083 - May His Bones Be Crushed

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Hello and welcome to the history of Rome. At 83, may his bones be crushed. In 125, Hadrian returned to Rome for the first time in four years. In that time, he had completed one full counterclockwise circuit of the empire, up through Gaul to Britain, then down through Spain into Africa, east across North Africa, up into Syria, then west across Asia Minor to Greece, and then, after a brief final stop in Sicily, back to the Italian peninsula. His return to the capital was greeted with a mixture of enthusiasm by some, annoyance by others, and indifference by the rest.

In the seven-plus years Hadrian had already logged on the throne, he had earned a reputation as an ever-active polymath executive whose interest extended to every corner of the empire. While the provincials loved the personal attention Hadrian lavished upon them, the Roman Romans, the ones who actually lived in Rome, were less enthused by the emperor's corresponding inattention. Hadrian had kept the bread and circuses flowing, and continued the building boom that had rolled on uninterrupted since the reign of Domitian, but there was a growing feeling that in most respects Hadrian was not really one of them. In the final analysis, the emperor turned out to be a Grecophile Spaniard who loved all the things a proper Roman was supposed to hate—hunting, astrology, poetry. He was also an unapologetic and open homosexual, and of course, there was his trivial, but somehow still earth-shattering decision to abandon the austere, clean-shaven face that had defined the look of the Roman aristocracy for centuries in favor of a full beard. Hadrian was an emperor, yes, but whether he was a Roman emperor was something of an open question.

For his part, Hadrian did not trouble himself too much with the social taboos he was upending, and for the most part his iconoclasm seems to have happened by accident. That is to say, he wasn't deliberately setting himself against existing tradition. He was instead simply supremely confident in who he was and what he was doing. There are a couple of explanations for his beard, for example, from it being an extension of his philhellenism, to it being an easy way to connect with rank-and-file soldiers who often wore beards, to a simple desire to cover a pockmarked and warty face. But nowhere does anyone report that he wore a beard just to tick off the conservative elites back in Rome. On a larger scale, his promotion of Greece at the expense of Italy was not undertaken because he wanted to spit on Italian exceptionalism, but because he knew that the long-term interests of the empire begged for all of the provinces to become united on a more equal footing.

As I said when I was introducing Trajan, it was fast becoming counterproductive to view the empire as a collection of provinces ruled by Rome, rather than a single, cosmopolitan, Mediterranean political unit. While the vast majority of subjects within the empire eyed this change of focus with relish, it all went over like a lead balloon in Italy, where every man, woman, and child had been raised from birth to believe that they were, in fact, exceptional in every single way, and ruled the world by divine right. Hadrian lived in his villa at Tivoli from 125 to the beginning of 127, conducting the business of empire from the newly constructed compound, rather than from the imperial palace on the Palatine, or, God forbid, the halls of the Senate. The world no longer revolved around Rome. It revolved around Hadrian, just as Hadrian wanted.

In 127, he got restless again and decided to go on a quick tour of the one province he had thus far neglected, Italy itself. So he spent the rest of the year traveling around the peninsula doing what he did best, adjudicating legal disputes and ordering architectural improvements in every municipality he passed through. It was during this tour that Hadrian decided to implement one of the few reforms that would not survive his death. Future emperors would follow Hadrian's precedence consciously or unconsciously for years, right down to the bearded face. But the emperor's reform of Italian political administration would be repealed practically hours after he died. Since the days of Augustus, Italy had been divided into seventeen administrative districts, but the local towns and cities were mostly left to their own devices. Hadrian decided to divide the peninsula into four zones, each run by an imperial procurator, who would answer directly to the emperor. It may seem an innocuous shift, but the Italians resented the hell out of the fact that Hadrian was effectively turning Italy into just another province. So, like I say, the reorganization of the peninsula would be repealed immediately once Hadrian wasn't around to defend this universally unpopular idea. Italian exceptionalism would die one day, but not yet.

