The Empresses of Rome

by Joseph McCabe

One of Hadrian’s secretaries was the historian Suetonius, whose work on the Emperors has provided us with much material. With him and the cultivated commander of the Prætorian Guards Sabina maintained a close friendship, and Hadrian made a grievance of it. So closely did he pry into the affairs of his friends that the rumour was set about that he had many mistresses among their wives. It was reported to him that Suetonius and Septicius Clarus “were behaving with more familiarity than the dignity of the Imperial house permitted,” as Spartianus puts it, and they were dismissed. There is no suggestion of grave irregularity on her part. The idea of divorcing Sabina, which Hadrian is said to have discussed, is expressly connected with what he called her “moroseness and asperity”; and we can well believe that her asperity took the form of bitter complaints about his own conduct. Nothing further was done, and, though we may regard with reserve the statement that Sabina deliberately prevented herself from having a child, lest she should put a new monster on the throne, the Imperial couple continued their uncongenial companionship.[13] Some of the coins which were struck in commemoration of their passage ventured to bear the legend, “Concordia Augusta”—struck in honour of the harmony of the Imperial household.

From Britain they returned to Gaul, where Hadrian excited comment by the opulence of his mourning over the death of Plotina. They then passed to Spain, where Roman civilization had taken deep root, and on to the land of the Moors. The colonies which Rome had planted along the strip of territory descending from the mountains to the sea had been devastated by the barbarians, and the frontier had been obliterated. Hadrian drove back the tribes, restored the towns, and returned, after an absence of more than a year, to Rome. The city was tranquil, and the building of the great villa which still, in its ruins, excites the amazement of the visitor at Tivoli, was proceeding. After a year or two of peaceful administration, seeing that the west, north, and south of the Empire were secure and prospering, Hadrian turned his face towards the east.

We need not follow him in this journey to Greece and Asia Minor, since it is not clear whether Sabina accompanied him, but it had a sequel of melancholy interest to the Empress. From the cities of Greece he made his way along the coast of the Black Sea to the region of the Parthians, where he again restored peace, and back through Asia Minor and the islands to Rome. Two or three years had been occupied in this journey, and Hadrian had become less Roman in taste than ever. He came home surrounded by Greeks, and with a great zeal for Greek and Eastern institutions. In particular he brought in his train a beautiful Bithynian youth whose name is from that time inseparably connected with his. Hadrian’s passion for Antinous is the chief stain on his character, and was probably the chief ground of Sabina’s resentment. The Emperor had visited Bithynia, and presumably met the youth there. Every traveller among rude and healthy nations is aware that such practices are by no means confined to decadent civilizations, nor does the student of contemporary morals see in them anything distinctive of the life of ancient Syria, Greece, or Rome. Nevertheless, the remarkable beauty of Antinous, which is familiar to us in many a statue, and the wanton openness of his association with the Emperor, attracted general attention and greatly embittered Sabina.

When, therefore, she set out with Hadrian, at the end of 128 or the beginning of 129, for a fresh and more extensive tour in the East, her enjoyment must have been heavily clouded by the daily and hourly presence of the Emperor’s companions. The young Adonis was not the only source of offence in Hadrian’s suite. Closer still to Hadrian was a young Roman noble of the most effeminate charm and the most dissolute life. Lucius Ceionius Commodus was later taken into Imperial partnership by Hadrian, and, although he did not live to attain supreme power, his descendants will more than once enter and disturb our story of the Empresses. Spartianus ascribes to him a “regal beauty” of face and person, a manner of great charm, a witty and sparkling conversation, and an utter depravity of morals. He had won the regard of Hadrian, not so much by the famous new dish which he had invented for the epicures of Rome—a boar, ham, pheasant, and peacock pie—as by the sensuous charm of his person and the exotic sensuality of his life. He would lie, washed in exquisite Persian ointments, on a couch strewn with roses, with a coverlet of lilies drawn over himself and his companion. Such ways were entirely foreign to the nature of Hadrian, but his robust vigour was singularly united with a fine artistic sensibility and a love of the softer east, which led him into many inconsistencies.

