Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome (30 page)

The emperor also meant to abandon Dacia, for the conquest of which many Roman lives had been sacrificed, but he was persuaded to reconsider. The original population had been killed or dispersed and their place taken by immigrants from the Roman empire. It would be unacceptable to hand them over to the untender mercies of their barbarian neighbors.

Hadrian went much further than pulling out of Parthia. So far as we know no formal announcement was made; it was unnecessary, and would have been incautious, to do so. However, a new long-term strategy can be inferred from his pacific behavior throughout the rest of the reign: Rome was to abjure military expansion of any kind in the future. Negotiation was to replace ultimatum. Trajan’s eastern adventure had been the last straw, showing that while it was possible to project military power temporarily beyond the frontiers of the empire, it was difficult to preserve territorial gains.

The withdrawals are evidence of Hadrian’s clear-sightedness and political courage, but they deeply angered many senior personalities. Opinion in Italy had fed on a diet of victories and as yet had no clear idea that Parthia had not, after all, been conquered. And even though Trajan’s failure was common knowledge in leading circles, the ethos of aggression was too ingrained to accept that the days of
imperium sine fine
were over.

A contemporary observer summed up the conventional view. Publius Annius Florus was a poet and rhetorician from northern Africa and the author of a brief sketch for schoolboys of Roman history, largely drawn from Livy. In it he compares Rome to a human individual as it grows up, reaches maturity, and subsequently attains old age. So he identifies childhood with the rule of kings, the conquest of Italy with its youth, and manhood with the late Republic.

And now the next
princeps
was reverting to the unacceptable and passive norm, or so the elites angrily regarded his actions. As often happens, military adventures abroad lend stability and popularity to governments at home—provided that they bring victory. Lack of success in this regard helped seal the fate of Domitian. Would it do the same for Hadrian?

The emperor was too busy for hypothetical questions. The indispensable Marcius Turbo was bringing the Jewish revolt to a victorious conclusion in Egypt and Cyrene. But now the Greek community in Alexandria started rioting against the defeated Jews.

The emperor replaced Trajan’s governor with a more competent and energetic figure, Quintus Rammius Martialis. It says much for his rapid decisiveness that Rammius was in his post on or before August 25, just over a fortnight since the news of Trajan’s death had reached Antioch.

Hadrian himself probably paid a quick visit to Egypt. There was great economic distress in the country, and he rapidly produced generous and carefully thought-out measures that provided tax relief for tenant farmers. From now on assessments would be made on the actual agricultural yield rather than land value (the
tributum soli)
. It was far more in character for him to investigate this situation directly, rather than rely at a distance on the recommendations of advisers.

It would have been too provocative to visit Alexandria, but he sent a Greek intellectual in his service who was known for his shrewdness and sharpness of wit, Valerius Eudaemon, as procurator, or financial director, for the city’s local administration; his task was to be the emperor’s eyes and ears.

Somewhere in Egypt—perhaps the border town of Pelusium or Heliopolis, at the southern head of the Nile delta—Hadrian presided over the trial, or at least some kind of official inquiry or hearing, of some hotheaded Alexandrian Greeks, led by a spokesman called Paul. A Jewish delegation was also present. From the reported proceedings it is possible to suppose the following savage sequence of events. After the failure of the Jewish revolt, many Jews were imprisoned and the triumphant Greeks put on a satirical stage show lampooning the rebel “king,” Lukuas. Some of them sang songs criticizing the emperor for deciding to resettle Jewish survivors of the revolt in an area of the city from which they could easily launch new attacks on the native population.

The irritated governor (Rammius’ predecessor) ordered the Greeks to produce their
“opera-bouffe
monarch.” Unfortunately this “bringing
forth” also brought many Greek rioters onto the streets. A Jewish witness asserted an unprovoked attack on a defeated community. “They dragged us out of prison and wounded us.” Charges and countercharges followed. The Jews said of the Greeks: “Sire, they lie.”

Hadrian was inclined to agree. He told the Greeks that the prefect was right to ban the carrying of weapons and that he disapproved of the satire on Lukuas. He advised the Jews to restrict their hatred to their actual persecutors and not to loathe all Alexandrian Greeks indiscriminately. This evenhanded treatment came as a pleasant surprise to the defeated insurgents.

At about the same time Hadrian dismissed the governor of Judaea. This was Trajan’s mysterious and ferocious favorite, Lusius Quietus, who was also removed from command of his Moorish cavalry. According to the
Historia Augusta
, “he had fallen under suspicion of having designs on the throne,” but this was an unlikely ambition for a tribal chieftain now an old man. More probably, he was feared as a potential “kingmaker” for a serious rival to Hadrian.

Lusius had been sent to Judaea to help suppress the Jewish revolt, for the Jewish community there had recovered, at least partially, from the destruction wrought by the Romans almost fifty years previously. He came to the task fresh from butchering the Jews in Mesopotamia, and his removal delighted the diaspora.

