We are about to see a Roman emperor in the old Reading Room of the British Museum. Hard on the heels of its highly successful exhibition on China’s first emperor, the museum hosts a show on Hadrian, whose wall in the north of Britain is our answer to China’s Great Wall. The show is part of a series of exhibitions on empires. It is a significant coup for the museum’s visionary director Neil MacGregor and his departmental curators.
In recent years, post-imperial and post-colonial historians have had few positive words for the motives and impact of western empires. It is a neat idea of the British Museum to remind us that there have been many more empires than the British or Spanish and that, often, these empires remain highly praised eras in the national history of countries that most resent the impact of European imperialism on themselves.
Romans in Britain: An expert’s guide to walking Hadrian’s Wall
David McGlade, senior trail officer at Hadrian’s Wall Heritage, has managed Hadrian’s Wall Path since 1995. Here he shares his highlights of the 73-mile wall built by Hadrian in AD122 to consolidate the northernmost frontier of the Roman empire.
“I would start in the east at Wallsend in Newcastle upon Tyne. The viewing tower at the Segedunum Roman fort provides outstanding views of the Tyne and the ruins of a more recent fallen empire, the city’s shipyards.
“Heading out of the city, one of the first stops should be George Stephenson’s birthplace, a cottage that sits next to a former railway line, now a cycleway, and is only less than half a mile from the route (just outside Wylam). This white stone miners’ cottage is furnished to recreate domestic living conditions of 1781, the year Stephenson was born here.
“Further on is Limestone Corner, an abandoned Roman building site, situated three miles from Chollerford. When excavating the north ditch, the Romans found that the dolerite rock there was too hard to quarry and abandoned the task. The site gives a good idea of just how difficult the wall’s construction was for the soldiers and military engineers involved.
“At Walltown Crags, a still visible section of the wall can be found, situated towards the western edge of the national park. Although modern quarrying has chopped some stretches of Hadrian’s Wall into shorter visible lengths, here one short yet impressive segment remains, snaking dramatically on top of the natural rocky defences of the Whin Sill, a striking example of Roman ingenuity and their skilful incorporation of the landscape into their design. This remains a little visited part of the wall, easily accessed from the Walltown recreation site.
“Birdoswald Roman fort is the next location I would recommend along the trail as one of the best preserved sections of wall.
“I would then press on to Lanercost Priory, a hidden Cumbrian gem, which stands close to the wall in a tranquil wooded valley. This Augustinian priory is built mostly from stone scavenged from the wall. Although it was one of the first priories to be dissolved by Henry VIII, today its beautiful 13th-century church remains remarkably well-preserved.
“A good spot to finish your walk is Port Carlisle, a small former port, which lies on the Solway coast a mile from Bowness-on-Solway. Hugely popular with Carlisle Victorians, ‘Port’ is situated in a conservation area and very close to marvellous wetland bird-watching areas. The only sounds are from the wading birds.”
Interview by Elizabeth Kirkwood
There are no ancient Romans left nowadays to cheer the arrival of one of their very own emperors into the cultural heart of a country that he and they once dominated. Instead there are classicists, ever more keen classics-watchers and even the big audiences who somehow continued to watch last year’s television series Rome. Hadrian is an emperor who should certainly make them think.
Hadrian was born in AD76 and ruled as emperor, succeeding Trajan, from 117 to 138. When I wrote my recent history, The Classical World, I chose him as its unifying personality from the age of Homer until his own death nearly a thousand years later. It is not just that Hadrian was the emperor who travelled most tirelessly round an empire that stretched, like none since, from Scotland to Arabia, from modern Portugal to the Black Sea. He knew so much of it first-hand, sleeping and living roughly in the army camps of each province in a way that the empire’s founder Augustus never did.
He was an educated man who liked to score points off practising experts and intellectuals and so took trouble to visit the most famous monuments and sights wherever he went. Nowadays his most famous monument is his huge villa at Tivoli, near Rome, where many of the features were named after great sights in the Greek world, recreated by him as if in a sort of ancient Las Vegas.
