served on the fourth and last of the
vigintivirate
committees, as
decemvir stlitibus iudicandis
, member of the Board of Ten for Civil Judgments. This demanded less onerous work than might at first appear. The
decemviri
chaired sessions of the Centumviral Court, which handled such noncriminal matters as disputed wills. The court enrolled 180 jurors, as a rule divided into up to four individual panels, each determining a different suit. Cases were heard in the Basilica Julia, a large conference hall in the Forum, Rome’s main square—once, before Augustus and the establishment
of one-man rule, the arena of political debate and power, but now merely a legal and shopping center.

Large crowds gathered to witness legal encounters. They had no interest in the youthful presiding judges, whose task was little more than to preside. The advocates were the real attraction. Their speeches created great excitement and were popular cultural events, rather as sermons used to be in seventeenth-century England. A well-informed commentator argued that he knew oratory was not dead when he noticed that a “young patrician who had had his tunic torn off, as often happens in a crowd, stayed on in nothing but his toga to listen for seven hours.”

As a
decemvir
Hadrian had attendants, or
viatores
, at his disposal and secretaries who recorded proceedings and, it may be surmised, were able to offer legal advice on those occasions when he had to make a decision.

Hadrian was also appointed a
sevir turmae equitum Romanorum
, commander of one of six squadrons of young Roman “knights.” Unless a man was a member of a
turma
, he was excluded from holding significant public office. It was a high honor to be a
sevir
. Here we have the first evidence that Hadrian was being fast-tracked for future preferment, presumably because of official interest on the part of someone at the imperial court if not of the emperor himself. The discreet helping hand of Trajan can be suspected; as we have seen, at this time he may have been serving as governor of one of the two German provinces, Upper Germania and Lower Germania, but a letter to Rome would have been sufficient. Sura, too, could have put in a word.

In the same year an even more distinctive honor came the young man’s way, probably at the behest of one of the consuls for 94, who was a friend of Trajan and had served under Trajan’s father. He was appointed
praefectus urbi feriarum Latinarum
, city prefect for the Latin Festival. This great celebration, originally a sacred truce among the warring towns of Latium, took place on the Alban Mount, a hill overlooking the Alban lake about twenty miles southeast of Rome and not far from the emperor’s great villa. All the leading officeholders and public figures of Rome processed out of the city to sacrifice an ox at the antique shrine of Jupiter Latiaris, which stood on top of the hill. Offerings of lamb, cheese, and milk were made, and long and joyful feasting followed.

In theory, the
praefectus
was left in charge of the deserted city, in place
of the consuls. But his duties were purely symbolic, and the post was awarded to young men with prospects. Julius Caesar appointed his great-nephew, the teenage Augustus (in those early days, called Gaius Octavius), and the emperor Claudius the youthful Nero. Hadrian was not in that league, but he was being singled out as a boy of promise.

Life was not all duty and ritual. Rome offered many opportunities for amusement and excitement. Apart from hunting, no record survives of young Hadrian’s leisure activities, but there was plenty for him to sample.

By the middle of the first century, Rome boasted more than ninety
feriae
, annual festivals or holidays. On these days no public business could be conducted and various forms of religious ceremony were conducted. However, no one in the Mediterranean world had yet picked up the Jewish notion of a seven-day week, and the concept of a Saturday or Sunday as a day of rest was unknown—let alone a weekend of leisure. Whether everyone laid down tools during the
feriae
and took time off may be doubted, but they were the only breaks in laborious routine.

Interspersed among and between the
feriae
were the games, or
ludi
. By the first century there were six sets of games at different times of the year over a total of fifty-seven days. Their purpose, at least in origin, was to reward the gods for Rome’s prosperity and success. They included the spring games in honor of the eastern goddess, the Great Mother, which took the form of a drama festival, and the licentious
Ludi Florales
, running from late April to early May, which featured naked actresses and prostitutes and took place partly at night. The last day of the Floral Games would have pleased Hadrian, for deer and hare were hunted in Rome’s premier racecourse, the Circus Maximus, whose grand marble stands, accommodating some 250,000 spectators, have long since gone and been replaced by today’s long, scrubby stretch of grass and dirt.

The greatest celebrations took place in the autumn, the Roman Games, or
Ludi Romani
, and the Plebeian Games, the
Ludi Plebei
. Programs of events were dominated by theatrical performances that were not universally popular; discontented audiences would shout, “We want bears!” or “We want boxers.”

Comedy and tragedy fell out of fashion under the emperors and were supplanted by the
pantomimus
, a dancer, usually male, who acted out all the parts in complex narratives. He was backed by flute and lute, sometimes even a full orchestra, and a singer or chorus. Plots were historical, mythological, or based on the masterpieces of Greek tragedy. A dancer’s repertoire was extensive and might even include a dialogue by Plato. What would one not pay to witness a dance performance that gave a wordless account of the philosopher’s theory of ideas?

Pantomimi
had a reputation for sexual immorality, and at the same time were sought after and patronized by the upper classes. The emperor Caligula included a
pantomimus
among his favorites, and Nero acted as one himself. In Hadrian’s day there was an eccentric old noblewoman, Ummidia Quadratilla, who kept a troupe of
pantomimi
in her home; when she found herself at a loose end she used to watch them dance. Her priggish grandson Gaius Ummidius Quadratus lived with her; he disapproved and took care never to see them perform.

Pantomime should not be confused with the mime, which was a much coarser, more highly spiced kind of spectacle. It encompassed a wide range of performance styles: words, usually prose but sometimes verse, mingled with music and acrobatic displays. The titles of the shows suggest an affinity with today’s tabloid newspapers—“Millionaire on the Run,” “The Locked-Out Lover,” “From Rags to Riches.”

Sometimes condemned criminals joined the cast and were compelled to suffer, in character, real-life punishment. Apuleius, in his picaresque novel
Metamorphoses
, written in the second century
A
.
D
., described a typical provincial company as it planned a very singular display. As a climax of the entertainment, a murderess was to “marry” and have sex with a donkey. The donkey selected for the purpose was, in fact, the author’s hero Lucius, a young man transformed by a malevolent witch.

Lucius was led to the local theater and left to graze outside the entrance while warm-up acts were presented. Then a new stage set appeared, a bed shining with Indian tortoiseshell, piled high with a feathered mattress and covered with a flowery silk coverlet. At this point, Lucius the donkey took fright. He realized that the woman was to be fastened to him in some way, and once copulation had taken place (or
was supposed to have done so) wild animals would be brought on to kill her. Lucius suspected that in the process he would lose his life as well, and seizing an unguarded moment galloped away.

Apuleius’ story is fiction, and the intended atrocity did not take place. However, it is known that a similar spectacle actually occurred in Rome, this time involving a bull: it replayed the legend of Pasiphaë, wife of King Minos of Crete, who fell in love with a bull and after copulation gave birth to the monstrous Minotaur, half bull and half man. Martial remarked approvingly on the event.

A minority of days during the games was given over to a sport that was hugely popular among all social classes—namely, chariot racing. Drivers and chariots belonged to four teams, or factions—red, white, green, and blue. In Rome these were substantial organizations that employed buyers, trainers, doctors, vets, grooms, and stablemen and were controlled by a team manager, or
dominus
. The factions attracted fierce, sometimes violent, loyalty among their fans.