081 - The Greekling

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Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, Episode 81, The Greekling. The Roman Empire had just enjoyed 20 years of wise and beneficial stewardship when the tragic but inevitable news arrived that the Emperor Trajan was dead. Even his contemporaries realized that they were living under the best emperor since Augustus, and fears about what came next filtered through every level of society. With Trajan being so great and all, it's pretty reasonable to assume that whoever succeeds him is going to be worse. Maybe not much worse, but it's going to be a step backwards. You can't get better than Optimus. It's a logical impossibility. And who knows, maybe his successor will be a lot worse. It's happened before. Compounding everyone's fears was the fact that Trajan paid almost no attention to the issue of succession publicly, which also meant that, hooray, another round of civil wars just might be how we determine who the eventual ruler, who will inevitably be worse than Trajan, will be. Sweet.

The anxiety that surrounded Trajan's day-to-day health was palpable, and when he began to seriously deteriorate in 117, his closest advisors began to take seriously the consequences of his death. Would it be possible to find a name and heir who would be acceptable to all the various aristocratic factions, and who wouldn't bollocks up the whole thing once he got into power? Obviously, no one we find is going to be as good as Trajan, so who can we dig up who will be the least bad choice? Names were bandied about, but Trajan's influential wife, Pompeia Plotina, worked behind the scenes to ensure that everyone understood that the only man who could reasonably succeed the dead emperor was her former ward Publius Aelius Hadrianus. Trajan himself seems to have been wishy-washy about Hadrian, and had been unwilling to commit himself to the young man, even though he was Trajan's only living male relative. Hadrian had enjoyed a good career, and had many doors opened for him by virtue of his relation to Trajan, but he had never received the special exceptions that signaled eventual inheritance.

But while Trajan may not have been fully sold on his cocky, promiscuous, philhellene nephew, his wife certainly was, and when the emperor died without leaving clear succession instructions, his opinion, to put it bluntly, no longer mattered. The official rumor is that when Trajan died, Pompeia quickly hushed up the death, and may have gone so far as to hire an actor to lay in the vacated deathbed pretending to be the emperor for the purposes of issuing the final recommendation that Hadrian ought to succeed him. While the veracity of this story is hard to pin down, the letters arriving in the senate announcing the last wishes of Trajan and the adoption of Hadrian were all signed by Pompeia, a singular occurrence in the whole of Trajan's reign, leading most to suspect that the empress authored the orders herself. Pompeia, though, was not acting out of the pure self-interest that had driven, say, Agrippina. Sure, she knew that her own position would be secure if Hadrian became emperor, but more important than that was assuring that the transfer of power was seamless and left no openings for civil war. Her husband may have been fantasizing about following Alexander the Great one last time, and leaving the empire to the strongest, but Pompeia was not about to let the Roman world be sucked back into the abyss of self-destruction.

News of the emperor's death was kept tightly under wraps until Hadrian's position was secured, and when word finally did make it back to the capital, it arrived at the same time as news that the legions in the east had gone ahead and declared Hadrian imperator. The senate and any possible pretenders to the throne were thus forced to deal not with a power vacuum, but a fait accompli. Hadrian is already the new emperor. Deal with it. Even without his future success coloring our view of his being named heir, Hadrian was as good a candidate for power as anyone else out there. He was 41 years old, well beyond the reach of the youthful excesses that had ruined Caligula and Nero, had ample military experience at the highest level, had governed provinces, and was, of course, the sole living male relative of the deceased emperor. He was not by any means the only man who eyed the death of Trajan with ambition, but there was never any doubt after Trajan's initial ascension that his younger cousin and former ward would be on the short list of candidates to succeed him. In other words, when the Roman world found out that Trajan was dead and Hadrian had succeeded him, there was a feeling that, well, yeah, that makes sense.

Publius Aelius Hadrianus was born on January 24, 76 AD into a Spanish-Italian family of senatorial rank. There is some disagreement about whether he was born in his hometown of Italica, near modern-day Seville, or whether he was actually born in Rome while his parents were in the capital on business, but the latter smells a lot like post-imperial revisionism, so I tend to go with the former, even if there is no real proof of it one way or the other. Italica was a Roman city in Spain that had been founded by Scipio Africanus to house his injured veterans after he had completed his clean sweep of the Iberian Peninsula and needed to get going on his invasion of North Africa. Hadrian's family, like Trajan's, had migrated from Italy not long after the colony's foundation, and both quickly became members of a new Spanish-Italian aristocracy, an aristocracy fueled by the lucrative Spanish olive oil trade. Hadrian's father was a well-regarded senator, like his neighbor and cousin Marcus Ulpius Trajanus, the future emperor Trajan. The elder Hadrian served with distinction across the empire, eventually rising to the rank of praetor, before he died unexpectedly in 86 AD while still in his mid-forties.