What particularly attracted me to Hadrian was that he had an idealised view of the past in a more pronounced way than any emperor before him. He had a sense of a former great classical age, centred above all on Athens of the fifth century BC, the city of the Parthenon, Socrates and the great sculptors and dramatists. Hadrian was a conspicuous friend of the classics while ruling an empire that had actually smothered the life of the classical past he admired. He was, therefore, a classicising emperor, an important aspect of his many-sided personality. He was born in Spain, although his own culture and outlook were in no way Spanish. He was brought up in Rome and, as emperor, he never even went back to his home town near modern Seville.
Nonetheless, the Spanish factor remains. Last summer, the Spanish translation of my history book went to number one in their non-fiction bestseller lists. It hesitated briefly at number two before dislodging a rival called Sex Tips from a Hundred Spanish Professionals, a book I suspect that Hadrian would have enjoyed more than mine.
According to his ancient biographers, Hadrian was a bundle of opposites. He was “both austere and accessible, mean and generous, cruel and merciful, and always changeable”. They make him sound like the boss from hell. Moderns have swung between presenting Hadrian as an intellectual, a lover of all things Greek, or simply a military man of action with an inquisitive mind.
Much dispute surrounds his wearing of a beard, unusual among previous emperors. In antiquity, a beard symbolised a Greek philosopher or wise man but the British Museum prefers the recent reinterpretation that Hadrian’s beard is meant to show him as a military man. I do not agree. Like his personality, his beard may have had several resonances but the Greek one prevails over the military.
The British Museum show is an admirable reminder of how knowledge of someone who died so long ago continues to grow. Last year, news broke of a remarkable find in south-west Turkey of an enormous portrait-statue of Hadrian, one of the hundreds that the local ruling classes in the more civilised cities of the empire created as a calculated honour to the emperor of the moment. Hot from the Turkish soil, this discovery is coming to London in a splendid act of cultural display.
Statues, however, are idealised and they are no guide to the emperors’ true natures. As Edward Gibbon, the great 18th-century historian of the Roman empire, realised, the bloodiest tyrants look so suave when carved in marble. More helpfully for our knowledge of the man, are actual letters from Hadrian that, amazingly, continue to turn up. There is a flow of texts that, because they were copied and inscribed on stone by grateful recipients, archaeologists are still finding. They are informative, though they too are stylised.
“Ancient” history does not only live and acquire new vigour because we continue to find surprising bits of it. It gains new emphases as our own world changes and brings different aspects and questions to the attention of historians. This vitality is one reason for the current surge in interest in the classics among university applicants. Modern scholars have realised how it is both powerfully near to and far from our own world. It helps to take off our natural blinkers. Visitors to the British Museum show will come away with their minds provoked on four headline subjects of their own contemporary world: hunting; homosexuality; an invasion of what is nowadays Iraq; and a “solution” to the problem of Jerusalem. Of course, the context of these issues was not ours but our changing world makes us look on this classicising emperor from new angles.
If Hadrian were still ruling us, he would promptly cancel the British hunting ban. He himself hunted tirelessly on horseback, confronting bears, wild boar and even a lion. In what is now Turkey, he even founded a city and named it Hadrian’s Hunts in honour of some especially good days of bloodsports nearby. All over the empire, his subjects admired him for his prowess on the hunting field. Sadly, no museum can provide Hadrian’s great horse, Borysthenes, to whom the emperor wrote a touching poem as an epitaph. I wish we could resurrect him and take him hunting with Alexander the Great’s beloved Bucephalas.
Like their horses, the sex lives of Hadrian and Alexander invite comparison. Both had beloved male companions: Hadrian the young Antinous, Alexander his famous Hephaestion. The British Museum catalogue simply states that Hadrian was “gay” but, again, the context of his sex life was not ours and we do not know that he never made love to his wife Sabina. She was said to have remarked that she had taken steps to see that she never had children by him because they would “harm the human race”. This story implies that had she not taken such precautions he might have impregnated her and also that the modern term “gay” does not quite do for at least part of his life.
