28 Hadrian: empire and conflict David Packer reviews the British Museum exhibition on the Roman Emperor Hadrian and sees some parallels with modern problems of empire building Hadrian: Empire and Conflict presents us with a variant of the great man' view of history. But in its own terms we are only presented with a partial biography of one of Rome's most important Emperors though the catalogue is more balanced. There is a strong emphasis on the political image us with the opportunity to look at the ideological mechanisms of power in a class society with some splendid artifacts representing this power.
There are some very fine portrait sculptures, mostly in a Greek neoAttic (neo-classical) style, portraits of the emperor in his various political incarnations. The image we are given of Hadrian is of a somehow 'modern', handsome and charismatic leader, the ultimate embodiment of power. We are presented with Hadrian as a young man in the guise of Romulus, the founder of Rome: as a naked war god; and as an implacable general, quashing underfoot a puny captive; and as a dignified pontifex maximus (chief priest) of the Capitoline deities dressed in his toga - one of the best statues of Hadrian in the exhibition. Both Hadrian and the Roman state knew how to manipulate his image for the greatest political effect. Other family members are included, such as the impressive full-length statue of his wife the empress Sabina and a number of images of Antinous his young lover. With the exception of the Emperor Augustus, there are more portrait statues of Hadrian and more surprisingly of Antinous, surviving from antiquity than of any other ancient individuals. Taken together they are undoubtedly powerful statements of Hadrian's political and cultural programme, although not always in an obvious way. For example, his policy of consolidation rather than military expansion, unpopular with significant sections of the ruling class. resulted in the production of numerous representation of Hadrian as a heroie general wearing a cuirass, clearly designed to deflect criticism of his 'weakness' in the face of the enemy.
There is more to the exhibition than the image of the emperor. Some secondary themes such as war and peace are more developed in the catalogue than in the exhibition itself, in particular there is a welcome focus on Hadrian's devastating Jewish war (so much for his peaceful image) and his extraordinary architectural program. This included the stunning Pantheon in Rome and his famous 'villa' at Tivoli, covering an area the size of a city and designed as a microcosm of the Empire. Who was Hadrian? Hadrian was a Spaniard, a descendent of Roman soldiers who had settled in Spain nearly three centuries previously. Although this made him a provincial outsider, his family was very wealthy and he had lived in Rome and held important political and military posts before becoming emperor. This enabled him to see the Roman Empire from the inside - the ruling senatorial view - and from the outside - from the perspective of a provincial élite. He was part of a new group of Senators in Rome, which included his predecessor and patron, the emperor Trajan, who began to develop a broader imperial vision, cosmopolitan rather than narrowly based on the single city-state of Rome, or even Italy.
Immediately on assuming power in August 117 CE Hadrian made a major strategic decision to withdraw the Roman army from Iraq (Mesopotamia). His predecessor the expansionist Trajan had led a large military expedition to conquer Armenia, Assyria and Mesopotamia and drive back the Parthian Empire to the regions we now call Iran. Hadrian had been a central figure on his general staff. Trajan took the Parthian capital of Ctesiphon just south of modern Baghdad and moved on to take Basra after which he issued a commemorative coinage emblazoned with the inscription, "Parthia capta". Trajan was to be seen as the new Alexander the Great.
The exhibition makes a nod towards a number of uncanny parallels between the problems faced by Hadrian and the Roman Empire in the early second century CE and those faced by our imperialist rulers today. The common crisis points were Iraq/ Mesopotamia, Judea/Palestine and the Balkans. However, the many ancient and modern cultural and political problems are only superficially alluded to and sometimes obscured.
Ancient Mesopotamia was the centre of a developed and populous civilisation, and Hadrian, along
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with other generals, soon realised the impossible logistics of occupation. Winning the war was relatively easy but winning the peace much more difficult.
