~72 min read • Updated Mar 25, 2026
Nerva
With the murder of Domitian, the principle of hereditary succession disappeared from the Roman imperial stage for a century. The Senate had never accepted heredity as the source of sovereignty; and now, after one hundred and twenty-three years of submission, it once more placed its power upon the throne. Just as in the beginning of Rome it had chosen the king, so now it named one of its own members as senior senator and emperor. This was a courageous act, and it becomes intelligible only when we remember that the power of the Flavian house, in the very generation that had seen the revival of senatorial authority purchased with the blood of the people of Italy and the provinces, had been extinguished.
Marcus Cocceius Nerva was sixty-six years old when the imperial dignity surprised him. The colossal statue of Nerva in the Vatican shows a handsome and manly face. No one would guess that this same man had been a distinguished jurist with a weak stomach, a mild and popular poet whom people had once congratulated as “our Tiberius.” Perhaps the Senate had chosen him because of his gray hair and his harmlessness. Nerva consulted the Senate on every policy he adopted and never broke his pledge that he would cause the death of no senator. He recalled Domitian’s exiles, restored their property, and thus moderated their revenge. He distributed land worth 60,000,000 sesterces among the poor and established a fund to assist and encourage the birth and rearing of children among the peasants. He abolished many taxes, reduced the inheritance tax, and freed the Jews from the tribute that Vespasian had imposed upon them. Meanwhile he restored the financial position of the state by practicing economy in the court and the government. He rightly thought that he had been just to all classes, and he said:
I have done nothing that would prevent me from laying down the imperial office and returning with an easy mind to private life.But a year after his accession the praetorian guards, who had been surprised by his nomination and were disgusted with his economies, surrounded his palace, demanded the murderers of Domitian, and killed several of Nerva’s advisers. He offered his throat to the soldiers’ swords, but they refused it. Feeling the humiliation, he wished to resign; but his friends persuaded him, instead of resigning, to take Augustus as his model and adopt as son and successor a man acceptable to the Senate and able to rule both the empire and the praetorian guard. Rome’s greatest debt to Nerva was that he chose Marcus Ulpius Trajan as his successor. Three months later, after a reign of sixteen months, he died.
The principle of adoption, thus accidentally revived, meant that every emperor, when he felt his powers failing, would associate with himself in government the ablest and worthiest man he knew, so that when death came there would be neither the folly of excited praetorians, nor the danger of a natural but worthless heir, nor civil war between rivals for the throne. Rome was fortunate in that Trajan had no son, nor Hadrian, nor Antoninus Pius, and each of these three men was able to practice the principle of adoption without slighting his own offspring or wounding paternal affection. During the time that this principle was applied, Rome received “the best succession of good and great kings that the world has ever seen.”
Trajan
Trajan was at the head of the Roman army in Cologne when he received news of his appointment to the empire. With the qualities he possessed, it was not surprising that he continued his work on the frontier and postponed his return to Rome for almost two years. He came of an Italian family that had long resided in Spain. He was born in that land. Roman Spain reached political supremacy through him and Hadrian, just as it had reached literary leadership in Seneca, Lucan, and Martial. He was the first of a line of military leaders whose birth and upbringing in the provinces apparently gave them that will and zest for life and vitality that had departed from the native stock of Rome. That Rome raised no protest against the elevation of a provincial to the imperial throne is itself an event and a sign in Roman history.
Trajan always remained the military commander. His bearing and gait were military and his presence inspired obedience. The lines of his face were not distinguished, but strong. Tall and powerfully built, he was accustomed to march with his soldiers and to plunge with full equipment into the dozens of rivers that lay across their path. His courage showed that indifference to death and life characteristic of ascetic people. When he heard that Licinius Sura was plotting to kill him, he went to dinner at Sura’s house, ate whatever was given him without examination, and allowed Sura’s barber to shave him. Technically he was not a philosopher. Usually he took the golden-mouthed orator Dio with him in his chariot to converse with him on philosophy, but he confessed that he understood not a word of Dio’s utterances. — Alas for philosophy. He had a clear and sound mind, within human limits; he spoke so little nonsense that it was surprising. Like all human beings he was vain, but he was completely free from the notion that what he said was always right. He never abused his office, joined his friends at table and on the hunt, drank heavily with them, and sometimes indulged in pederasty, as if performing that act in homage to the customs of his time. Rome thought it praiseworthy that he never, by love affairs with other women, disturbed his wife Plotina.
When Trajan reached Rome at the age of forty-two he was at the height of his physical and mental powers. His simplicity, good nature, and moderation easily won over a people that had only recently become familiar with tyranny and oppression. The Senate chose Pliny the Younger to deliver the address of welcome. At about the same time Dio Chrysostom read before the emperor an oration on the duties of a ruler from the Stoic point of view. Both Pliny and Dio in their addresses drew a distinction between “despotic rule” and “leadership.” That is, the emperor should not be the lord of the estate but its chief servant and the representative of the people’s will as expressed by their delegates, the senators. Pliny said in his address: The ruler of all should be chosen by all. Trajan listened courteously.
This kind of gracious beginning was nothing new in history; what surprised Rome was that he fulfilled their promises abundantly. He turned over to his assistants and colleagues the villas in which his predecessors had spent a few weeks each year; Pliny the Younger says: He considered nothing his own except what his friends possessed. But he himself lived in simplicity like Vespasian. On all matters of importance he consulted the Senate and found that, even if he never used the language of an absolute ruler, he could exercise almost absolute power. The Senate was willing to leave him to govern as he pleased provided he observed the formalities that preserved the dignity and prestige of the Senate; the Senate, like all Rome at this time, loved security too much to be free. Perhaps it was also glad that Trajan was cautious and had no intention of burdening the rich to court the poor.
Trajan was an able and tireless administrator, a master of financial accounts, and a just judge. In the summary of Justinian’s laws this principle is attributed to Trajan: It is better that the guilty should go unpunished than that the innocent should be condemned. By careful supervision of expenditures (and some profitable conquests) he was able to complete vast and extensive public buildings without increasing taxes; on the contrary, he reduced taxes and published the budget so that the revenues and expenditures of the state might be open to examination and criticism. He asked the senators who enjoyed his friendship to be almost as devoted to administrative work as he was himself. Many eastern cities had managed their finances so badly that they had reached the verge of bankruptcy, and Trajan sent commissioners like Pliny the Younger to help and supervise them. This procedure weakened municipal independence and institutions, but there was no alternative. Autonomy, with extravagance and incompetence, had cut its own throat.
The emperor, who had been bred in war, was an outspoken imperialist who preferred order to liberty and power to peace. Not a year had passed since his entry into Rome when he set out to conquer Dacia. Dacia, which in general is Romania of 1940, was like a fist thrust into the heart of Germany, and therefore had great military value in the struggle that Trajan foresaw between the Germans and Italy. Its annexation to Rome would give Rome control of the road that ran from the river Save to the Danube and from there to Byzantium — a very valuable land route toward the East. In addition, Dacia had gold mines. In a campaign whose plan was excellently drawn and swiftly executed, Trajan led his armies through all obstacles and resistances to Sarmizegetusa, the capital of Dacia, and forced the city to surrender. A Roman sculptor has left a meaningful portrait of Decebalus, king of Dacia — a noble face with power and character. Trajan restored him to the throne as a vassal king and returned to Rome (102). But Decebalus soon broke his treaty and resumed his independent rule. Trajan again led his armies into Dacia (105), built a bridge across the Danube that was one of the engineering wonders of that century, and again attacked the Dacian capital. Decebalus was killed, a strong garrison was stationed to hold Sarmizegetusa, and Trajan returned to Rome to celebrate his victory with games lasting 123 days in which 10,000 gladiators (probably prisoners of war) took part. Dacia became a Roman province, received Roman colonists who came to claim land, the Dacians intermarried with them, and Latin was corrupted into their Romanian form. The gold mines of Transylvania were placed under the direction of an imperial procurator and soon paid the material cost of the war. Trajan, to reward himself for his labors, carried away from Dacia a million pounds of silver and half a million pounds of gold — the last substantial plunder that armies brought for the luxury of Rome.
