Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome (46 page)

There was much building work for Hadrian to inspect. Best of all, the Pantheon was ready. An architectural masterpiece, it is one of the very few Roman buildings that has survived complete to the present day (in the guise of a Christian church). Approached from the front, the building has the appearance of a conventional temple, with three rows of columns supporting a pediment with a pitched roof. Visitors pass through bronze doors (the originals, although repaired in the sixteenth century) and find themselves in a round space surmounted by a great coffered dome, with a circular opening through which the sky can be seen. The exterior of the dome was covered in gold leaf.

The Pantheon retained its dedication by the man who commissioned the original structure, Augustus’ friend and partner in rule, Agrippa. Hadrian had a rule of not having his name inscribed on buildings he commissioned; but he made one exception, the newly completed majestic temple of Trajan and Plotina, which he dedicated
parentibus suis
, to his adoptive father and mother.

An even more tempting architectural treat awaited the emperor outside the city—the villa complex at Tibur. He intended to stay there for some time, and it cannot reasonably be doubted that Antinous was now living with him.

A senator or ambassador summoned to Tibur to enjoy the emperor’s hospitality was driven in a carriage up a long hill from the plain below. To his left he looked across gardens to a stone theater and a circular temple of Venus. The road skirted a high, colonnaded terrace about 250
yards long; supporting it was a long multistory block of tiny rooms, quarters for the service staff—the cooks, cleaners, gardeners, engineers, builders—who made the villa function. It has been estimated that as many as two thousand people—slaves, servants, officials, and guests—could occupy the villa at any one time.

The distinguished visitor stepped down from his conveyance and walked up some steps into a large vestibule where there was a shrine to Hadrian’s beloved Matidia. He was guided to his quarters, or directly to a presence chamber, through a labyrinth of halls, banqueting suites, columned porticoes, baths, peristyles and atria, covered walkways and formal gardens.

First impressions were overwhelming. The place was garishly multicolored. Public rooms were decorated with frescoes and marble of every hue, and bright mosaics covered their floors. A phrase on an inscription, which may have been Hadrian’s own words, speaks of “the Aelian villa with the colorful walls.” In niches or on plinths, indoors and out, everywhere there were groves of statues, all of them, as was the convention, painted in brilliant colors.

Another, equally ubiquitous feature of the villa was water. It spurted, fell, or flowed in monumental fountains, ran along sluices, or stood still and glassy in rectangular pools. Martial spoke approvingly of
rus in urbe
, or the countryside in the town. The Romans had a pronounced taste for intermingling nature with urban artifice. In Hadrian’s villa, greenery was civilized by statuary and architecture set off by a touch of nature, of the wild. As much space was given over to gardens and fields as to buildings.

The
Historia Augusta
reports that the emperor

In this memorial nomenclature, Hadrian was not original. For generations wealthy Romans had built country villas on much the same lavish principles as he applied to what he liked to call, modestly, his “house at
Tibur.” They took pleasure in naming features after admired originals, usually Greek; so Cicero had his “Academy” a century and a half before Hadrian established his. The difference was one of scale and scope. Even Nero’s famous Domus Aurea, or Golden House, a luxuriant mix of town and country in the heart of Rome, occupied only between 100 and 200 acres to Hadrian’s 250 or more.

It is not known for certain which parts of the villa corresponded to which Roman province or place. Hadrian made room at Tibur for the great Greek philosophers: the Lyceum was a gymnasium outside the walls of Athens where Aristotle gave lectures and Plato’s Academy a walled olive grove. The Poecile was the Painted Stoa
(Poikile Stoa)
at the northern end of the Athenian marketplace, where Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, met his students. Their equivalents in the villa were not copies, but at most stylized evocations or perhaps on occasion simply the names given to a building or a piece of land. For visitors they were presumably identifiable by appropriate statues and decorations.

