Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome (48 page)

More than half a millennium later Hadrian picked it up where it had fallen. During his previous visit, his attention had been caught by the
synedrion
, or council, at Delphi for the Amphictyonic League, but it did not include enough Greek cities. He decided to launch a new Panhellenion along Periclean lines. As before, a grandly refurbished Athens was to be the headquarters and Greek cities would be invited to send delegates to an inaugural assembly. Member communities had to prove their Greekness, both culturally and in genetic descent, although in practice some bogus pedigrees were accepted.

The enterprise had a somewhat antiquarian character. So far as we can tell from the fragmentary surviving evidence, Hadrian aimed at roughly the same catchment area as Pericles had done—in essence, the basin of the Ionian Sea. Italy and Sicily were excluded once again, and there was no representation of Greek settlements in Egypt, Syria, or Anatolia. The emperor made a point of visiting Sparta, presumably to ensure that it did not stay away as it had done in the fifth century.

A renaissance of old glories was reflected in the development of archaized language; so, for example, Spartan young men
(epheboi)
suddenly took on an antiquated Doric dialect in their dedications to Artemis Orthia, a patron goddess of the city. It seems clear that one of
the purposes of Hadrian’s policy was to recruit the past to influence and to help define and improve the decadent present.

Hadrian began to call himself the “Olympian,” echoing the example of Pericles as well as reflecting the completion of the Olympieion, the vast temple to Olympian Zeus. He was soon widely known throughout the Hellenic eastern provinces as “Hadrianos Sebastos Olumpios,”
Sebastos
being the Greek word for Augustus, or indeed “Hadrianos Sebastos Zeus Olumpios.”

What did the Panhellenion actually do? It administered its own affairs, managed its shrine not far from the Roman Agora and offices, and promoted a quadrennial festival. It also assessed qualifications for membership. But Hadrian was careful to give it no freestanding political powers. All important decisions were referred to him for approval. Rather, the focus was cultural and religious, and a connection was forged with the Eleusinian Mysteries. In essence, the task was to build spiritual and intellectual links among the cities of the Greek world, and to foster a sense of community. The Panhellenion also furthered the careers of delegates, who were usually leading members of Greek elites (but not necessarily Roman citizens), and created an international “old-boy network” of friends who advanced one another’s interests.

A good deal of notice was required for the summoning of the new assembly, and the buildings the emperor had commissioned in 125 were probably not yet finished. But the future look of Athens was already evident. The city was being transformed and the area around the Olympieion was defined as a new district, named (not difficult to guess) Hadrianopolis. At its boundary an arch was erected, which can still be seen today. On the west side, facing the Acropolis, an inscription on its architrave reads, “This is Athens, the onetime city of Theseus,” Theseus being the city’s legendary founder. On the east side, facing the Olympieion, another reads, “This is the city of Hadrian, not of Theseus.”

It was cheek of a very high order. However warmly they welcomed the emperor’s pro-Hellenic policies, this expropriation of their city must have irritated many Athenians. But they had no alternative to biting their lips.

About March 129, with the sea lanes open again, Hadrian set sail for Ephesus. He roamed around the eastern provinces, scattering buildings, instructions, and benefactions in his wake. As usual, he refused to tolerate poor performance by public officials, punishing delinquent procurators and governors, the
Historia Augusta
reports, “with such severity that it was believed that he incited those who brought the accusations.”

The emperor’s main political object for this tour was a gathering of client kings along the frontier with the Parthian empire. This “durbar” was the mirror image of the Panhellenion, originally summoned as it had been to manage a continuing Persian threat. The Parthians had now assumed the role of the sinister Other. Hadrian, of course, had not the slightest intention of provoking a war. Instead, he mounted a spectacular but peaceful demonstration that the Roman empire was safe from invasion.