With this booty the emperor paid 650 denarii (260 dollars) to every citizen who asked for it — probably 300,000 persons applied, and enough remained to cure the unemployment caused by the discharge of soldiers with the greatest program of public buildings, state aid, and architectural adornment that Italy had seen since the time of Augustus. Trajan repaired old aqueducts and built a new one that still functions. At Ostia he constructed a vast harbor connected by waterways with the Tiber and the Claudian harbor, and adorned it with warehouses that were models of beauty and utility. His engineers repaired old roads. They built a new road across the Pontine marshes and constructed the Via Traiana from Beneventum to Brundisium. They reopened the Claudian canal that drained Lake Fucinus, cleared the harbors of Centumcellae and Ancona of silt and mud, built an aqueduct for Ravenna and an amphitheater for Verona. Trajan provided and paid for roads, bridges, and new buildings throughout the empire. But he checked architectural rivalry among the cities and encouraged them to spend their surplus revenue on improving the condition and environment of the poor. He was always ready to help any city that had suffered from earthquake, fire, or storm. He tried to advance agriculture by requiring senators to invest one third of their capital in Italian land; and when he saw that this policy was extending the system of vast estates into few hands, he encouraged small proprietors by advancing state money at low interest for the purchase and improvement of land and houses. To increase the birth rate he enlarged the allowances to peasants, gave government mortgage loans to Italian farmers at five per cent (half the usual rate), and allowed local charitable boards to distribute the interest at the rate of sixteen sesterces (about $1.60) a month for each boy and twelve for each girl among needy peasant families. The sums seem small, but present observations indicate that sixteen to twenty sesterces were sufficient to maintain a child on Italian farms in the first century A.D. With similar hope Trajan allowed the children of Rome, in addition to the grain given as charity to their fathers, to receive a charitable grain allowance. The alimenta system (peasant child support) was extended by Hadrian and the Antonines and included several parts of the empire. Private philanthropists also contributed to it, as Pliny the Younger gave 30,000 sesterces a year for the children of Comum, and Caecilia Macrina left a million sesterces for the same purpose for the children of Tarracina in Spain.
Trajan, like Augustus, preferred Italy to the provinces, and Rome to Italy. He made full use of the architectural genius of Apollodorus of Damascus, who had designed the new roads and aqueducts and the bridge over the Danube. The emperor now commissioned him to demolish and clear large sections of the city on which houses had been built, and ordered him to cut away forty meters from the base of the Quirinal hill and, on this space and the adjacent area, to build a new forum equal in area to the sum of the previous forums and surrounded by buildings worthy in splendor and majesty of a capital that had reached the height of its power and wealth. One entered the Forum of Trajan through the Arch of Trajan. The interior of the forum, measuring 113 by 108 meters, was paved with smooth stone, and surrounded by a high wall and a colonnade; the western and eastern walls were enclosed by semicircular halls formed of Doric columns. In the center of the new forum rose the Basilica Ulpia, named after Trajan’s clan and intended as a center for trade and finance. Its exterior was adorned with fifty monolithic stone columns; its floor was of marble; its vast hall was surrounded by black stone columns; and its roof, with massive beams, was covered with bronze. Near the northern end of the new forum two libraries were built, one for Latin works and the other for Greek. Between these two libraries stood Trajan’s Column and behind them the Temple of Trajan. When the forum was completed it was counted among the wonders of the architectural world.
Trajan’s Column, which still stands, was of prime importance for the transportation of materials. It was made of eighteen cubic blocks of carved marble, each weighing about fifty tons. The stone blocks were brought by ship from the island of Paros, transferred at Ostia from ship to barge, carried against the current of the river, hauled up the slope beside the river on rollers, and taken through the streets to the building site. Each stone block was cut into thirty-two pieces: eight pieces formed the base of the column; three sides of the base were decorated with sculpture; the fourth side was the entrance to a staircase consisting of 185 steps. The shaft of the column, which at its lower end was 3.65 meters in diameter and 29.5 meters high, was composed of twenty-one stone blocks, and on its summit stood a statue of Trajan holding the globe of the world. The stone blocks were decorated, before being put in place, with bas-reliefs of the Dacian campaign. These reliefs represent the highest point of Flavian realism and historical sculpture in antiquity. Their aim is not the calm beauty or imaginative types of Greek sculpture; their aim is rather to depict real scenes and the clash of war. The posture of these figures compared with that of Greek figures is like the works of Balzac and Zola after Corneille and Racine. In the 2,000 figures of these 124 winding panels we follow the conquest of Dacia step by step: Roman battalions leaving camp with full equipment, crossing the Danube on a bridge made of flat boats, pitching a Roman tent in enemy territory, a mêlée of arrows, spears, scythes, and stones, the burning of a Dacian village while women and children beg Trajan for mercy, Dacian women torturing Roman prisoners, surgeons treating the wounded, Dacian emperors one by one drinking the cup of poison, the head of Decebalus brought as a trophy to Trajan, and a long line of women and children carried from their homes into Roman slavery — in reliefs that masterfully tell a story in the history of sculpture, what we have said and other things are narrated. These artists and their employers were not excessively patriotic; they show Trajan’s merciful acts, but at the same time they portray the heroic aspects of a nation’s struggle for freedom; the most beautiful forms in this scroll are those of the Dacian king. These reliefs are a marvelous document; to be fully effective, more individuals and events are reflected in them than should be. Some of the figures are so crude and unfinished that one suspects they may have been carved by a Dacian warrior. Because of ignorance of the science of perspective and its application in sculpture, the figures are primitively placed high and on top of one another, and the whole relief, like the frieze of Phidias, is visible only by means of a joking dove that flies up from the ground. This was an interesting deviation from the classical style whose rigidity had never expressed the intense vitality of the Romans. Its “continuous method” — in which each scene melts into the next — continued the experiments of the Arch of Titus and opened the way for the reliefs of the Middle Ages. Despite its defects, this repeatedly winding story was imitated again and again: from the Column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome and the Column of Arcadius in Constantinople to Napoleon’s column in the Place Vendôme in Paris.
Trajan completed his building program by finishing with generous magnificence the baths that Domitian had begun to construct. During this period of six years peace had wearied him; administration was a task that did not awaken his hidden energies like war; and residence in the palace did not refresh him. Why not follow Caesar’s plans where Mark Antony had failed, settle the Parthian question once and for all, establish a more suitable frontier with the military situation in the East, and seize control of the trade routes that ran from Armenia and Parthia to Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, and India?
After careful preparation he set out again with his armies (113). A year later he had taken Armenia. And a year after that he had crossed Mesopotamia, captured Ctesiphon, and reached the Indian Ocean — the first and last Roman commander to stand beside that sea. The people of Rome learned geography by following his conquests; the Senate was entertained by hearing almost every week of the hasty conquest or surrender of another nation: the Bosporus, Colchis, Asiatic Iberia, Asiatic Albania, Osroene, Mesene, Media, Assyria, stony Arabia, and finally Parthia. Parthia, Armenia, Assyria, and Mesopotamia became provinces, and the new Alexander earned the honor of appointing and seating a king over the ancient enemies of Rome. On the shore of the Red Sea Trajan thought he was too old to repeat the advance of the Macedonian king toward the Indus. He contented himself with building a fleet on the Red Sea to supervise passage and trade with India. He placed garrisons at all strategic points and reluctantly returned toward Rome.
