HADRIAN, A.D. 117–A.D. 138
Some four years after his correspondence with Pliny on the subject of the Christians in Bithynia, the Emperor Trajan died somewhat suddenly in the course of his Eastern campaign, at the Cilician, town of Selinus (A.D. 117).
Trajan was succeeded by his kinsman Hadrian, who had married the Emperor’s great-niece Julia Sabina. The circumstances of Hadrian’s succession are somewhat confused. It was given out generally that he had been adopted by Trajan as his successor. It is certain, however, that his pretensions to the imperial power were favoured by Trajan’s Empress, Plotina, and some even ascribe his succession largely to a palace intrigue; it is clear that no real opposition to his peaceable assumption of the imperial power was offered.
It is regrettable that we possess no notable contemporary history of one of the most remarkable of the Roman Emperors. How intensely interesting would have been a picture by Tacitus of so extraordinary and unique a personality!
What we know of Hadrian and his reign of twenty-one years we gather principally from the pages of Spartianus, one of the six writers of the Augustan history who lived in the days of Diocletian, more than a century and a half later, and from some brief notices of Dion Cassius, of the Emperor Julian, and of three or four other writers who have given us short sketches of his life, and also from a somewhat longer account of the eleventh century monk Xiphilinus, and from notices on medals and inscriptions.
The Emperor Hadrian was no ordinary man. Rarely gifted with various and varied talents, he delighted to appear before the Roman world as a soldier and a statesman, as an artist and a poet; and in each of them, certainly in the first two characters, he occupied a fairly distinguished position. To the world he has gone down as a great traveller. He was not content with sitting at the helm of his Empire in Rome, or in one of his magnificent villas in Italy; he would see each of his many provinces and their chief cities with his own eyes, and then judge what was best for them,—how he could best improve their condition and develop their resources.
During his reign there were few, indeed, of the chief cities of the Roman world which he had not visited,—few which did not receive in some fashion or other the stamp of his presence among them. He was accompanied usually with a vast trained staff, as we should term it, of experts in arts and crafts, of painters, sculptors, architects, and skilled builders.
He had, of course, immense resources at his command, for he was a great financier, and was able with little effort to draw vast sums for the magnificent works he carried on in all parts of the Empire. The world had never seen, will probably never see again, a great building sovereign like Hadrian; and though he restored, decorated, rebuilt baths, amphitheatres, stately municipal buildings, and in many instances whole cities, often named after himself,[30] he never seems to have neglected Rome; for the traces of his expensive works there are still to be seen, while he watched over and lavishly kept up the costly amusements so dear to the luxurious and pleasure-loving capital. In one day, for instance, we read of a hundred lions being slain in the arena of the great Roman theatre, while his doles to the people were ever on a lavish scale. Rome was never allowed to suffer for the absence or for the immense foreign expenditure of the imperial traveller.
But Hadrian was not a good man, though he was a magnificent sovereign. His life was made up of the strangest contradictions. At times he played the part almost of an ascetic, abstaining from wine in his repasts, and even submitting to the work and fatigues of an ordinary legionary soldier. At times his life was disfigured by the grossest excesses and debauchery.[31] His attitude towards Christianity especially concerns us. He had no religion, no faith. He was interested in all cults to a certain extent, was even initiated into the mysteries of some of the old pagan beliefs; and while he accepted nothing, he denied nothing.
His famous rescript to Serenus Granianus, now generally accepted as genuine, gives us some conception of his estimate of Christianity, at least in the earlier portion of his reign. It virtually endorses what Trajan had written to Pliny in the matter of the Bithynian Christians. They were not to be hunted out, but if legally convicted as Christians they were to suffer. Hadrian, certainly in his earlier years, even went further in the direction of toleration than his predecessor. An informer, unless he could prove the truth of his accusation, would be subject to the severest penalties of the law.
But Hadrian, like Trajan who reigned before him, and Antoninus Pius who succeeded him on the imperial throne, knew very little of Christianity. It is more than doubtful if he had ever seen a Gospel; and although his sense of justice and his perfect indifference to all religions dictated the terms and inspired the tone of the famous rescript in question, in common with all Roman statesmen he evidently disliked and even feared the strange faith which was gradually gaining ground so rapidly in the world of Rome.
