HADRIAN, Roman emperor (117-138 a.d.), distinguished for the peace and beneficent energy of his government, was born at Rome 76 a.d. His full name was Publius Aelius Hadrianus; his ancestors, originally from Picenum, had been settled at Italica in Spain since the time of the Scipios. He lost his father at the age of ten, and was placed under the guardianship of Trajan, a cousin of his father and also a native of Italica, who was already a conspicuous man in the Roman army. We know little of Hadrian’s youth; but he gave early promise of the readiness and versatility which distinguished him in later life, for he was so ardent a student of Greek that men nicknamed him Graeculus. At fifteen he entered on the practical career of war and government which befitted a Roman, and grew fond of the chase even to excess. Patronized by Trajan and assisted by powerful friends he rose rapidly, filling successively all the civil and military offices, which now, as under the republic, were open to young men of good birth. On Trajan’s elevation to the empire Hadrian was the first to congratulate him. He served with distinction in both the Dacian campaigns; in the latter Trajan presented him with the ring he had received from Nerva, a proof of his regard which justified him in aspiring to be his successor. If Trajan was not always favourably disposed towards Hadrian, the good-will of the empress Plotina never failed him, and was particularly helpful in some of the most critical turning points of his career. She it was who secured his alliance with Sabina, granddaughter of the emperor’s sister, a marriage, however, which proved anything but happy. She, it was thought, did him still more effectual service at Trajan’s death, even determining the question of the succession in his ...favour. When that emperor returned from his victorious war in Parthia, the succession was still undecided; and we are assured on the express testimony of Dion Cassius that Plotina and her friends concealed his death for several days in order to facilitate the elevation of Hadrian. Whatever may have been the truth of such stories, Hadrian’s claim to the empire rested on the unquestionable fact that he was the fittest man. His position as prefect of Syria, and commander of the legions with which Trajan had prostrated the Parthian empire, made him supreme in the army, while his peaceful disposition and civil demeanour must have made him acceptable to the senate. Yet he was not unconscious of the insecurity of his position; for he hastened to propitiate the army by a donation of twice the usual amount, and to excuse his abrupt elevation to the senate by alleging the impatient zeal of the soldiers and the welfare of the state, which could not exist without an “imperator.” The first important act of Hadrian was to abandon the late conquests of Trajan, and again to make the Euphrates the eastern boundary of the empire. At his elevation the provinces were unsettled, and the barbarians on the frontier restless and menacing. He was convinced that the old limits of Augustus offered the most defensible frontier, and that the energy of the emperor was sufficiently occupied in governing the provinces already won. This policy of renunciation was ascribed to jealousy of Trajan; but history has recognized its wisdom. While arranging the affairs of the East, Hadrian had an opportunity of pardoning some eminent citizens who were accused of hostility to him, and after his return to Rome he confirmed his popularity by many gracious acts. Modestly declining the honours heaped upon himself, he carefully rendered the last offices to the deceased emperor, and considerably lightened the burdens of the citizens. During an absence in Moesia, where he had gone to compose some troubles with the Sarmatae and Roxolani, a formidable conspiracy was formed against him. The details are obscure; but four consular men, among the most eminent of Rome., were accused of being concerned in it, and were put to death. Some, however, went so far as to say that the conspiracy was a scheme devised by Hadrian for getting rid of dreaded rivals. It was a dark transaction which threw a suspicion on bis character. On his return to Rome he exerted himself to undo the evil effects of it by a generous and popular policy. Towards the senate he expressed the utmost deference and consideration; he admitted the most eminent of its members to familiar intercourse, raised them to the highest honours, and supplied the indigent with means to maintain their position. He was equally liberal to the body of the people, granting them a large donation of money, remitting the arrears of taxes for the last fifteen years, and increasing the funds which Trajan had devoted to the alimentation of poor children. These measures of Hadrian might be criticized as the calculating policy of one who felt his position to be insecure, and who could afford to be generous to the city out of the revenues of the empire But such a theory could not apply to what is most characteristic in hi3 rule,—his unwearying-care for the provinces and for the empire as a whole. He understood the true task of a Roman emperor better perhaps than any of his predecessors. More clearly than any of them he saw that the period of conquest was past, that an extension of the frontiers would only weaken the defensive power of the empire, that the time for consolidation and for softening the distinction between Rome and the provinces was come. While Trajan had been guilty of the anachronism of rivalling Alexander the Great, Hadrian made it the work of his life to become acquainted with the provinces, to learn their needs and resources, to improve and benefit them; he sought to be the effective ruler of the empire as a whole, and so was the first to realize the cosmopolitan task which his