The interesting parallel/contrast with today has been made by a number of commentators and reviewers, who have emphasised Hadrian's rapid surrender of Mesopotamia. It is suggested that Hadrian, unlike today's lesser men, understood the logistics of intractable war, mass resistance and military overstretch resulting in a 'quagmire", they emphasise that Hadrian got out just in time. A golden age? Hadrian's greatness lay in his grasp of what was necessary and his ability to act decisively. But was his policy of limitation and consolidation a strategic solution for the Roman Empire, rather than just an astute but pragmatic response to a dangerous situation? Was it his answer to an intractable contradiction at the heart of Roman imperialism? It is doubtful that he understood that Rome had reached its historical limits. As far as we know no politician or emperor during the second century CE believed that Rome had reached its high tide, or was eventually to slide into slow stagnation and a long decline. On the contrary it was a confident age, according to the eighteenth century historian Edward Gibbon, a 'golden' age.
Today, after two world wars he is praised for ushering in a long period of peace and prosperity, conveniently downplaying the brutal Jewish War. Significantly, in this exhibition, Hadrian's Jewish policy is not avoided. We see artifacts that some of his Jewish victims left behind when they sought refuge in desert caves: mirrors, bronze jugs, bowls, a straw basket, etc.
Hadrian's new policy of retrenchment and consolidation was certainly opposed by significant section of the Roman ruling class in the Senate, who recognised in the bullish Trajan their ideal Emperor, while the cultured "Greekling' was un-Roman. Undoubtedly they wanted opportunities for military glory and prestige, but also war had more practical economic imperatives for them.
In retrospect we can see the intractable contradiction facing the Roman state between continual expansion, necessary to maintain the political, social and economic dynamism of the system (the continuous acquisition of new land, booty and slaves, or 'stolen labour power' Rome was still based on a slave mode of production) and the practical limits imposed by geography and resources both technical and human. The great distances and logistics involved in further expansion compared to the technology of transport and communication that was available now imposed limits. Even more important was the intractable problem of sourcing adequate manpower.
By Hadrian's day the provinces were increasingly the source of manpower for the army, even for the citizen legions, of which there were only about thirty - a surprisingly small army of approximately 150,000 legionaries plus a similar number of non-citizen auxiliaries. In Rome's Republican past, near inexhaustible sources of citizen manpower for the army was one of the Roman state's greatest strengths, but this was increasingly not the case as the free citizen farmer, a class that provided the best soldier in the ancient world, was steadily replaced by large estates worked by slaves and dependent subsistence tenants. And by Hadrian's day, the spiraling cost to the exchequer of this army was a growing problem. It soaked up a massive proportion of state expenditure, which in the last analysis was a reflection of the relatively low levels of economic productivity and therefore limits on the levels of taxation. The limits of cultural imperialism The new strategy of military, political and cultural consolidation began by delineating fixed frontiers. They separated those who were to become Roman (as Hadrian hoped) and those who were not, the barbarians'. Hadrian's wall between the Rivers Tyne and Solway is a notable example. His policy of Romanization or cultural imperialism was not one based
29 on ethnicity or race, as some on the left seem to believe. It was an attempt to culturally homogenize the vast, diverse and unstable empire, through the dissemination (and imposition in some cases, for example with the Jews, with disastrous results) of a Greco-Roman culture. This policy included a Pax Romana - universal peace, economic development with an emphasis on statesponsored infrastructure and prestige building projects, including at the municipal level, expansion of Roman citizenship and the rule of law, all to be guaranteed by the person of the Emperor and of course the army.
However, Hadrian's policy could not resolve the historic contradictions of the Roman Empire. His was a policy that needed money. Cash handouts to the citizens of Rome alone amounted to more than thirty million sestertii a year. But low levels of productivity could only mean relatively low tax returns, therefore robbery with violence' was a necessary component of the system in order to pay for the huge state expenditures. Fortunately for Hadrian, but less fortunately for his successors, he could side-step these contradictions because he had inherited a full exchequer swollen with the booty from Trajan's previous conquests and systematic robbery of wealthy Dacia (Romania and Bulgaria), and Mesopotamia, which would have included huge numbers of chattel slaves. Without Trajan's conquests, Hadrian's peaceful cultural policy would have been impossible. Rome and the Jews Many of the surviving statues of Hadrian portray him as a soldier in a cuirass. Although a cultured philhellene, who wrote poetry and was an amateur architect, he was also a ruthless politician and experienced soldier. He was not the peace-loving ruler, often portrayed in popularly history, but an effective leader of the Roman imperial state.