This dislike of Christianity, which some historians characterize in Hadrian’s case as positively hatred of the faith, was shown markedly in the latter years of his life by the deliberate insults which he offered to the most sacred Christian memories in Jerusalem after the close of the terrible Jewish war in A.D. 135. Some modern writers have pleaded that no special profanation was intended by Hadrian when the building of Ælia Capitolina on the site of Jerusalem was proceeded with after the Jewish war; but the testimony of Christian writers[32] here is very positive. An image of Jupiter was placed on the Mount of the Ascension; a statue of Venus was adored on the hill of Golgotha; Bethlehem was dedicated to Adonis, and a sacred grove was planted there; and the impure Phœnician rites were actually celebrated in the grotto of the Nativity.
But for the historian of the first days of Christianity, by far the most important event in this brilliant reign of Hadrian was the fatal Jewish war of A.D. 133–5 and its striking results. This was the war of extermination, as the Talmud subsequently termed it; the war in which the false Messiah Bar-cochab and the famous Rabbi Akiba were the most prominent figures. The outcome of this terrible war was the absolute destruction of the nationality of the Jewish people. From henceforth, i.e. after A.D. 134–5, the whole spirit of the Jews was changed; they lived from this time with new ideals, with new and different hopes and aims. This wonderful change we have described at some length and with many details in Book V. of this work.
From this time forward, there is no doubt that the conception which Roman statesmen had formed of Christianity underwent a marked change. Hitherto, more or less, the Christian was regarded as a Jewish dissenter, and was viewed at Rome with dislike, but at the same time with a certain contemptuous toleration provided that he kept out of sight. Trajan evidently, from the Pliny correspondence, was averse to harsh persecution if it could be avoided; and Hadrian, certainly in his earlier years, followed the policy of Trajan. But after A.D. 135 all this was changed. The Jewish people after the termination of the last bitter war passed into stillness.
They now rigidly abstained from admitting any stranger Gentiles into the charmed circle of Judaism, sternly forbidding any proselytizing. They abandoned all earthly ambition—their hope and expectation of seeing their land independent and powerful was relegated to a dim and distant future. They believed that they were the chosen people in far-back days of the Eternal of Hosts—they would quietly wait His good pleasure, and by a rigid observance in all its minutest details of the divine law, which they made the sole object of their study and meditation, would merit once more His favour; they hoped and expected at some distant day again to rejoice in the light of His countenance,—a light, alas! long since veiled owing to their past disobedience; to the Christian and his teaching in the meantime they vowed an implacable hatred.
It then began (after A.D. 134–5), slowly at first, to dawn upon the statesmen of Rome that the Christian was no mere Jewish dissenter, but a member of a new and perfectly distinct community, a sect intensely in earnest, successful in making proselytes, possessing, too, a secret power which the Roman statesman marvelled at but was incapable of understanding,—a secret power which made the Christian absolutely fearless of death and utterly regardless of any punishment human ingenuity could devise; a sect, too, which, quite independent of the Jews, daily was multiplying, and was rapidly numbering in its ranks men and women of every calling, drawn, too, from every province indifferently in the wide Roman empire,—becoming, indeed, an Empire within an Empire.
But the subjects of this inner Empire, while loyal to the State, obedient, and peaceful, dwelt as it were as a nation apart, professing an allegiance to an invisible Power unknown to the ancient traditions of Rome, and irreconcilably hostile to the ancient religion on which the true Roman loved to believe the grandeur of the Empire was based.
The consciousness of all this may be said to have really dawned upon Roman statesmen only after the great change which passed over Judaism at the close of the awful war of Hadrian,—a change which showed for the first time the broad gulf which yawned between the Jewish people and the new Christian community.