127 also marked Hadrian's tenth year in office, which he celebrated with appropriate games and banquets. The auspicious occasion was marked with darkness, though, as the emperor seems to have either fallen ill or suffered from a serious accident that laid him up for months, right around the time of his decennial celebrations. But the emperor was not going to be held down for long, and in the spring of 128, he was healthy enough to make a return trip to North Africa, which he had been forced to speed through on his way to the summit with the Parthians in 123. Before he left, though, he finally accepted the one honorific he had thus far refused, having decided he had finally done enough good to be hailed Father of the People.

On this latest trip to Africa, he was able to focus more intently on the particulars of the North African provinces, though the visit basically followed the standard Hadrianic template – inspect the troops, order defensive fortifications built, improve municipal infrastructure, and settle legal disputes. Hadrian's standout accomplishment during his time in Africa happened just as he was arriving. Plagued by drought, the arrival of the emperor had been accompanied by sudden rainstorms, prompting coins to be issued praising Hadrian the Rainmaker. Before the fall came, Hadrian skipped back to Italy on his way to Greece, where he planned to take part in the Elysian Mysteries for a second time, this time as a full initiate.

The cult tickled all of the emperor's sweet spots, from its classical Greek character, to its overt mysticism, to its ability to bring together the Hellenized world in one unifying ceremony. This last point stuck in the emperor's head, and on this, his third long-term stay in Greece, he initiated a plan to bring the Greeks together as a single political force. The Greeks had, of course, always been the cultural engine of the empire, but their long history of city-state independence and its attendant intra-Greek squabbling had always left them weak politically. So hot on the heels of his decision to downgrade Italy to just another province status, Hadrian pushed the Greeks to join together in a new pan-Hellenian league designed to raise them from eastern backwater to major player. He personally lobbied the magistrates of Athens and Sparta, the two most important and most antagonistic cities, to join in the new league that would unite Greece and bring them power within the empire that they had thus far never dreamed possible. Intrigued by Hadrian's promise of increased influence, the Greeks began to work on the details of who would be allowed to join the league, where meetings would be held, for how long, and what the extent of its powers would be, and all the other minutia that accompanied these sorts of high-minded diplomatic assemblies. Just to be clear, though, the practical power the new pan-Hellenian league would wield would be none, as Hadrian had no intention of relinquishing any imperial prerogatives. But he hoped a unified community of Greeks would nonetheless contribute to the future stability of the empire.

Despite his hopes, though, the league collapsed after his death. Without the emperor's active attention, the Greeks fell back to their old ways and did what Greeks do best, squabbling with each other until the league was left an irrelevant shell. In 129, the emperor sailed from Athens to Anatolia, and from there he traveled down into the eastern provinces, where he called together—presumably in Antioch, though I haven't been able to confirm that little detail—the collection of client-kings who served as the buffer between the empire proper and the barbarian lands beyond the frontier of civilization. For the hawkish senate, the summit was a complete embarrassment, as it shoved in their faces once again Hadrian's policy of purchasing peace, rather than fighting for it, as had always been the Roman way. Client-kings were client-kings because they were paid by the emperor to stay client-kings. The crass financial nature of the relationship offended the senate, but Hadrian paid them no mind, boasting about the fact that he had won more by doing nothing than others had by waging war.

Hadrian then traveled south to Egypt in 130, but along the way he stopped off at the ruins of Jerusalem to take care of some unfinished business. The province had been heavily depopulated during the various Jewish revolts, its great cities had been destroyed, the Temple of Solomon had burned to the ground, and the political authority of the Jewish high priests a thing of the past. Hadrian decided to bring the troubled region back to life by annihilating the last vestiges of Judaism and rebranding the old province as a Hellenistic colony of the Greco-Roman world. He ordered the devastated Jerusalem rebuilt, renaming the city Aelia Capitolina, the Aelia part coming from Hadrian's own name, and the Capitolina part signaling that the city was dedicated in the name of Jupiter. Hadrian then ordered a temple be built on the site of the old Jewish temple, an affront that on its own may have been enough to spark another revolt, but coupled with the emperor's new ban on circumcision was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. In just two years time, revolt in Judea would once again be headline news, and no fewer than twelve legions would be needed to prosecute and win the third Jewish war.

