Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome (31 page)

He was that useful thing in politics, “a safe pair of hands,” and Trajan had sent him to Greece on a delicate mission to resolve a three-hundred-year-old boundary dispute between Delphi and her neighbors.

Interestingly, Nigrinus had a distant family connection with the onetime Stoic opposition, for his uncle had been a friend of the Republican martyr Thrasea Paetus, one of Nero’s most celebrated victims. Perhaps his hostility to Hadrian owed something to the political idealism that Nerva and Trajan’s commitment to the rule of law and senatorial cooperation had largely made redundant.

But Nigrinus’ motives may not have been so pure. His performance as governor of Dacia seems not to have satisfied the emperor, uncomfortably on the spot or at least close at hand. Hadrian brought his brief tenure to an end and replaced him with Turbo, who had taken little time in suppressing the Berber disturbances in Mauretania. He was given temporary command of both Dacia and Pannonia, with the obvious remit of reorganizing the frontier defenses after the withdrawals. This was a daring appointment, for Turbo was only an
eques
, and so strictly
speaking ineligible for a post reserved for senators. But for Hadrian merit outweighed class.

So each member of the offending quartet had grounds for resentment; Palma’s and Celsus’ careers had been abruptly terminated in the recent past, and Nigrinus and Lusius Quietus had just lost their jobs. But if they all had motives for disaffection, it is not altogether certain that they acted on them. Some observers believed that they were set up. Dio Cassius, writing only a century later, remarked that they were victimized “in reality because they had great influence and enjoyed wealth and fame.”

What was the actual offense of which they were accused? Two versions of the story have come down to us. According to the
Historia Augusta
, Nigrinus and the others planned an attempt on the emperor’s life while he was conducting a sacrifice; but Dio claims that the occasion was a hunt. The contradiction is only an apparent one, for (as we have seen on page 23) hunts were preceded and followed by sacrifices to the gods—especially to Diana, goddess of the chase, and if the catch was good, to the goddess of victory. Hadrian was passionate about the sport, so we can be sure that he often went hunting with his
amici
as a relaxation from affairs of state and the crisis threatening the empire.

Two interlinked problems arise. First, the only alleged conspirator traveling with the emperor at the time was Nigrinus; the others were many miles away. Second, three of them were executed at their country houses in Italy—Palma at Tarracina (now Terracina), an ancient Latin town some thirty-odd miles southeast of Rome, Celsus at Baiae (today’s Baia), a fashionable seaside resort for Rome’s superrich in the bay of Naples, and Nigrinus at Faventia (modern Faenza) in the Po Valley in northern Italy, presumably his hometown. Lusius was put to death while on the move somewhere in the eastern provinces or northern Africa.

If we assume that there really was a plot to kill Hadrian, how can these data be reconciled with it? Why was Nigrinus not arrested at once in the wake of a failed attack, and why was he allowed to go home? Perhaps
the attackers were hired men (legionaries or locals) and it was not immediately obvious who their employer was. But not only would it be hard to recruit people for such a risky mission and control them, but it would be unusual for a noble Roman, especially a distinguished public servant with a link to the brave Stoic opponents of the imperial system, to farm out the cutting off of a tyrant to anonymous others.

Here is a feasible scenario. A hunt was chosen for the attempt, for on no other occasion were armed men routinely allowed in an emperor’s presence, apart from his guards. Nigrinus and some others of like mind in the party decided to strike down Hadrian with their hunting weapons at the ceremonies either at the beginning or the end of a hunt in Thrace or Moesia. Something held them back from making the attack—Nigrinus could have been ill or, most likely, Hadrian turned out to be too well guarded and the intended assassins too few in number for them to have a realistic chance of survival, even if they managed to destroy their victim. So nothing happened, and nothing was noticed.

The scheme came to light only a little later, when the dismissed Nigrinus had returned to Italy and private life. One or more plotters may have revealed it for irrecoverable reasons, or perhaps a servant in the know did so in the expectation of reward. More probably, their correspondence was intercepted, for, if they were to agree on their plans, the principals must have communicated with one another during the weeks following Hadrian’s accession.

Such interception would have been no accident, for Trajan had accessed the public courier or postal service to keep himself informed about “state business”; Hadrian himself quietly put in place Rome’s first organized secret service (before his time, emperors had indeed made use of informers and spies but in an ad hoc manner). To create a new bureau would have been politically controversial, so he added a confidential codicil to the job descriptions of the already-existing
frumentarii
. These were commissary agents in charge of organizing army supplies and were well placed to gather information about the activities of Roman officials in the provinces. Whether the new service was already in place so early in the reign is uncertain, but its establishment demonstrates Hadrian’s abiding interest in uncovering the unspoken concerns of the senatorial
elite. The exposure of the Nigrinus conspiracy thanks to secret surveillance could have been what prompted him to make use of the
frumentarii
.

A variant explanation for what happened may be found in the career of a German-born centurion, Marcus Calventius Viator. His name appears on two altars, one found in Dacia and the other in Gerasa (today’s Jerash City in Jordan). In the first he appears as the training officer of Nigrinus’ cavalry bodyguard. The second, ten years on, reveals a remarkable promotion; he is now in charge of the cavalry wing of Hadrian’s own imperial bodyguard, the Germanic Batavi whom he inherited from Trajan. Someone close to a traitor could not usually count on a glittering future. Did the emperor take Calventius under his wing as a reward for informing on his commanding officer? It is a tempting speculation.

