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[Assistant] The Emperor's next stop was Britannia, that foggy island on the edge of the world that as a minor province had hosted a surprising number of major imperial figures, including Julius Caesar, Claudius, Vespasian, Titus, and now Hadrian.


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[Assistant] Hadrian's purpose in Britain was the same as his stop along the Rhine.


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[Assistant] Inspect the frontier defenses and ensure the discipline and reliability of the legions stationed there.


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[Assistant] The island had seen a local revolt accompanying Trajan's death in 117 and Hadrian was looking for a permanent solution to the periodic British uprising.


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[Assistant] The emperor's solution became the defining artifact of his reign.


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[Assistant] This was certainly not Hadrian's intention, given the myriad other splendid works of art and architecture he devoted his full time and attention to.


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[Assistant] But the 70 mile long wall he ordered built from the Solway Firth to the North Sea has stood the test of time, and its stone ruins seem to tell the whole story of Hadrian's reign in one dull grey package.


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[Assistant] His peace and defense policy, his provincial travels, his love of architecture, his savvy economic and political instincts.


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[Assistant] It's all there in the wall that cuts a line across northern Britain.


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[Assistant] At its heart though, the wall was not meant to be a simple defensive frontier, and we shouldn't accept the, this side civilization, that side barbarism, that summaries of historical summaries often reduce it to.


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[Assistant] I think part of the key to understanding the true purpose of the wall is the fact that it bisected Brigante's territory.


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[Assistant] That strongest and typically allied with Roman interests, Northern British tribe, had caused trouble before, had possibly been involved in the 117 difficulties, and no doubt was forever seen as a sleeping menace by the Roman authorities.


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[Assistant] By slicing their territory in two and forcing all north-south traffic to pass through Roman checkpoints, the imperial authorities were able to effectively divide and monitor the brigantis.


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[Assistant] The wall was also a tax collection point, a place where Roman civilization was able to take root in the form of the garrison towns that naturally grew around the legionary barracks, and of course, it was an awe-inspiring projection of Roman power.


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[Assistant] It is interesting to remember that what we see today is just the leftover remains, and that when it was originally built, Hadrian's wall was whitewashed a spotless ivory color.


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[Assistant] In the dark climate of the north, the wall was a glowing white line that reminded everyone who the true masters of the world were.


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[Assistant] Though the wall is, of course, a historical treasure, I can't help but laugh when I think of what Hadrian's reaction would be upon learning that for all his Philholenism, patronage of the arts and sciences, and the myriad great temples he left in his wake, that a simple stone wall in far-off Britain would be his defining legacy.


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[Assistant] Leaving the British legions toiling away on a wall, just as he had left the Rhine legions toiling away on their wall, Hadrian headed south through Gaul and into his old home country of Spain, where he spent the winter of 122-123, likely hunting and enjoying the rustic pleasures of the Iberian Peninsula.


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[Assistant] When spring came, he headed across the Straits of Gibraltar into Mauritania, where a Moorish rebellion had broken out. The brief rebellion seems to have come to nothing.


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[Assistant] But it would be enough to prompt Hadrian on a subsequent trip to Africa to order that a defensive line be built facing into the Atlas Mountains where the nomadic raiders were based.


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[Assistant] As with his wall in Britain, the North African wall was designed as much to manipulate and monitor traffic flow as anything else.


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[Assistant] The nomads needed to periodically cross the Roman frontier on their way to freshwater and pasture lands, and Hadrian wanted to make sure that they were inspected and counted as they came and went.


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[Assistant] Details of the rest of his stay in Africa are sketchy, but the imperial entourage seems to have headed east to the depopulated province of Cyrene, where they then either set sail for Syria directly or where they simply pass through on their way to Alexandria, where they then set sail from.


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[Assistant] With their ill-defined political structure, the Parthians were forever wracked by internal squabbles over who should be king.


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[Assistant] But during the brief periods where one claim it united the fractured eastern kingdoms, Rome had to be on guard against possible encroachment, and that was exactly what Hadrian was in Syria to do.


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[Assistant] But following the example of Augustus rather than Trajan.


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[Assistant] Hadrian planned to solve all the disputes between the two great empires diplomatically.


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[Assistant] Though the ancient sources are once again maddeningly vague, Hadrian appears to have met in personal conference with the Parthian king along the Euphrates, and the two hammered out a deal that confirmed the river as the border between them.


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[Assistant] The details of what concessions were made along the way were not recorded, but whatever the cost, Hadrian no doubt saw it as a cheaper alternative to the blood and treasure war in the East would naturally drain.


