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The "Five Good Emperors"

Hadrian (117-138)

Hadrian was much like his mentor, Trajan, but with more emphasis on administration. He, too, presided over significant building projects, the most famous of which was the re-building of the Pantheon, still one of the most remarkable buildings in Rome. He initiated the construction of his own tomb, later made into a medieval fortress and known as the Castel Sant’Angelo.

But more than anything else, Hadrian is known for his wall up in Britain. Hadrian did not try to extend the limits of the Empire; rather, he sought to fix those limits more firmly in place. The wall in Britain is the most famous, but he undertook analogous efforts elsewhere, including networks of walls and fortresses connecting the Danube with the Rhine, and hundreds of miles of ditches along the border of the Sahara.  These steps were all with an eye to making sure the frontiers stayed fairly peaceful.

You may hear some argue that this is somehow symbolic; that it marks an end to Roman expansion and therefore somehow marks the beginning of the end for the Empire itself. This is nonsense. In the first place, it can be demonstrated that this work, including Hadrian’s Wall in Britain, was never intended to be strictly defensive; it was, rather, a series of forward positions from which the Roman army could respond to threats before they became full-scale invasions. Moreover, it can be shown that Rome did not cease to attempt to expand and, indeed, that on occasion it was capable of expanding successfully. These activites were an expression of the nature of the man himself: organized, regular, careful, firm. Future emperors might use them or neglect them, as they did with Rome’s many other tools of empire.

This is not to say Hadrian’s conservative stance on the frontiers was without consequence. Some of the more important effects were on the nature and function of the army. With Hadrian we see the first steps toward a system of frontier garrison troops, permanently stationed, along with a field army that gets moved from one hot spot to another. These were only the first steps, so the lines were not so clearly formed, but they were definitely taken.

The frontier troops were increasingly drawn from locals, so that the troops on Hadrian’s Wall were mainly Britons, for example. Even the field army was no longer dominated by those of Italian birth, but were Illyrian or Syrian or African or Spanish. Especially in the provincial garrisons this permitted the slow growth of local sentiments and attachments. Long before the arrangements were recognized as legal, these frontier troops were taking local women as concubines or in non-legal marriage. As these local ties grew stronger, the provincial troops came to think of themselves as Gauls or Britons as much as Romans.

All that was mostly in the future, though. Hadrian himself was quite cosmopolitan in his outlook. No emperor travelled more than he did. In his legislation and his actions we can see that he tended to view the Empire as a whole, or as a collection of parts, of which Italy was only one. Originally, the provinces were tributaries of the great city of Rome. By the 2nd century, Rome was still a great city and the seat of government, but it was not the source of manpower for the army, nor was it the source of wealth, nor of intellectual life.

Hadrian did have an adopted son, but he died near the end of Hadrian’s life. Rather urgently, for he was already ill, the emperor asked Antoninus to become his heir. After some hesitation, he agreed, and Hadrian died not long after, on 10 July.