By a curious chance, the Arabian altar is dedicated to the goddess Diana. It was doubtless in her honor that a hunting party offered up its sacrifice on that dangerous distant day when an emperor was the quarry.

The executions were a political disaster. The fact that senators had been persuaded to vote for them was irrelevant. In their eyes, Hadrian had broken the spirit if not the letter of his guarantee of their personal security, foreshadowing a return to the days of Domitian. Although far away by the Danube, Hadrian immediately recognized the damage that had been done. Disaffection in the ruling class could bring about a return of the Stoic opposition and undo the political settlement, based on consent, that Nerva and Trajan had established.

At about this time the historian Tacitus was finishing the composition of his
Annals
, and a late passage expresses a melancholy exhaustion with his history of imperial victims during the time of the early emperors; he may also have been covertly alluding to the bloodstained opening of Hadrian’s reign. “This slavish passivity, this torrent of wasted bloodshed far from active service, wearies, depresses, and paralyzes the mind.”

Hadrian tried to extricate himself from blame. It was all Attianus’ fault and what had been done had been done against his own will. Was the emperor protesting too much—or telling the plain truth? It is hard to tell. In a sense, whether or not the quartet did intend the emperor’s
death is immaterial. They were Hadrian’s enemies and potentially dangerous. Perhaps what we have here is a prototype of the murder of Thomas Becket; rather as Henry II’s knights made more than was meant of the king’s exasperation with his archbishop, so the guard prefect may have guessed at a new emperor’s fears, and acted. It is conceivable that he did so without informing his employer, in order to give him the deniability he would need when explaining himself to the Senate.

In any event, there was little Hadrian could do at the moment to retrieve the situation, but the sooner he could calm the provinces and return to Rome, the better.

Hadrian stood on the bank of the Danube and reviewed his troops. To show how perfectly his Batavians, the imperial horse guard, were trained, he ordered them to swim across the river in full armor. This was something of a party trick, for they had a long tradition of crossing wide expanses of water en masse.

The Batavians had a deserved reputation for ferocity; Tacitus remarked of them: “They are made exclusively for war, like arms and weapons.” There were about one thousand of them in the guard and, as intended, they made a daunting impression on the barbarian tribes to the north.

A tombstone found near the Danube celebrates in well-turned Latin verse the achievements of one of these guardsmen, a certain Soranus.

This was not the man’s only skill. He was also an archer who could shoot one arrow in the air and hit it with another, splitting it in two—a feat of which Robin Hood would have been proud.

Who wrote these lines is unknown, but Hadrian was a frequent poet who liked to mark out his life in Greek or Latin meter. It is probable he was the admiring author.

Whatever his critics were saying, safe in their town houses in the capital or relaxing in their country villas, Hadrian understood and liked soldiers and enjoyed military life.

By June 118 the Danube frontier had been redrawn and hostile tribes—for example, the Iazyges on the Hungarian plain—pacified. Hadrian acquired the services of a Iazygian prisoner-of-war, a certain Mastor, who was a skilled huntsman “because of his strength and daring.” With his steed, Borysthenes, and his groom both having been recruited from the wild regions north of the Danube, the emperor was equipped to enjoy the dangerous thrills of the chase as never before. His relationship with Mastor became close, and he kept him in his service for the rest of his life.

New governors, friendly to Hadrian, were appointed. Thus, Falco was tackling disturbances in the north of Britannia, and making progress. The Parthians were quiet as they reabsorbed the territory that Trajan had annexed. The brushfires of rebellion had been stamped out.

At last, in June the emperor was ready to leave for the long journey to Rome, confident that the military crisis following the failure of the Parthian expedition and Trajan’s death was over. The task now was to pacify his civilian critics at home.

An emperor’s entry into Rome on July 9, especially his first, tended to be a grand, noisy event. Hadrian had probably traveled overland from Pannonia to northern Italy, riding down the coast road to Ariminum and then over the Apennines on the via Flaminia.

As he approached the city, he met the consuls and other officeholders, with their guards of
lictors
carrying the axe and rods of
imperium
, who walked out beyond the walls to greet him. They were accompanied by all the senators, dressed in their whitest red-striped togas and leading representatives of the
equites
. Members of the emperor’s
clientela
, or client list, were well represented—especially the young sons of senators and
equites
ambitious for public careers. The
praefectus urbi
was in attendance, together with other imperial officials.

The road became a long avenue as it crossed the built-over Campus Martius. He rode past the mausoleum of Augustus; this was now full,
and at some point he would need to prepare a burial place for himself. A little farther down was the Ara Pacis, a masterpiece of Roman sculpture, albeit inspired by the reliefs on the Parthenon in Athens; its four walls showed the emperor Augustus and his family in the act of sacrificing to the gods. The altar was a celebration of the peace and prosperity that the empire had conferred on its inhabitants.

Next, a large open space to Hadrian’s right gave onto the ruins of the temple to all the gods, the Pantheon, which Augustus’ right-hand man, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, had erected ninety years previously. It had been burned down in 80. The emperor asked himself if it was not time to rebuild it.

The avenue was reaching its conclusion, passing through an old gate, the Porta Fontinalis. Here Rome’s citadel, the Capitol, to the right and a colossal new structure, Trajan’s forum and market, paid for from the loot of Dacia, created an architectural defile. The lesser forums of Julius Caesar and Augustus clustered nearby.