Hadrian was blithely unaware of the train wreck he was setting in motion though, and no doubt pleased with how nice and Greek he had left the region, he traveled south to Egypt where he planned to indulge in every tourist trap the ancient kingdom had to offer. It is the emperor's trip up the Nile that finally brings us to the relationship that had dominated Hadrian's personal life the past five years, his long-standing affair with the teenage boy Antinous.

Now homosexuality as a psychological identity was still two thousand years or so from being created, and in the classical world gender roles and sex were not nearly as defined as they are today, so it is hard to come right out and say that Hadrian was gay or that that made him unique among Roman emperors. Gibbon, for example, famously commented that Claudius was the only emperor whose taste in love was quote, entirely correct. In the ancient world, the line of appropriateness came down to whether one was the dominant or passive partner, the former being all well and good, while the latter was seen as a mark of great shame, and, as with the case of Julius Caesar and Octavian both, the source of frequent political jabs. That all being said though, there were certain mores concerning homosexual interactions that it seems Hadrian, as in everything else he did with his life, flouted with impunity. His choice of partners, his complete abandonment of women, and above all, his willingness to do everything out in the open, bothered the permissive, but subtly so, Roman aristocracy.

And this brings us to Antinous, the boy from Bithynia. How the emperor and the young man met is a matter of historical speculation, but however he became attached to the imperial entourage, be it at Hadrian's specific request, or through some more general order by the emperor to bring all the most beautiful youth to his court, by 125, the 48-year-old Hadrian and the 14-year-old Antinous were likely living together openly in Hadrian's Italian villa. The age difference is shocking to modern sensibilities, but in a world where teenage girls were routinely married to middle-aged men, the gap was not a serious impediment to their relationship. Plus, one of those unstated mores regarding homosexual behavior was that a young man could indulge in a sort of exploratory bisexual period that was often guided by an older man during his teen years. So while the relationship between Hadrian and Antinous was something of a scandal, those exploratory years were supposed to be handled with all due discretion by the older partner, the emperor himself felt no significant pressure to end the relationship. Besides, by all accounts, this was no fling for Hadrian, he appears to have been genuinely in love.

Antinous had been born in 111 in Bithynia, and was, by all accounts, a beautiful young man. It is supposed that sometime around 124, Antinous was enrolled in the imperial page program that trained young men for service as valets, secretaries, couriers, and whatever else the emperor required. It is also supposed that it was around the time Hadrian returned from his first tour of the empire in 125 that Antinous officially joined the imperial entourage. Moving into the emperor's villa, Antinous quickly became the emperor's constant companion, and for the next five years, wherever Hadrian went, so went Antinous.

For all the happiness they shared, though, the couple was headed for a tragedy that we are still at a loss to explain today. In 130, as I said, the imperial court moved south into Egypt, where Hadrian intended to bask in the glow of the most ancient kingdom of the known world. They took in the pyramids and the sphinx, and visited the tomb of Alexander the Great. Then they boarded a grand flotilla that headed up the Nile to the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis and beyond. In October of 130, the flotilla stopped off at Hermopolis to visit an old temple dedicated by Ramses II, and it was while in port there that the drowned body of Antinous washed up on the banks. Hadrian was crushed.

