Hadrian

James Morwood

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780934778
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

The Roman emperor Hadrian, who lived from 76 to 138 AD was a hugely influential figure whose architectural legacy is obvious even today. However, he was also contradictory and mysterious: he was a Spaniard who became emperor at Rome; he was a popular, successful soldier who aimed to be a man of peace. He dabbled in black magic, and he courted scandal: as well as his bitterly unhappy marriage, he had a very public love affair with Greek boy, who died in mysterious circumstances surrounded by rumours of human sacrifice.This title explores these contradictions and complexities, and pieces together the picture of a man, his life, times and influence. It presents a rounded picture written in a lively and accessible style.
Looking in detail at key themes and topics of Hadrian's life, the title explores his Spanish background, his military service and initiatives of peace, his architectural legacy such as the Pantheon, his villa at Tivoli, his love of Athens and Athenian culture, his relationship with Antinous, and how he dealt with Christians and Jews. In addition to this, the title covers social aspects of life in the Roman empire in the second century: slavery, Roman baths and hygiene, the public spectacles of circus races, gladiatorial fights and animal hunts.

ANCIENTS IN ACTION

Boudicca

Marguerite Johnson

Catullus

Amanda Hurley

Cleopatra

Susan Walker & Sally-Ann Ashton

Hadrian

James Morwood

Hannibal

Robert Garland

Horace

Philip Hills

Lucretius

John Godwin

Martial

Peter Howell

Ovid: Love Songs

Genevieve Liveley

Ovid: Myth and Metamorphosis

Sarah Brown

Pindar

Anne Pippin Burnett

Sappho

Marguerite Johnson

Spartacus

Theresa Urbainczyk

Tacitus

Rhiannon Ash

Hadrian

James Morwood

Bloomsbury Academic

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First published 2013

© James Morwood, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

James Morwood has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-7809-3477-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publications Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

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Contents

List of Figures

Introduction

Chronology

1Death on the Nile

2Growing up in Rome and Spain

3Starting Out

4War and Peace

5Rebuilding Rome

6Hadrian’s Villa – the Sunny Pleasure Dome and the Caves of Ice

7Bread and Circuses – Keeping the People Happy

8The Journeys

9Hadrian and Athens

10Antinous

11Christians and Jews

12The End

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Figures

Figure 1 Map of the Roman Empire in 117 AD

Figure 2 Antinous

Figure 3 The young Hadrian

Figure 4 Trajan

Figure 5 A field dressing station

Figure 6 Soldiers of the Praetorian Guard carrying containers of wax tablets for burning

Figure 7 Hadrian as Mars

Figure 8 Hadrian’s Wall

Figure 9 The dome of the Pantheon

Figure 10 The Pantheon

Figure 11 Hadrian

Figure 12 Hadrian’s Villa

Figure 13 The Maritime Theatre at Hadrian’s Villa

Figure 14 Gladiators

Figure 15 The Colosseum

Figure 16 The basilica in the agora of Smyrna

Figure 17 Hadrian in Greek dress

Figure 18 The Temple of Olympian Zeus at Athens

Figure 19 Hadrian’s gate at Athens

Figure 20 Pericles

Figure 21 Sabina

Figure 22 Sabina’s Apotheosis

Figure 23 Polydeuces, Herodes Atticus’ boy favourite

Figure 24 Antinous as Osiris

Figure 25 Hadrian’s Mausoleum, now the Castel Sant’Angelo, and the Pons Aelius

Figure 26 Hadrian

Introduction

This is the shilling life.1 Anthony R. Birley, a leading scholar of the period, published the 400-odd tightly packed pages of his masterly Hadrian, The Restless Emperor in 1997. A particularly impressive feature of his shrewdly insightful book is that he is able to suggest where and in whose company Hadrian may have been at any given stage of his career. A dazzling array of illustrations as well as a fine extended essay on our subject are on offer in Thorsten Opper’s catalogue to the Hadrian exhibition which he mounted in the British Museum in 2008. Among many valuable aspects of this latter publication is the light it casts on the current archaeological state of play. Any modern book on Hadrian will inevitably be greatly in debt to Birley and Opper, and I am delighted to acknowledge how much I owe them. A further entrant to the lists is Anthony Everett, who in 2009 published Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome, again a book of some 400 pages which usefully establishes the context for the emperor’s career. It is a somewhat old-fashioned, gracefully written biography – and none the worse for that.

However, the figure of Hadrian is particularly well suited to the shorter compass of this Ancients in Action series. Like the ‘shilling life’ of W. H. Auden’s poem ‘Who’s Who’, it will give you all the facts, including how ‘Love made him weep his pints like you and me’. So much of what we think we know about Hadrian is in fact uncertain. Admittedly, we have a considerable number of relevant contemporary inscriptions and some illuminating documents on papyrus from Egypt. Unfortunately, however, we possess only two literary sources for Hadrian’s life, both dating from much later. The first is Book 69 of Dio Cassius’ Roman History, a survey which led f...

Table of contents

• Ancients in Action