position imposed. For this end he sought to obtain a personal knowledge of the people he had undertaken to govern. Leaving Rome in 119, he visited probably every province of the empire. After traversing Gaul he inspected the legions on the Rhine, and then crossed to Britain, where he built (121) the great rampart from the Tyne to the Solway which bears his name. He returned through Gaul into Spain, and then proceeded to Mauritania, where he suppressed an insurrection. We next find him in the East averting a war with Parthia by a timely interview with the king. From the Parthian frontier he travelled through Asia Minor and the islands to Athens, where he sojourned a consider ιble time, and so returned by Sicily to Rome, having made the circuit of the empire. After some stay at Rome he resumed his travels. It is impossible to fix the details of this second progress with any exactness. It was chiefly in the East; and he did not finally return to Rome till 134. Everywhere he left lasting traces of his restless and beneficent energy; he built aqueducts and temples, and raised fortifications in suitable places; he inspected the details of the administration, learned to know the offi iials, and made himself at home in the military encampments. He was accompanied by a body of architects and artizιns organized like a legion, whom he employed to gratify his passion for building in a truly imperial manner. Athens was the favoured scene of his architectural labours; he added a new quarter to the city, and finished the temple of the Olympian Zeus. While Hadrian spent his life in inspecting the provinces, and was not disinclined to purchase peace by a subsidy to the restless tribes on the frontiers, he did not neglect the army. All along the frontier his legions stood in constant preparation for battle. He maintained a rigorous discipline; the rules he drew up for the army long served as a kind of military code. He trained them to the severest exercises, and anticipated all complaint by sharing in their fatigues, walking bare-headed on a march of 20 miles a day, and partaking of their coarse fare of cheese, lard, and sour wine. The only important war in which this army was tested was the great rebellion of the Jews, which broke out in 131, and lasted for several years. The founding of a Roman colony on the site of Jerusalem, an 1 an order of Hadrian forbidding the rite of circumcision, were the causes of the war. The Jews fought with the most resolute despair, and they were crushed only by a powerful army commanded by the best general of the empire. According to Dion, 580,000 Jews fell in battle. The whole country was reduced to a wilderness. But the loss of the Roman legions was so severe that in writing to the senate Hadrian omitted the customary formula:—“If you and your children are well, it is well; I and the army are well.” In the later years of his life Hadrian discontinued his travels, and lived at Rome or near it. His health, which had been impaired by long exposure to the extremes of heat and cold, began to fail; and, what was worse, the dark and suspicious moods which had broken out occasionally in his earlier years became more frequent and fatal. His aged brother-in-law Servianus fell a victim to his jealousy; his wife Sabina died, not without a rumour of poisoning. Most of those who had been his familiar friends, and had been raised by him to the highest offioes, were superseded, or banished, or put to death. But his passion for architecture did not abate. He built for his residence the great villa of Tibur, which was eight miles in circuit, and was a kind of epitome of the world, with miniatures of the most celebrated places in the provinces, and even of Hades. He built a splendid mausoleum, which has been the nucleus of the castle of St Angelo, and rebuilt several edifices at Rome. In these years he had to choose a successor. His first choice was Aelius Verus, who did nothing to justify such a distinction. The next was Antoninus Pius, so called from the filial assiduity with which he cherished the last days and the memory of his adopted father. Antoninus saved him from suicide, to which his physical sufferings impelled him, and from imbruing his hands in the blood of many noble Romans, who had provoked his moody and fickle temper. Hadrian died at Baiae, 138 A.n. The cruelty of his latter life had so eclipsed the lustre of his early rule that the senate at first refused him divine honours, and were prevailed upon to grant" them only at the urgent solicitation of Antoninus. In the travels and administrative energy of Hadrian we see only one side of his character. He had a versatile and many-sided mind, in which the faculty for command, speculative curiosity, and literary ambition were strangely blended. Not satisfied with the toils imposed on the laborious autocrat of the world, he sought to excel the Greek professors and artists each in his own special walk. In painting, sculpture, and music, in rhetoric and philosophy, he considered himself the competent rival and critic of men who had made these pursuits the work of a lifetime. The architect Apollodorus atoned for his frankness with his life. The more politic Favorinus, when reproached for yielding too readily to the emperor in some grammatical discussion, replied that it was unwise to dispute with the master of thirty legions. The product of Hadrian’s pen which has been most celebrated is the dying address to his soul :—
“Animula vagula, blandula, Hospes comesque corporis, Quae nunc abibis in loca Pallidula, rigida, nudula; Nec, ut soles, dabis jocos ?”
Under Hadrian Salvius Julianus composed a “perpetua! edict,” which is supposed to have been a fixed code of some kind, but the exact significance of the edict is disputed. Still there can be no doubt that Roman law owes much to Hadrian.