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[Assistant] The settlement once again sent the hawkish senate into a tizzy, who couldn't understand why the emperor was bothering to deal with a kingdom the legions had so recently steamrolled.


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[Assistant] But Hadrian had a vision of peace and stability, and he was not going to abandon it just to satisfy the egos of a bunch of rich old aristocrats back in Rome.


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[Assistant] Having come to terms with the Parthians, Hadrian headed back to the west through Asia Minor.


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[Assistant] Throughout 124, he played the part of tourist, judge, and director of public works in every strop along the way, and indeed, practically every city he would ever visit during his 21 years in office.


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[Assistant] Was left with an improved aqueduct system, an expanded street, or a new theater, or some other civic improvement Hadrian had devised or approved of.


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[Assistant] His last stop in Asia Minor before he landed in Athens in the autumn of 124 was the province of Bithynia Pontus on the southern coast of the Black Sea.


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[Assistant] The stopover is important because it was while passing through the city of Claudiopolis that Hadrian possibly first met Antinous, the young Bithynian who would come to mean so much to the Emperor.


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[Assistant] No record exists of when the two first met, but the journey through Antinous' home province is as likely a time as any.


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[Assistant] I thought I would get into the Hadrian and Tenuis relationship this week, but I'm going to put it off until next week, as I would very much like to get Hadrian back to Italy before we close out this week's episode.


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[Assistant] So I'm just gonna leave it that this is the time Hadrian may have first laid eyes on the boy.


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[Assistant] Hadrian then crossed the Aegean and settled into Athens for the winter.


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[Assistant] He was driven to make it back to the city before the famous rites of the Elucinian mysteries took place in the autumn. A mystical experience the emperor very much wanted to take part in.


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[Assistant] He arrived in time and became an initiate in the elaborate Greek mystery religion, just as had Augustus before him.


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[Assistant] He spent the winter in Greece laying out plans to transform Athens from decaying backwater into refurbished cultural capital. A plan the Greeks looked upon as a mixed blessing.


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[Assistant] Ever proud of their historical independence, they appreciated the Emperor's interests, but were a bit annoyed at the extent to which Hadrian was planning to put his own stamp on the ancient city.


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[Assistant] Hadrian may have loved all things Greek, but the Greeks did not necessarily love all things Hadrian.


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[Assistant] By 125, Hadrian had been out of Italy for four years. And though, if he had had his druthers, he probably would have just settled permanently in Athens, the city he truly loved.


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[Assistant] He knew that he had to return to Rome at some point, or the Senate would ratchet up their feelings of neglect into feelings of rebellion. But it would not be all bad.


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[Assistant] Before leaving, Hadrian had left detailed instructions for the construction of a new imperial villa complex in Tivoli, about 20 miles from Rome, that would be a little slice of Greece in the heart of Italy.


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[Assistant] His on-site managers had reported that the villa, while not totally finished, was at least habitable.


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[Assistant] And the emperor could look forward to residing in his new home upon his return.


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[Assistant] In 125, Hadrian sailed from Greece, and after passing through Sicily to inspect the breadbasket of the Empire, the Emperor finally made his triumphant return to the capital.


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[Assistant] Though he had no love for the city itself, his return meant that he could tour all the new construction he had ordered before he left.


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[Assistant] Knowing that he was going to be gone for years, Hadrian wanted to make sure the citizens of Rome did not feel that the Emperor had forgotten them, and the capital was already feeling the effects of Hadrian's new architectural vision.


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[Assistant] Including the recently completed reconstruction of Agrippa's burned out pantheon.


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[Assistant] Next week, we'll set out once again with Hadrian as the restless Emperor tours the Italian Peninsula, returns to North Africa, and then heads back to the Eastern Empire where his heart truly resided.


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[Assistant] Along the way, he would pass through the destroyed ruins of Jerusalem, where he would make a fateful decision to rebrand the city and the wider territory of Judea as a truly Greco-Roman province.


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[Assistant] A decision that would have serious consequences as yet another brutal Jewish revolt would break out, disrupting the uninterrupted peace Hadrian had worked so hard to maintain.


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[Assistant] In that time, he had completed one full counter-clockwise circuit of the empire, up through Gaul to Britain, then down through Spain into Africa, east across North Africa, up into Syria, then west across Asia Minor to Greece, and then, after a brief final stop in Sicily, back to the Italian peninsula.


