One of the buildings of the Forum of Trajan. The interior as it looked in the days of ancient Rome.
THE TOMB OF HADRIAN
The most versatile and perhaps the ablest of all the emperors—an artist, poet, philosopher, general, and statesman—- was Hadrian. Two-thirds of his reign of twenty-one years (117-138 A. D.) he devoted to travel throughout his vast empire. The object of these journeys was not, like that of our presidents, to explain policies and secure votes for reëlection to a second term; for the emperor’s lease of power was lifelong. His purpose was rather to discover and meet the needs of his people. We find him accordingly improving the organization, equipments, and discipline of the army, fortifying exposed points of the frontier, negotiating treaties of alliance with border states, building roads, providing the cities he visited with temples, theaters, and aqueducts, carefully overseeing the complex system of administrative officers, or finding relaxation in conversation with architects, authors, and philosophers.
HADRIAN’S TOMB
Now known as the Castle Sant’ Angelo.
EMPEROR HADRIAN
In the period of the decline the tomb was converted into a fortress, and this character it has retained to the present day. During the Middle Ages and early modern times, a period of fifteen hundred years, it was the center of nearly all the factional strife and of the civil and foreign wars that raged in and about the city. During this time it experienced the greatest changes in appearance by the removal of decorations and facings and the substitution of ramparts, turrets, and other elements of military defense.
Its present name, Castle of Sant’ Angelo, was given it in the time of Pope Gregory the Great. The story is told that in 590, when leading a procession to Saint Peter’s in an attempt to check by prayer a dreadful pestilence, “as he was crossing the bridge, even while the people were falling dead around him, he looked up at the mausoleum and saw an angel on its summit, sheathing a bloody sword, while a choir of angels around chanted with celestial voices the anthem since adopted by the Church in her vesper service.” In commemoration of the miracle a statue of the Holy Angel Michael stands on the summit with wings outspread.