Hadrian was only ten at the time, and as the only male in line, he was thrust into the role of paterfamilius at an incredibly young age. But since he was still a minor, and everyone fretted about boys who grow up without strong male guidance, Hadrian's education was entrusted to his cousin Trajan, who was fast rising in Roman politics, and another Spanish-Italian noble named Publius Aetianus, who would play a key, if infamous, role in Hadrian's early administration. Young Hadrian was educated in classic Roman fashion, and the zeal the boy showed for all things Greek—literature, philosophy, art, whatever—earned him the nickname Grecolus, which meant little Greek or Greekling. It was a mildly disparaging nickname, as the typical Roman aristocrat studied Greek culture, yes, but kept the sensuous and corrupting passions of the East at arm's length. Hadrian, though, embraced all things Greek, and for the rest of his life, idolized and sought to emulate his heroes Homer and Xenophon and Plato. The villa complex he would build for himself after becoming emperor was nothing less than a massive homage to the Greeks in its architecture, landscaping, and underlying philosophic principles.

When Hadrian was fourteen, Trajan brought him to Rome to personally supervise the last stages of the boy's education and oversee his transition to manhood. Trajan was just completing the consulship he had been awarded by demission for his rapid response to Saturninus' revolt, and the teenage Hadrian found himself planted right smack dab in the middle of Roman power politics. At this point, there would have been little reason for Hadrian to dream that he might himself don the purple one day, but his close relationship to Trajan meant that he was definitely being prepared for an important role in the imperial system somewhere, so he best pay attention. Living in Rome during the last years of Domitian's reign, not that anyone knew that they were the last years of Domitian's reign, gave Hadrian a close-up view of what to do and what not to do with power, and his later conduct hints that he learned his lessons well, even if there were a few growing pains at first.

Through the influence of Trajan, Hadrian received three consecutive military tribuneships in Pannonia, Moesia, and Upper Germany successively. It was unusual for a young aristocrat to serve even two consecutive tours, as Moes simply did their year's service and went back to the comfort of their estates. But Trajan was obviously intent on instilling Hadrian with all the martial virtues that he himself so prized. For his part, Hadrian seems to have been an excellent and well-liked soldier. He enjoyed camp life. The camaraderie, the attention to detail, the rigorous exercise, all appealed to him, and for the rest of his life he was able to come and go from legionary camps with ease, speaking the language of his soldiers and willingly sharing in their hardships. Though he is remembered today as the quintessential pacifist emperor, Hadrian always loved military life, and his troops, in turn, always loved him.

It was while he was serving his second tribuneship in Moesia that Hadrian learned that his elder cousin had been adopted by Nerva, and it was while he was serving on his third tour in Upper Germany a few months later that he learned that the old emperor was dead, and Trajan now ruled in his own right. Tradition has it, as I mentioned, that it was Hadrian himself who rode to Trajan's command post on the lower Rhine and delivered news of Nerva's death. Just like that, in the span of about four months, Hadrian went from a young provincial noble looking to get started on a career to the sole living male relative of the emperor of the Roman Empire. Needless to say, whatever ambitions he had had for himself were about to be ratcheted up about a thousand percent.

But if Hadrian expected to be treated like Gaius and Lucius, or more recently Titus Flavius, he was sadly mistaken. Trajan showed absolutely no sign that he planned to share any of his imperial power with his young cousin. Hadrian's career would obviously receive a healthy leg up, but so did a lot of other people's careers. Everyone connected to Spanish Rome benefited from having one of their own on the throne, but there is no indication that Trajan was any more or less disposed towards his former war than anyone else. Indeed, if we dig a little, we find that it's possible Trajan was skeptical that the brash, bordering on flamboyant Greekling was fit for high office of any kind, and that it was the constant lobbying of Pompeia who kept the future emperor's career moving steadily upward. Perhaps at Pompeia's urging, Hadrian was assigned to act as the new emperor's official emissary in the Senate, soon after Trajan's ascension. He was tasked with reading aloud the emperor's letters home, a job that apparently caused Hadrian some embarrassment, as his rough accent, a mix of Spanish and military pronunciations, was ridiculed by the cultured Italian elite.