Presumably the Canopus canal in Egypt and the Vale of Tempe in Thessaly had personal associations for Hadrian that cannot now be recovered with any assurance; with the former (to be named some years later), an allusion to Antinous may be hazarded (see pages 283–84), and Tempe’s reputation for sorcery points to one of the emperor’s abiding interests. The Prytaneum, the town hall of Athens, seems out of place, but perhaps it was in some way connected with Hadrian’s service as archon.

Whether or not the trapezium of underground tunnels beneath open land to the south of the estate was intended as a metaphor for Hades is unsure, but possible. Such an ambitious engineering project must have had some important function. So far as can be told, the tunnels had no practicable exits except for a subterranean link to an open-air stone theater. Some scholars suggest that this may have been a cult theater, used for religious events, and that in the tunnels initiates experienced chthonic rituals, not unlike the terrifying ceremonies at Eleusis, where darkness and sudden bright light induced ecstatic visions of truth. An underworld, indeed.

The villa was both a palace and a vacation resort, accommodating on one site the public and the private. For the rituals of state the
architects—among whom we assume the talented amateur, Hadrian himself—designed spaces of more than sufficient grandeur. At the same time, the emperor enjoyed the good things in life: he was “devoted to music and flute players, and was a great eater at great banquets.” At Tibur there were open-air dining rooms, leafy terraces for pleasant promenades, quiet gardens populated with rural deities in marble—Dionysus, Pan, Silenus—and, very probably, rough country for hunting. Where Domitian built a despot’s palace on the Palatine, Tibur was the home of a sociable citizen-emperor.

Hadrian wished to maintain a personal life away from the public gaze and his official duties. His most astonishing architectural innovation was a round structure at the heart of the complex. Almost exactly of the same diameter as the Pantheon in Rome, it is still substantially in place, but unroofed and ruined. Inside the external wall are a colonnade and a moat surrounding a circular island on which a building stood—an intertwining confection of stone curves and straight lines. As well as living and sleeping areas, it contained two lavatories and a small bathhouse (with access to the moat for swimming). A minivilla within the villa, it could be reached only by wooden bridges that were easily removed to give a sense of complete inaccessibility. Here was the emperor’s hideaway. Here he could relax alone, or be alone with Antinous.

A building can scarcely be cited as reliable evidence of the psychology of its maker. However, beautiful as the marble cottage is, the suspicion arises that it was the invention of a man with negative affect, with a weak fellow-feeling for others. Here we see Hadrian, solitary in his deluxe hermitage, hidden in the crowd, as a misanthropic Timon of Athens, although much too rich to be ruined by his unbefriending generosity.

The villa was an elaborate reminder of imperial power. It was no accident that its splendors matched those of the court of a Hellenistic monarch. Even though Hadrian was a
civilis princeps
, who walked with kings nor lost the common touch, he governed in an even more executive manner than his predecessors. In the capital, the fiction of the emperor as the first citizen of a republic was still observed and Hadrian politely followed the constitutional conventions. However, when he was in Italy, the center of government was to be found at Tibur not
Rome. Also, Hadrian spent more than half his reign traveling. Consulting the Senate, attending its meetings, and seeking its advice was not possible.

Of course, an emperor seldom acted alone and when announcing a decision often indicated the many experts whom he had consulted. He increasingly depended on his
amici
(literally, “friends”), chosen advisers and senior officials who accompanied him wherever he happened to be. A favored
amicus
might be appointed a
comes
(or “companion,” hence the later title of
count)
and given a particular area of responsibility. The emperor also made use of a
consilium
, a council of state that could consider, even develop, policy and endorse major decisions. This was not a permanent committee but a shifting group of men of high rank. They were drawn from a pool of senators, including some with a legal background, and
equites
(among them, heads of government departments), and were selected for their expertise on any given topic on which the emperor needed advice.

The imperial bureaucracy was growing, but, more important, its administrative departments, previously managed by freedmen, were increasingly headed by
equites
, for whom the public service offered a well-paid career path. This change meant that not only senators had an opportunity to participate in government.