The last two years of Hadrian’s reign, which immediately followed the close of the great Jewish war, were marked by the adoption of a new and severer policy by the State in regard to Christians. We hear of cases of extreme harshness in the case of the treatment of Christians by the State. Many stories of martyrdom date from this period. This stern policy was pursued through the reign of the blameless Antoninus Pius, and became yet more pronounced and severe in the years of his successor, the yet nobler and purely patriotic Marcus, under whose rule, beneficent and just though it generally was, the Christians suffered as they had never suffered before.
For the first time after the close of the great Jewish war, A.D. 133–A.D. 135, the imperial government recognised what a grave danger to the Roman polity, to its ancient religion and its beliefs, was Christianity.
For more than sixty years—that is, from the day that Nero charged the then comparatively little band of Roman Christians with being the authors of the great fire which reduced so large a portion of Rome to ashes—had the sword of persecution hung over the Christian communities. From that day, the follower of Jesus was an outlaw in the great Empire. His home, his life, were exposed to a perpetual danger; ever and anon a period of bitter persecution set in, and lives were sacrificed and homes were wrecked to gratify some wild and senseless popular clamour, or even as the result of some private and often malicious information. There was no security any more for a member of the proscribed sect.
It is true that a great and wise Emperor like Trajan reluctantly allowed the law as it stood to be carried out, but he made no effort to change it or to mitigate its stern penalties. Hadrian, certainly in his early and middle life, was like his predecessor generally averse to harrying the quiet sect, and his well-known rescript even threatened the severest penalties to the false informer who denounced a Christian; but in spite of these just efforts the Christian lived in a state of perpetual unrest,—a martyr’s death was ever before the eyes of one who elected to be a follower of Jesus. This position of the Christians in the Roman Empire continued from A.D. 64–5 until the later days of Hadrian, A.D. 135–8.
But after the close of the great Jewish war, A.D. 135, as we have said, things grew even graver for the Christians. They now stood out conspicuous as an irreconcilable sect, quite different from the Jews, who after the great war had quietly submitted to Roman law and order.
HADRIAN’S POLICY TOWARDS CHRISTIANITY IN HIS CLOSING YEARS
In the last years of Hadrian and during the reigns of Pius and Marcus must be dated not a few of the accounts of early martyrs. The “Acts” which contain these recitals, it is true, are for the most part of doubtful authority.[33] They contain details which are clearly not historical, and critical investigation generally pronounces them untrustworthy. But the studies of later years, especially in the lore of the catacombs, show us that even for the more improbable and precarious records, evidently edited and enlarged at a date considerably later than the events which they purport to chronicle, there is evidently a basis of truth; and it is clear that the men and women whose sufferings and brave deaths for the faith are told in the “Acts,” for the most part were historical persons.
But we possess a much more dependable foundation for our statement that the last years of Hadrian and the prolonged reigns of Hadrian’s two successors, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Antoninus, were periods of bitter persecution for the Christian sect in Rome and in the provinces; that the years which elapsed between A.D. 135 and A.D. 180 were years of a persecution graver and more sustained than anything endured previously by the followers of Jesus.
There has come down to us a group of contemporary Christian writings,[34] the authenticity of which no critic friendly or hostile ventures to impugn. It is from these writings that we obtain our knowledge of what was the condition of the Christians in the Empire.
There is no question but that doubtful “Acts of Martyrdom,” many of which purport to belong to this period, i.e., from the last years of Hadrian to the death of Marcus Antoninus, have given colour to the theory which has found favour with certain writers, some even of the first rank, that, after all, the number of martyrs was but small. Recent study has, however, completely set aside this theory. In the first place, the scientific investigation of the Roman catacombs has shown that in many cases the heroes and heroines of the doubtful “Acts” were real historical persons; and, secondly, a careful study of the fragments of contemporary writers above referred to, has given us an exact and accurate picture of the period in question,[35] and the largest estimate of the number of sufferers during this period which has been made is probably too small.