The sources for Hadrian’s life are unsatisfactory; the chief are Spartianus in the Scriptores Historioe Augustae, and Dion Cassius as abridged by Xiphilinus, lib. lxix; see also Aurelius Victor Be Caesaribus, and Eutropius; for modern works consult Merivale’s History of the Romans under the Empire ; Gregorovius, Gesch. Hadrians·, and W. W. Capes’s “Age of the Antonines” in the series Epochs of Ancient History. (T. K. )
HADRIAN, Wall of. It is under this heading that it seems most convenient to give a short account of the stone wall and other works erected by the Romans in the north of England between the Solway and the Tyne, and commonly known as the Roman Wall. As will be afterwards seen, those who have written on the subject are by no means agreed that the name of Hadrian ought to be exclusively associated with this great fortification. But before touching on the question, it is necessary to describe the works themselves.
Viewed as a whole the Roman Wall, when entire, consisted of three parts:—(1) a stone wall, strengthened by a ditch or fosse, at a short distance from its northern base; (2) three parallel earthen walls, with a ditch sloping down from the northern side of the second of these lines; (3) stations, castles, and turrets, placed at various intervals for the accommodation of troops, and communicating with one another by a military way.
The Murus or stone wall extended from Wallsend on the Tyne to Bowness on the Solway Firth, a distance of fully 73 English miles. No portion of it now remains as when finished, so that its original height cannot be accurately determined. Bede gives 12 feet, an estimate that our chief modern authority on the Wall, Dr J. Collingwood Bruce, deems too low, for some parts of its course at least. Its thickness varies, being 6 feet in some places and 9∣ in others.
The northern face of the Wall was continuous, but the southern had numerous outsets and insets, as if portions of the work had been carried on at the same time but without definite instructions as to a uniform breadth. In this way when sections met differences in width often showed themselves, though the junction was so managed that the irregularity was confined to one face. It is not improbable that a similar discretion was allowed as regards height. Both sides consisted of blocks of freestone 8 or 9 inches thick, 10 or 11 broad, and from 15 to 20 long. These had been sometimes quarried near the spot, sometimes brought from considerable distances. The interior was filled with rubble firmly cemented with mortar of a peculiar tenacity. In pursuing its course from sea to sea, the Wall seldom deviated from the shortest and straightest course it could follow, and then only with the evident design of seizing neighbouring elevations that would otherwise have commanded its position. Along the whole length of its northern ba3β, and adding greatly to its strength as a defensive work, was drawn a ditch or fosse of varying breadth and depth, 36 and 15 feet respectively being probably its average dimensions. In some places the difficulties to be overcome by its excavators, owing to the rocky nature of the soil, must have been enormous in an age when blasting with gunpowder was unknown. But none of them have been shunned.
South of the Murus ran the earth wall or Vallum, consisting, as has been already stated, of three ramparts and a ditch. Of these mounds the most northerly was raised at a distance from the base of the stone wall varying, according to the nature of the country, from 30 yards to half a mile. Time and the spoiler have dealt so hardly with it that its original dimensions cannot now be accurately stated. It seems, however, to have been about 20 feet broad at the base and at least 10 feet high. The materials of which it was made up consisted of earth largely intermixed with fragments of stone of all sizes and shapes. 24 feet or so further south was a ditch apparently somewhat inferior in breadth and depth to the ditch of the Murus, though otherwise of the same character. On its southern edge was a rampart much smaller in size than the one just noticed, while the series was completed by a third mound, approaching in its dimensions the larger of the other two, and raised at nearly the same distance as it from the centre of the included ditch.
Along the wall, at intervals averaging 4 miles, were stationary camps strongly fortified. According to the Notitia Utrüisque Imperii, which contains a brief record of the civil and military arrangement of the empires of the
East and West, and is supposed to have been compiled in the beginning of the 5th century of our era, there were 23 such stations. Thenames given areas follows:—Segedunum (Wallsend), Pons Aelii (Newcastle), Condercum (Benwell Hill), Vindobala (Rutchester), Hunnum (Halton Chester), Cilurnum (Chesters), Procolitia (Carrawburgh), Borcovicus (Hυusesteads), Vindolana (Chesterholm), Aesica (Great Chesters), Magna (Carvoran), Amboglanna (Birdoswald), Petriana, Aballaba, Congavata, Axelodunum, Gabrosentum, Tunocelum, Glannibanta, Alionis, Bremetenracum, Olen-acum, and Virosidum. It is somewhat strange that not a trace of one of these names survives in the local vocabulary of the present day, though the exact positions of a number of the stations have been identified beyond all doubt by other means. The sites had been chosen with great care, and much labour must have been expended in their construction. They were in fact military cities, “suited,” to use the words of Dr Bruce, “to be the residence of the chief who commanded the district, and providing secure lodgment for the powerful body of soldiery he had under him.” It is not clear, however, that more than 18 of the 23 were situated per lineam valli, the others being probably supporting stations. The Wall was further strengthened by quadrangular buildings called mile-castles as well as by smaller watch-towers or sentry-boxes of stone; while connecting the whole was a military way made in Roman fashion and protected by the other parts of the fortification. By means of this road the garrisons of the different stations could be quickly and safely concentrated on any point along the line that was threatened by an enemy. “It is sometimes asked,” remarks the authority just quoted, “How long would the Wall be in building 1 ? From calculations that have been made, founded upon the experience gained by the construction of the vast works connected with modern railways, it is considered that, in the existing circumstances of the country at the time, the Vallum and the Murus could not be reared in a shorter period than 10 years. The cost of it in our present currency would be about .£1,000,000. Above 10,000 men would be required to garrison its stations” (Wallet Book of the Boman Wall, p. 37).
