Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome (29 page)

A sad, strange footnote to the intrigues at Selinus has been discovered in modern times. It is the gravestone of a certain Marcus Ulpius Phaedimus, which reads:

Much can be deduced from this text, but the heart of a mystery remains. From our knowledge of Trajan’s tastes, we can guess that Phaedimus, originally a slave, was an attractive young man. He was certainly an important one, for his duties gave him easy access to the emperor’s person.

Two questions arise. Is it not a curious coincidence that Phaedimus died on the very day that Hadrian received the announcement of Trajan’s death? And why did it take twelve years before his body was returned to Rome?

If the immediate cause of Trajan’s demise (compounding his heart condition) was an infection contracted out east, then perhaps Phaedimus fell victim to it too, alongside his master. Conceivably (but certainly no more) he killed himself from grief. However, the delay in removing his remains is strange.

The only rational explanation is that some scandal attached to the dead man’s name, for which a discreet silence, a forgetting, was the right response. So the trail leads to Attianus and Plotina. If there was truth in the rumor of subterfuges, a loyal Phaedimus may have known too much, seen too much to permit his survival. Liquidated to protect Plotina’s credibility, the sooner he, and even his very existence, was forgotten, the better.

Hadrian needed to take swift, firm action, or other governors with armies under their command would themselves be tempted to bid for the purple. The memory of the Year of the Four Emperors was still green. He presented himself to his legions, who hailed him as emperor without demur. Hadrian was careful to be generous and gave the men—and
doubtless the rest of the army throughout the empire—a “double donative,” or bonus.

The Senate needed delicate handling, for it treasured its constitutional right to approve the appointment of a new head of state. Hadrian drafted a polite, carefully worded letter in which he sought divine honors for Trajan. He apologized that he had not left the Senate the opportunity to decide on his accession. He explained: “The unseemly haste of the troops in acclaiming me emperor was due to the belief that the state could not be without an emperor.”

The gesture seems to have been appreciated. He received the Senate’s reply a few weeks later, in September. They had voted unanimously to deify the
optimus princeps
and added numerous other honors. So far as Hadrian was concerned, they offered him the high title of
pater patriae
, father of the people. He declined, taking Augustus’ view that this was one honor that had to be
earned;
he would defer acceptance until he had some real achievements to his credit.

He was also awarded a Triumph—to mark Trajan’s victories. He declined the offer, but because the pretense of success had to be preserved, Hadrian authorized one for the late
princeps
. Instead of the man himself, an effigy would, unusually, preside over the celebrations and ride in the triumphal chariot.

Coins were quickly issued to disseminate an image of benevolent continuity. One gold piece showed Trajan handing a globe to Hadrian, signifying the transfer of the rulership of the world. In another appears the image of the phoenix, the wonder bird of Egyptian legend. When it dies it burns itself on a pyre and from its ashes its successor arises, which then buries its parent’s remains. The phoenix was an image of continual renewal—and Hadrian the new link in an eternal chain. A third coin from early in the reign reprises the phoenix theme, adding the more ambitious claim that the “Golden Age” had returned.

The dowager empress and Hadrian’s mother-in-law, Matidia, received a due reward in the coinage; they share a splendidly preserved aureus (in the British Museum’s collection) in which a bust of Plotina is partnered by one of Matidia. The message was clear: Trajan’s women were going to remain key members of the imperial household.

Perhaps the most remarkable is a coin with two obverses—that is, one side carries a head of Trajan and the other of Hadrian, both laureled. What was unprecedented was the latter’s short-cut beard. Those who met him from day to day were familiar with this artful innovation; as he well knew, in civilian dress it made him look like a Greek, and when wearing armor, like a down-to-earth soldier. Until his accession, emperors’ faces, whether in statuary or on coins, had been clean-shaven. Now the fashion changed: men in every corner of the empire looked at their money and discarded their razors.

The elderly Attianus was fiercely protective of his onetime ward and wrote to him from Selinus warning of enemies who would do their best to ensure that the new reign was stillborn. In its abbreviating manner, the
Historia Augusta
provides a less-than-helpful précis:

Laberius carried substantial political weight. A senior figure, he made his name under Domitian and had distinguished himself in Trajan’s Dacian wars. He was that increasingly rare thing in a multicultural court, an Italian, and more than that—a true Latin from Lanuvium, an ancient city near Rome in the Alban Hills. Nothing is known of his plotting, but he may have been implicated in the disgraces of Palma and Celsus. Also a banished man, Crassus labored under the dangerous disadvantage of an ancient aristocratic name. He appears to have been a serial conspirator, against Nerva as well as Trajan.

Emperors often removed favorites or relatives who had fallen from grace to one or other of the many tiny islands that lie off the Italian coast. Expelled from the Senate, these isolated and impotent captives seldom returned to public life. Why Attianus should have particularly
feared this pair is unclear; as guard prefect in attendance on the emperor he would have seen secret reports on suspicious activity by dissidents, but perhaps he was being overcautious.

Baebius Macer was a different matter. He was
praefectus urbi
, prefect of the city of Rome; a combination of chief of police and mayor, the
praefectus
was responsible for law and order and had jurisdiction in criminal matters. He was of a scholarly disposition and a stickler for what he saw to be right. He was not only in a powerful position, but was likely to take a dim view of any constitutional irregularities as a new regime tried to establish its authority. Attianus had reason to fear a man without the moral flexibility for which the times called.

