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THE LATE REIGN AND THE SUCCESSION

Though in antiquity Hadrian was best remembered for his relationship with Greek culture and the Greek cities of the eastern Roman empire, he is nowadays most associated with the great wall stretching across the north of modern England – about as far as one could get from the Greek world and still be inside the imperial frontiers. The wall that bears Hadrian’s name was a monumental construction, a series of earth-works and fortifications that used the local topography to its best advantage and symbolically closed off the line of the Tyne–Solway isthmus from South Shields in the east to Bowness in the west.

The emperor marked out frontiers wherever he went, his trip to Germany coinciding with the construction of a frontier infrastructure anchored by massive palisades. While in Spain, Hadrian seems to have suppressed a revolt of the Mauri (presumably Moorish tribesmen from across the straits of Gibraltar in the province of Mauretania Tingitana). He may not actually have crossed the straits himself, but he initiated the development of Tingitania as an urbanised frontier bulwark for the rich and peaceful Spanish provinces. In the same way, deep on the desert frontier of Numidia, Hadrian’s reign marks the earliest phases of another fortified limes, on much the same scale as that of Germany: the camp of Numidia’s garrison, the Legio III Augusta, was transferred fully 150 miles southwards, to Lambaesis, while still another 150 miles south of there a series of artificial walls and trenches were dug in the semi-desert, beyond the Aurès mountain range. These did not so much provide a continuous barrier as a set of channels through which to control the movement of desert nomads into more settled regions during their annual transhumance. Again, in easternmost Pontus at the edge of the Caucasus, various timber fortifications were rebuilt in brick and stone by the Hadrianic governor Lucius Flavius Arrianus (better known to us as Arrian, author of a history of Alexander the Great), who learned at first hand how to repel nomads from the Eurasian steppe if they made it through the Caucasus passes.

North Africa

In a very real sense, the Hadrianic building programmes were what created a stable Roman frontier, and it is not a coincidence that the Latin word limes, which had originally meant ‘military or frontier road’, now began to mean ‘frontier, barrier or border’. Th e fortifications made clear that the infi nitely expansible empire of the fi rst century AD no longer existed; henceforth there would be a Roman empire on the one side and a barbarian world beyond it on the other. The two worlds had always been separate in an ideological and conceptual sense, but Hadrian’s activities fi xed a geographical barrier, more or less permeable depending on circumstances. Walls did not alter the Roman conceit of having mastered the whole world – the Latin orbis terrarum, or the oikumene as Greek philosophers liked to call it – but they foreclosed the prospect of further conquest in a way that the Augustan age would have found inconceivable.

Just as he took care of the frontiers, Hadrian worked hard to provide a model for the troops: in a world where continuous conquest was no longer on the cards, different sorts of activity would have to take its place. In the course of the second century, legionaries turned into construction experts, not just for siege machinery and fortifications, but as road- and town-builders, the engineering corps of the Roman world. Moreover, like a good general, Hadrian set an example of discipline to his soldiers. He marched with the men, he ate the same food, and he eschewed all luxuries in the field and on the march, walking or riding like the rest of the army wherever he went.

We possess an extraordinary inscription revealing, in Hadrian’s own words, what it was like for an emperor (or indeed any commanding offi cer) to inspect his troops. The inscription comes from Lambaesis, the new camp of the Legio III Augusta in Numidia. In it, Hadrian addresses the second cohort of auxiliary cavalry in spring 128. Along with praise for their building skills and combat manoeuvres, he offers criticism of open-order cavalry tactics, deploring them as inherently dangerous and contrary to good military science. Manoeuvres and constant drill were the centrepiece of Hadrianic military discipline.