Several of the ancient writers allude to ramparts and lines of forts raised by the Romans across the island during the time they had a footing in it. Of these notices some refer to the barrier on the isthmus of the Forth and Clyde (see Antoninus, Wall of, vol. ii. p. 139); the others probably apply to the more important works now described. In his Agricola Tacitus states that the Roman general during his operations in the north of England (79 a.d.) compelled many states hitherto hostile to lay down their arms and surrounded them with garrisons and castles. A hundred years later two contemporary historians, Dion Cassius (as abridged by Xiphiline) and HerodiaD, writing of events in Britain that occurred in their own day, both notice—the former in two places—the existence of a wall in Britain, separating the Roman territory from the uncon∙
quered tribes that dwelt beyond; but neither of them mentions when or by whom it was built. Another century onwards and Spartian, one of the Scriptores Historioe Augastoe, states that the emperor Hadrian was the first to rear a wall across Britain (circa 120 A.D.) as a defence against the northern barbarians. It was, he adds, 80 miles in length. The same author in his life of Severus tells us that emperor also raised a wall from sea to sea (circa 208 A.D.). Aurelius Victor, who flourished about the year 360 A.D., ascribes to Severus the building of a wall in Britain, employing almost the words of Spartian; while his contemporary, Eutropius, makes a similar statement, adding, however, that this rampart was 32 (according to another reading, 132) miles long, and erected for the defence of certain portions of the country, which Severus had reconquered for Rome. Another possible wall-builder is introduced to us in the early years of the 5th century by the poet Claudian, who represents Britain as indebted to Stilicho, the successful general of the emperors Theodosius I. and Honorius, for some protection of this nature against the attacks of the Scots, Picts, and Saxons. Lastly, Gildas, our earliest native historian, asserts that the Britons themselves built a wall to aid them in warding off the assaults of the Picts and Scots, and that another was constructed by the Romans with native assistance, just before their final abandonment of the island. Both statements are repeated by Bede, who identifies the former of these structures with Antonine’s wall and the latter with the more famous fortification near his own monastery of Jarrow
Founding on such unsatisfactory if not conflicting data, modern writers have been led to give various answers to the questions—When and by whom was the Roman Wall built? The limits of the present article do not admit of any discussion of the subject, and those who wish to see these questions fully examined, as well as to read an account of the inscriptions and other antiquities discovered from time to time along the line of the Wall, are referred to the list of works given below, more especially to Dr J. C. Bruce’s exhaustive treatise. For others the following summary may be sufficient.
Gordon, to whom we owe one of the earliest surveys of the Wall, is of opinion that the Vallum was the work of Hadrian, and the Murus of Severus. Horsley believed that the stations and the northern rampart of the Vallum were raised by Agricola, the ditch of the Vallum and its remaining mounds byHadrian, and the stone wall with its castles, towers, and its great military way by Severus. Dean Merivale, while admitting that camps and mounds may have been erected on the isthmus by Hadrian and Severus, supposes that the stations were faced with masonry and the work planned as well as partly executed by Theodosius, his designs being afterwards fully carried out about 400 a.d. by Stilicho, in orders issued from Gaul. But others, and foremost among them Dr Bruce, see in the fortification a unity of design that points it out as the work of one period and one mind, and have come to the conclusion that Hadrian was the builder of the whole. This view, as it does not exclude the probability that his engineers worked to some extent on lines already laid down by Agricola, and that Severus, before entering on his unfortunate campaign against the Caledonians, or after its close, repaired and strengthened the works of his predecessors, seems most consistent with the statements of ancient writers, with the testimony of inscriptions, and with the appearances presented by the relative position of the component parts of the fortification itself.
See Gordon’s Itinerarium Septentrionale, London, 1727; Horsley’s Britannia Romana, London, 1732; Hutton’s History of the Roman Wall, London, 1813; Hodgson’s Roman Wall, <t∙c., Newcastle, 1841; M ’ Lauchlan ’ s Survey of the Roman Wall, made in the years 1852-54; Bruce’s Roman Wall, 3d ed., London, 1863. (J. M ‘D. )
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