There was nothing new about these centralizing trends, which (as already observed) can be detected in previous reigns; the novelty was the pace with which they were moving forward under an autocrat whose benevolence was matched by his decisiveness.

Most of the women in his family were dead by now, but Hadrian had a number of male kinsfolk, some of whom he liked better than others. Servianus had married Hadrian’s eldest sister, Paulina, by thirty years her husband’s junior. He had criticized his young brother-in-law during Trajan’s reign, but he was now seventy and enjoying the twilight of a successful career.

He retained a certain political importance, for his daughter had married a man called Gnaeus Pedanius Fuscus Salinator and given birth to a son, Pedanius Fuscus. He had been born in or about 113 and was now a
boy of twelve or so. His importance lay in the fact that he was Hadrian’s great-nephew and the only other male Aelian. Everyone could see that the emperor, approaching his fiftieth birthday, was most unlikely to sire offspring at this late stage, and showed no inclination to secure the succession with an adoption. Little Pedanius Fuscus could expect to be the emperor’s heir when he grew up.

A more congenial personality than Servianus was Marcus Annius Verus, a wealthy senator and a member of the Spanish set at Rome. The family came from Baetica and may have been related to the Aelii: like them, its fortune probably originated in the export of olive oil. Verus had four children, two boys and two girls, all of whom made highly advantageous matches. He was high in favor with Hadrian, who appointed him to a third consulship, for the year 126; this was an unprecedented distinction on the part of an emperor who had served as consul only three times himself.

Servianus was a friend of Verus and sent him an odd little congratulatory poem. In it a man called Ursus claims to be a leading player in the “glass-ball game,” but admits that “I myself was beaten by the thrice consul Verus, my patron, not once but often.” Sometime many years previously Servianus had adopted the name of Ursus; as he had only held the consulship twice, he was ruefully admitting defeat in the great game of politics, for which playing with a fragile glass ball was an apt metaphor.

One of Verus’ sons, also Marcus Annius Verus, married an heiress who owned a vast brickworks outside Rome (and no doubt profited from Hadrian’s many building schemes). In 121 a son arrived, yet another Marcus (confusingly, every male Verus, not simply the firstborn, shared the same given name). By the time of the emperor’s return to Italy he was a toddler of four.

The father died in the year of his praetorship, probably in 124, and the child was adopted by his grandfather. Many years later Marcus remembered the old man for “his kindly disposition and avoidance of bad temper.” Despite her exceptional wealth, his mother instilled austere habits in her son: he reported that she was god-fearing and virtuous, and lived “the simple life, far removed from the habits of the rich.”

His grandfather was not the only man to busy himself about this little
boy. Lucius Catilius Severus, his maternal great-grandfather, played so active a part in his upbringing that Marcus added the names Catilius Severus to his original Marcus Annius Verus. Catilius, a Bithynian of Italian descent, was a close friend of the emperor, having given him crucial support during the first nervous days of his accession to the purple.

On his return to Italy, Hadrian met the orphan, now about four, and took a liking to him. According to the
Historia Augusta
, he was a “solemn child from the very beginning,” a quality that pleased the emperor. As time passed, his interest and affection grew; Marcus was brought up under the emperor’s close supervision—literally “in Hadrian’s lap,”
in Hadriani gremio
. Evidently, the child seldom lied, and Hadrian nicknamed him Annius Verissimus, or “most truthful”—a pun on his
cognomen
Verus, which means “true” in Latin.

At the unusually young age of six, before he started his education proper, Marcus was enrolled as an
eques
, by Hadrian’s specific arrangement. A year later the emperor enrolled him among the Salii, a priestly college founded by the legendary king Numa Pompilius, Hadrian’s antique model of the just and wise ruler. These were the “leaping priests” of Mars—twelve young patricians who wore outlandish outfits originally worn by warriors in the remote past. Every March they purified the sacred trumpets that the Romans carried to war and sang the “Carmen Saliare,” a chant the function of which was to keep Rome safe in battle. Hadrian’s intervention was unusual, for the college usually elected new members itself, and was a sign of special favor.