His brutal and ferocious suppression of the heroic, if misjudged, Jewish revolt (131-35 CE), Rome's most serious internal opposition, turned into long war of bloody genocide. Ever since the first Jewish war of 66-74CE, the capture of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple of Solomon, the Jews had become increasingly alienated from the Roman hegemony. Toward the end of Trajan's reign a cataclysm burst across the whole Middle East (114-17CE). By the time the Jewish rebels of the Diaspora War had been bloodily suppressed they had massacred, including in cities like Alexandria and Cyrene, 220,000 Greeks and Romans.
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30 The timing of the uprising was one of the reasons for the failure of Trajan's Parthian War. Without any sense of irony Trajan had come to the conclusion that it was necessary to 'smash them down to stop their excessive, reckless violence.
Hadrian had not introduced a conciliatory policy and when the revolt broke out, it involved the entire region and all social classes. The messianic leader of the rebellion Simon Bar Kokhba proclaimed himself king and took the name, The Son of the Star. The Roman's prosecuted the war with typical ruthlessness.. Large numbers of Jews were enslaved and many more dispersed to join the already extensive Diaspora across the Empire and beyond. Jewish society and their homeland Judea were totally destroyed and 'ethnically cleansed' and the province then renamed Palestine, with geo-political consequences that we live with today. Roman losses were heavy but victory parades followed. For Hadrian it was a political disaster, the biggest failure in his long and otherwise successful reign. For the Jewish people it was an historical disaster comparable to the
According to some commentators, Hadrian's "remarkable decision" at the beginning of his reign to withdraw from Mesopotamia and finish the policy of endless expansion, "prolonged the empire's span". But is this true?
A century later the writer and Senator Cassius Dio who lived during the warlike Severan dynasty still reflected the hostile attitude towards Hadrian. It was little more than sixty years after Hadrian's death that the Emperor Septimius Severus once again successfully led a large Roman army to occupy Mesopotamia and later in his reign he advanced deep into Northern Scotland, eventually dying at York
Even Hadrian's immediate successor Antoninus Pius advanced beyond Hadrian's Wall into Scotland and built what is known as the Antonine Wall between the river's Clyde and Forth and recently made a world heritage site. This turf wall and ditch was only occupied for about thirty years. None of these later advances were held for long and Hadrian's Empire had, in a historical sense, reached the limits of direct Roman power, nonetheless, his policy of limitation and consolidation was probably never accepted as a defining strategy for Empire. and working in this wonder, things are quite different: the social and ecological problems crowd in and fill your view. The truth is that our cities have always been dominated by the rich and those of the mass of working people who live and toil in them. the capitalist pursuit of profits is growing alarmingly: • Modern capitalist cities are absolutely dominated by cars and trucks. This leads to massive, life-threatening pollution and a vast network of roads and car parks that scar the urban landscape. People live on islands surrounded by seas of asphalt and concreteconcrete. The city creates its own, warmer climate. people each year; still greater numbers die from the pollution. Vehicle emissions are also a major contributor to greenhouse gases and climate change that threatens humanity with utter catastrophe. the motor car. Similarly, the great bulk of freight is carried by trucks not rail.
Developers, aided by governments, have created the appalling urban sprawl with all its ecological and social consequences (erosion of farmland, huge distances between home and work, etc.). The word "developers" is an appalling euphemism capitalist sharks would be a more accurate description. • And now, in the name of urban consolidation, these same developers are being encouraged to build their often crappyblocks of units anywhere and everywhere. ecologically wasteful and often extremely unhealthy (emissions from building materials, plasties and cleaning agents). government. workers, but homelessness is growing sharply (estimated to be over 100,000 nationally) as governments refuse to build public give subsidies to people to rent from private landlords). • Shopping centres (malls and supermarkets) dominate much of city life. They kill most of the neighbourhood shops and force are purely the result of the capitalist thirst for profit-they appear before us as facts of life; people never get to discuss what is really needed. Moreover, the ubiquitous shopping mall represents a serious privatisation of social space—we all have to