The World

Trajan’s Iraq war started well. As Hadrian covered his rear in Syria, Trajan, deploying a cosmopolitan army, which was only about 2 per cent Italian and included Arab cameleteers from Palmyra, Balearic slingers and African horsemen under a Berber general Lucius Quietus, found the Parthians in disarray. After swooping on the capital Ctesiphon, he sailed down the Tigris to the Gulf, where he gazed at the ships: ‘I should certainly have crossed to India too if I were still young.’ But the Parthians regrouped, while their allies – the Jews in Alexandria, Cyprus and Judaea – rebelled. Facing an Iraqi insurgency, the sixty-three-year-old Trajan had to fight desperately, ‘his majestic grey head’ attracting enemy fire. Retreating to Antioch, he ordered Quietus to cull the Jews, who were slaughtered and enslaved in huge numbers. The Best Emperor suffered a stroke – though he was convinced he was being poisoned. At his bedside, Empress Pompeia and her niece Matidia forged or coaxed Trajan’s adoption of Hadrian. Anyone who knew too much paid the price. Two days after Trajan’s death, in August 117, his wine taster died aged twenty-eight, as noted on his gravestone – surely more than a coincidence and a hint of dark deeds around the deathbed.

Emperor Hadrian abandoned Trajan’s conquests in Parthia, a sensible decision given that Jewish rebellions were still being suppressed. But he did not trust Quietus, so he had him killed. Then, arriving in Rome, he pre-empted any opposition by executing four ex-consuls.

Hadrian was nicknamed the Greekling, a fan of Hellenistic culture, fashion and love, wearing his full head of hair curled and a well-tended beard, Greek-style. He liked to be an expert on everything: he was certainly one of the most talented of emperors. He wrote witty poetry, possessed the gift of the gab and worked hard. His expeditions from Syria to Britannia make him the best-travelled of monarchs until the age of steam. He was jealous of experts, yet he promoted talented people, enjoying cheeky repartee with poets. When a woman gave him a petition and he said he might not have time to read it, she retorted, ‘Don’t be emperor then.’ He praised her and gave her an audience. But this highly strung and restless emperor was also as lethal as he was subtle, liquidating enemies fast and deploying spies, the frumentari, commissaries, who gave him reports on the personal lives of his subordinates, always useful knowledge. He could be pompous, pedantic and touchy, never forgiving Trajan’s architect, who told him, ‘Be off, and draw your gourds’ – Hadrian was designing domes – ‘you don’t understand these things.’ Hadrian later had him killed.^* And he once stabbed a slave secretary in the eye, blinding him.

While he adored his mother-in-law Matidia, whom he deified on her death (not always the attitude of sons-in-law), his marriage with her daughter Sabina deteriorated, but he insisted on her travelling with him. In 119–21, on a trip to Germania and Britannia, where he built his wall across the north, the relationship hit a crisis. His chief secretary, Suetonius, now forty, born in Africa, a friend of Pliny, was Trajan’s ex-archivist who had sifted the imperial papers to compile his Lives of the Caesars. He was accused of having an affair with Sabina, then in her thirties. Pliny said he was ‘quiet and studious’, but judging by his eye for outrageous material (he was also the author of a vanished masterpiece, Lives of Famous Whores), he was playful company. The historian was sacked – and then vanished. Did Hadrian quietly kill him?

Sabina continued to accompany Hadrian on his travels: in Bithynia, he fell in love with a beautiful Greek boy, the fourteen-year-old Antinous, who became his permanent companion. Travelling in 129 through Judaea and visiting the ruins of Jerusalem, a reminder of the ongoing rebellions by the Jews, he decided to build a shrine to Jupiter on the site of the Temple and a Roman city on the site of the holy city that he renamed Aelia Capitolina (after his own family Aelus and Jupiter’s temple on the Capitoline Hill). Moving on to Egypt, he was celebrating the festival of Osiris – which marks the death of the Egyptian god and his rebirth as the Nilotic waters – when somehow Antinous, now twenty, drowned, whether by accident, suicide, a ritual gone wrong or a sacrifice in return for Hadrian’s life. Poleaxed, Hadrian founded a new city, Antinouspolis, around his lover’s tomb, then established a cult across the empire that celebrated the life-giving death of divine youth. The cult became popular, evidence that a sacred young man offering salvation through his own death and resurrection was a persuasive narrative. But Hadrian’s luck changed in those Nilotic waters.