This statue of Roman Emperor Hadrian, who built Hadrian's wall separating the Roman province of Britannia from the "barbarians" who lived north of the wall, stands at the entry onto the 1897 walkway over the Roman baths.
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"Hadrian (24 January 76 – 10 July 138) was Roman emperor from 117 to 138. Hadrian is known for building Hadrian's Wall, which marked the northern limit of Britannia. He also rebuilt the Pantheon and constructed the Temple of Venus and Roma. Philhellene in most of his tastes, he is considered by some to have been a humanist, and he is regarded as one of the Five Good Emperors.
Hadrian was born Publius Aelius Hadrianus into a Hispano-Roman family. Although Italica near Santiponce (in modern-day Spain) is often considered his birthplace, his actual place of birth remains uncertain. However, it is generally accepted that he came from a family with centuries-old roots in Hispania. His predecessor, Trajan, was a maternal cousin of Hadrian's father.[4] Trajan did not officially designate an heir, but according to his wife Pompeia Plotina, Trajan named Hadrian emperor immediately before his death. Trajan's wife and his friend Licinius Sura were well-disposed towards Hadrian, and he may well have owed his succession to them.
During his reign, Hadrian travelled to nearly every province of the Empire. An ardent admirer of Greece, he sought to make Athens the cultural capital of the Empire and ordered the construction of many opulent temples in the city. He used his relationship with his Greek lover Antinous to underline his philhellenism and led to the creation of one of the most popular cults of ancient times. He spent extensive amounts of time with the military; he usually wore military attire and even dined and slept amongst the soldiers. He ordered military training and drilling to be more rigorous and even made use of false reports of attack to keep the army alert.
Upon his accession to the throne, Hadrian withdrew from Trajan's conquests in Mesopotamia and Armenia, and even considered abandoning Dacia. Late in his reign he suppressed the Bar Kokhba revolt in Judaea, renaming the province Syria Palaestina. In 136 an ailing Hadrian adopted Lucius Aelius as his heir, but the latter died suddenly two years later. In 138 Hadrian resolved to adopt Antoninus Pius if he would in turn adopt Marcus Aurelius and Aelius's son Lucius Verus as his own eventual successors. Antoninus agreed, and soon afterward Hadrian died at Baiae."
And from Encyclopedia Britannica: (
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"Adrian, also spelled Adrian, Latin in full Caesar Traianus Hadrianus Augustus, original name (until 117 ce) Publius Aelius Hadrianus (born January 24, 76 ce—died July 10, 138, Baiae [Baia], near Naples [Italy]) Roman emperor (117–138 ce), the emperor Trajan’s cousin and successor, who was a cultivated admirer of Greek civilization and who unified and consolidated Rome’s vast empire. He was the third of the so-called Five Good Emperors.
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RISE TO POWER
When Trajan was consul in 91, Hadrian began to follow the traditional career of a Roman senator, advancing through a conventional series of posts. He was military tribune with three Roman legions. In about 95 he served with the Legion II Adjutrix in the province of Upper Moesia, on the Danube River, whence he transferred in the next year to Lower Moesia (with the Fifth Macedonica). Toward the end of 97, Hadrian was chosen to go west to Gaul to convey congratulations to Trajan, whom the aged emperor Nerva had just adopted and thereby designated his successor. Trajan’s ward now belonged to the governing circles of the empire. Inevitably, hostility and envy awaited him. In 98 Julius Servianus, his brother-in-law, attempted unsuccessfully to prevent him from being the first to inform Trajan of Nerva’s death. Thereafter, the two men were probably never on cordial terms, for Servianus posed a constant threat to Hadrian’s position.
