PART IV
I
HADRIAN, A.D. 117–A.D. 138
Some four years after his correspondence with Pliny on the subject of the Christians in Bithynia, the Emperor Trajan died somewhat suddenly in the course of his Eastern campaign, at the Cilician, town of Selinus (A.D. 117).
Trajan was succeeded by his kinsman Hadrian, who had married the Emperor’s great-niece Julia Sabina. The circumstances of Hadrian’s succession are somewhat confused. It was given out generally that he had been adopted by Trajan as his successor. It is certain, however, that his pretensions to the imperial power were favoured by Trajan’s Empress, Plotina, and some even ascribe his succession largely to a palace intrigue; it is clear that no real opposition to his peaceable assumption of the imperial power was offered.
It is regrettable that we possess no notable contemporary history of one of the most remarkable of the Roman Emperors. How intensely interesting would have been a picture by Tacitus of so extraordinary and unique a personality!
What we know of Hadrian and his reign of twenty-one years we gather principally from the pages of Spartianus, one of the six writers of the Augustan history who lived in the days of Diocletian, more than a century and a half later, and from some brief notices of Dion Cassius, of the Emperor Julian, and of three or four other writers who have given us short sketches of his life, and also from a somewhat longer account of the eleventh century monk Xiphilinus, and from notices on medals and inscriptions.
The Emperor Hadrian was no ordinary man. Rarely gifted with various and varied talents, he delighted to appear before the Roman world as a soldier and a statesman, as an artist and a poet; and in each of them, certainly in the first two characters, he occupied a fairly distinguished position. To the world he has gone down as a great traveller. He was not content with sitting at the helm of his Empire in Rome, or in one of his magnificent villas in Italy; he would see each of his many provinces and their chief cities with his own eyes, and then judge what was best for them,—how he could best improve their condition and develop their resources.
During his reign there were few, indeed, of the chief cities of the Roman world which he had not visited,—few which did not receive in some fashion or other the stamp of his presence among them. He was accompanied usually with a vast trained staff, as we should term it, of experts in arts and crafts, of painters, sculptors, architects, and skilled builders.
He had, of course, immense resources at his command, for he was a great financier, and was able with little effort to draw vast sums for the magnificent works he carried on in all parts of the Empire. The world had never seen, will probably never see again, a great building sovereign like Hadrian; and though he restored, decorated, rebuilt baths, amphitheatres, stately municipal buildings, and in many instances whole cities, often named after himself,[30] he never seems to have neglected Rome; for the traces of his expensive works there are still to be seen, while he watched over and lavishly kept up the costly amusements so dear to the luxurious and pleasure-loving capital. In one day, for instance, we read of a hundred lions being slain in the arena of the great Roman theatre, while his doles to the people were ever on a lavish scale. Rome was never allowed to suffer for the absence or for the immense foreign expenditure of the imperial traveller.