He too, like Mark Antony, had moved too fast, gone too far, and neglected to consolidate his conquests and lines of communication. As soon as he reached Antioch he learned that Khosrow, the Parthian king whom he had deposed, had gathered another army and reconquered central Mesopotamia. Revolt had broken out in all the new provinces; the Jews of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Cyrene had rebelled; and in Libya, Mauretania, and Britain the fire of enmity had flared up. The old warrior wished to rush back to the battlefield, but his body refused to obey. He had lived with such energy in the hot East that he had lived as in the temperate West, and had worn himself out; he contracted dropsy, and a stroke paralyzed that mighty will in a broken frame. With great sorrow he commissioned Lucius Quietus to suppress the Mesopotamian revolt, sent Marcius Turbo to crush the Jews of Africa, and appointed his nephew Hadrian to command the main Roman army in Syria. He ordered that he himself be taken to the coast of Cilicia, hoping to sail from there to Rome. The Senate was preparing a great triumph for him such as had not been renewed since the time of Augustus. Trajan died at the age of sixty-four, after a reign of nineteen years, at Selinus (117). His ashes were taken to the capital and buried under the great column that he himself had chosen as his tomb.
Hadrian
The Ruler
It is unlikely that it will ever be known whether the most brilliant of the Roman emperors reached the throne by amorous intrigue or by Trajan’s conviction of his worth. Dio Cassius says: “His appointment was the result of the fact that when Trajan died without an heir, his widow, Plotina, who was in love with Hadrian, contrived to make his elevation to the throne certain.” Spartianus repeats the same story. Plotina and Hadrian denied the rumor, but despite the denial it circulated until the end of his reign. By giving a substantial sum to the soldiers Hadrian settled the matter.
Publius Aelius Hadrian traced his ancestry and family to the city of Adria on the Adriatic coast, and, as he says in his autobiography, his ancestors had migrated from there to Spain. The same Spanish city, named Italica, which in the year 52 had witnessed the birth of Trajan, also saw the birth of his nephew Hadrian in the year 76. When Hadrian’s father died (86), the boy was placed under the guardianship of Trajan and Caecilius Attianus. Attianus educated him and aroused such an interest in Greek literature in him that young Hadrian was given the nickname “the little Greek.” In addition he studied singing, music, medicine, mathematics, painting, and sculpture, and later he dabbled in five or six arts. Trajan summoned him to Rome (91) and gave his nephew in marriage (100) to Vibia Sabina. As seen in bust portraits — though they may have made her more attractive — she was a woman of distinguished beauty who was aware of it, and Hadrian found no eternal happiness in her. Perhaps Hadrian loved dogs and horses very much and spent much time hunting with them, and when they died he built tombs for them. Perhaps he was an unfaithful husband, or seemed so. In any case Sabina bore him no child, and although she accompanied Hadrian on many journeys, they lived apart all their lives. Hadrian showed her every kind of courtesy and kindness and withheld from her no favor except affection. When Suetonius, one of his secretaries, spoke of Sabina in a tone lacking respect, he dismissed him.
Hadrian’s first decision as emperor was to revise his uncle’s policy of imperialism, because he considered the Parthian campaign, shortly after the Dacian wars, to involve enormous loss of men and resources and, believing that if the campaign achieved complete victory the benefits would be difficult to maintain, he had wanted to dissuade Trajan from it. Trajan’s commanders, who were eager for military honors, had never forgiven his opposition. Now he recalled the armies from Armenia, Assyria, Mesopotamia, and Parthia, made Armenia a vassal state instead of a Roman province, and accepted the Euphrates as the eastern frontier of the empire. Trajan had taken Caesar as his model; Hadrian imitated Augustus and, as far as he could, united with peaceful administrative methods that unprecedented territory that ruthless arms had won for Rome. The commanders who had held Trajan’s forces under command — Palma, Celsus, Quietus, and Nigrinus — considered this policy timid and unwise. In their opinion, abandoning the attack was merely defense, and merely defending was tantamount to dying. While Hadrian was with his armies near the Danube, the Senate announced that those four commanders had been caught in a conspiracy to overthrow the government and had been executed by order of the Senate. The people of Rome were startled to see that those men had been killed without trial. Although Hadrian, who hastened back to Rome, protested that he had had nothing to do with the matter, no one believed him. He pledged that he would put no senator to death except by order of the Senate, gave the people a cash gift, and entertained them with numerous games. He remitted overdue taxes up to 900,000,000 sesterces, burned the tax records in a deliberate fire, and ruled for twenty years with intelligence, justice, and soundness. But his unpopularity remained complete.
His ancient biographer describes him as tall and handsome and says that he artificially curled his hair and “wore a full beard that covered the natural defects of his face. And from that time onward all Romans wore beards. He had a powerful body and kept himself strong by much exercise, especially hunting. In several cases he killed a lion with his own hand.”
So many different elements were mixed in him that it is difficult to describe them. They say: “He was gloomy and cheerful, witty and dignified, lustful and cautious, strict and generous, dry and compassionate, deceptively simple, and in everything twofold.” He had a quick, impartial, skeptical, and penetrating mind, but he respected tradition as the connective tissue of generations. He read and praised the Stoic works of Epictetus, but with frankness and good taste he sought pleasure. He believed in neither religion nor freedom from superstition; he laughed at the oracles of the temples, mocked magic and astrology, encouraged the national cult, and performed the duties of pontifex maximus with perfect precision. He was courteous and obstinate, sometimes cruel, and usually kind; perhaps his contradictions were merely adaptations to circumstances. He visited the sick, helped the unfortunate, extended existing charities to widows and children, and was a generous patron to artists, writers, and philosophers. He sang and danced well and played the lyre. He was a competent painter and a mediocre sculptor. He wrote several books: a grammar, an autobiography, and poems both worthy and unworthy, in Latin and Greek. He preferred Greek literature to Latin, and the Latin of old Cato to the eloquent and fluent prose of Cicero; in imitation of him many authors used the affected prose of the ancients. He gathered in a university the teachers who received state salaries, gave them good pay, and built a splendid Athenaeum for them to rival the museum of Alexandria. He enjoyed gathering scholars and thinkers around him, bewildering them with questions, laughing at their contradictions and debates. Favorinus, from Gaul, was the wisest man in this philosophical court; when his friends mocked him for having yielded in argument with Hadrian, he replied: Whoever has thirty legions behind him is sure to speak correctly.
Along with these many intellectual interests, Hadrian possessed the sense of a practical man free from error. Following Domitian, he assigned freedmen to minor tasks, chose merchants whose ability had been tested to administer the government, and formed from them, senators, and jurists a council that regularly met to consider policy matters. He appointed one man as advocate of the public treasury to detect bribery or fraud in tax payments, and the significant result of this was that although taxes had not changed from their previous form, revenue definitely increased. He himself supervised all administrative departments and, like Napoleon, astonished the heads of departments with the detailed knowledge he had of their fields of work. Spartianus says: “His memory was overflowing; he wrote, dictated, listened, and conversed with his friends at the same time” — though repeating this story suggests suspicion. With his attention and the help of numerous civil officials the empire was probably better administered than before or after. The price the emperor paid for this severe order was the increasing growth of “regulatory mania” that brought the empire even closer to absolute monarchy. Hadrian observed all the forms of cooperation with the Senate; nevertheless, his agents and their executive orders increasingly encroached upon the duties of the body that had once seemed the “assembly of kings.” He was too close to his own problems and difficulties to foresee that the concentration of affairs in departments, which accelerated work but multiplied itself, might in time become an unbearable burden for the taxpayers. On the contrary, he believed that, within the law and order his government had established, every individual residing in the empire who had talent would find employment, and everyone could quickly rise from one class to a higher one.