But if he was bummed about not immediately being named Caesar, and instead being turned into a glorified secretary, Hadrian could not help but believe he was still going to succeed Trajan one day, as the emperor arranged for the daughter of his favorite niece, Vibia Sabina, to marry him in 100 AD, further strengthening the familial ties between the two men. The marriage would prove to be politically useful, but personally unhappy, as neither seems to have liked the other very much. For one thing, Hadrian appears to have had far more affection for his mother-in-law than his wife, which forever rankled young Sabina, and of course, it did not help any that Hadrian was gay, a fact we'll explore in more detail next week. Obviously, the marriage produced no children.

Hadrian's career continued its vague course upwards, and we know that he accompanied Trajan on both legs of the Dacian Wars, but we have no record of what, if anything, the young officer accomplished in his first tours of real combat duty. He was awarded a praetorship in 106, after the final victory over Decebalus, and was given command of a legion in Germany that same year. The next year, he was assigned a pro-praetorship in Pannonia, and once again commanded a legion, but in both cases, he was still subordinate to the sitting provincial governor. In 108, he was granted a consulship, but it was a less prestigious Suffolk consulship, a minor slight that escaped no one's attention. Trajan was obviously of two minds about Hadrian. On the one hand, he was moving his cousin up in the world, but on the other, he wasn't coming close to granting him heir status, presumptive, apparent, or otherwise.

What Hadrian made of all this is anyone's guess. I would suppose that he was somewhere in between two extremes. He doesn't seem to have been vocally cranky that he was being denied what he felt was rightfully his, but neither does he seem to have been relieved that he wasn't going to wind up on the hot seat himself one day. He was ambitious, and he was capable, and likely coveted the imperial throne, but he wasn't marching around with an immature sense of entitlement either. He sort of disappears from the public record for a few years following his consulship, eventually turning up in Athens in 112, where he was an eager tourist and student. He immersed himself in the cultural life of the city enough that he was given Athenian citizenship and elected an archon, one of the senior civic magistrates of the city.

After his tour of Greece, Hadrian followed Trajan east in 114, and, at least for the early part of the new campaign, once again found himself assigned tasks beneath the purview of historians. He was likely attached to Trajan's staff, as Cassius Dio mentions that he shared in the quote, day-to-day activities of the emperor. While we don't know exactly what he got up to, we know that he had a front row seat for the initial conquest and the local revolts that followed. The speed with which he abandoned Trajan's conquered territories tells us that through this period, the reliably loyal Hadrian was likely critical of Trajan's policies in private. But his doubts don't seem to have affected his relationship with the emperor, and in 117, Hadrian was finally given an independent command. And not just any command, but the governorship of Syria, one of the most important posts in the empire. Trajan had recently reassigned the previous governor to Dacia, where a revolt was underway, and for the first time, he decided to hand his cousin some real power. Clearly, whatever doubts he had about the Greekling had been satisfied, as the governorship of Syria was no token prize.

For Hadrian, the promotion could not have come at a better time. No one could have known it at the time, but Trajan was entering his final year in office, and the issue of succession was about to rear its ugly, and thus far still utterly unaddressed head. It was by a lucky stroke of fate, then, that rather than being just another staff officer, one likely assigned for no other reason than that he was related to the emperor, Hadrian found himself instead serving as the governor of Syria when Trajan died. Not only was it a prestigious and strategically critical post, but most importantly, it put him at the head of his very own army. It was one thing to buck for power from the shady corners of the imperial entourage. It was quite another to do so from the head of the eastern legions.

I don't think I need to rehash the circumstances of Trajan's death again, so I'll just leave it that Hadrian was an Antioch in August of 117 A.D., when he heard that Trajan was dead. Through the string-pulling of Pompeia, Hadrian found out slightly before everyone else, and he was forced to sit on the news. He also was forced to sit on the news that it was going to be announced that Trajan had named him heir, news that cannot have been easy to just sit on. There were more than a few of Trajan's lieutenants, though, who could easily picture themselves in the purple, so it was going to be important to play the transfer of power just right. For the most part, at least in the initial stages, Hadrian hit a pitch-perfect note. He marched out to the head of his Syrian legions and formally announced the news of Trajan's death, at which point the troops spontaneously hailed him as emperor, just as they had likely been instructed to do. He then drafted a note to the Senate, apologizing for the haste with which his soldiers had embraced him. He was sorry events had moved so quickly that the Senate had been cut out of the process. He promised to continue Nerva and Trajan's policy of leaving senators more or less sancrosanct, and promised that once he was sure the borders were secure, that he would return to Rome and consult with the venerable conscript fathers.

