Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

by Everitt, Anthony

• ISBN13: 9780812978148
• ISBN10: 0812978145
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-09-14
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks

Summary

From the acclaimed author of "Augustus" comes the first major account of the emperor Hadrian in nearly a century. Everitt presents a compelling, richly researched biography of the man whom he calls arguably the most successful of Rome's rulers.

Author Biography

Anthony Everitt, visiting professor in the visual and performing arts at Nottingham Trent University, has written extensively on European culture, and is the author of Cicero and Augustus. He has served as secretary general of the Arts Council of Great Britain. Everitt lives near Colchester, England’s first recorded town, founded by the Romans.


From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpts

Chapter One


Invaders from the West

. . .

This is a tale of two families and an orphaned boy.

The Aelii and the Ulpii had the usual share of irritations and friendships, marriages and estrangements, and their influence on the child lasted for his entire life. He was called Publius Aelius Hadrianus Afer, and he was born on the ninth day before the Kalends of February in the year when the consuls were the emperor Vespasian and his son Titus—that is to say, January 24, a.d. 76. Hadrian (for this is the English version of his name) first saw the light of day in Rome, but his hometown was far away, on the extreme edge of the Roman empire.

Andalusia, in southern Spain, is well sited, for it is the bridge between Europe and Africa and its coastline joins the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. For many centuries it has been among the poorest regions of Europe. Farm laborers there are still among the worst paid in the Continent.

Barren lands and snowcapped mountains alternate with fertile fields watered by the Guadalquivir River, which rolls down the wide valley it wore away from rock through prehistoric millennia and pours itself into the main. A few miles upstream of the fine city of Seville is the undistinguished little settlement of Santiponce. Here, way below tarmac, apartment buildings, and roadside cafes, below the feet of its more than seven thousand inhabitants, lie hidden from view the unexcavated remains of Roman Italica. The population then was about the same as that of today, and the Aelii were among the leading families of this provincial backwater. This was little Hadrian’s patria, his place of origin.

On an eminence overlooking Santiponce, the splendid ruins of New Italica, added on to the original town by the adult Hadrian much later in his life, bake in the sun. Wide avenues, lined with the footings of vanished shady colonnades, crisscross a vast scrubby field, once an opulent and busy urban center but now populated only by a few dusty, undecided butterflies. Along a main street are the foundations of a public baths complex and the mosaic floor, displaying the signs of the zodiac, of a rich man’s villa. Through tall trees, the visitor glimpses one of the empire’s largest amphitheaters, all of it still in place except for some fallen upper arches.

Today’s Andalusia is beginning to recover its long-vanished prosperity, thanks to a revived democracy and membership in the European Union. From a viewing platform over which a nude statue of the emperor Trajan presides, new, snaking motorways look as if they are tying a knot around the ancient monuments; and nearby yet another Italica, this time “Nueva,” is rising from the ground. Blinding white high-rises and empty streets await their first occupants.

Two thousand years ago the region was among the wealthiest of the Roman empire. The Latin name for the Guadalquivir was the Baetis, and the province was called Baetica after it. The great geographer Strabo, writing in the first quarter of the first century a.d., had little time for most of Spain, which he found rugged, inhospitable, and an “exceedingly miserable place to live.” But Baetica was a different story.

Turdetania [another name for Baetica, after its aboriginal inhabitants] is marvelously blessed by nature; and while it produces all things, and in large quantities, these blessings are doubled by the facilities for exporting goods, [including] large quantities of grain and wine, and also olive oil, not only in large quantities, but also of the best quality.

Olive oil sold exceptionally well. A staple of the ancient world, it was part of everyone’s diet as well as being used for indoor lighting, cosmetics, soap equivalents, and medicine. Demand from a large city such as Rome was huge (perhaps as many as 5 million gallons a year were consumed), and Baetican landowners so

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Excerpted from Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome by Anthony Everitt
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