Sabina had for companion a Greek poetess, Julia Fadilla, of such virtue and attainments that a statue was somewhere raised to honour her as a pattern of integrity. The incongruous party, with its conflicting groups of virtue and vice—a fitting symbol of the unhappy union of West and East—crossed the sea to Athens, and then visited Corinth, Eleusis, and the other surviving cities of Greece. The frame of that superb civilization still gleamed, almost intact, on the soil of Hellas, though the soul of Greece had departed. It was as if one gazed on the smooth white corpse of a beautiful woman. Groups of sophists still disputed in the gardens or under the shady colonnades; but they were puny mimics of Socrates, Zeno, and Epicurus. Politicians still babbled in the Agora; but they blessed the hand of Rome that had closed brutally on the throat of their fair country. The Acropolis still shone in its panoply of Parian marble, and Hadrian had restored the harbour and repaired many of the ravages of time and violence. He regretted the greed of his forerunners, and sought to restore the ancient spirit. But the poor revival of art and letters and religion, which he succeeded in effecting, was only the last flicker of the vitality of Greece.

They crossed the sea to Ephesus, which at that time rivalled Antioch and Alexandria as a metropolis of the decaying civilizations of the East. Its great Temple of Diana, a teeming store of art and treasure, drew men from all parts, while priests of all religions mingled in its streets with panders to all vices and ministers to every form of art and luxury. Smyrna, another flourishing city of Asia Minor, attracted them next, with its magnificent assemblage of temples, colonnades, baths, and theatres, and they passed on to Sardis and the other cities of that fascinating and repellent Greek-Oriental region, where new mysticism ran like veins of gold in the old volcanic deposits. The winter was spent in the luxury of Ephesus and Smyrna, and with the spring they traversed the successive provinces of Asia Minor, admiring and restoring the remains of Greek and Persian grandeur. Through Syria, where famous Antioch detained them for a time, they went on, probably, to the ruined cities of Tyre and Sidon, and returned to Heliopolis, Damascus, and Palmyra. In Palestine they found the survivors of the scattered Jewish nation living in great poverty and dejection among the ruins of their cities, or still scrutinizing the prophets and looking for the Messiah in the larger communities on the coast. On the site of Jerusalem, where a few broken towers gave a melancholy reminder of their former prosperity, Hadrian ordered that a new Roman colony should be established.

From Judæa they moved to Arabia, and then to Egypt. Alexandria was then the second city of the world in importance, the first in interest. All the exhausted streams of the older civilizations had poured into it. Never before or since was there so cosmopolitan a population, such a gathering of old vices and new moralities, dead religions and fresh religions, cults six thousand years old and the latest gospels of Judæa and Persia. Its harbour still held the ships of every port in the Mediterranean, its Serapeum, Museum, and Cæsareum sheltered the art and culture of the world, and its deafening streets rang with the tongues of the world. But the soul of Egypt, too, was dead, and the Imperial party moved up the Nile to admire the surviving relics of its past. No doubt priests and learned men from Alexandria would attend as interpreters. They wandered in Memphis, which the sand of the desert was beginning to bury, passed through Heliopolis, and reached Besa, where they experienced the great sensation of the tour. The beautiful Bithynian youth was drowned in the Nile, and Sabina had to regard with disdain the womanly tears and the extravagant mourning of the Emperor. It is not clear to this day whether the death was accidental or voluntary. Hadrian, of course, said that it was accidental; but a rumour lingers in the chronicles that the Emperor, in his new zeal for Oriental superstition, had learned that his life was doomed unless some loved being was sacrificed for him, and Antinous offered himself. Hadrian has taken the secret with him, but the temples and statues he raised all over the Empire kept the memory of the pretty youth fresh for centuries.