The orator Fronto, tutor of Hadrian’s adoptive grandson and eventual successor Marcus Aurelius, would – decades later – mock Hadrian for insisting on constantly training his troops while being unwilling to let them off their lead and fight. The irony is real, but so too was Hadrian’s belief in the value of his disciplinary regimen, as is attested by the Tactica of Hadrian’s Greek friend Arrian, whom he had appointed to the vital governorship of Cappadocia near the Armenian frontiers. In Arrian’s little work on military tactics, which he dedicated to the emperor at the very end of his reign, he specifically praises the revival of supposedly long-defunct practices that were good for the troops. Hadrian’s training-heavy example, as it was described by Arrian, was seen as the model of good, old-fashioned discipline right into the fifth century. When emperors appealed to some vague ideal of ancient military conduct, or late antique authors lamented the fallen standards of their own day, they were thinking of Hadrian’s army. A longer-lasting military reform was meant to ensure that recruits for the legions, now permanently garrisoned on the frontiers, could be raised locally. Local recruiting would remain a problem in the frontier zones, where there were few communities of Roman citizens, so long as the historic restriction of legionary service to citizens remained in place. Going right back to republican times, only enfranchised Romans could serve in the legions; non-citizens were recruited into auxiliary units, served longer terms at lower pay, but gained the coveted Roman citizenship upon their honourable discharge. Because of that distinction, frontier regions had tended to supply the auxilia while Italy and the old overseas provinces in Spain, Africa Proconsularis and the islands, had furnished the legions with recruits. Now, by raising one or two cities near the frontier forts to the status of coloniae, Hadrian turned their residents into Roman citizens and ensured a permanent supply of young men eligible for legionary service to the garrisons near where they were born.

If we turn back from these structural reflections to our narrative of Hadrian’s reign, we find the emperor returning to Italy in 125, after four years away and a stop-over in Sicily, which had never before been visited by a Roman emperor. His precise route back to Rome is unknown, but he may well have personally dedicated the victory arch of Trajan at Beneventum (modern Benevento) along the way. By late summer of 125 he was in Rome, and shortly thereafter had retired to his country estates at Tibur (modern Tivoli), where an enormous palace was constructed for him where a rather modest villa had once stood.

The year 126 opened with Annius Verus, urban prefect for the past seven years, as consul for the third time. As we saw, this was a great – indeed now unique – honour for a private citizen. It foretold Hadrian’s eventual predilection for Verus’s grandson, another Marcus Annius Verus, whose father had died and who had then been adopted as a son by his thrice-consular grandfather. This young Annius Verus spent a great deal of time in the company of the emperor, was enrolled as an equestrian at the age of five and became a Salian priest at the age of seven (the Salii were an archaic priesthood revived – or perhaps invented – by Augustus, and concerned with the ritual protection of the Roman army). Because this younger Annius Verus would eventually succeed to the throne as the emperor Marcus Aurelius, some have suspected that Hadrian already considered him a potential successor in the 120s, but there is no clear evidence to that effect. On the other hand, Verus’s family was highly favoured: not just the elder Annius Verus, but both of his sons-in-law, Aurelius Antoninus and Ummidius Quadratus, were consulars and among the empire’s most senior statesmen.

Hadrian found life in Rome very dull after so many years of travelling and, although he stayed in or near the city throughout 126, he spent much of 127 touring the Italian countryside, including the regions north of the Po that were now becoming heavily urbanised centres of imperial administration – a role they would enjoy even more during the coming centuries. In early August 127, Hadrian celebrated his decennalia, the tenth anniversary of his accession, in Rome, and he now also accepted acclamation by the senate as pater patriae, father of his country, an honour he had previously declined. In 128, he travelled for some months to Africa to tour Rome’s provinces there. We know little of his itinerary, but since all the governors of the African provinces were recent appointees, it is possible that he had planned to undertake a thorough peregrination. He definitely visited both Numidia and Mauretania Caesariensis, the long coastal strip of modern Algeria. The emperor strew privileges in his wake, granting colonial status to Utica and providing a major new aqueduct for Carthage. Other cities, too, became coloniae, and many peregrine (non-citizen) communities were raised to municipal status, a half-step towards enfranchisement that gave local municipal officials an automatic right to Roman citizenship. Nevertheless, Africa would remain a patchwork quilt of legal statuses for generations to come, with coloniae, municipia and unenfranchised peregrini all sharing overlapping provincial space; this was in strong contrast to Spain and Gallia Narbonensis, which were by now entirely colonial or municipal, and also to northern Gaul, Britain and the Balkans, which were overwhelmingly populated by non-citizen peregrini.

Before mid-summer 128, Hadrian returned to Italy, but he had no intention of staying there long. Instead, he would once again go to the east. By autumn he was in Athens, where he stayed with Claudius Atticus, who was soon to be honoured with the consulship; his son Herodes Atticus had just returned from his first senatorial posting as quaestor. The emperor again took part in the Eleusinian rites and was now initiated into a higher ritual grade, that of epoptes, which meant that he had not merely taken part in the procession and prayers, but had actually witnessed the mystery itself – whatever that was, for we moderns have no idea. More ambitiously, Hadrian began planning the creation of the Panhellenion, a league or association of all the ‘Hellenes’, centred on Athens and meeting in the Olympeion, the temple of Olympian Zeus begun by Peisistratos back in the sixth century BC and now nearly complete. Unlike any previous Greek league, this one was meant to include every Greek city founded before the age of Alexander, another sign of the imaginary Classical world Hadrian was trying to recreate for Greece. It is impossible to doubt the emperor’s enthusiasm for this project, which was reciprocated by his Greek subjects who henceforth referred to him as Sebastos Olympios, the Olympian Emperor.