Like I said, no one knows for sure what happened, and I am certainly not going to push some version or another with certainty. Most of the ancient sources report that it was simply an accident while Antinous was off on a swim. But others suppose that Antinous committed suicide, either because he knew that the aged emperor would soon grow tired of him, or, perhaps worse yet, that the emperor would not grow tired of him, and Antinous would be trapped in a shameful pseudo-marriage he could not control. Still others state that Antinous was sacrificed, according to the mystical advice of Egyptian holy men, who told the emperor he could achieve long life if another died in his place. In this last telling, some have it that Antinous willingly gave himself up, some that Hadrian's agents killed the boy in his name, but without his knowledge, and others that Hadrian ordered up the murder himself.

What are we to make of this jumble? Honestly, I don't think anyone knows, but the emperor's reaction to the news seems to belie that he was anywhere near growing tired of the boy, or that he ordered Antinous killed. Because while in mourning, Hadrian founded a city in Antinous's honor at the site where he died. Further, the various astrologers and mystics the emperor often kept hanging around assured the emperor that the new star in the sky he had detected was indeed Antinous, and Hadrian declared that the boy had attained true godhood, and a new cult would be created to worship him. In fact, as it stands, Antinous is one of the most well-known faces of the ancient world, due to the proliferation of statues and monuments Hadrian erected in his honor across the empire.

Eventually, Hadrian's sadness was overtaken by pressing business, but the cult of Antinous spread across the east as local municipalities of every size quickly recognized that an easy way to curry favor with the emperor was to direct a few dollars to the worship of his dead lover. For a while, the cult of the now idealized vision of youthful beauty that Antinous came to represent competed head to head with the emerging cult of Jesus Christ for adherents.

Back in Rome, the news of Antinous' death was accompanied by the news that Hadrian had ordered the boy deified. The senate was taken aback by what they considered to be a double insult. First, there was the fact that a non-imperial family member was being deified. Mothers, sisters, fathers, sons, they were all welcome in the cult of the Caesars, but a nineteen-year-old boy with no legal or familial connection to the emperor, who was by all accounts simply Hadrian's lover? People knew Caligula had really gone round the bend when he threatened to make his horse a consul. Was this really so different? Perhaps the more pressing concern for the senate, though, was that Hadrian, in his grief, had bypassed them completely. Emperors who wanted to stay on the good side of the aristocracy asked the senate's permission to deify dead relatives. It was just good manners. The last emperor to simply declare someone's divinity was Domitian, very early on in his reign. Not that he really cared much right at that moment, but by deifying Antinous, Hadrian suddenly found himself being compared not to Augustus and Trajan, but to Caligula and Domitian.

So, like I said, Hadrian never would get the aristocracy on his side, and when it came time for Antoninus to deify Hadrian after the emperor's death in 137, well, that became something of a protracted struggle. Antoninus finally threatened to resign, forcing the senate to deify his adoptive father or face the prospect of civil war. After laying the foundations of the new city of Antinopolis, Hadrian made his way back down the Nile to Alexandria, and from there seems to have headed for Greece. We don't know whether he returned to Italy at all in the meantime, but Hadrian was definitely in Athens in 132, when news came that a violent revolt had broken out in Judea.

The reason why a rebellion broke out at that precise moment is still unknown, but in general, the Jews had been in a state of apoplexy since Hadrian had wandered through their homeland, all but outlawed their religion, and then rebuilt Jerusalem as some pagan colony. So the fact that an uprising began at all was one of those when, not ifs. One thing we do know is that the revolt was not spontaneous. It was a carefully planned affair that had probably been in the making from the moment Hadrian departed Judea for Egypt. In addition to the network of caves and tunnels the Jewish fighters constructed to offer safe harbor in what was sure to be a guerrilla campaign, the Jewish leadership also hit upon a neat trick to help them secretly stockpile weapons. Following Hadrian's exceedingly high standards for military equipment, local Jewish craftsmen sent in deliberately shoddy weapons to the local Roman garrisons. When the equipment was predictably returned as substandard, it was picked out of the rubbish bin and reworked for use by the Jewish rebels. When the revolt finally did break out, Roman commanders were shocked at how well the Jews were armed.