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[Assistant] His return to the Capitol was greeted with a mixture of enthusiasm by some, annoyance by others, and indifference by the rest.


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[Assistant] In the seven plus years Hadrian had already logged on the throne, he had earned a reputation as an ever active polymath executive whose interest extended to every corner of the empire.


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[Assistant] While the provincials loved the personal attention Hadrian lavished upon them, the Roman Romans, the ones who actually lived in Rome, were less enthused by the emperor's corresponding inattention.


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[Assistant] Hadrian had kept the bread and circuses flowing and continued the building boom that had rolled on uninterrupted since the reign of Domitian.


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[Assistant] In the final analysis, the emperor turned out to be a Grecofile Spaniard who loved all the things a proper Roman was supposed to hate. Hunting, astrology, poetry.


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[Assistant] He was also an unapologetic and open homosexual. And of course, there was his trivial, but somehow still earth-shattering decision to abandon the austere, clean-shaven face that had defined the look of the Roman aristocracy for centuries in favor of a full beard.


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[Assistant] Hadrian was an emperor, yes, but whether he was a Roman emperor was something of an open question.


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[Assistant] That is to say, he wasn't deliberately setting himself against existing tradition. He was instead simply supremely confident in who he was and what he was doing.


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[Assistant] There are a couple of explanations for his beard, for example, from it being an extension of his Phil Hellenism, to it being an easy way to connect with rank-and-file soldiers, who often wore beards, to a simple desire to cover a pockmarked and warty face. But nowhere does anyone report that he wore a beard just to tick off the conservative elites back in Rome.


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[Assistant] On a larger scale, his promotion of Greece at the expense of Italy was not undertaken because he wanted to spit on Italian exceptionalism, but because he knew that the long-term interests of the empire begged for all the provinces to become united on a more equal footing.


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[Assistant] As I said when I was introducing Trajan, it was fast becoming counterproductive to view the empire as a collection of provinces ruled by Rome, rather than a single cosmopolitan pan-Mediterranean political unit.


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[Assistant] While the vast majority of subjects within the Empire eyed this change of focus with relish.


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[Assistant] It all went over like a lead balloon in Italy, where every man, woman and child had been raised from birth to believe that they were, in fact, exceptional in every single way and ruled the world by divine right.


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[Assistant] Hadrian lived in his villa at Tivoli from 125 to the beginning of 127, conducting the business of empire from the newly constructed compound rather than from the imperial palace on the Palatine or, God forbid, the halls of the Senate.


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[Assistant] The world no longer revolved around Rome, it revolved around Hadrian, just as Hadrian wanted.


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[Assistant] In 127, he got restless again and decided to go on a quick tour of the one province he had thus far neglected, Italy itself.


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[Assistant] So he spent the rest of the year traveling around the peninsula doing what he did best, adjudicating legal disputes and ordering architectural improvements in every municipality he passed through.


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[Assistant] It was during this tour that Hadrian decided to implement one of the few reforms that would not survive his death.


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[Assistant] Future emperors would follow Hadrian's precedence consciously or unconsciously for years, right down to the bearded face.


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[Assistant] But the emperor's reform of Italian political administration would be repealed practically hours after he died.


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[Assistant] Since the days of Augustus, Italy had been divided into 17 administrative districts, but the local towns and cities were mostly left to their own devices.


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[Assistant] Hadrian decided to divide the peninsula into four zones, each run by an imperial procurator, who would answer directly to the emperor.


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[Assistant] It may seem an innocuous shift, but the Italians resented the hell out of the fact that Hadrian was effectively turning Italy into just another province.


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[Assistant] So, like I say, the reorganization of the peninsula would be repealed immediately once Hadrian wasn't around to defend this universally unpopular idea.


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[Assistant] Italian exceptionalism would die one day, but not yet.


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[Assistant] 127 also marked Hadrian's 10th year in office, which he celebrated with appropriate games and banquets.


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[Assistant] The auspicious occasion was marked with darkness though, as the Emperor seems to have either fallen ill or suffered from a serious accident that laid him up for months, right around the time of his decennial celebrations.


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[Assistant] But the emperor was not going to be held down for long, and in the spring of 128, he was healthy enough to make a return trip to North Africa, which he had been forced to speed through on his way to the summit with the Parthians in 123.


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[Assistant] Before he left though, he finally accepted the one honorific he had thus far refused, having decided he had finally done enough good to be hailed Father of the People.


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[Assistant] On this latest trip to Africa, he was able to focus more intently on the particulars of the North African provinces, though the visit basically followed the standard Hadrianic template.