The label better fits the remarkable passion from his 50s onwards that he showed to the adolescent Antinous. He met him in north-west Turkey, perhaps on a day’s hunting, a sport they both enjoyed. In October 130, the boy Antinous drowned in Egypt in the river Nile in circumstances that gossip further enhanced. We do not know the truth but what we do know is that Hadrian promoted honours for the dead boy, which far exceeded even Alexander’s for beloved Hephaestion. Antinous received divine honours as a god. A new city was founded under his name in Egypt. It is telling that Hadrian also named one of the groups of its citizens after Athens, an insight into his classicising love of the city. His love for Antinous was even greater. We have scores of stone statues, which individuals and cities put up in the divine boy’s honour. A new one turned up recently in Spain, where it apparently stood in the residence of a local official, probably the governor of the province. It reminds us how Antinous and his cult became a bandwagon for members of the ruling class, even in their own personal homes.
Above all, Antinous is the focus of the Italian archaeologists’ latest discoveries at Hadrian’s own personal space, his Tivoli villa. They now believe that a large shrine of Antinous stood just beside the main entrance to the entire villa, complete with Egyptian palm trees and a transplanted obelisk. In his final years, Hadrian was still prominently mourning and honouring the boy-love of his life. Every visitor to the villa confronted the shrine head-on.
The catalogue of the exhibition proposes that the affair with Antinous and the resulting cult had political motives as a means of binding the Greek-speaking empire more closely to Hadrian. I do not believe that notion for one moment. It began from a passion and was spread because the emperor wanted it to be spread.
Before meeting Antinous, Hadrian had participated in a disastrous invasion of Iraq by which his predecessor Trajan hoped to win military glory. When Hadrian took power, he withdrew all the Roman troops from a venture that had provoked serious rebellions in the Middle East. His reported justification echoed older Roman wisdom but has come to have an eerie resonance. “They must have their freedom”, he remarked, “because they cannot be protected.”
Notoriously, Jerusalem was not so fortunate. In the 110s, before Hadrian became emperor, Jews in north Africa, Egypt, Cyprus and the near east had taken the chance of rebelling during his predecessor Trajan’s war in the Iraq region. Twenty years on, Hadrian launched his troops against the city and flattened it, even changing its name to a Roman one. He forbade Jews to enter the site and literally took the word Judaea off the map. Some of our modern historians now see Hadrian as simply finishing off the last stage of a process of suppression begun 60 years earlier under the future emperor Vespasian, who presided over the Roman destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Again, I doubt this. The ancient sources are famously unsatisfactory here but Hadrian is explicitly credited with provoking a Jewish revolt by ordering a ban on circumcision. I continue to believe the implication that he had found the practice barbarous and deforming and had banned it without any thought for the consequences. The revolt was all of his own making.
Is this sort of blindness about others what a reverence for a classical past induces in rulers? Certainly not, I would answer. In the true Greek classical age which Hadrian admired, there was a deeply-rooted history of tolerance, personal liberty and respect for fellow citizens as democratic equals. Under Roman rule these fundamental values had been displaced.
By showing friends of the classics that they may be enemies of what they idealise and wish to preserve, Hadrian has another lesson for us today. Often when I visit rich friends of the classics, I am asked to admire collections of antiquities bought without a declared provenance. The buying power of such friends is sometimes encouraging classical art to be looted from its historical context and brought on to the market for their attention. The art-loving Hadrian is an example for them all. His vast villa at Tivoli was filled with classicising sculptures that represented many of the most admired works of art from the classical Greek past. However, so far as we know, the pieces were all first-class copies and there was not a stolen original among them. Hadrian may have flattened Jerusalem but he is the emperor whose collecting is most in keeping with our own British Museum’s code of practice. His imminent stay in its Reading Room is not entirely unjustified.
Robin Lane Fox is University Reader in Ancient History at Oxford and the author of ‘The Classical World: An Epic History of Greece and Rome’ (Penguin £9.99). To buy it for the special FT Bookshop price of £7.99 plus p&p, tel: 0870 429 5884.
‘Hadrian: Empire and Conflict’, sponsored by BP, is at the British Museum from July 24 to October 26