Hadrian was rewarded. In some anti-Roman oracular verses, originating among the Jews of Alexandria and widely read in the eastern Mediterranean, an emperor received a rare compliment.

The name of the relevant sea is the Adriatic, so the reference is to Hadrian. Here at last, from the point of view of battered Jewry, the catastrophe of the revolt had given way, against every expectation, to a well-wishing ruler.

In early October the emperor left Antioch and proceeded urgently northward, with the troubled Danube provinces as his eventual destination. Meanwhile, Lusius Quietus’ horsemen returned discontented to Mauretania, where they stirred up an anti-Roman revolt. The emperor immediately dispatched Turbo, fresh from his Egyptian success, to deal with the disturbance.

The worst possible news arrived. Quadratus Bassus was dead. We do not know if he fell in battle or was felled by natural causes but the depth of the loss was revealed by the arrangements for the long journey from Dacia to the dead man’s home city, Pergamum. They matched what a prince of the blood might expect, with a military escort for the cortege and civic welcomes whenever it arrived at a town of any size and importance. The tomb was paid for at the public expense. In effect, Bassus received the Roman equivalent of a modern state funeral.

Fortunately, Quintus Pompeius Falco, a friend of Hadrian’s, had been governor for at least two years of the huge Danubian province of Lower Moesia, originally a narrow strip south of the Danube and now also encompassing the kingdom of the Roxolani, Dacia’s neighbor on the river’s northern side. He was able to hold the line temporarily.

The emperor, chased by continuing congratulations, made his way to Thrace or perhaps Lower Moesia itself, and discussed with Falco what was to be done. He decided to appoint the reliable Gaius Avidius Nigrinus, who had been imperial legate in Achaea during Hadrian’s stay in Athens in 112; the two men must have met then and had presumably got on well together.

Once again he came to the conclusion that it was pointless trying to hold on to territory that Rome could defend only at a vast expenditure of treasure and lives. So he instructed Falco and his legions to withdraw from the lands of the Roxolani in eastern Dacia (leaving only a narrow
cordon sanitaire
north of the river, named Lower Pannonia). The superstructure of Apollodorus’ great bridge across the Danube was dismantled—probably only a temporary measure to foil a possible enemy attack. Under no circumstances could Hadrian’s now controversial reputation survive a barbarian incursion into well-established provinces.
The demolition may have been a wise precaution, but it was also an unhappy metaphor for a perceived failure of nerve.

Hadrian reached an agreement with the king of the Roxolani, increasing Rome’s ongoing subsidy (the price Trajan had been willing to pay for acquiescence in annexation), granting him Roman citizenship and, it is to be assumed, “most favored nation” status. He took the name Publius Aelius Rasparaganus, the “Aelius” showing respect for his patron. He may also have made Hadrian a valuable and soon to be much-loved gift. It was about now that the emperor’s favorite horse, Borysthenes, was a colt. He was named after the river Borysthenes (today’s Dnieper), which flowed through the land of the Alani, a tribe related to the Roxolani and their near neighbor. This could be the moment when horse and rider met for the first time.

As an official Friend of the Roman People, the king would rule a buffer state that kept the empire safe from unruly barbarians in the northern hinterland beyond the Roxolani—at a cost much lower than that of garrisoning a reluctant province.

A sensible-enough deal, one might think. But much of the Roman elite never forgave Hadrian for what they saw as pusillanimous behavior. Even half a century later, the rhetorician and friend of emperors Marcus Cornelius Fronto felt strongly enough about the issue to say acidly of Hadrian that he was “energetic enough in mobilizing his friends and eloquently addressing his army.” He trained his legions “with amusing games in the camp rather than with swords and shields: [he was] a general the like of whom the army never afterward saw.”

These sneers about a competent soldier were wide of the mark. Although designed to stress by contrast the supposed talents of a later emperor, they must have been credible to be worth making, and they illustrate the scorn that Hadrian’s new strategy aroused.

It was against this gloomy backcloth that a strange and bloodstained sequence of events unfolded during 118. Attianus, the Praetorian Guard prefect, now back in Rome with the Augustas, laid before the Senate the details of a plot against the emperor and persuaded it to vote for the executions of the conspirators. These were four in number and of high seniority,
for each of them was a former consul and had been close to Trajan.

Two of them, Celsus and Palma, were already in Hadrian’s bad books: as already noted, they had fallen from grace in a court intrigue toward the end of the previous reign. Presumably they were living in retirement in Italy. Then there was the dismissed Lusius Quietus, traveling from his last posting in Judaea to an unknown destination—perhaps his homeland of Mauretania.

The fourth guilty man was the new governor of Dacia. Gaius Avidius Nigrinus was a senior politician and general, and a respected member of the Roman social scene. He appears in a very favorable light in Pliny’s letters, as an intelligent public official dedicated to good governance. Once, when tribune of the people, he read out to the Senate