Most melancholy was the close of the brilliant life of the great Emperor. Shortly after the close of the Jewish war, Hadrian returned to Italy and settled in the magnificent and fantastic palace he amused himself by building in the neighbourhood of Rome at Tibur. The vast group of buildings and parks and gardens of the so-called Villa of Hadrian was a copy of the more famous temples, baths, and villas he had visited during his long travels. Egypt, Greece, Italy, supplied him with models. But the seeds of a fatal malady were already sapping his strength. He was a sufferer from dropsy in its worst form; his life, too, had long been enfeebled by his wild excesses, to which ever and again he had given way. Then the strange mental sickness, the fatal heritage of so many absolute sovereigns, came over him. Nothing pleased him; no ray of hope lightened his ailing, suffering life; the present and the future were both dark.
His government became cruel, arbitrary, tyrannical. Many executions, not a few of them striking the highest in rank and authority, disfigured the closing years of the Emperor. The Christian sect, which lately, as we have explained already, had become in a specific manner feared and dreaded by the State, largely suffered during these sad closing years of his reign, and the dread persecution to which it was subjected during the reigns of his successors began in good earnest.
One dominant thought seems to have haunted Hadrian—the longing for death. Those who were nearest to his person, under the influence of the wise prince his adopted successor, generally known as Antoninus Pius, restrained him on several occasions from laying violent hands on himself; but it was no avail, and Hadrian died at Baiæ, A.D. 138, the death no doubt hastened, if not absolutely caused, by his own act.
The following little table will explain the succession of the Antonines to the Empire:
Hadrian first adopted Ælius Verus—a patrician, but a voluptuous and carelessly living man; he died, however, in the lifetime of Hadrian, leaving a son Verus, afterwards associated in the Empire with Marcus, whom, however, he predeceased by many years.
Hadrian subsequently adopted as his successor Aurelius Antoninus, known in history as Antoninus Pius.
Antoninus Pius belonging to a Gallic family of Nîmes, had filled the highest offices in the State, and later became a trusted counsellor of the Emperor Hadrian, and his devoted friend. He was a patrician of the highest character. When Hadrian adopted him he required him to secure the imperial succession by adopting Verus the son of Ælius Verus, whom he had originally adopted but who had died, and also Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, his young kinsman, a nephew of his (Hadrian’s) wife.
Antoninus Pius became Emperor in A.D. 138. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus succeeded him in A.D. 161.
ANTONINUS PIUS, A.D. 138–A.D. 161
MARCUS ANTONINUS, A.D. 161–A.D. 180
After the death of Hadrian, in A.D. 138, for forty-two years the Empire of Rome was ruled by two sovereigns who, pagan though they were, live in the pages of historians of all lands as the most perfect of any known sovereign rulers. They are known as the two Antonines: the first is distinguished by the title given him by his contemporaries, “Pius”; the second, by the best known of his several names, “Marcus Aurelius.”
They were not conquerors, not even great legislators; although under their beneficent, and with one sad exception generally wise rule, the laws of the State, in the case especially of the downtrodden and helpless, were materially improved and supplemented.
Our contemporary pagan literature here, alas! is but scanty; what has come down to us is even more unsatisfactory than what we possess in the contemporary records of Hadrian.
No great writer in prose or poetry arose in these forty-two years; and when in the fifth and following centuries, the era of confusion and universal decay, manuscripts began to be only sparingly copied, the records of this period were neglected, and what attention to literature was given, the copyists of the MSS. devoted to the masterpieces of the Augustan and even of an earlier age, such as the famous prose works of Cicero and Tacitus, of Pliny and of Suetonius; of poets such as Lucretius, Vergil and Ovid, Propertius, Juvenal and Horace.
We possess only abbreviations of the Chronicles of the Antonines, somewhat dry and uninteresting, wanting in details and in picturesque illustration. It is true that no great war—no striking conquest—no terrible intestine disturbances—disfigured these happier reigns, or supplied material which would arrest the attention of the writer and reader. It is mainly from side sources that we learn enough of the character and government of the Antonines to justify the unfeigned admiration which in all times has been given to these two good and great princes.
