Reviews

056

Hadrian: The Restless Emperor

Anthony R. Birley
(New York: Routledge, 1997) 399 pp., $50

Hadrian, who ruled Rome from 117 A.D. to 138 A.D., seems like the ideal subject of a biography. It was Hadrian who built the fortification wall that still snakes across northern Britain and who constructed the great dome of the Pantheon in Rome. He was devoted to Greek culture, traveled almost continuously from one end of the Roman Empire to the other, and bestowed lavish benefactions on cities. Hadrian also fought a ghastly war against the Jews (the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome [132–135 A.D.]), seizing Judea and restricting Jewish religious expression by prohibiting circumcision and the ordination of rabbis. After laying claim to Jerusalem, Hadrian renamed the city Aelia Capitolina—after himself, Aelius Hadrianus, and his favorite god, Jupiter Capitolinus. Hadrian’s divisive policy ultimately promoted rival claims to the Holy Land that still cause turmoil in the Middle East.

He was also a sybarite. Hadrian devoted many years to constructing a vast pleasure palace at Tivoli, just outside of Rome, for the enjoyment of his friends. This entertainment complex featured fountains and pools lined with statuary, gardens, dining rooms, baths and reception halls. Early in his life, Hadrian also formed a passionate relationship with the handsome youth Antinous of Bithynia. When Antinous drowned in the Nile, Hadrian grieved excessively, and the result was a plethora of statues, many now in European and American museums, commemorating Hadrian’s lover in a softly effeminate style.

Few ancient persons, however, except perhaps Cicero and St. Augustine, exposed enough of themselves in private letters, autobiographies or interviews to permit us direct contact with a full-blooded personality—like Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln or David McCullough’s Harry Truman. During his last years, Hadrian did write an autobiography that was subsequently lost. Marguerite Yourcenar’s Mémoires d’Hadrian,¹ the most famous book on Hadrian, is an imaginative reconstruction of that work; the real autobiography survives only in brief excerpts from two third-century authors: Marius Maximus and Cassius Dio, whose works have also been lost.

Because the sources are woefully incomplete, scholars of the ancient world usually avoid traditional biography. The celebrated historian of Rome Sir Ronald Sime wisely avoided a biographical approach in his book The Roman Revolution (1940); instead, he focused on the web of personal and family connections that enabled Augustus and other emperors to wield power.

Anthony Birley’s Hadrian: The Restless Emperor tries for the full-blooded biography. Unfortunately, the book often tells us simply where in the Roman world Hadrian was at specific times in his life—though we do not know for certain—and what he may have thought or done. Birley suggests, for example, that Hadrian joined the iuvenes, a fellowship of energetic young men who regularly terrorized townspeople, but there is no actual evidence. A compelling account of Hadrian’s life and character cannot be constructed on the basis of speculation alone. Even 057Birley admits that “in the last analysis the complex personality and thus the motivation eludes us.”

Nevertheless, evidence for Hadrian’s reign—later histories and chronicles, a brief ancient biography, coins and many Greek and Latin inscriptions—does afford engaging insights into the emperor’s life. The famous verses that Hadrian composed as he felt death approaching, for example, suggest a whimsical sense of death: “Little soul, little wanderer, little charmer…Where are you off to now?” In 130, after losing Antinous, Hadrian visited Thebes in Upper Egypt, and saw the famous “singing statue of Memnon” (actually a colossal figure of Pharaoh Amenophis III that emitted sounds when warmed by the morning sun). During the visit, Julia Balbilla, an intimate friend of Hadrian’s wife Sabina, carved 40 lines of poetry (still extant) onto the statue’s stone—commemorating Hadrian’s visit and the charm of Queen Sabina. Despite Hadrian’s sexual dalliances and his alleged bad relations with his wife, the court put forward a public image of domestic harmony.

What comes through most insistently in Birley’s portrait is Hadrian’s attachment to Greek culture. The romance with Antinous was decidedly a Greek-style affection. In contrast with his clean-shaven predecessors, Hadrian wears a beard in official portraiture—notably in the bronze bust from Beth-Shean, Israel, displayed on the book’s dust jacket—and presumably wore one in real life. This was not the untidy, casual growth of a philosopher but the well-trimmed beard of a fine Greek gentleman. Sabina’s friendship with Julia Balbilla went back to earlier dinner parties in Athens, where Hadrian hobnobbed with the likes of Philopappus, Julia’s brother, a famous benefactor of Athens. It was Greek aristocrats and intellectuals like Philopappus, the Spartan noble Eurycles Herculanus and the Athenian sophist Herodes Atticus who accompanied Hadrian on his travels to the East. Above all, Hadrian favored Athens. The Athenians made him a citizen, elected him archon (ruler) and, at Eleusis, near Athens, initiated him into the famous mystery cult of the grain goddess, Demeter. Hadrian assigned Athens an entire island for her food supply and built her (among other gifts) an aqueduct, a library and a gymnasium. In the quarter of Athens east of the Acropolis, he completed the great temple to Olympian Zeus, begun centuries earlier by the tyrant Peisistratus. The emperor placed a colossal ivory and gold statue of the god inside.