When he left Athens for the east in 129, Hadrian was accompanied by many of the Hellenic intellectuals and grandees whose company he enjoyed, among them Julia Balbilla, widow of the prominent Athenian Philoppapus and a friend of the empress Sabina. Hadrian’s sister Paulina may have travelled with the imperial party as well, though his brother-in-law, Paulina’s husband Julius Servianus, remained in Rome. The imperial party travelled from Athens to Ephesus and then through the southern provinces of Asia Minor. We can find evidence of Hadrian in Caria, as well as further inland in Phrygia and Galatia, then moving via Cappadocia to Lycia and ultimately to Syria on the other side of the Taurus mountains. He spent some time in Antioch, showering the city with privileges, but he also honoured other Syrian cities, among them Tyre, Damascus and Samosata. All three were now, like Antioch, permitted to call themselves by the Greek title metropolis, as jealously guarded a status as that of neokoros.

While in Syria, the emperor’s Hellenism took a new and dangerous turn, as he intervened in a quarrel between local Jews and Greeks. Both communities had special privileges under Roman rule, but they also had a long-standing mutual dislike, which surfaced whenever they were forced to live together. Hadrian came down precipitately on the Greek side. In a harshly worded edict that reeked of Hellenic anti-Judaism, Hadrian forbade circumcision, thereby outlawing a central part of Jewish ritual practice. He also decided to rebuild Jerusalem – destroyed by Vespasian and Titus after the Jewish revolt of the 60s AD – as a Roman colonia, placing a temple of Jupiter Capitolinus on the site where the Jewish temple had once stood. Offensive as that was, it was really the ban on circumcision that sparked the last and most brutal Jewish rebellion against Roman rule.

Hadrian spent the winter of 129–30 in Syria, venturing as far east as the caravan oasis of Palmyra in the Syrian desert, before travelling via Arabia and Judaea to Egypt in the summer of 130. He went overland from Gaza to Pelusium and, as noted above, he entertained his historical predilections at the latter site by reconstructing Pompey’s tomb and inscribing his own verse on it. He was in Alexandria in August, where he restored to the city the privileges it had lost after the Jewish revolt of 116–17, and he conversed there with the scholars of the Ptolemaic Museion (whence comes our own word ‘museum’). He also probably visited the double-legionary camp at Nicopolis. This housed the Legiones XXII Deiotariana and the II Traina, which together made up the whole Roman garrison of Egypt. His plan was to sail upriver into Upper Egypt after the Nile’s annual flood subsided.

Hadrian’s visit to Egypt was a long one, and rather different from his earlier tours. In Egypt, there were very few Greeks and very few Greek communities on whom he could lavish the privileges he had showered across the rest of the eastern provinces. He had therefore to exercise his philhellenism in a different way, by founding a brand new Greek polis. It would possess all the urban institutions of a proper polis and it would stand as one of just four Greek cities in Egypt, alongside Alexandria, Naucratis and Ptolemais. The rest of Egypt was a sea of native villages that had changed relatively little since Alexander’s successor Ptolemy took over from the last pharaohs and retained most of the pharaonic dispensation rather than remake it in the Greek image. Hadrian’s plan for a new Greek city was an important early step in the Romanisation of Egypt, or rather its Hellenisation within a Roman imperial mainstream, that we will return to in our discussion of the third century.

Hadrian’s Egyptian tour went on to Naucratis and Ptolemais, the other Greek cities of the north, and then started up the Nile late in 130, beginning at Heliopolis, the birthplace of the mythical Phoenix, near where the river starts to spread out into its gigantic delta. Further upriver, the pyramids and sphinxes of Memphis had been a tourist destination for Greeks, and later Romans, for half a millennium and we have evidence that the imperial touring party of 130 followed in the footsteps of earlier visitors by carving its graffiti – names and doggerel verse – on the Great Pyramid. From Memphis, they continued on to Oxyrhynchus, an important administrative centre for Middle Egypt and a site in whose sands are preserved many of the papyri on which our understanding of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt is based. In October, they reached Hermopolis, the site of the temple of Thoth, identified with the Greek god Hermes, which was another frequent tourist destination for curious Greeks and Romans. Here, Hadrian was able to witness the great festival of the Nile, which commemorated the self-sacrifice of the Egyptian god Osiris who was responsible for ensuring the Nile flood and thus the fertility of Egypt itself.