In 132, prepared as they were ever going to be, the Jewish leader Simon bar Chagba announced that he was the messiah Jewish prophecy had long promised and that he was going to drive the pagans out of Judea and restore the independent kingdom of Israel. At first, the lunatic ravings of yet another Jewish messiah struck the local Roman administrator Tinius Rufus as beneath his time and attention. But it soon became clear that Simon was leading a well-armed and politically unified insurrection force. The two legions at Rufus' disposal sustained heavy damage from the quick and mobile Jewish guerrillas, and reinforcements had to be sent in from Syria and Egypt. But the ineffectiveness of the new arrivals only bolstered Jewish confidence, and the legion from Egypt appears to have been completely wiped out sometime in 133. By this point, the whole province was in revolt, and the regular Jewish fighters found plenty of housing and supplies from non-combatant sympathizers across the country. Simon then declared independence for the new state of Israel, and with the Romans reeling from the unexpected force of the rebellion, the Jewish leadership found themselves in effective control of much of the province. Coins and edicts were issued, marking 132 as year one of a new Jewish state.

But Hadrian was not going to stand by and watch a Roman province simply shrug off their imperial masters. He may have been a skeptic of the efficacy of war when it came to external threats, but internal threats were something else entirely. He ordered his best general, Sextus Julius Severus, to leave his post in Britain and make with all haste for Judea, and pick up as many troops as he felt necessary along the way. Hadrian and Severus' plan was simple, methodically use overwhelming force to crush the insurrection. It took plenty of time, money and men to slowly grind out victory in Judea, but in 135 victory did come. It is reported that no fewer than twelve legions took part in the action that saw the Romans destroy fifty fortified towns and almost a thousand separate villages. In addition to the heavy Roman casualties, almost 600,000 Jews were killed during the retaking of Judea. Severus finally strangled off Simon in the last holdouts in 135, and the legions declared victory.

The devastation and depopulation that accompanied this last Jewish war, a war many scholars mark as the true beginning of the Diaspora, reminds one of Tacitus' famous line which the historian attributed to a British chieftain, that the Romans make a desert, and they call it peace. Surveying this desert, Hadrian decided to double down on his plan to eradicate the Jews and leave in their place a Hellenized population of Greco-Romans. Hadrian's post-war policy then was nothing less than cultural genocide. He banned the Jews from entering Jerusalem, still called Aelia Capitolina, continued his ban on circumcision, outlawed the Hebrew calendar, and prohibited the use of Torah law. The sacred scroll was carried up to the Temple Mount and burned, and for years afterward, Jewish scholars were executed for perpetuating their outlawed religion. As a final reminder that in Hadrian's eyes Judaism was dead, the emperor renamed the province Syria-Palestinia, after the Philistines, an ancient enemy of the Jews.

It is hard to understate the effect all of this had on the future of Judaism. From 135 on, Judea was no longer the cultural, political, or religious center of Jewish life, and would not be again until well into the modern era. The Jewish communities scattered across the Roman Empire were forced to look to an enclave of Babylonian Jews for guidance, safe as those leaders were within the more tolerant borders of the Parthian Empire. As I just mentioned, some scholars mark the true beginning of the Diaspora at Hadrian's victory of 135, rather than by the tame by comparison victory of the Flavians in 70.

For having ordered the death and enslavement of their race, and the eradication of their religion, Hadrian is uniquely despised within Jewish histories, who always follow the emperor's name with the epitaph, May his bones be crushed. Next week, Hadrian will return to Italy, where he will spend the last years of his life decaying into a bitter, agonized mess. Just as his ascension to power had been marked by political murder, so too would his release of it. These violent bookends to the emperor's career were all the proof the Senate needed to become convinced that despite all of his avowed pacifism, generosity, wisdom, and benevolence, that Hadrian was at his core a paranoid psychotic who would kill them all if given half a chance.