His quick and logical mind was disgusted by the chaos resulting from vague and contradictory laws that had accumulated. He commissioned Julianus to harmonize the regulations of previous judicial administrators in a perpetual edict. He encouraged the codification of laws to a greater degree and thus prepared the way for Justinian. Hadrian performed the function of a court of appeal both in Rome and on his travels and became famous as a fair judge because he always showed as much leniency as the authority of the law allowed. He issued countless decrees that usually favored the weak against the strong, or slaves against masters, small proprietors against great landowners, tenants against landlords, and consumers against the tricks of retailers and price-raising by middlemen. He rejected charges of treason to the state, refused to accept wills of persons with children or of those he did not know for his own benefit, and ordered that the laws be applied with some indulgence toward Christians. He himself planted seedlings on state land and encouraged others to do the same; thus landowners of vast rough estates transferred them to tenants to plant fruit trees and pay no rent until the trees bore fruit. Hadrian was not a radical reformer but merely an excellent administrator who tried to achieve the greatest common good within the limits of human inequalities. He preserved old forms but quietly poured new contents into them according to the needs of the time. Once, when his inclination toward administration had subsided, he refused to receive a woman petitioner on the excuse “I have no time.” The woman cried out, “Then cease to be emperor”; Hadrian granted her petition.
The Wanderer
Hadrian, unlike his predecessors, was as interested in the empire as in the capital. Following the pleasant precedent set by Augustus, Hadrian decided to visit all the provinces, examine their conditions and needs, and alleviate those needs with missions and resources that the empire could provide. At the same time he wished to see the customs and arts, clothing, and ideas of the various nations of his realm; he wanted to visit the famous sites of Greek history and immerse himself in that Hellenic culture that was the background and ornament of his mind. Fronto says: “He wished not only to rule the world but to travel in it.” In the year 121 he set out from Rome. His entourage had no royal pomp and splendor but consisted of a group of experts, architects, builders, engineers, and artists. First he went to Gaul and “with various gifts brought aid to all communities.” From Gaul he went to Germania and astonished everyone by the completeness of his inspection of the empire’s defense against future destroyers.
He rearranged and lengthened the paved roads between the Rhine and the Danube and improved their condition. Although he was a man of peace, he understood the arts of war and believed that his peaceful disposition should not weaken his armies or mislead his enemies. He issued strict regulations to maintain military discipline and observed them when visiting camps, lived the life of a soldier, ate the soldiers’ food, never traveled by vehicle, marched dozens of kilometers on foot with full equipment, and showed such endurance that no one could guess he was at heart a student and philosopher. At the same time he rewarded good performance, raised the legal rank and economic status of military personnel, provided better weapons and adequate supplies, relaxed the discipline of their free hours, and insisted only that their amusements should not make them unfit for the tasks ahead. The Roman army never had a better condition than in his time.
At this time, along the Rhine toward its mouth, he advanced and sailed by sea to Britain (122). We have no news of his activities there except that he ordered a wall to be built from the Solway Firth to the mouth of the Tyne River “to separate the barbarians from the Romans.” On his return to Gaul he traveled at leisure through Avignon, Nîmes, and other cities of Provence and spent the winter in Tarragona in Spain. While walking alone in his host’s garden, a slave with drawn sword rushed at him and tried to kill him. Hadrian overpowered him and calmly handed him over to his servants, who found him insane.
In the spring of 123 he took several legions to fight in northern Africa, where the inhabitants were plundering the Roman cities of Mauretania. After crushing and driving them back to their hills he boarded ship to go to Ephesus. After spending the winter there he traveled to the cities of Asia Minor, listened to petitions and complaints, punished wrongdoing, rewarded the worthy, and provided money, plans, and workers for building temples, baths, and municipal theaters. Cyzicus, Nicaea, and Nicomedia had suffered a severe earthquake. Hadrian paid the damage from imperial funds and built a temple in Cyzicus that immediately became one of the seven wonders of the world. On the Black Sea coast he advanced eastward as far as Trebizond and ordered the governor of Cappadocia (the historian Arrian) to investigate the condition of all the Black Sea ports and report to him. Then he went southwest, passed through Paphlagonia, and spent the winter in Pergamum. In the autumn of 125 he sailed to Rhodes and from there to Athens. He spent a pleasant winter in Athens and then returned toward Rome. At the age of fifty he still had enthusiasm and stopped in Sicily, climbing Mount Etna to watch the sunrise from a height of 3,350 meters above sea level.
It is interesting that he was able to spend five years away from his capital and be confident that his subordinates would continue their work. Hadrian, like every good manager, had formed and trained an almost automatic government. He stayed in Rome a little more than a year. But the thirst for travel ran in his blood and his mind was on all those places that could be built in the world! In 128 he set out again; this time he went to Utica, Carthage, and the new rising cities in North Africa. In the autumn he returned to Rome. Before long he packed his bags again and spent another winter in Athens (128–129). He was appointed president of the court, presided with pleasure over contests and festivals, and enjoyed being called liberator, sun, god of gods, and savior of the world. He mingled with philosophers and artists and imitated the song-making of Mark Antony and Nero without imitating the madness of either. When he became exasperated with the chaos of Athenian laws he appointed a committee of jurists to codify them. Since he had always been interested in religions with skepticism, he arranged to be initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries. Finding Athens afflicted with unemployment and determined to restore it to the glory of Pericles’ time, he summoned skilled architects, engineers, and craftsmen and undertook a building program wider than his public buildings in Rome. In a square enclosed by columns his workers erected a library with marble walls that had 120 columns, a gilded roof, and rooms gleaming with porphyry, paintings, and statues. They built a gymnasium, an aqueduct, and a temple for the goddess Hera and another for “Zeus of all the Greeks.” The most ambitious of these architectural works was the completion of the Olympieum (131) — the vast temple of Olympian Zeus that Pisistratus had begun six centuries earlier and Antiochus Epiphanes had failed to finish. When Hadrian left Athens the city was cleaner, more progressive, and more beautiful than at any time in its historical past.
In the spring of 129 he sailed to Ephesus and again traveled in Asia Minor, and as he advanced he drew plans for vast buildings and cities. Unannounced he went to Cappadocia and inspected the garrison there. In Antioch he paid for the construction of an aqueduct, temple, theater, and baths. In the autumn he went to Palmyra and Arabia and in 130 traveled to Jerusalem. The holy city was still in ruins and almost in the condition Titus had left it sixty years earlier; a handful of poor Jews lived in dens and nests among the rocks. Hadrian’s heart was moved by this desolation, and his imagination was stirred by that empty space. He had hoped from the revival of Greece and the Hellenistic East to raise higher the barriers between Greco-Roman civilization and the Eastern world; now he dreamed of turning Zion itself into a citadel of paganism. He ordered Jerusalem to be rebuilt as a Roman colony and named Aelia Capitolina, the first part taken from Hadrian’s clan and the second from the Capitol of Jupiter in Rome. This was a gross blunder in psychology and statesmanship committed by one of the wisest statesmen in history.