It was at Hermopolis that disaster struck. Hadrian travelled with a large party, not least his wife Sabina and her entourage of learned women. The emperor’s own personal companion was the Bithynian boy Antinous. We learn very little of Antinous in contemporary literary sources and, for that reason, he has been the source of much modern conjecture, not least the homerotic romance made famous in Marguerite Yourcenar’s 1951 novel, Memoirs of Hadrian. That Antinous was the love of Hadrian’s life can hardly be doubted, but the historical record leaves him a blank slate on to which modern scholars can project their own visions. He may have been travelling with Hadrian since the visit to Bithynia in the early 120s, but there is no proof of that. If he did, we have no idea how public their companionship was or whether Antinous was given some minor Roman office to keep him busy. Scholars also differ over whether Hadrian was publicly endorsing the kind of romantic love between males that was central to the Classical Athenian culture to which he was so devoted. If he was, then Hadrian was playing erastes to Antinous’ eromenos, in a paternal and nurturing, but also actively homosexual, love affair between adult man and adolescent boy. The one thing of which we can be absolutely sure is that Antinous was Hadrian’s favoured hunting companion and that his death by drowning in the Nile at Hermopolis occasioned an outpouring of public grief quite alien to Roman emperors. There were hostile rumours that the boy’s death was voluntary, a magical recreation of the death of Osiris perhaps designed to restore Hadrian’s health or ensure his long life, and Hadrian had to insist on the accidental nature of the drowning. What we do know is that Hadrian finally decided to found his new Greek city here, opposite Hermopolis on the right bank of the Nile, and to call the province’s fourth autonomous city Antinoopolis after his dead favourite.

Grief did not prevent the imperial party from continuing its journey, which progressed in November south to Ptolemais, Thebes and Philae, and visiting the famous singing statue of Memnon (the Pharaoh Amenophis III) at Thebes; here, as at Memphis, they commemorated their passage with verse scribbled on the singing statue itself. Before the year was out, Hadrian was back in Alexandria, where the official deification of Antinous was promulgated and spread almost instantly throughout the Greek east. For the Egyptian audience the dead boy was assimilated to Osiris, and we have a hieroglyphic monument to a new hybrid deity Osirantinous. Elsewhere, though, Greeks had long been happy to accept the divinisation of mortals and the cult of Antinous joined many others, his statues reproduced from one end of the empire to another, the whole Roman world thereby sharing in the emperor’s private grief.

Hadrian began the new year of 131 in Alexandria, before returning to Syria and taking a journey by land up to Cilicia and Pamphylia in south-eastern Asia Minor. From the south coast, Hadrian went by ship to Ephesus, which was now made twice neokoros, and then ventured into the far north of the province of Asia on the border of Bithynia. There, it can be conjectured, he paid his respects at Bithynium, the home of Antinous, but soon there was more bad news – Hadrian’s sister Paulina had died and was now honoured as Diva Paulina. Hadrian was again making for Athens, where he overwintered in 131–2, participating in the Eleusinian mysteries for the third time. In the spring of 132 he celebrated the dedication of the temple of Olympian Zeus, so many centuries delayed, and inaugurated the first Panhellenion, his great festival of all the Greeks.

All the while, however, trouble had been brewing in Judaea. Hadrian’s prohibition of circumcision, his rebuilding of the Jewish temple as a Greek cult site and the foundation of a Roman colonia where the ancient Jewish capital had once stood together proved too great a provocation. For several years Jewish militants had been stockpiling weaponry, fortifying remote strongholds and planning rebellion. In 132 the storm broke and the Roman legate Tineius Rufus found it impossible to fight an enemy who refused to meet his legions in open battle and relied instead on guerrilla warfare from hidden bases. The governor of Syria brought in reinforcements, but the Romans were soon suffering massive casualties. The initial success of the revolt seems clearly to have been the result of its coherence and unity, under the authority of a single ‘prince of Israel’, Shimon bar Kokhba, known as Bar Cochebas in much later Christian sources written in Greek. Contemporary Greek and Roman writers do not so much as mention his existence, but the Romans clearly understood the messianic cast of the rebellion and struck directly at the Jews’ religious leaders. Bar Kokhba was supported by the rabbi Akiba, one of the most influential of the post-Flavian rabbis, and he and many others lost their lives as the legions suppressed the rebels.