The greatest single political figure behind the emperor Trajan was the man who had masterminded his elevation, Lucius Licinius Sura. Hadrian enjoyed Sura’s favour, and, as long as he was alive, Hadrian prospered. Trajan’s wife, Plotina, seems also to have been close to Sura and a partisan of Hadrian. For a time Servianus could do no harm. Through Plotina’s favour, Hadrian married Trajan’s grand-niece, Vibia Sabina, in 100. In 101 Hadrian was quaestor and in 102 served as Trajan’s companion in the emperor’s first war in Dacia on the Danube. In 105 Hadrian became tribune of the plebs and, exceptionally, advanced to the praetorship in 106. No less exceptional than the speed of promotion was Hadrian’s service as praetor while in the field with the emperor during his second war in Dacia. In 107 he was briefly governor of Lower Pannonia. Then, in 108, Hadrian reached the coveted pinnacle of a senator’s career, the consulate. In 107 Licinius Sura had held that office for the third time, an honour vouchsafed to very few. It was a cruel blow when Sura died at an unknown date immediately following Hadrian’s consulate.
Hadrian’s career apparently stopped for nearly 10 years. Other promising young Romans suffered a similar retardation at about the same time. It would appear that a new political influence, opposed to Sura, Plotina, and Hadrian, dominated Trajan’s court after Sura’s death. Perhaps Servianus played some role. One fact illuminates this otherwise obscure period of Hadrian’s life: he was archon at Athens in 112, and a surviving inscription commemorating this office was set up in the Theatre of Dionysus. Hadrian’s tenure is a portent of the philhellenism that characterized his reign, and it suggests that in a time of political inactivity Hadrian devoted himself to the nation and culture of his beloved Greeks. Somehow, however, Hadrian’s star rose again, and he returned to favour before the emperor died.
One source says that Hadrian was an officer under Trajan during the Parthian wars at the end of his reign. In 117, when Trajan began his journey westward, Hadrian was left in charge of the crucial army in Syria. Friends of Hadrian, whose careers had been held up, can also be discovered in sensitive commands at the same time, probably because Plotina and her associates had regained Trajan’s confidence. On August 9 Hadrian learned that Trajan had adopted him, the sign of succession. On the 11th, it was reported that Trajan had died on the way to Rome, whereupon the army proclaimed Hadrian emperor. The sequence of events has always provoked suspicion of a conspiracy on Plotina’s part, but the truth will never be known. Certainly, it was Trajan who had taken the fateful step of entrusting the army of Syria to Hadrian.
POLICIES AS EMPEROR
Hadrian wrote to the Senate requesting honours for his adoptive father and ratification of the army’s proclamation; all this was granted. The new emperor began a slow return to Italy. He had to make sure of the crucial provincial commands; it was also expedient to have some dissidents rounded up at home before his return and (he would be able to argue) on someone else’s orders. Trajan’s conquests in Armenia and Mesopotamia were quickly abandoned.
Acilius Attianus, as prefect of the Praetorian Guard, directed affairs in Rome before Hadrian’s return. He ordered the summary executions of four senators of exalted, consular rank, all (it would seem) threats to the security of Hadrian. This bloody prelude to the new regime was unsettling, and Hadrian affirmed it was contrary to his will; he laid the blame on Attianus, just as he often blamed instructions of the dead Trajan for other unpopular acts. When Hadrian reached Rome in the summer of 118, his position was reasonably stable. He courted popular sentiment by public largesse, gladiatorial displays, and a formal cancellation of debts to the state. Attianus, however, was replaced, and his colleague in the prefecture, Sulpicius Similis, was also dismissed. Hadrian installed as prefects the distinguished Marcius Turbo, a general to whom the new emperor owed much, and Septicius Clarus, the patron of Suetonius the biographer. Before many years had passed, both of these men had fallen into disgrace. Hadrian was mercurial or possibly just shrewdly calculating in dispensing favours.