From there he went to Alexandria (130), smiled with tolerance and indulgence at its quarrelsome people, enriched the museum, rebuilt Pompey’s tomb, then took Caesar’s hand, and with his wife Sabina and his beloved Antinous boarded ship and amused himself on the Nile. A few years earlier in Bithynia he had met that young Greek, been stirred by the youth’s perfect beauty, hazel eyes, and curly hair. He had made him his favorite slave boy and developed an intense affection mixed with tenderness for him. Sabina made no protest that has been recorded and reached us. But in the cities it was rumored that Antinous’ relation to Hadrian was that of Ganymede to Zeus; nevertheless, it is also possible that the emperor, childless, loved him as a son fallen from heaven. At this time, when Hadrian had reached the height of his happiness, Antinous, who was no more than eighteen, died — apparently drowned in the Nile. Spartianus says the ruler of the world “wept like a woman,” ordered a temple to be built on the shore, buried the boy there, and presented him to the world as a god. Around the tomb he built a city called Antinoöpolis (City of Antinous), whose destiny was to become the capital of Byzantium. As the grief-stricken Hadrian returned to Rome, legend-makers recast the story: now it was rumored that the emperor had learned through magical prediction that his greatest plans would succeed only if the person he loved most died; and it was also said that Antinous had heard this prophecy and volunteered to meet death. Perhaps this story was woven so quickly that it embittered the last years of Hadrian’s life.
When he returned to Rome (131) he felt that he had made Rome better than he had found it. In the past, even in Augustus’ time, Rome had not been so prosperous and the Mediterranean world had never reached such perfection of life; that world would never again be the home of a civilization so progressive, so vast, and so profoundly shared. No individual had governed it with Hadrian’s benevolence. Augustus had thought of the provinces as a profitable appendage to Italy that must be maintained for Italy’s sake; now for the first time the ideals of Caesar and Claudius took on the color of realization. Rome was no longer the tax collector of Italy but the responsible administrator of a realm in which all parts received equal attention from the government, and in which the Greek spirit ruled the East and thought while the Roman spirit ruled the state and the West. Hadrian had seen all that and unified it. He had promised to “administer the countries of Rome with the understanding that they are the property of the people and not his own”; and he had kept his promise.
The Builder
Only one task remained — and that was to make Rome more beautiful than before. The artistic spirit that was in Hadrian always competed with the spirit of the ruler; while he was arranging the laws of Rome he rebuilt the Pantheon. No other individual built so abundantly, and no other ruler built so directly. The buildings made for him were sometimes according to his own plan and always, during their progress, under his scholarly supervision. He ordered dozens of structures to be restored or repaired and inscribed his name on none of them. Rome in all its parts benefited from the rare union of power and intellect in this man. The famous saying “If youth knew and age could” was a riddle solved in his person.
The most famous of his restored buildings was the Pantheon — and it is a building from ancient times and the ancient world that has survived better than any other. The rectangular temple that Agrippa had built had been destroyed by fire; apparently only the Corinthian portico in front of it remained. Hadrian ordered his architects and engineers to build, north of the remains of the temple, a circular temple in the purest Roman style. His Hellenic taste had inclined him to prefer Greek types to Roman types in the architecture of his capital. The new temple did not harmonize with the portico, but its interior — a circle forty meters in diameter without obstructive barriers — created an illusion of space and freedom that only Gothic churches later equaled. The walls were six meters thick, built of brick and faced with marble in the lower part and stucco in the rest. The roof of the portico was of bronze sheet so thick that when Pope Urban VIII had those sheets removed they were enough to cast 110 cannon and build the high altar canopy of St. Peter’s.
The great bronze doors were originally gilded. Seven niches were opened in the lower part of the interior of the temple, which had no windows, and decorated with tall marble columns with entablatures; once these niches served as alcoves in which statues were placed. Now they are small chapels in a vast church. The upper part of the wall was covered with frames of precious stone, between which porphyry columns served as dividers. The coffered dome, which rose inside the building from the top of the walls, was a masterpiece of Roman engineering. It was raised by pouring concrete into the panelled sections behind the centering and waiting for the concrete to set and become solid. Its monolithic quality resisted lateral pressure, but to double the assurance the architect built buttress piers inside the wall. An opening eight meters in diameter at the top of the dome admitted light into the temple, and although there was no other light it was sufficient. From this magnificent dome, the largest in history, the genealogical line of architecture branches through Byzantine and Romanesque types to the dome of St. Peter’s and from there to the dome of the Capitol in Washington.
It is probable that Hadrian himself designed the double temple of Venus and Roma, which was built opposite the Colosseum; for legend says that he sent the plan of the building to Apollodorus; and when the old architect made a critical comment and sent the plan back, he had him executed. This temple was interesting for several features: it was the largest temple in Rome, it had two sanctuaries each belonging to one of the two gods who sat back to back on two thrones without relation to each other, and its domed roof of gilded bronze tiles was one of the most brilliant sights of the capital. The new emperor built a more open house for himself — and it is a villa whose remains still attract visitors to the suburb that in Hadrian’s time was called Tibur and in our time Tivoli. There on an estate measuring 11,265 meters he built a palace with various rooms, and in its gardens there were so many famous works of art that all the major museums of Europe have increased their wealth from the ruins of that palace. The designer of this palace displayed the Romans’ indifference to symmetry; according to need or the command of fancy the buildings were constructed one after another and no more effort was made for harmony than is visible in the architectural chaos of the great square. Perhaps the Romans too, like the Japanese, had grown tired of symmetry and enjoyed being surprised by disorder. In addition to colonnades, libraries, temples, a theater, a music hall, and a racecourse, the extravagant architect added small replicas of Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, and Zeno’s Stoa — as if, amid all that useless wealth, the emperor would set his hand to reforming philosophy.
The villa was completed in the last years of Hadrian’s life. We do not know whether he found happiness there. The Jewish revolt in 135 embittered him; he suppressed that revolt without mercy and was distressed that he could not end his government without war. In the same year, when he was still no more than fifty-nine, he contracted a painful and wasting disease — of the tubercular and dropsical type — that gradually broke down his body, spirit, and mind. He became harsher and his behavior more warlike, and he grew suspicious that his oldest friends were plotting his murder and succession. Finally, perhaps in a period of madness, he ordered several of them to be executed — and we do not know how much right he had.
In order to end the war of succession that was forming in his court, he chose his friend Lucius Verus as his adopted son. When Lucius soon afterward died, Hadrian summoned a man to his bedside in Tibur who had a reputation for flawless perfection and wisdom and chose him, whose name was Titus Aurelius Antoninus, as his adopted son and successor. With an eye to the distant future he advised Antoninus to adopt and educate two boys who were growing up in the court for the government. One was Marcus Annius Verus, nephew of Antoninus, who was then seventeen, and the other was Lucius Aelius Verus, son of Lucius Verus, who was eleven. The title “Caesar,” which until then had been reserved for emperors and their male offspring, was conferred by Hadrian upon Antoninus. And thereafter, while emperors kept the title “Augustus” for themselves, the name “Caesar” was given to the acknowledged heir to the throne.