Back in Rome, all of this hit the Senate at the same time. Trajan was dead, he had named Hadrian heir, the eastern legions had gone ahead and hailed Hadrian as emperor, and he had accepted. What could they do about it? So they ratified the quote-unquote last witches of Trajan and confirmed Hadrian as the new emperor, heaping on him all the titles and honors of his predecessor. Hadrian accepted most of the accolades, but pointedly refused the title father of the people, an honorific he felt should be earned, not just handed out willy-nilly.

The first thing the new emperor did was travel to Cilicia to oversee the funeral and cremation of Trajan. Obviously, he could not have done otherwise, but beyond the purely ceremonial optics, the trip allowed Hadrian an early opportunity to meet face-to-face with Trajan's inner circle and confirm their behind-the-scenes support for his new administration. Though Hadrian maintained a confident public front, there was still much to fear in the political back rooms and the legionary tents of the empire. He seems to have secured the support of the Trajan loyalists, but there were a handful of powerful rivals who would need to be dealt with quickly to ensure that his reign was more augustus and less galba. At first, his narrow purge would only put proverbial heads on the chopping block, but in a few months, real heads would roll, causing Hadrian all manner of political havoc.

Initially, though, Hadrian refused to do anything violent. His old guardian, Attianus, had risen to the rank of Praetorian prefect and wrote to Hadrian soon after the latter's ascension that a few senators were plotting a coup. The prefect counseled immediate executions, but Hadrian disagreed. This was no time to go around lopping off heads. Maybe later, if there was proof of their continued sedition, but for now, the official policy was wait and see. But though he was not in the mood to stain his new administration with blood, at least not yet, Hadrian was well aware of what the score was. Men who could not be counted on, or who were suspected of their own imperial ambitions, needed to be removed from their positions and replaced with men loyal to Hadrian.

One of the first and most famous to go was Lucius Quietus, the North African general Trajan had left in command of the legions in Mesopotamia. An aggressive Trajanite, Quietus not only had motivation to unseat the new emperor, but also the means to do something about it. What Hadrian needed to deny his rival for power was the opportunity to act. So he unceremoniously terminated Quietus' command and ordered him to head back west. This command change was then followed by the famous order that very possibly would have spurned Quietus into open revolt, had he still been in charge, and an order that would set the tone for Hadrian's entire reign. Just days after becoming emperor, Hadrian ordered the legions to begin withdrawing from all the territories in the east Trajan had just conquered. The order would come as a shock to the political classes, and had he not already established himself as a favorite son of the legions, it is likely they would have rioted when he more or less declared they were going to abandon the territory they had all just won with their blood and sweat. I say more or less because Hadrian never made any formal announcement of his intentions, merely recognizing that an openly stated policy of withdrawal would have been political suicide. Instead, he just began recalling the expeditionary forces back to their former barracks on the west side of the Euphrates.

It is not a decision Hadrian entered into lightly, and the speed with which he implemented his new policy, and the tenacity with which he stuck to it in the face of domestic political attacks, demonstrates that he had been thinking about it for a very long time. Indeed, as we'll see, the idea of withdrawing behind the traditional, defensible Augustan borders of the empire was at the very core of Hadrian's being. The abandonment of Mesopotamia was no tactical retreat, it was a strategic realignment. That didn't make the bitter pill of reducing the territory of the empire go down any easier, but the new emperor was adamant about his vision for the future, and it is a testament to his political skill that he was able to make such a hugely unpopular decision stick.

Next week, we'll see that Hadrian's vision for an eternally defensible empire was not limited to the Euphrates. All across the empire, he would build defensive fortifications to mark the permanent boundary of the civilized world. But if in so doing he earned himself a reputation as a pacifist, then we need to rethink the meaning of that word. Whatever else it is, building huge stone walls that restrict the movement of previously unmolested locals is not a passive move. I think Hadrian is best described as running a highly aggressive defense. His goal was not to just sit back and man the walls, it was to project Roman power across the Mediterranean and control not just the civilized interior, but the unruly tribes beyond the frontier. Not with military occupation, but with overwhelming economic and political dominance.