Despite Hadrian’s philhellenism, he is probably best grasped as a forceful and immensely talented example of the traditional Roman autocrat. His poem about approaching death, for example, is in Latin, and Birley agrees that it contains echoes of the old Latin poet Ennius, whose verses must have lain close to the emperor’s heart. Hadrian modeled his tomb, now the Castel Sant’ Angelo in Rome, on the mausoleum of Augustus. Like Augustus, Hadrian resided long years in Rome, where he had many friends, and his itineraries crisscrossed the western part of the empire. When he ordered a stone wall built athwart Britain, with a broad ditch dug in front of it, Hadrian was not only separating Romans from barbarians but pronouncing a new frontier policy indicating, in Birley’s words, “that the age of expansion was over.” Thus Hadrian pulled back from the eastern conquests of his predecessor Trajan and embraced the venerable advice of Augustus to “keep the Empire within fixed limits.”

Similarly, Hadrian’s war against the Jews grew not out of hostility to Jewish culture, as Birley maintains, but out of the traditional Roman impetus to establish cities amid the empire’s subjects, tightening Rome’s grip over its territories. Jerusalem, mostly ruined and desolate since the destruction of 70 A.D., was to be populated in large part by legionary veterans whose offspring would in time form a needed pool of military recruits. The new city’s chief god and namesake, Jupiter Capitolinus, 058the analogue of Zeus, was Rome’s imperial god, and it was with imperial Jupiter that Hadrian identified most closely.

In general, Birley sketches out a convincingly nuanced interpretation. He puts Hadrian’s career in order, as best he can, and he provides scholars with full references to the primary sources and a huge number of modern studies. He even manages to elucidate some of the enigmas, among them Antinous’s “death in the Nile,” as Birley terms it. Birley argues that Antinous, convinced that the gods demanded a victim, accepted suicide on Hadrian’s behalf. Hadrian heard rumors to this effect and tried to protect his deceased friend from calumny. This clears up some of the mystery about Antinous’s death, perhaps sufficiently to deflect another Agatha Christie. Still, because of the meager source material, Birley’s Hadrian lacks the palpable sense of personality that readers expect from a biography.

Birley’s accomplishment might have been greater had he devoted more attention to buildings. Much has been written recently on Hadrian’s building programs, especially in Athens and Rome,² but Birley neglects these studies. A day’s walk among the still imposing ruins of Hadrian’s gardens at Tivoli vividly evokes the personality of their builder and gives a clear sense of his conception of empire. It is impossible not to envision the god-like autocrat splendidly entertaining his wealthy and cultured friends, who were, in turn, symbols of his imperial power. Tivoli’s grandeur is reminiscent of Versailles, the ornate palace where Louis XIV, the Sun King, hosted the stars of French nobility, intelligence and culture. Like Versailles, Hadrian’s ruins are an architectural and artistic showplace designed to express the builder’s grandiose conception of his reign.

Unfortunately, Birley generally ignores this kind of archeological evidence. Like earlier Augusti biographers, such as Syme, Birley is essentially a philologist, a literary scholar, with little faith that buildings can be made to speak or to display much about their builder’s values and personality. But in Hadrian’s case, testimonials of brick, stone and concrete may be the most eloquent records we have.³

Homeric Questions

Gregory Nagy
(Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1996) 180 pp., $12.95

Gregory Nagy, the Francis Jones Professor of Greek Literature at Harvard, is probably the most influential Homerist alive today. Drawing on his deep learning in classical philology, comparative studies of oral poetry and historical linguistics, he has written half a dozen fiendishly clever and massively erudite (but also densely argued and sometimes difficult to read) books that have permanently changed how scholars read Homer.

Homeric Questions is the shortest and by far the most accessible of his books. It speaks directly to issues that have already surfaced in the pages of Archaeology Odyssey (see “Homer and Troy,” AO 01:01): Who was Homer? And how did the Iliad and Odyssey get written down in the first place?