Their unity and military prowess is what separates this revolt from that of 116–17 under Trajan: despite its disruptiveness, that earlier revolt was put down relatively easily and ended in the annihilation of the Jewish population in provinces such as Cyrenaica. During the Bar Kokhba revolt, by contrast, the rebels actually took control of provincial territory and held it for several years, until 135. We do not know that they ever took Jerusalem, but they certainly did force Hadrian to return briefly to Judaea in person and to summon his best general, Sextus Julius Severus, from faraway Britain. A man skilled at handling difficult natives, he was now meant to bring his expertise to the Jewish revolt. Tineius Rufus had already been wreaking reprisals on the Jewish civilian population, but Severus continued this policy and extended it, adopting small unit tactics, cutting off rebel outposts, starving or smoking them out, and then massacring them indiscriminately. Hundreds of Jewish villages were wiped off the map, hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed, and many more enslaved. It was a return to the methods of subjugation that had characterised early phases of Roman expansion and it was one that would have a long future along the northern frontiers, where the periodical sowing of terror among native populations was thought to be the best means of controlling them.

In Judaea, it took until 135 and the death of Shimon bar Kokhba for the last Jewish fortress to fall. After that, Jews were forbidden to enter the territory of Aelia Capitolina, the Roman colonia on the site of Jerusalem. Within a few years of the end of the war, even the provincial name Judaea was erased – the province was henceforth called Syria Palaestina.

While Julius Severus continued to deal with the revolt, Hadrian returned to Italy via the Balkans. He was back in Rome by May of 134, in which year his widowed brother-in-law Julius Servianus achieved his third consulate. This honour, though long delayed, may have been a sign of Hadrian’s plans for the succession, since he was ageing fast and generally in ill health. The year 137 would mark his vicennalia, the twentieth anniversary of his accession. He was the first emperor since Tiberius to have reigned so long, although no one at the time would have made so unflattering a comparison explicit. Hadrian was now actively planning for his death, building a gigantic mausoleum in the Ager Vaticanus, across the Tiber from the Campus Martius: it is the monument now known as the Castel Sant’Angelo after its conversion to a papal fortress during the Middle Ages. Planning for the succession, unlike planning for the mausoleum, was a disaster, thanks to Hadrian’s failing health and his alienation from many old friends at this time. Hadrian was childless and had done even less than Trajan to signal his choice of heir. In the later 120s, his great-nephew, Pedanius Fuscus – the grandson of Paulina and Julius Servianus, whose father, another Pedanius Fuscus, had probably died soon after his consulship in 118 – imagined himself to be heir presumptive. As the emperor’s nearest male relative, the younger Fuscus had travelled with Hadrian to Greece. But back in Rome, compelled by health to choose a successor, Hadrian passed Fuscus over.

Instead, in his vicennalia year, Hadrian adopted as his son one of the year’s consuls, a young senator of Gallic origin named Lucius Ceionius Commodus. Hadrian renamed him Lucius Aelius Caesar at his adoption. The choice was unpopular, perhaps because it was inexplicable. Commodus was a virtual unknown. His sole recommendation was that he was married to a daughter of Avidius Nigrinus, one of the four Trajanic consulars executed back in 118. Some argue that the adoption was Hadrian’s way of expiating that crime, but that is far-fetched: the imperial rationale must remain a mystery. The frustrated Pedanius Fuscus took poorly to the adoption of Lucius, and Hadrian had him put to death in 137. His 90-year-old grandfather, Hadrian’s brother-in-law Julius Servianus, was forced to commit suicide; at least two other forced suicides are named, and we are told that there were ‘many other deaths’ as well. Hadrian’s unloved wife, the Augusta Sabina, also now died – a natural death, despite inevitable rumours of poisoning – and she was duly deified by the senate.