Hadrian’s illness and suffering had now increased; blood often flowed from his nostrils, and in that despair he gradually longed for death. Earlier he had prepared his tomb on the far side of the Tiber — and it is the same tomb whose melancholy remains are today called Castel Sant’Angelo and can still be reached by the Aelian Bridge that Hadrian had built. He was moved by the action of the Stoic philosopher Euphrates, who was then in Rome; the philosopher, suffering from illness and old age, asked Hadrian for permission to kill himself; when permission was granted he drank hemlock. The emperor asked for poison or a sword, but none of his attendants would grant his request. He ordered a Danubian slave to stab him with a dagger, but the slave fled. He ordered his physician to poison him, but the physician committed suicide and a dagger was taken from him just as he was about to use it. He lamented that although he had the power to execute anyone he wished, he himself had no permission to die. He dismissed his physicians and went to Baiae, where he deliberately ate foods and drank beverages that would hasten the end of his life. Finally, after sixty-two years of life and twenty-one years of rule, worn out and maddened by pain, he died. A short poem of his remains that, like Dante, sadly expresses the sorrow of remembering happy days:
My soul, my darling, my fleeting one,
Guest and companion of my body,
To where are you hurrying —
Pale, stern, naked,
Never to play again, never to play again.Antoninus Pius
No history has been written about Antoninus Pius because he committed almost no blunder and no crime. His ancestors and two generations before them had come from Nîmes, and his family was one of the wealthiest in Rome. When he ascended the throne at the age of fifty-one he bestowed upon it the most just government that Rome had ever seen; and that government in no way fell short of other Roman governments in the excellence of its administration.
He was the happiest man who ever wore a crown in history. They say he was tall and handsome, healthy and good-natured, kind and determined, modest and powerful, eloquent and an enemy of rhetoric, beloved by all and indifferent to flattery. If we accept the word of his adopted son Marcus we must reject “that flawless giant whom the world never knew.” The Senate called him Pius as an example of the more moderate Roman virtues and as “the best of emperors.” He had no enemies, and the number of his friends exceeded hundreds. He was unacquainted with grief and sorrow. When he was about to set out for Asia as proconsul his eldest daughter died. His younger daughter, who was the wife of Marcus Aurelius, was unfaithful, and rumor had it that his own wife was as beautiful as she was unfaithful. Antoninus bore these rumors in silence; and after Faustina’s death he established a fund in her name and honor for the support and education of girls, and built one of the most beautiful temples in the Forum in her memory. He did not marry again, lest he hinder the happiness and inheritance of his children, and lived with a concubine.
In the narrow sense of the word he was not an intelligent man. He had not studied and with aristocratic generosity he looked upon men of letters, philosophy, and art. Nevertheless he helped such persons greatly and often invited them to his house. He preferred religion to philosophy, worshiped the old gods with apparent sincerity, and was an example of piety for his adopted sons that Marcus never forgot. Marcus Aurelius says to himself: “Do everything as a disciple of Antoninus. Remember his constancy in every reasonable act, his evenness in all things, and his piety and good humor and indifference to vainglorious names. … And recall with how little he was content; how laborious and patient he was, and how devout he was without superstition.” Nevertheless he was tolerant of non-Roman cults, bore Hadrian’s measures toward the Jews, and continued his predecessor’s leniency toward the Christians. He did not spoil others’ pleasure, enjoyed jokes and made good ones himself, played with his friends, fished, hunted, and no one could guess from his behavior that he was emperor. He preferred the calm of his villa in Lanuvium to the luxury of the official palace and almost always spent his nights in the privacy of his family. When he inherited the throne he set aside all thought of carefree comfort that he had longed for as consolation for old age. When he realized that his wife was thinking of greater pomp and splendor he reproached her: “Don’t you understand that we have lost what we had before?” He himself knew that he had inherited the care of the world.
He began his reign by pouring his boundless wealth into the imperial treasury. He canceled overdue taxes, gave cash gifts to the citizens, paid the expenses of several festival games, and by buying wine, oil, and grain and distributing them removed their shortages. He continued Hadrian’s building program in Italy and the provinces with moderation. Nevertheless he managed the internal finances so well that when he died the total treasuries of the country held 2,700,000,000 sesterces. He rendered an account of all receipts and payments to the public. He behaved toward the Senate as one of its members and never undertook any important action without consulting its leaders. He devoted himself both to the cares of government and to questions of policy. “He gave as much importance to all people and all things as to himself.” He continued Hadrian’s work in liberalizing the law, made the punishment for adultery the same for man and woman, deprived cruel masters of the right to own slaves, limited the torture of slaves in trials, and prescribed a severe penalty for any owner who killed a slave. He encouraged education with state funds, paid the schooling expenses of poor children, and extended many of the privileges of the senatorial class to teachers and philosophers approved by the public.
He governed the provinces as well as he could without traveling. During his long reign he never left Rome or its vicinity for a single day. He contented himself with appointing to the governorships of the provinces men whose ability and integrity he had tested. He was very eager to keep the empire safe without war; “he constantly quoted the saying of Scipio that he preferred to save the life of one citizen (Roman) than to kill a thousand enemies.” He was forced to wage several small wars to suppress revolts in Dacia, Achaea, and Egypt, but he left these matters to his subordinates and kept to the cautious frontiers of Hadrian. Some German tribes mistook his mildness for weakness and were perhaps encouraged by it to prepare the invasions that after his death shook the pillars of the empire. This was his only mistake in statesmanship. Apart from these cases the provinces were happy in his reign, and accepted the empire as the only alternative to anarchy and strife. They petitioned him, and he accepted almost all; and people could be confident that he would repair the damage of any public calamity. Provincial writers — Strabo, Philo, Plutarch, Appian, Epictetus, Aelius Aristides — sang the praises of the Roman peace; and Appian assures us that in Rome he saw envoys of foreign countries vainly seeking permission for their countries to be accepted under the yoke of Rome and its benefits. Never had a monarchy left individuals so free or respected the rights of its subjects so highly. “The ideal of the world seemed to have been realized. He himself governed, and for twenty-three years he ruled the world as a father.”
The only task left for Antoninus was to complete a good life with a peaceful death. At the age of seventy-four he contracted a stomach disorder and his fever rose. He called Marcus Aurelius to his bedside and entrusted the care of the country to him. He ordered his servants to carry the golden statue of Fortune, which had stood for years in the emperor’s bedroom, to Marcus Aurelius’ room. To the officer of the guard he gave as the password the word “security” or “peace of mind.” A little later, as if falling asleep, he died (161). All classes and cities competed with one another in honoring his memory.
The Philosopher Emperor
Renan said that Antoninus “would have had no rival in fame as the best ruler if he had not designated Marcus Aurelius as his successor.” Gibbon said: “If anyone were invited to name that particular period in the history of the world in which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would without hesitation name the period that elapsed between the accession of Nerva and the death of Marcus Aurelius. The succession of a series of good and great rulers is probably the only period in history in which the happiness of a great nation was the sole object of government.”
Marcus Annius Verus was born in Rome in the year 121. His ancestors had come from near Corduba a century before. There apparently their honesty had earned them the surname “Verus” (true). Three months after the boy’s birth his father died, and he was taken to the house of his wealthy grandfather who was then consul. Hadrian often visited that house, became fond of the boy, and saw in him the makings of a king. Rarely has a boy’s youth been so blessed, or has he himself so intelligently recognized the power of his good fortune. This boy wrote fifty years later: “I thank the gods that I had such a good grandfather and grandmother, such a good father and mother, such a good sister and good teachers, and good relatives and friends, and almost everything good.” Time restored the balance by giving him a questionable wife and an unworthy son.
No boy was ever educated with such insistence. In childhood he was appointed to the service of the temples and priests; he memorized every word of the old and unintelligible prayers; and although philosophy later shook his faith, he never reduced the serious performance of the obligatory ancient rites. Marcus Aurelius loved sports and contests, and even catching birds with traps and hunting, and an effort was made to train his body as well as his mind and character. But seventeen teachers in childhood are a great obstacle. Four grammar teachers, four rhetoric teachers, one jurist, and eight philosophers divided his soul among themselves. The most famous of these teachers was M. Cornelius Fronto, who taught him rhetoric. Although Marcus loved him and showed him all the affectionate kindness of a princely pupil and exchanged letters full of charm and sincerity with him, the young man turned his back on the art of oratory as a useless and dishonorable skill and devoted himself to philosophy.