Hadrian disagreed. Whatever the guilt or innocence of those accused, this was not the moment for a ruler who had not yet established himself to put senior politicians to death. It was too soon to judge loyalties, and he turned down Attianus’ request. To make his position clear publicly, he wrote again to the Senate. Among many high-minded sentiments,

The prefect complied with the emperor’s decision—or at least gave the appearance of doing so. Crassus unwisely left his island, so the official story went, and his keeper had him put to death. The emperor’s writ did not yet run reliably.

Plotina and Matidia, accompanied by Attianus, boarded ship with Trajan’s body and set sail to Antioch and the new emperor. Hadrian went out to meet them, probably at Seleucia, and viewed the remains. These were then cremated and the imperial party took ship for Rome. They carried the ashes with them and eventually they were laid to rest in the small burial chamber at the foot of Trajan’s Column.

As autumn set in, embassies began arriving at Antioch bearing letters of congratulations from municipalities across the empire. Each needed a written answer, which would be taken home and proudly reproduced in
stone in every main square. The
princeps
wrote, in formulaic mode, to the Youth Association of Pergamum:

Celebrations were staged all over the Roman world, some of them elaborate. But in Antioch, merrymaking was the last thing on Hadrian’s agenda. Fresh and insecure on the throne, he impulsively had the Castalian springs in the pleasure gardens of Daphne blocked up with a huge mass of stone; he did not want anyone else to receive the same message from the oracular waters that he had.

The empire was breaking up. Everywhere the enemies of Rome could not resist exploiting the tempting coincidence of an imperial military setback and an imperial death. The
Historia Augusta
summed up the situation:

Within a few days of assuming power, the emperor took the two most important, and bitterly controversial, decisions of his entire reign. One of them was tactical and the other strategic. Neither was improvised, but must have been the product of hard thought.

Long imperial frontiers required a large standing army, and paying for this was extremely expensive, and new provinces meant new garrisons. The army was the state’s largest single cost. There was also a limit to the available manpower that could be safely withdrawn from economically productive activity. The technology of warfare, the logistical difficulty of maintaining extended supply chains, and the slowness of long-range communications placed limits on the size of territory that a central government would find manageable. It is true that Rome ruled
with a light touch and expected local elites to manage the day-to-day affairs of provincial towns and cities. However, government business seems to have grown inexorably.

In addition, it was not at all obvious that the benefits, the profits, that would accrue from new conquests would make the effort entailed worthwhile, at least in the medium term. Much of the land contiguous with the empire was ecologically marginal and, with the exception of the Parthian and Dacian empires, economically unrewarding—neither worth the trouble of annexing nor the expense of administering. What, one might ask, would be the point of taking over little-populated Scotland?

The historian Appian, who lived through the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian, made the point well.

Emperors, needing to balance their books, settled for the minimum military establishment consistent with safety. They felt they could not afford a mobile reserve ready to meet crises as and when they occurred. (Such a reserve, when unemployed, would also present them with a potential threat to their own power.)

This parsimony had two main consequences. First, any military defeat would create a hole in the empire’s defenses that would be difficult to plug—as Augustus had found when three legions were destroyed on the Rhine frontier in
A
.
D
. 9. Domitian had been forced to withdraw troops from Britannia to meet trouble in Dacia. Second, aggressive war, even when victorious, was just as dangerous to imperial stability. Trajan had raised additional legions during his Dacian campaigns (bringing the total establishment up to thirty); however, for his Parthian expedition, he still had to order legions from Pannonia to join him in the east, imperiling the Danube frontier. Once the expedition had been seen to fail, enemies of Rome on every side had seized the opportunity for rebellion. In fact, just to maintain the status quo was almost too much for the legions.

So military and financial reality argued against further enlargement of the empire. Intermittently, emperors recognized this. Augustus, who had been an out-and-out expansionist for most of his career, advised his successor, Tiberius, to stay within existing frontiers. Tacitus’
Annals
, a savage but authoritative study of the early empire, had recently appeared (perhaps published between 115 and 117, but possibly some years later). He reports that the aged Augustus produced a list of the empire’s military resources very near the end of his life; the document was “all catalogued by Augustus in his own hand, with a final clause … advising the restriction of the empire within its present frontiers.” Hadrian may well have seen a copy of, even read, the historian’s masterpiece. In any event, he must have known of the policy. The first
princeps
being a man whom he greatly admired, he accepted his century-old advice without hesitation. Beneath the rhetoric of attack, Domitian, too, seems to have recognized the dangers of endless advance.

It was against this background that Hadrian issued orders to immediately abandon his predecessor’s three new provinces—Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Assyria—and to regroup permanently behind Rome’s traditional border, the Euphrates. Although this decision came as a great shock, it is evident that the dying Trajan, the aggressive warrior, had himself realized that a pull-back was inevitable. Hadrian deposed Trajan’s puppet king, and as a polite compensation installed him in Osrhoene, from which Abgarus and son had been ejected. The emperor explained his decision by quoting from one of his favorite old Roman authors—Cato the Censor. In 167
B.C
. Rome defeated the Macedonians with some difficulty and the Senate was considering what it should do about them. Cato pronounced: “Because it is impossible to keep them under our care, they will have to be left independent.”