We do not know if the Parthian king, Chosroes, still embattled by ambitious relatives, was invited to another riverine summit meeting, but he was at least offered sweeteners for good behavior. His daughter, held as hostage in Rome for twelve years, was at last sent back to Parthia and the emperor promised to return the royal throne, which Trajan had captured during his ruinous invasion of Mesopotamia. However, before anything could be decided, Chosroes was deposed and his successor had more important matters on his mind than playing a walk-on role in Hadrian’s political theatricals.

So far as the client kings were concerned, they were a mixed bunch with uncertain loyalties. Conventional opinion disapproved of Rome’s purchasing peace with subsidies, but the emperor was proud of his achievements. According to the
Epitome de Caesaribus
, “after procuring peace from many kings by means of secret subventions, [Hadrian] liked to boast openly that he had won more by doing nothing than from waging war.”

Dealing with distant rulers who knew that it was impractical for the Romans to punish lack of cooperation by military action sometimes led to embarrassment. Pharasmenes was king of the Iberi, a tribe that lived between the Black and Caspian seas (today’s Georgia), and was a case in
point. He haughtily declined Hadrian’s invitation to his grand assembly, despite being the recipient of generous gifts—among them an elephant and a detachment of fifty soldiers. When Pharasmenes reciprocated with some gold-embroidered cloaks, the irritated Hadrian apparently ridiculed the king’s presents by sending three hundred condemned men to be killed in the arena dressed in cloth of gold.

The emperor’s next destination was Egypt, for which he planned an extensive tour, but en route he passed through Judaea. Here he made a fateful decision.

Since the devastation that followed Titus’ capture of Jerusalem in 70, the ruined and depopulated province had hardly recovered. Jewish society became localized into villages. The high-priestly families that had dominated Judaea disappeared from history, the Sanhedrin, ancient Israel’s supreme court, ceased operations, and the old upper class vanished. As for Jerusalem, the city’s fortifications were left in ruins and the Temple remained rubble. This was typical Roman behavior: in previous ages Carthage had been razed and years passed before reoccupancy of the site was allowed. A similar fate had befallen Corinth.

The bitter uprising among Jews of the diaspora at the end of Trajan’s reign seems not to have affected Judaea, presumably because the Moorish general Lusius Quietus had been appointed its governor with a brief to stamp out any discontent. Once the uprising had been quashed, Hadrian, newly in power, had won a reputation for being sympathetic to the Jewish cause when he acted as a disinterested arbiter in disputes between Alexandrian Jews and Greeks.

The emperor’s sympathy seems to have been tactical and did not represent his real opinion. He now determined that enough time had passed to reconstitute Judaea as an ordinary province, by which he meant that it should be Hellenized. Quite a number of affluent Jews, he observed, were willing to become collaborators. It may even be that some of them actively encouraged the emperor to pursue his Hellenizing agenda.

Circumcision had been outlawed by Domitian and Nerva. Interestingly, Christians, too, disapproved of the procedure: Paul of Tarsus called it mutilation and argued that those who inflicted it should be “cut
off,” or castrated. Hadrian renewed the prohibition and made the offense punishable by death.

At Jerusalem the emperor refounded the city and commissioned a temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, to be built on the ruins of Herod’s temple. He brought in settlers and seems to have established a
colonia
of Roman citizens, which in the course of time would produce recruits for the garrison legion that had been based nearby for sixty years, the X Fretensis.

To underline the point that Jerusalem was now a Roman city with Greek-speaking inhabitants and no longer had the slightest association with Jewry, Hadrian named it Aelia Capitolina, in honor of his own family, the Aelii, and the king of the Olympian gods whose great shrine stood on Rome’s citadel. Jehovah was banished. If we can trust the new city’s celebratory coinage, the emperor personally helped to plow a furrow around its boundary. Cities in the neighborhood also signaled his presence. Shrines in his honor were founded at Caesarea and Tiberias, and Gaza launched a Hadrianic festival.

So far as Hadrian was concerned, the Jewish question was settled.

The emperor had been greatly looking forward to touring Egypt, with its strange animal-headed gods, its lauded skill in magic, and its extraordinary temples and palaces. Here was a mysterious, age-old civilization that had largely preserved its unique character. The Macedonian dynasty of the Ptolemies, ruling from Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast, had only partly Hellenized it. A Roman province since the defeat and deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, Egypt was the emperors’ private domain, and nothing was allowed to imperil its huge strategic value as a grain producer for the capital. Senators were forbidden to visit, and few emperors bothered to go there either, despite their having the title of pharaoh. The kingdom’s governance was entrusted to a prefect, who was always a nonpolitical
eques
. Unless there was trouble, Egypt was largely left to its own devices.

Hadrian, ever the missionary, was determined to deepen Egypt’s conversion into a worthy member of the Greco-Roman world. What he had in mind was to found yet another Hadrianopolis, somewhere many miles south in the country’s traditional heartland.

He may have had another, more personal reason for his visit. A fourth-century church father, Epiphanius, claims that he suffered from leprosy, which none of his doctors could heal, and that he went to Egypt to find a cure. At first sight, the story is unconvincing. It is highly unlikely that he contracted leprosy, a disease which is hard to catch and often associated with poverty and a bad diet. However, the assertion may be a faulty echo of the emperor’s previously reported subcutaneous affliction. Egypt had a high reputation for medicine; the healing and magical arts were closely allied, something that would have appealed to Hadrian. A recurrence of erysipelas could well have made him abandon conventional treatment for the arcane nostrums of the Egyptian priesthood.

No later than the end of August 130, Hadrian traveled down the coast road from Gaza to Pelusium, the fortress town that guarded the entry into Egypt. It lay between the marshes of the Nile and the Mediterranean shore. It was on the beach here that in 48
B.C
., at the start of Rome’s long civil war, Pompey the Great (Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus) was lured ashore from his ship and stabbed to death by a renegade legionary in Egyptian pay. He had been fleeing from Julius Caesar after his army’s decisive defeat in Pharsalus in Greece and was hoping to find sanctuary with the pharaoh. “Dead men don’t bite,” said one of the king’s advisers. Pompey’s head was cut off and presented to Caesar.

The body was buried on the shore and a small monument erected above it. With the passage of time sand blew over it and covered it from view. Never one to pass up the chance to mourn a dead celebrity, the emperor located the grave and had the sand brushed away. And, of course, he wrote a poem, which was inscribed on the monument. Referring to the fact that many shrines had been erected in Pompey’s name throughout the empire, one line reads:

The high point of Hadrian’s visit was to be a journey up the Nile. The expedition had to wait until late September or October, when the river’s annual flood would abate. In the meantime the emperor spent some time in Alexandria, where there was plenty to see and do. The Greek community had long believed that the Romans always favored the Jews
at their expense. Now there were hardly any Jews left in the city, following the suppression of their uprising, and Hadrian the Hellenizer made himself popular by investing in restoration projects to make good the damage that had been done.

The old palace of the Ptolemies was not a single edifice but a royal campus filled with buildings of every kind. Among them was the Mouseion, which housed the ancient world’s most distinguished scholars, intellectuals, and authors. Membership was a high privilege, and brought with it the honor of free meals. “By Mouseion,” wrote Philostratus, a third-century expert on Greek intellectuals, “I mean a dining table in Egypt to which the most distinguished men from all over the world receive invitations.”

Hadrian took a close interest in the Mouseion’s work. He is known to have appointed two members, and, as already noted, his
ab epistulis
, successor to the dismissed Suetonius, was a former head of the Mouseion, the Gallic scholar Julius Vestinus. The emperor was not going to miss dinner at the high table for anything. However, it is not certain that his visit was well received. Behaving as usual with uneasy uppitiness to the gathered scholars, the emperor “put forward many questions for consideration,” claims the
Historia Augusta
, “only to provide the answers himself.”