He thanks his teachers for not teaching him logic and the science of judicial astrology: he thanks the Stoic Diognetus for freeing him from superstition; Rusticus Junius for introducing him to Epictetus; and Sextus of Chaeronea for teaching him how to live according to nature. He thanks his brother Severus for having spoken to him about Brutus, Cato of Utica, Thrasea, and Helvidius. “From him I received the idea that there should be a state in which one law prevails for all, public order, equal rights, and freedom of speech, and the idea that a monarchical government should above all respect the freedom of those over whom it rules.” Here the Stoic ideal of imperial monarchy conquers. He thanks Maximus for teaching him “self-control, not being offended by anything, cheerfulness in all circumstances, the right mixture of kindness and dignity, and the performance of duty without complaint.” It is clear that the leading philosophers of his time were pious unbelievers rather than metaphysicians indifferent to life. Marcus took them so seriously that for a time he almost destroyed his naturally weak physique with zealous asceticism. At the age of twelve he put on the coarse cloak of the philosophers, slept on a little straw that he scattered on the floor, and for a long time resisted his mother’s entreaties that he sleep on a mattress. Before he became a man he was a Stoic. He gives thanks “that I preserved the flower of my youth; that I did not make myself a man before my time, but postponed manhood somewhat longer than was necessary … that I never had to abandon celibacy … and later, when I was sometimes seized by the impulse of love, I was quickly cured.”
Two influences diverted him from professional philosophy and professional sanctity. One was the succession of minor political offices to which he was appointed; in this case managerial realism clashed with the idealism of the young thinker. The other influence was his association with Antoninus Pius. He did not complain of Antoninus Pius’ longevity but continued a life that was simple, free of luxury, filled with philosophical studies and administrative duties, while living in the palace and passing through a long period of apprenticeship; and seeing the devotion and honesty of his adoptive father in government had a powerful influence on his development. The name Aurelius, by which we know him, was the clan name of Antoninus that both Marcus and Lucius accepted as their own when they were adopted. Lucius became a cheerful, worldly man and a competent connoisseur of the pleasures of life. When in 146 Pius asked for a colleague to share the government, he appointed only Marcus and left the empire of love to Lucius. After Antoninus’ death Marcus became sole emperor. But he remembered Hadrian’s wish and immediately made Lucius Verus his full colleague and gave his daughter Lucilla in marriage to him. At the beginning of his reign, as at its end, the wisdom of the philosopher in him suffered lapses through kindness. The division of government was a bad precedent that later, in the time of Diocletian and Constantine, divided and weakened the realm.
Marcus Aurelius asked the Senate to grant divine honors to Pius, that is, to call him a god, and with perfect taste he completed and rededicated the temple that Pius had built for his wife to both Antoninus and Faustina. He showed every courtesy to the Senate and enjoyed seeing that many of his philosopher friends had become members of it. All Italy and all the provinces called him the realized dream of Plato. The philosopher ruled. But Marcus Aurelius had no thought of trying to create a Platonic republic. Like Antoninus he was a man of caution; radicals do not grow up in great palaces. His being a philosopher-king was Stoic rather than Platonic. He reminded himself that “you should never hope to realize Plato’s republic. Be content with improving humanity a little, and do not consider that improvement a small matter. Who can change the thoughts of men? And without changing feelings what can you create except a few servile and double-faced hypocrites?” He had realized that not all men wish to become saints; and with great sorrow he accommodated himself to a world of corruption, decay, and wrongdoing. “The immortal gods have allowed innumerable ages to pass in which they have endured without anger so many and such evil men and have even surrounded them with blessings; but you, who have so short a time to live, are already weary?” He resolved that, instead of relying on law, he himself would become an example to the people. He made himself in practice the servant of the nation; he carried the entire burden of government and justice and even that part that Lucius had agreed to assume but neglected. He allowed himself no luxury, behaved with simple friendliness toward all people, and wore himself out by his great accessibility. He was not a great statesman: he spent too much public credit in the form of cash gifts to the people and the army, gave 20,000 sesterces to each member of the praetorian guard, increased the number of those who could demand free grain, held expensive and numerous gladiatorial games; and remitted large amounts of unpaid taxes and tribute — this generosity had many precedents, but it was not wise at a time when revolt or war was visibly threatening in several provinces and on distant frontiers.
Marcus Aurelius, with vigor, continued the legal reforms that Hadrian had begun. He increased the number of court working days and shortened the length of trials. He often sat as judge himself, inflexible toward great offenses but generally merciful. He provided legal protection for children under guardianship against dishonest guardians, for debtors against creditors, and for provinces against governors. He made it easier to revive associations that had been prohibited. He legalized those associations that were primarily burial societies. He gave them legal personality so that they could inherit, and established a fund for the burial of the poor. He expanded the allowances to peasants for increasing the birth rate to an unprecedented degree in history. After his wife’s death he created a locality for aid to young women; a beautiful relief shows the girls gathered around Faustina the Second, and she pours grain into their laps. He abolished mixed bathing for men and women, prohibited excessive salaries for actors and gladiators, limited the expenditures that cities made for gladiatorial games according to the wealth of those cities, made the use of blunt weapons compulsory in heroic gladiatorial combats, and, as far as that bloody custom allowed, worked to remove death from the arena of play — the people loved him but did not love his laws. When he enlisted gladiators for the Marcomannic wars in the army and the people cried out with angry humor: “He is taking away our entertainment; he wants to force us to become philosophers.” Rome was preparing to become pious, but it was not yet fully ready.
It was the misfortune of him and the long peace of Hadrian’s and Antoninus’ time that rebels inside and barbarians outside were encouraged. In 162 a revolt broke out in Britain, the Chatti tribe invaded Roman Germany, and the Parthian king Vologases III declared war on Rome. Marcus Aurelius chose capable commanders to suppress the northern revolt, but he entrusted the main task of fighting the Parthian king to Lucius Verus. Lucius did not take a step beyond Antioch. Because Panthea lived there, and she was a woman so beautiful and perfect that to Lucian she seemed the perfection of all the masterpieces of sculpture and, in addition, had an intoxicating voice, lyre-playing fingers, and a quick mind in literature and philosophy. Lucius saw Panthea and, like Gilgamesh, forgot his age. He abandoned himself to pleasure, hunting, and finally debauchery, while the Parthians swept into terrified Syria. Marcus Aurelius made no comment on Lucius’ actions; but he sent a plan of battle to Avidius Cassius, who after Lucius was the senior commander of the expeditionary force, whose military importance helped the commander not only to drive the Parthians out of Mesopotamia but also to raise the Roman standards in Seleucia and Ctesiphon. This time the two cities were burned and razed to the ground so that they would no longer be bases for Parthian campaigns. Lucius returned from Antioch to Rome and a triumph was held for him in which he generously insisted that Marcus share it.
Lucius had brought with him the invisible conqueror of the war — and that was the plague. This disease had first appeared among the soldiers of Avidius in conquered Seleucia, then spread so rapidly that Cassius withdrew his army to Mesopotamia while the Parthians enjoyed the revenge of their gods. The retreating soldiers carried the disease with them to Syria.