The title “Pius,” which was bestowed on the elder Antoninus by the Senate at the beginning of his reign, and by which he is universally known, was well deserved. His unfeigned devotion to the ancient Roman religion, his reputation for justice and wisdom, for clemency and sobriety, his stern morality, the high example he ever set in his private and public life—were admirably expressed in this title. His great predecessors—Emperors such as Vespasian and Titus, Trajan and Hadrian, possessed each of them some of these distinguishing characteristics, but only some; the lives of these famous Emperors being all more or less disfigured by regrettable flaws.
But the title “Pius” in the first instance seems to have been given to the first Antonine owing to the universal admiration of his generous and devoted behaviour to his adopted father and predecessor Hadrian, whom he tenderly watched over during his last sad years of ever increasing sickness and terrible life-weariness, and whose memory he protected with a rare and singular chivalry, if we may venture to use a beautiful and significant word which belongs to a later period in the world’s history.
The sources, whence we derive our too scanty knowledge of this almost flawless life, besides the notices and details preserved in the abbreviations of the contemporary chronicles we have spoken of, comprise the comparatively recently recovered letters of Fronto, a famous philosopher and man of letters to whom Antoninus Pius entrusted the principal share in the training of his adopted son and successor known in history as the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and more especially the noble and touching estimate of his works and days contained in the singular and exquisite little book written by his adopted son Marcus, generally known as his “Meditations.”
We find the following striking words relating to Pius written by Marcus in this little book after the great Emperor, who had trained him so well for his high destiny, had passed away. It was in the form of a soliloquy with himself—with his own soul:
“Life is short; the only fruit of the earth-life is to do good to the men among whom our lot is cast. Ever act as a true pupil of Antoninus (Pius). Call to mind his invariable fixity of purpose in carrying out what was reasonable; remember how calm was his conduct under all circumstances; think of his piety; remember that serene expression of his; his invariable sweetness—his contempt for vainglory; his constant care in sifting the truth; his indifference to unjust reproaches ... never suspicious; utterly careless of his own personal comfort; paying little heed to his food or his clothes; indefatigable in work; ever patient and self-denying.... Think (O my soul) of all this, so that when your own hour for departure strikes, it may find you, as it found him, conscious that the life-work had been well done.”
Antoninus Pius had inherited a great fortune; and at the time of his adoption by Hadrian he was well on in middle life, and had filled with dignity and honour many of the high offices of State. When he succeeded to supreme power as the absolute and irresponsible sovereign of the greatest Empire ever under the sceptre of one man; after carefully discharging the many duties of his great position in his magnificent palace overlooking the Roman Forum, its splendid temples and its yet more splendid memories, he loved to retire for a brief season to his ancestral home and farm of Lorium in Etruria.
Antoninus Pius delighted in exchanging the imperial state and wearisome pomp of his Roman court, the artificial pleasures of the theatre and the circus, which gave him no real satisfaction, for the true and healthy joys of the woods and the fields. He enjoyed the harvest and the vintage festivals of the people. He loved the excitement of the chase; he was at once a devoted fisherman and a hunter, though for these things he never neglected the graver duties and the awful responsibilities of his great position. The Fronto letters give us a beautiful picture of his family life at his Lorium farm.
But the great and good Emperor had a deeper and more far-reaching object at heart than simple self-gratification when he cast off the trammels of State and forsook the gay and brilliant court of the great capital for the plain unostentatious life of a country gentleman of the old Roman school.
The first Antonine was conscious that the soft, luxurious city life of which Rome was the great example, and which was too faithfully copied in the wealthy provincial centres, was enfeebling the Empire,—the builders and makers of Rome he well knew were the hardy race of men who feared the old gods and who were ready to fight and die for their country, and these men were the peasant-farmers produced by the old rural life of Italy. He would set the fashion himself, and if possible popularize this better and nobler way of living. He would bring back the memories of those great ones who had been the makers of that mighty empire.