The new emperor remained at Rome for three years. In 121 he set forth on a tour of the empire, west and east, to inspect troops and examine frontier defenses. He went to Gaul and Germany, thence to Britain in 122. From there he moved on to Spain and spent the winter in Tarraco, where he made arrangements for coping with an uprising in Mauretania (Morocco). He next passed eastward, approaching Asia Minor (Anatolia) by the Aegean after an overland trip through the Balkans. He quickly negotiated some problems with the Parthians and then visited northwestern Asia Minor. Returning to the west coast in 124, he sailed to Athens and finally reached Rome again in 125. This prolonged absence from the capital of the empire had its administrative justifications. There had been disturbances in some provinces, and the Parthians had to be dealt with; there was a general need for imperial supervision. Nevertheless, another motive impelled the emperor in his journeys—namely, an insatiable curiosity about everything and everybody. The Christian writer Tertullian called him rightly omnium curiositatum explorator, an explorer of everything interesting. That curiosity was bred of a keen intellect and an anguished spirit. These together drove him inexorably, and by a roundabout path, to the Greek East. After he left Spain early in 123, he never saw the western provinces again. Hadrian soon came to look upon his reign as a new Augustan age. In 123 he began to style himself Hadrianus Augustus, deliberately evoking the memory of his great predecessor; he announced a golden age on his coinage. The peace he so much cherished was a latter-day Augustan peace, and he bequeathed to posterity a public statement of his exploits that imitated the one left by Augustus.
Hadrian spent another three years in Rome, but in 128 he set forth again. After a visit to North Africa, he went to Athens, and from there he sailed to Asia Minor; he penetrated far eastward into Syria and Arabia. Crossing over into Egypt, he explored the Nile; then, for the third time, he went to Athens. It is not certain whether Hadrian returned to Rome in 132 or a little later; he was certainly there in May of 134, but by then a revolt in Judaea forced him abroad still another time. He went to Palestine, not as a tourist but as a commander. That journey was Hadrian’s last.
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The emperor’s travels show the man better than anything else and are marked by some of his most-memorable achievements. In northern Britain he initiated the construction of the tremendous frontier wall that bears his name from Wallsend-on-Tyne to Bowness-on-Solway. At Lambaesis, in Algeria, his rigorous inspection of the troops and his severe standards of discipline can be seen in a long inscription preserving an address he made to the soldiers in 128. In Athens the emperor’s benefactions were numerous. At the Athenians’ request, he had their laws professionally redrafted, and he brought to completion the massive temple of Olympian Zeus that the Peisistratid tyrants had begun more than five centuries before. He created the Panhellenion, a federation of Greeks that was based at Athens, which gave equal representation to all Greek cities and thereafter played a conspicuous part in the history of Roman Greece. At the shrine of Delphi, Hadrian gave his support to a building renaissance. The impact of all this on Hadrian personally cannot be exaggerated. Like Augustus before him, he was initiated into the Greek mystery religion at Eleusis, and, after the temple of Olympian Zeus was dedicated, he assumed the title Olympius.
The irrational element in Hadrian was important. He was an adept in astrology, like many intelligent Romans of the time. He was also an aesthete who ascended Mount Etna, in Sicily, and Jabal Agra?, near Syrian Antioch, simply to watch the sunrise. He had a lively sense of the past, preferring older writers to more recent ones, favouring archaism for its own sake. He revolutionized style in the empire by wearing a beard and setting a precedent for generations of emperors.
In Bithynium-Claudiopolis (modern Bolu) in northwestern Asia Minor, Hadrian encountered a languid youth, born about 110, by the name of Antinoüs. Captivated by him, Hadrian made Antinoüs his companion. When, as they journeyed together along the Nile in 130, the boy fell into the river and drowned, Hadrian was desolate and wept openly. A report circulated and was widely believed that Antinoüs had cast himself deliberately into the river as a part of some sacred sacrifice. Although Hadrian himself denied this, the sober 3rd-century historian Dio Cassius thought it was the truth. The religious character, if such there was, of the relation between Hadrian and the boy is totally elusive. The emotional involvement is, however, quite clear. Seeing Hadrian’s grief, the Greek world strove to provide suitable consolation for the bereaved and honour for the deceased. Cults of Antinoüs sprang up all over the East and then spread to the West. Statues of the boy became a common sight. In Egypt the city of Antinoöpolis commemorated his death."