Hadrian’s reign was poised to end in the same high-profile bloodshed with which it had begun, when the sudden death of Aelius Caesar revealed the pointlessness of it all. He had been sent to the armies on the Danube both to get some military experience and to impress a sense of dynastic continuity on the soldiers. Tubercular even before he left, the Balkan weather did him no good. When he returned to Rome late in 137, on the night before he was meant to address the senate, he fell sick and died before the morning, coughing blood. He left behind a 6-year-old son, also named Lucius Ceionius Commodus, and a daughter, Ceionia Fabia, who was already betrothed to the younger Marcus Annius Verus (that is, the future emperor Marcus Aurelius).

Hadrian moved quickly to name an alternative successor. He turned sixty-two on 24 January 138, and was by then himself dying of tuberculosis, disturbed by wild dreams, and sometimes too ill to come to the senate house. The new heir was Aurelius Antoninus, like the late Aelius Caesar a man of southern Gallic descent, but anything but an unknown. On the contrary, he had a long and unexceptionable history of service in the senate. Born in 86, he was the maternal grandson of the great marshal Arrius Antoninus, who had been consul for the second time in the year 97, when Trajan was adopted by Nerva. By the year 110 he had married Annia Faustina, daughter of the thrice-consular Annius Verus, and was thus launched on a career among the luminaries of the Hadrianic age. Antoninus was allowed to keep his name upon his adoption, but he was also made to adopt two heirs. One, Lucius Aelius Ceionius Commodus, was the son of the dead Aelius Caesar, and now renamed L. Aurelius Commodus; he was betrothed to the younger Faustina, daughter of Antoninus and Annia Faustina. The other was the 16-year-old Marcus Annius Verus, already Antoninus’s nephew by marriage, who had been favoured since his birth in 121 and was betrothed to Ceionia Fabia, daughter of the dead Aelius Caesar. Now, with his adoption by Aurelius Antoninus, he was to change his name to Marcus Aurelius Verus, uniting in his person and family the great clans of Trajanic Rome: his mother, Domitia Lucilla, was an heiress of enormous personal wealth, and his sister, Annia Cornificia, was married to Ummidius Quadratus, one of Hadrian’s favoured generals.

With these multi-generational adoptions, Hadrian would in effect fix the imperial succession for at least two, perhaps three future reigns. Antoninus, we are told in the desperately scant literary evidence for this period, hesitated a long time before accepting what Hadrian was offering him. This was more than the gesture known as recusatio imperii, a show of reluctance and feigned refusal that even the most avid aspirant to the purple was meant to display. Antoninus was a modest man. He may genuinely have preferred the privileged life of a blameless senator to the responsibilities of imperial rule. But a blameless senator was also a dutiful one and, on 24 February 138, a month after Hadrian’s birthday, the adoption ceremony went ahead and Aurelius Antoninus became T. Aelius Caesar Antoninus. He received the title imperator as a type of praenomen or first name, implying that he had already received a military acclamation as emperor, and was given the tribunician power, an essential part of the package of powers that made up imperial authority. He never did stop using his own nomen Aurelius, and was designated for the consulship of 139, his second.

Important men who opposed this succession, or were thought to do so, now went into retirement, and the old praetorian prefect Marcius Turbo, who had been there since the very start of Hadrian’s reign, was finally relieved of his post. Turbo’s anomalous role as sole prefect was allowed to set no precedent, and the office now reverted to two prefects, Gavius Maximus and Petronius Mamertinus, both of whom could be trusted to support the succession plans. They would ensure a smooth transition in government, for Hadrian’s death was fast approaching. Dropsy had set in, and he is said to have begged for someone to kill him, by poison or the sword: his personal physician committed suicide rather than administer a killing draught. Unable to die and in great misery, Hadrian set about writing an autobiography in imitation of Augustus: the work itself has not survived, but it was used as a source by authors whose work we possess. Death finally came on 10 July 138 at Baiae, a holiday resort on the coast of the bay of Naples. Antoninus was at the emperor’s side. Hadrian died, as a later author put it, ‘hated by all’.

The executions at the end of his reign, recalling as they did the executions at its start, had left only bitter memories. The emperor was buried temporarily at one of his villas in Campania, to await the completion of his mausoleum in Rome. In the city itself, Hadrian’s adoptive grandson Marcus sponsored the gladiatorial games that traditionally accompanied the mourning for a Roman of status, but he did so in his capacity as a private citizen, using his family’s own inheritance, the pious duty owed to a revered ancestor. With the death of Hadrian, our main story can begin. These preliminaries have been necessary because the networks of marriage, patronage and inheritance that stretch from the Flavians, through the reigns of Nerva and Trajan, and into that of Hadrian definitively shaped the next fifty years of Roman history.