This occurred about the month of October. The dates of these journeys of Hadrian are much disputed, but a trivial detail has determined this part of the tour. They went on to Thebes, and, in accordance with custom, cut their names and the date in the great statue of Memnon. They probably pushed on as far as Philæ, to see the temple of Isis, but we find them back in Syria at the end of the year, or the beginning of 132, and soon afterwards in Rome. The great villa had now been completed at Tivoli, and we must assume that Sabina lived there during the three or four years that remained for her. They were years of continued melancholy. Hadrian was sobered, but soured. The Jews had disturbed his cherished peace by rebelling, on account of his design to cover the site of their holy city with a Roman colony, and he had ruthlessly destroyed what remained of their cities, and erased the name of Jerusalem by calling the new town Ælia Capitolina. Illness began to enfeeble his frame, and he brooded darkly over the question of a successor, which men were discussing. He passed in heavy dejection through the lovely gardens and marble temples of his villa, still mourning the loss of Antinous. An obelisk has been found there with the inscription that it was raised to the youth by Hadrian and Sabina—a fiction that must have angered the Empress, if it were done before her death. But she did not live to see the darker gloom of his closing years. She died in, or about, the year 136, “not without a rumour of poison,” says Spartianus; the rumour is not worth considering. She had been entitled “Augusta” by the Senate in 127, but Hadrian refused her the divine honours which were usually bestowed on dead Empresses. They were awarded by his successor.

The busts of Sabina which we have suggest just such a personality as we have gathered from the meagre references to her in the chronicles. She was a woman of smooth and regular features and fine person, without beauty or charm. Her face gives an impression of intellect, virtue, and silent suffering. She is the kind of woman who would neither overlook the vice of her husband nor actively resent it, or assert herself in any way; the kind of woman to retreat in disdain to her books. That she was “treated as a slave” by Hadrian, as Aurelius Victor says, we may decline to believe, and regard the statement as a popular exaggeration; nor, on the other hand, can we agree with Gregorovius that a letter in which Hadrian invites his mother to dine with him on his birthday, and says that Sabina has gone into the country, shows their “mutual dislike.” Duruy quotes this very letter in disproof of the belief that they were estranged, and points out that it goes on to say that Sabina had “sent her share for the family dinner.” The French historian believes that the legend, “Concordia Augusta,” on some of the medals of the time expressed a fact. We cannot, however, imagine Sabina resigning herself to her husband’s passion for youths, and the few authentic details left us about her relations with Hadrian generally indicate a mutual aversion. As an Empress, she was a nonentity; as a woman, an admirable blend of old-world sobriety and new-world culture.

Hadrian survived her for two unhappy years. The whole Empire was covered with monuments of his public service, the coinage of every province proclaimed his beneficence, the slave, the widow, and the orphan gratefully told of his magnanimity. But the illness and depression of his last year permitted him to commit a crime, and, so accustomed was the new generation to good conduct in its rulers, the recollection of his great deeds was almost obliterated. To the astonishment of all, and the indignation of the thoughtful, Hadrian announced that he had chosen as Cæsar his dissolute and decadent companion, Lucius Verus. His brother-in-law Servianus, now an old man of ninety, and the grandson of Servianus, a youth of nineteen, seem to have been among the murmurers, and, on trivial pretexts, they were put to death. These cruel murders brought a deep shadow over Hadrian’s last year, but a last opportunity was given him to repair his action. Lucius Verus, worn and consumptive from debauch, died, and Hadrian now made choice of the most worthy man in the Senate, Titus Antoninus; adding, however, in his quaint way of mingling good and evil, that he must in turn adopt the son of Lucius Verus and young Marcus Aurelius, a Sybarite and a Stoic, two antithetic types of Roman life. He went down to Baiæ, suffering acutely from dropsy. The pain and weariness were so great that he tried to secure poison or a sword, but Antoninus prudently guarded and nursed him. He died in the year 138, “done to death by physicians,” he ironically said. In his last days he composed some slight verses, which I may translate: