Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome (5 page)

Hadrian’s two guardians were busy men and cannot have had much time to supervise their ward’s progress closely; but they shared Domitia Paulina’s ambitions for her son. Hadrian was sent to a secondary school when he was about twelve years old. It was one of the best, or at least best known, in Rome, for its
grammaticus
, a Latin word meaning both secondary-school teacher and grammarian, was the celebrated Quintus Terentius Scaurus. Author of a manual on grammar and books on spelling and the correct use of prepositions, he was a master of scholarly ratiocination at its driest.

Grammatical cruxes were popular talking points among educated Romans, and evidently went down well with the bright young student from Baetica; or so we infer, for the adult Hadrian made himself out to be something of an expert on linguistics. He was the author of
Sermones
, or “Conversations,” two volumes on grammatical topics (sadly, lost), and once engaged in scholarly debate with his former teacher. He challenged Scaurus, still alive and working, on his interpretation of the word
obiter—
“by the way” or “in passing”; he cited many learned authorities, including a letter Augustus wrote to Tiberius in which the emperor criticized his stepson for avoiding the word. Of course, Hadrian added bumptiously, the emperor was only an amateur.

Here we have the unmistakable tones of the precocious and competitive teenager who insists on outdoing the expert, and who will never altogether grow up. It was the authentic Hadrian.

Going to school—or, more exactly, to the
grammaticus
’s house—was to enter the dangerous world of grown-ups. Well-to-do parents understood
this and appointed a
paedogogus
, a trusted slave who supervised children at home and accompanied them to the classroom. He was all the more necessary as his charges approached puberty and attracted the attentions of men in the street. Boys were more at risk than girls, if only because the latter went out in public less often and were usually educated at home. Unsavory encounters were common, and a handsome bribe could transform the home tutor into a go-between. And it did not take more than a gift or two to persuade an inquisitive child to a fumble.

It was to ward off this kind of threat that the poet Horace’s father refused to delegate accompanying his son to school.

Unfortunately the trouble was not over once a pupil had walked through a
grammaticus’s
door. If a contemporary of Hadrian, the great poet and satirist Decimus Junius Juvenalis (his full name is uncertain; we know him as Juvenal), is to be believed, the classroom was the scene of much furtive sexual experimentation. Observing that the teacher was expected to act
in loco parentis
, he wrote that fathers

Covert sexual abuse was commonly accompanied by overt physical abuse. Masters routinely flogged idle or rebellious or just lively students. A mural at Pompeii reveals a typical scene: the schoolmaster stands sternly on the left, students are seated quietly at their desks, and a boy carries the almost fully stripped culprit on his shoulders. Another grabs his legs. A classroom assistant raises a cat-o’-nine-tails, ready to strike. So central was the experience of corporal punishment to the learning
process that an expression for being too old for school was
manum subducere ferulae—
“to withdraw the hand from the cane.”

The curriculum Hadrian settled down to study was narrow. The notion of a liberal education that catered to mind and body was little valued. Mathematics and science were not on the syllabus, nor music and the arts, with the sole exception of literature. Gymnastics and athletics were left to the holidays.

There were, in essence, only two related subjects of study—literature and oratory—and two languages to be learned, Latin and Greek. Hadrian was introduced to the classics of both tongues, foremost of which were the two epics of Homer, the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
, composed by one or more oral poets in the eighth and seventh centuries
B.C
. In Latin he studied masterpieces from the more recent past—the speeches of Marcus Tullius Cicero, “that genius, the only possession of Rome to rival her empire”; Horace; and Publius Vergilius Maro, or Virgil, author of the great national epic, the
Aeneid
, which celebrated Rome’s eternal empire,
imperium sine fine
.

Scaurus and his assistants were not directly concerned with literary criticism, although they did expound the “moral” of every passage. Texts were examined in great detail and their meaning explained, their meter and syntax analyzed, as well as the tonal and rhythmic aspects of the spoken word. Hadrian and his fellow students were taught to read aloud with intelligence and feeling. They broke down, or parsed, sentences into their constituent elements—subject, verb, object, and so forth—and scanned verse through a tough system of question-and-answer.

This could be dreary work, and the classes in oratory were much more fun. For centuries, the art of public speaking had been an essential skill for any upper-class Roman interested in a career as a politician and as an advocate in the courts. To get on in the world it was essential to be able to address large gatherings with confidence and to persuade listeners of the rightness of one’s point of view. Even under the empire, when election to office had largely been replaced by imperial designation, oratory was a highly valued art.

Scaurus introduced Hadrian’s class to the foundations of rhetoric. Boys learned to retell legends and stories from Rome’s past in their own words. They took epigrams from the poets and developed them into arguments.
A more complex task was to compose speeches around imaginary themes. These were either
controversiae
, exercises based on cases in a court of law, or
suasoriae
, the giving of advice at a public meeting.

Pupils spoke on one side of a case or the other. The issue debated, of course, had less to do with the law than with resolving a moral dilemma. This was no accident, for the study of oratory was an essential part of a boy’s ethical molding. As Marcus Porcius Cato, called the Censor, a paradigm of Republican citizenship, observed in the second century
B.C
.: “An orator, son Marcus, is a
good
man good at speaking.”

Whatever might have been the case in his day, theory was not now borne out by practice. As an induction to virtue, oratory left much to be desired. The subjects for debate were too remote from the challenges of ordinary life to be relevant, and encouraged the use of specious and hairsplitting arguments. The unscrupulous would knowingly strive to make the worse cause seem the better. Oratory’s disjunction from the real world was reflected in the fact that it had become a highbrow entertainment. Speeches were honed to perfection and authors then read them aloud in lecture theaters. Audiences would applaud a particularly fine effect. The art of persuasion had dwindled into a work of art.

We are not told whether Hadrian liked going to school. Contemporary observers were highly critical, but we know of at least one man who looked back on his education as the “happiest days of my life.” Hadrian may not have gone that far, but he had a lively, inquiring mind and his studies certainly won his attention.

Quite suddenly he became infatuated with all things Greek. Soon after the death of his father, he immersed himself in Greek studies so enthusiastically that he was nicknamed Graeculus, “little Greek boy.” There is the slightest hint in the
Historia Augusta
that the two events were somehow linked; perhaps his philhellenism filled an emotional gap (especially if, as is possible, his father had taken him to Greece when on a foreign posting and introduced him in a simple way to the glories of its civilization). It is likely that his guardian’s new wife, Plotina, encouraged him. She became very fond of Hadrian and was something of an intellectual and philhellene herself.

Caution is called for. The only thing unusual in Hadrian’s passion was the length to which he took it. The Romans were a practical people who distrusted works of the imagination, unless they conferred an immediate and useful benefit. Law, architecture, engineering—these were disciplines they could understand, for they called for rigorous mental application but no flights of fancy.

However, they had little in the way of a homegrown intellectual or cultural tradition. Although they had been aware of the Greeks for all of their history, they were bowled over by what they found when they conquered the Greek world in the second century
B.C
. and incorporated it into their empire. The cities—Athens, Antioch, Ephesus, Alexandria (in every way Greek rather than Egyptian)—astounded with their beauty, elegance, and splendor. Greek philosophy and scientific inquiry, its poetry and drama, provoked a deep, if reluctant, admiration. Most well-educated Romans spoke Greek fluently; Latin poets copied the literary masterpieces of Athens and Italian architects modeled their buildings on its temples and pillared porches.

Horace famously wrote:

He added, with almost tangible disgust, that the “fetid smell” of primitive Italian verse forms gave way to clear and unpolluted air.

The Greece with which Hadrian was so fascinated was no longer simply that of the mainland, of the tiny city-states that drove off two Persian invasions, among whom the most powerful had been democratic Athens and militaristic Sparta, of Socrates and Plato, of Sophocles and Aristotle. Nor was it just the larger Greece of all the many colonies that the mainland city-states had scattered around the Mediterranean along the coastlines of the Black Sea, Asia Minor, and northern Africa, in Sicily and southern Italy.

In fact, “Greece” had grown further still to include the complete eastern half of the Roman empire. This was because four centuries earlier the Macedonian king, Alexander the Great, had overthrown the Persian
empire, whose territory stretched from the Ionian Sea to the Indian Ocean. After his death, his generals divided his conquests into powerful independent kingdoms, and introduced Greek ideas, Greek and Macedonian colonists, and, above all, the Greek language to these vast oriental domains.

Any natives who wanted to get on were obliged to Hellenize themselves. As Peter Green remarks:

Of course, the Greekness of many Asiatic provincials was only skin deep. Their Roman overlords thought them tricky, cowardly, greedy, and unreliable. They were venal confidence tricksters, and what could sometimes be a true talent for high-flying rhetoric was in the case of most Asiatics no more than a tiresome gift of the gab.

To many traditionally minded Romans, there was something still more threatening about the Greeks—their approach to religion. Official Roman religion was not intended to be emotionally satisfying; it entailed a web of complicated rituals in the home and in the public square, designed to preserve the
pax deorum
, the grace and favor of the gods. Eastern cults, by contrast, offered mysticism and their ceremonies induced out-of-body, ecstatic experiences. Initiates were often sworn to secrecy. The state, whether under the Republic or the empire, distrusted excessive excitement and was always on its guard against the
coniuratio
, the society bound together by a common oath and invisible except to its members. Cults were often expelled from Rome, but they were so popular that they kept creeping back.

This spiritual exoticism appealed to Hadrian’s deepest levels of feeling far more than did Rome’s traditional nit-picking
superstitio
, and would go on doing so for all his life. And so did two other oriental imports—magic and astrology. Magic had long been illegal, but became increasingly
popular under the empire. It was employed for many purposes—healing illnesses beyond the reach of conventional medicine; hurting, even killing, one’s enemies; stimulating erotic love; ensuring the victory or defeat of a charioteer at the races.

This last was the purpose of a curse tablet in lead found by archaeologists, which still conveys a strong stench of hatred two millennia later. It demands of a powerful spirit, or
daimon
,

Spell books were published and “magical papyri” have been unearthed from the bone-dry sands of Egypt that reveal the lengths to which people were willing to go to unleash the powers of darkness.

One of magic’s key principles was
sympatheia
, or “fellow feeling.” This allowed the part to be taken for the whole,
pars pro toto—
hence the removal from barbershops of hair or nail clippings, which gave the spellbinder power over their owner. Alternatively, and more ambitiously, the principle of “like for like” explained the use of wax dolls which, when pierced with a needle, communicated pain, even death, to their human originals. Another version of
similia similibus
entailed human sacrifice, where one living person was killed either to save another or to preserve the state, or in an act of self-immolation volunteered his or her own life. But in these days such a tragic transaction was rare, and the Baetican teenager had no grounds for supposing that it would ever apply to him, or anyone he might come to love.