Great And Gay Caesar's Ghost

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday August 16, 2008

John McDonald

An assemblage of rare artefacts reflects the life and death of Hadrian - arguably Rome's most enigmatic emperor.

Hadrian: Empire And Conflict

British Museum, London, until October 26

ALL historical writing flirts with fiction but some figures have been fictionalised so successfully that it is hard to imagine the real person. This has been the fate of Hadrian, who was Roman emperor from 117 to 138 AD. He is known to many people only as the urbane, philosophical voice that fills the pages of Marguerite Yourcenar's historical novel, Memoirs Of Hadrian (1951). After reading this book, which takes the form of an extended letter from Hadrian to the young Marcus Aurelius, one has such a sense of the man's personality that it requires an effort to break the spell.

Hadrian soon will acquire another layer of mythology from John Boorman's film adaptation of Yourcenar's novel. But, despite her careful use of historical sources, it has been said that Yourcenar's Hadrian is more of a self-portrait than a picture of the emperor himself.

Thorsten Opper, the curator of the British Museum's Hadrian: Empire And Conflict, warns against seeing the Roman era too exclusively through the lens of our own preoccupations. He quotes the classical scholar Ronald Syme, who said that Yourcenar's novel was not historical fiction but fictional history. The problem is that our view of the real Hadrian is as fragmented today as one of his statues or temples. Many of the accounts of the emperor's life that have come down to us from Roman times were written by his enemies or at least by chroniclers who accepted malicious gossip as fact.

In a work of fiction a good anecdote will always have a place, even if its historical veracity is dubious, but Yourcenar's Hadrian is no less of a construct than Robert Graves's portraits of the Caesars in I, Claudius (1934). The successful BBC television series made from that novel means that millions of us will only ever envisage Claudius as Derek Jacobi, or John Hurt as the depraved Caligula.

The most distinguished recent addition to the field is Robert Harris's Imperium (2006), which forgoes the device of the secret autobiography and tells the story of the great orator, Cicero, through the eyes of his slave and secretary, Tiro. This means that we follow events at one remove, not through the private thoughts and feelings of the chief protagonist. This gives Harris's novel a more coldly political dimension than those of his predecessors. Although it reads like a thriller in comparison with Yourcenar's self-consciously literary style, Imperium may be the most convincing of all the fictional portraits of ancient Rome.

I dwell on these novels because it requires a leap of the imagination to visualise the world of Hadrian. He ruled an empire that stretched from the Scottish border to the Sahara Desert, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Euphrates River. It was a vast, multicultural enterprise criss-crossed by trade routes and riven by conflict. He had inherited an even larger empire from his adoptive father, Trajan, who had pushed the borders so far that Rome's resources were strained. This meant that one of Hadrian's first tasks was to relinquish some of Trajan's recent acquisitions on the eastern front. Roman belligerence was replaced by policies of strategic withdrawal and diplomacy.

It is odd to realise that almost 1900 years ago the first things a new Roman emperor had to do was to withdraw his forces from a costly occupation of Iraq and sue for peace in the Balkans. These acts of political pragmatism have won Hadrian a mixed reputation. There were nationalists in the Roman senate who saw such withdrawals as cowardly. This view was echoed by German scholars imbued with Prussian militarism but later generations have praised his good sense and moderation. The modern image of Hadrian is of a man weary of war and tolerant of other cultures - a liberal avant la lettre. Neither view can be seriously countenanced. As Opper puts it, Hadrian was "a very complex character". He was a dedicated soldier who spent almost half his reign visiting his troops in far-flung corners of the empire. Hadrian combined this with a passionate interest in the arts - he left an architectural legacy unmatched by any other emperor, the highlight being the Pantheon in Rome.

He was a political animal who knew when and how to take a backward step but did not hesitate to use brute force if required. His suppression of the Jewish uprising in Judea, 132-135 AD, resulted in the systematic extermination of hundreds of thousands.

As with the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, Hadrian was a wall builder. His most famous effort separated Roman Britain from the barbarian tribes of the north but he also built a wall in northern Africa. Today, one thinks inevitably of the Berlin Wall or the wall in Gaza that has become a new symbol of intractable conflict.

Hadrian's private life was no less complicated than his public persona. Despite the protestations of earlier scholars who tried to portray Hadrian as a devoted family man, he was clearly homosexual.

In fact, if anyone deserves a float at the Mardi Gras, it is Hadrian. Not only was he gay but when his young Greek lover, Antinous, drowned in the Nile, he nurtured a new cult in his memory. Within a few years, Antinous was recognised as a God throughout the empire, his cult challenging that of Jesus Christ. After Augustus and Hadrian, we have more statues of Antinous than any other figure of that period.

Hadrian's arranged marriage to Trajan's niece, Sabina, was childless but he observed all the correct forms and made shrewd plans for his succession. In Rome this counted for much more than any perceived sexual misconduct. The Roman attitude to sexuality saw nothing unusual in a man having a passion for teenage boys, so long as he took the properly active role.

With so many competing views of Hadrian's life and personality, the British Museum has concentrated on the material evidence. This includes a series of large busts and standing sculptures of Hadrian, notably a magnificent marble head that was excavated in August 2007 in the Turkish city of Sagalassos. There are sculptures of Antinous as a beautiful youth and as an incarnation of the god Osiris. There is a scale model of Hadrian's villa near Tivoli, on the outskirts of Rome, one of the most ambitious and innovative building projects of the age, along with many fragments and photos.

There are also artefacts from the wars in Judea and from Roman Britain and even a collection of amphorae used to transport olive oil from Spain to the centre of the empire. As with the bricks used for building, these vessels are significant for archaeologists because they are stamped with information that has proved useful in solving problems of dating and identification. Of all the treasures and splendours that characterised Hadrian's reign, little remains. The best-preserved examples in this show are two gilded bronze peacocks that once adorned Hadrian's mausoleum in Rome, now known as the Castel Sant' Angelo. They have survived through being appropriated by the Popes - otherwise they would have been melted down like most of Rome's glorious heritage.

As excavations continue at Tivoli and elsewhere, we will continue to learn more about Hadrian, with each discovery having the capacity to solve old problems and generate new ones. It is a mark of the progress being made that the curator can assert: "Events in the field of classical archaeology can at times move very fast indeed."

Meanwhile, for the most complete written portrait of Hadrian one must refer to Anthony Birley's biography, Hadrian: The Restless Emperor (1997), which has the unusual virtue of being both scholarly and readable. To anyone who has passed through the British Museum's exhibition, Hadrian's face will remain fixed forever in their minds. There is even one small identifying feature - a crease on both earlobes now thought to be a sign of coronary artery disease. This may explain his death at the age of 62 or it may be that he simply exhausted himself with travelling and - judging by the size of his villa - lavish entertaining.

Hadrian is known to have written an account of his life although nothing remains but a few stray passages. One miraculous survival, however, is a fragment of verse - which every commentator feels obliged to quote - his so-called Farewell To Life:

Little soul, little wanderer, little charmer, body's guest and companion, to what places will you set out for now?

To darkling, cold and gloomy ones -

And you won't make your usual jokes.

This is Birley's translation but there are dozens, if not hundreds, of different versions. Presuming they are authentic, these few lines bring us closer to Hadrian than all the ravaged objects in the British Museum.

It is a sardonic anticipation of death from a man who clearly loves life. His personality may still be a fragment but he is more than a monument in marble.

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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