Homeric Questions takes off, like most English-language Homeric scholarship of the last 30 years, from the research of Milman Parry and Albert Lord in the 1920s. Parry was fascinated by an old theory that Homer, a non-literate poet, used the repetitions and formulaic structure of his verse as mnemonic devices that helped him fuse together old stories, compose interpolated episodes and recite his massive poems. Parry and Lord traveled to what was then Yugoslavia to test this hypothesis by observing actual oral poets at work. Their findings revolutionized Homeric scholarship: Unlettered Serbian and Croatian poets did indeed compose and recite long, complex epics, using techniques that often paralleled Homer’s.

Lord went on to argue that around 700 B.C. a Greek who had mastered a revolutionary new technology, alphabetic writing, had Homer dictate the Iliad and Odyssey to him while he recorded the poems in this script. Once written down, Lord believed, these magnificent poems drove all competitors from the field. By Plato’s day, Homer was simply “the poet.”

Nagy places himself squarely within the Parry-Lord tradition, but takes issue with the oral dictation model and its more recent champions, like Barry Powell (see “Who Invented the Alphabet?” AO 01:01). Scholars generally agree that the Homeric poems originally existed as part of an oral tradition in which, over time, the stories and the ways of telling them would have changed significantly. Whereas a number of scholars in the Parry-Lord tradition propose that the Homeric poems were written down, and thus “frozen,” at a single moment in time, Nagy sees a long-term evolution of the texts. He sketches out a five-stage model of the epics’ history. From about 2000 B.C. to 750 B.C., the material that later came to form the Iliad and Odyssey was extremely fluid, varying greatly from poet to poet and place to place. In the second or “formative” stage, from about 750 through 550, the Greek oral tradition established the poems’ main story lines and narrative techniques. The third or “definitive” stage, lasting from about 550 B.C. to 325 B.C., witnessed the standardization of the sequence of stories in the poems; it was also during this period that versions of Homer’s epics were first 060written down. A further “standardizing” period lasted from 325 B.C. to about 150 B.C., during which the poems became separate units, much like our Iliad and Odyssey. Finally, there occurred a “relatively rigid” phase, inspired by Aristarchus’s redaction of the Homeric texts at the Alexandria Library in the second century B.C.

The core of Nagy’s book deals with the second and third stages of his model, which describe how the main elements of the epics came to be fixed. Nagy then examines the implications of his model for our reading of the mythical stories incorporated into the texts. He argues that we can treat these episodes much as anthropologists treat myth in the modern world. But the difference between ethnographers listening to stories in Borneo or South America and classicists reading Homer or Apollodorus is, of course, that ethnographers can examine the myths’ context: They can study the kinds of performance given and the reactions of the audience; they can search for other uses of the myths (to educate children, say, or to accompany some kind of social ritual), and they can even cross-question the storyteller.

Sadly, no one can ask Homer what he meant. Nagy suggests, however, that we can at least look at situations in which Homer’s characters themselves tell mythical stories—the muthoi from which our word “myth” comes—and get a sense of the stories’ contexts and the kinds of audience reaction. Nagy pushes this point rather hard; we have only a small sample of stories on which to base interpretation. But he is surely correct that Homer’s stories-within-stories open a window onto the 061archaic Greek worldview.

In a brief epilogue Nagy suggests that his kind of philology can put us in touch with the vanishing world of pre-modern cultures. At the end of the book, he defines philology as “love of the word;” such a love, Nagy writes, “is an active conjuring up, by the words themselves, of what is felt to be real.” In the 19th century, classical scholars assured the world that if we just paid close attention to Greek grammar, we could discover the roots of Western civilization among the Greeks of Homer’s day. Nagy’s version of this thesis will probably not fare any better in the late 20th century than those it replaces, but it is refreshing to find a classicist who believes so passionately in the value of Greek literature. Nagy makes Homer exciting.

This is a book to argue about. In trying to make sense of the poems’ background, scholars try to prove or disprove theories without having access to much direct evidence. They thus fall back on archaeology, on differing interpretations of the little evidence that exists, and, worst of all, on their own sometimes subjective ideas of plausibility. Not every part of Nagy’s case is convincing. I am sure he is right that there were competing versions of the Trojan cycle in the eighth century B.C., many of which became marginalized as a single Homeric tradition took over. But I see no good argument against (and plenty of good arguments for) Lord’s thesis that one or more orally dictated texts, written down around 700 B.C., contributed significantly to the gradual formalization of the Homeric poems over the next few centuries.

But this is the beauty of Homeric scholarship: The poems raise more questions than we can answer, and the debates go on. Homeric Questions confronts such problems with a stimulating directness and vigor. It is bound to be controversial, as were Nagy’s earlier studies; but it will no doubt remain at the center of these debates for many years to come.

Hadrian: The Restless Emperor