It was no mere love of antiquity, no special taste for antiquarian lore, which induced Antoninus Pius to grave upon his coins the immemorial symbols telling of the ancient traditions belonging to the great past of Rome,—symbols many of which have been immortalized in the “haunting and liquid” rhythms of the poet loved in Rome,—Æneas carrying his father; the white sow sacrificed to Juno by the fugitive Æneas on the banks of Tiber; Mars and Rhea Sylvia; the sacred wild fig-tree beneath whose branches the wolf found the children Romulus and Remus; the wolf suckling the baby founders of the Queen City; the augur Nævius and his razor before King Tarquinius Priscus; Horatius who defended the bridge against the hosts of Porsenna. It was not the instinct of a curious and scholarly archæologist, but a deep and far-reaching purpose, which prompted Antoninus Pius to search out and rebuild the little unknown Arcadian village of Pallanteum, the ancient home of Evander, the host of Æneas,—Evander, the founder of the earliest Rome, whose beautiful story is told in the noble epic of Vergil.[36] The Emperor would popularize, would bring before his people the glorious memories of the storied past—the wonderful story of Rome—its cherished traditions which told of the old love of the Immortals for Rome.
Antoninus Pius was by no means the first who felt that the greatness of Rome had been built up by that hardy race of men who had lived the simple homely life of rural toil, by men who feared the gods and believed in the rewards and punishments of the Immortals. The great statesman Emperor Augustus more than a century earlier had recognised this, and his poet Vergil had pressed home this truth in his deathless verses.
In the Eclogues, and still more in the Georgics, men were led to reverence the old simple manners and customs; and in the charmed verses of the Æneid the same teaching was enforced with yet greater eloquence and earnestness. “Work and pray” was the conclusion of the Georgics (in primis venerare deos), was the burthen of the poet’s solemn charge.
And it was not only Augustus and his loved poet Vergil who had felt the power of the ancient Roman religion, so sadly ignored if not despised in their day and time, and who had seen that a return to the old Roman way of living and to the primitive simple beliefs and the old austere life alone would help to purify the corrupt and dissolute manners which were weakening, perhaps destroying, the old Roman spirit. Tacitus, the greatest historian Rome had ever given birth to, had also expressed the same beautiful thought. Juvenal the poet-satirist, too, who had lashed with an unsparing pen the luxury, the vices, and the follies of his age, painted as his ideal Roman a Curius, thrice consul, who, despising all state and pomp and luxury, hungry and tired after a day in the fields, preferred “a meal of herbs and bacon served on homely earthenware.”
Juvenal had a true Roman reverence for the old heroes of the Republic, for the Curii, the Fabii, and the Scipios, and their unostentatious way of living. Even Martial felt a strange charm in the antique simplicity of the old republican statesmen and soldiers.
The younger Pliny, courtier, statesman, and polished writer, weary and sated with the brilliant luxurious life of a great noble in the earlier years of the second century, in his wonderful picture of social life in the times of Trajan, shows us how intensely sensible he and his circle were of the purer pleasures and rest to be found in “the stillness of the pine woods, and the cold breeze from the Apennines which blew over his quiet rural home in Tuscany.”
But while Augustus and his famous poets had striven to lead the citizens of the great empire to love and lead the more austere and purer life of the primitive Roman people, it was an open secret that the imperial teacher himself failed to lead the life he professed to love, for Augustus stained his own works and days with grave moral irregularities. The two Antonines, on the other hand, different from Augustus, set themselves as the noblest examples of a pure austere life; no moral stain or flaw was ever suffered to disfigure the life-work of these two patriotic pagan sovereigns.
There was one master-thought deep buried in the heart of Antoninus Pius and of his adopted son and successor Marcus Antoninus. Their whole career was influenced by an intense love of Rome. They would preserve the mighty Empire from the decay which they perceived was fast gaining ground; they would set, by their own example, the vogue of the purer, simpler religious life on which the foundation stories of the Empire had been so securely laid; hence the bitter persecution of the Christian sect which was so striking and painful a feature in the Antonine administration of the Empire,—a persecution evidently active and bitter in the reign of Pius, but which greatly increased in intensity and virulence under the rule of his successor Marcus.
The Antonines were intensely persuaded that all that was great and glorious in the Roman Empire came from the simple and even austere life led by their fathers under the protection of the mighty Immortals—of Jupiter of the Capitol, of Mars the Avenger, of Vesta with her sacred f