Lucius took some of these soldiers to Rome to march in the triumph. These few infected every city they passed through and every region of the empire to which they were later assigned. Ancient historians spoke more of the casualties and less of the nature of the disease. According to the description given, it was either typhus or probably bubonic plague. Galen thought it resembled the disease that destroyed the Athenians in Pericles’ time; in both cases black eruptions covered almost the entire body, the patient shook violently from severe coughing, and “his breath stank.” The disease rapidly spread through Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece, Italy, and Gaul; in the course of one year (166–167) its casualties exceeded those of the war. In Rome 2,000 persons died in a single day, many of them from the aristocracy. Bodies were carried out of the city in batches. Marcus Aurelius, helpless before this invisible enemy, did everything he could to alleviate the evil, but the medicine of his time could offer no guidance, and the epidemic ran its course until it created immunity in the survivors or killed them. Its effects were infinite. Many places became so depopulated that they turned into forests or wilderness. Food production declined, transport was disrupted, and floods destroyed large quantities of grain. Famine and scarcity followed the plague. The cheerfulness and vitality that had prevailed at the beginning of Marcus Aurelius’ reign disappeared. People fell into a dazed pessimism, went in crowds to charm-readers and temple servants, filled the altars with incense and sacrifices, and sought consolation in the only place offered them — the new religions of individual immortality and heavenly peace.
Amid these internal difficulties came the news (167) that the tribes along the Danube — the Chatti, Quadi, Marcomanni, and Iazyges — had crossed the river, broken a Roman garrison of 20,000, and poured unchecked into Dacia, Raetia, Pannonia, and Noricum. The news said that some of them had crossed the Alps, defeated the force sent against them, besieged Aquileia (near Venice), threatened Verona, and laid waste the fertile fields of northern Italy. The German tribes had never before moved with such unity or threatened Rome so closely. Marcus Aurelius acted with astonishing determination. He set aside the pleasures of philosophical study and decided to enter what he foresaw would be the most important war Rome had fought since Hannibal. By calling up policemen, gladiators, slaves, and brigands as well as barbarian mercenaries into the legions emptied by war and plague he astonished Rome. He even pressed the gods into military service: he ordered the priests of foreign religions to perform sacrifices for Rome according to their various rites. He himself sacrificed so many cattle at the altars that a jest circulated that the bulls sent him a message; they begged Marcus Aurelius not to be too victorious, “if you conquer, we are lost.” To raise money for the war, without imposing new taxes, he auctioned off the jewels, artworks, and valuables of the imperial palaces in the Forum. He took precise defensive measures — fortified the frontier cities from Gaul to the Aegean, closed the passes leading to Italy, and bribed German and Scythian tribes to attack the invaders from the rear. With energy and courage that would have been more admirable in a man who was an enemy of war, he trained his army so that it became a disciplined force and led it in a hard battle whose plan was skillfully drawn up strategically. He drove the besiegers from Aquileia and pursued them as far as the Danube until almost all were captured or killed.
He realized that this action had not ended the German danger. But thinking that the situation was safe for a while he returned to Rome with his colleagues. On the way Lucius died of a stroke and rumor, which like politics has no vein of mercy, spread that Marcus Aurelius had poisoned him. From January to September 169 the emperor rested from the labors that had worn his weak body to the point of collapse. He suffered from abdominal pain that often weakened him so much that he could not even speak; he controlled that pain by eating little, down to one meal a day, under supervision. Those who knew his condition and his food were astonished at his labors in the palace and on the battlefield, and could only say that what he lacked in strength he made up for with willpower. In several cases he summoned the most famous physician of the age — Galen of Pergamum — and praised him for the unostentatious treatments he gave.
Perhaps the repeated discouragements in internal affairs combined with political and military crises intensified his illness, so that at the age of forty-eight he had grown old. His wife Faustina, whose beautiful face survives in numerous statues to our time, may not have enjoyed sharing bed and board with embodied philosophy. Faustina was a lively creature who craved a happier life than the sober nature of Marcus Aurelius could provide for her. In the city it was rumored that Faustina was unfaithful; actors in silent plays imitated Marcus Aurelius as a “c ... c” and even named his rivals. Just as Antoninus had said nothing about Faustina the mother, Marcus Aurelius was silent about the daughter. Instead he promoted her supposed lovers to high offices, showed her every kindness and courtesy, and when she died (175) raised her to the rank of a goddess and in his Meditations thanked the gods for “so obedient and affectionate a wife.” There is no evidence by which to condemn Faustina. Of the four children she bore Marcus Aurelius — and Marcus Aurelius loved them with such affection that the warmth of it still remains in his letters to Fronto — one daughter died in childhood, the daughter who survived was saddened by the way of life of her husband Lucius and became a widow after his death, and the other two were twin sons born in 161; one of them died at the moment of birth, the other was named Commodus. Rumor-mongering scandal-lovers called him the gift of a gladiator to Faustina, and Commodus himself spent his whole life proving that rumor true. But the son was a beautiful and strong child; Marcus Aurelius was strangely infatuated with him, introduced him to the legions in a way that indicated designation as successor, and appointed the best teachers in Rome to prepare him for government. The youth preferred to model cups, dance, sing, hunt, and fence; he developed a comprehensible aversion to books, scholars, and philosophers, instead enjoyed the company of gladiators and athletes, and soon surpassed all his peers in lying, cruelty, and foul language. Marcus Aurelius was so good and generous that he neither punished nor rejected him; he continued to hope that education and responsibility would bring Commodus to his senses and make a king of him. The lonely and frail emperor, with unkempt beard and eyes tired from worry and sleeplessness, turned from such a wife and son to the grave tasks of government and war.
The attack of the Central European tribes on the frontier had only paused for a moment. In this effort aimed at weakening the empire and liberating barbarism, peace was nothing but disarmament. In 169 the Chatti attacked the upper Rhine regions of Rome. In 170 the Chauci invaded Belgium, and other forces besieged Sarmizegetusa. The Costoboci crossed the Balkan mountains, entered Greece, and plundered the mystery temple at Eleusis twenty-two kilometers from Athens; the Moors attacked Spain from Africa, and a new people called the Lombards appeared for the first time on the Rhine. Despite defeat the fertile barbarians grew stronger, and the sterile Romans weaker. Marcus Aurelius realized that the situation had now reached the point where war must continue to the point of annihilation until one side destroyed the other or was itself destroyed. Only a man trained in the Roman and Stoic sense of duty could so completely transform himself from a contemplative Stoic philosopher into a capable and successful commander. But the philosopher remained the philosopher, except that he was hidden under the armor of a strong leader. In the midst of the second Marcomannic war (169–75) Marcus Aurelius wrote his little book of Meditations in his tent opposite the Quadi on the bank of the Granua River, by which the world chiefly remembers him. With this brief glance at a mortal and fallible saint thinking about ethical and fateful issues while leading a vast army in a struggle upon which the fate of the Roman Empire depends, one of the most accurate images that time has preserved of its great men can be seen. During the day he pursued the Sarmatians, and at night he could write about them with sympathy: “When a spider catches a fly it thinks it has done something great. So too is the man who has trapped a rabbit or … captured the Sarmatians. … Are they not all robbers alike?”
Nevertheless he fought for six exhausting years with the Sarmatians, Marcomanni, Iazyges, and the Quadi tribe, defeated them, and advanced his armies as far as Bohemia. No resistance remained, and Marcus Aurelius was on the verge of annexing the lands of the Quadi, Marcomanni, and Sarmatians (roughly the lands of Bohemia and the upper Danube Galicia) as new provinces when illness struck him down in his tent at Vindobona (Vienna). When he felt the hand of death he called Commodus to his bedside and warned him to continue the policy that was on the verge of success and to realize Augustus’ dream by advancing the empire’s frontier to the Elbe River. Then he refused food and drink. On the sixth day, with the last strength left to him, he rose and introduced Commodus to the army as the new emperor. When he returned to the tent he covered his head with his cloak and a little later died. Before his body reached Rome the people worshiped him as a god who had deigned to live on earth for a few years.
Written & researched by Dr. Shahin Siami