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[Assistant] Inspect the troops, order defensive fortifications built, improve municipal infrastructure, and settle legal disputes.


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[Assistant] Hadrian's standout accomplishment during his time in Africa happened just as he was arriving.


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[Assistant] Plague by drought, the arrival of the Emperor had been accompanied by sudden rainstorms, prompting coins to be issued praising Hadrian the Rainmaker.


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[Assistant] Before the fall came, Hadrian skipped back to Italy on his way to Greece, where he planned to take part in the Eleusian Mysteries for a second time, this time as a full initiate.


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[Assistant] The cult tickled all of the Emperor's sweet spots, from its classical Greek character, to its overt mysticism, to its ability to bring together the Hellenized world in one unifying ceremony.


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[Assistant] This last point stuck in the emperor's head, and on this, his third long-term stay in Greece, he initiated a plan to bring the Greeks together as a single political force.


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[Assistant] The Greeks had, of course, always been the cultural engine of the empire.


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[Assistant] But their long history of city-state independence and its attendant intra-Greek squabbling had always left them weak politically.


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[Assistant] So hot on the heels of his decision to downgrade Italy to just another province status, Hadrian pushed the Greeks to join together in a new Pan-Hellenian league designed to raise them from Eastern backwater to major player.


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[Assistant] He personally lobbied the magistrates of Athens and Sparta, the two most important and most antagonistic cities, to join in the new league that would unite Greece and bring them power within the empire that they had thus far never dreamed possible.


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[Assistant] Intrigued by Hadrian's promise of increased influence, the Greeks began to work on the details of who would be allowed to join the league, where meetings would be held, for how long, and what the extent of its powers would be, and all the other minutiae that accompany these sorts of high-minded diplomatic assemblies.


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[Assistant] Just to be clear though, the practical power the new Pan-Hellenian League would wield would be none, as Hadrian had no intention of relinquishing any imperial prerogatives.


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[Assistant] But he hoped a unified community of Greeks would nonetheless contribute to the future stability of the empire.


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[Assistant] Despite his hopes though, the league collapsed after his death.


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[Assistant] Without the emperor's active attention, the Greeks fell back to their old ways and did what Greeks do best. Squabbling with each other until the league was left an irrelevant shell.


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[Assistant] In 129, the emperor sailed from Athens to Anatolia, and from there, he traveled down into the eastern provinces where he called together, presumably in Antioch, though I haven't been able to confirm that little detail.


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[Assistant] For the hawkish senate, the summit was a complete embarrassment, as it shoved in their faces once again Hadrian's policy of purchasing peace, rather than fighting for it, as had always been the roman way.


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[Assistant] Client kings were client kings because they were paid by the emperor to stay client kings.


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[Assistant] The crass financial nature of the relationship offended the Senate, but Hadrian paid them no mind, boasting about the fact that he had won more by doing nothing than others had by waging war.


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[Assistant] Hadrian then traveled south to Egypt in 130, but along the way, he stopped off at the ruins of Jerusalem to take care of some unfinished business.


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[Assistant] The province had been heavily depopulated during the various Jewish revolts. Its great cities had been destroyed, the Temple of Solomon had burned to the ground, and the political authority of the Jewish high priests a thing of the past.


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[Assistant] Hadrian decided to bring the troubled region back to life by annihilating the last vestiges of Judaism and rebranding the old province as a Hellenistic colony of the Greco-Roman world.


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[Assistant] He ordered the devastated Jerusalem rebuilt, renaming the city Alia Capitolina.


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[Assistant] The alien part coming from Hadrian's own name and the capital line apart signaling that the city was dedicated in the name of Jupiter.


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[Assistant] Hadrian then ordered a temple be built on the site of the old Jewish temple, and a front that on its own may have been enough to spark another revolt, but coupled with the emperor's new ban on circumcision, was simply the straw that broke the camel's back.


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[Assistant] In just two years time, revolt in Judea would once again be headline news and no fewer than 12 legions would be needed to prosecute and win the third Jewish war.


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[Assistant] Hadrian was blithely unaware of the train wreck he was setting in motion, though, and no doubt pleased with how nice and Greek he had left the region. He traveled south to Egypt, where he planned to indulge in every tourist trap the ancient kingdom had to offer.


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[Assistant] It is the Emperor's trip up the Nile that finally brings us to the relationship that had dominated Hadrian's personal life the past five years.


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[Assistant] His long-standing affair with the teenage boy Antinous.


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[Assistant] Now, homosexuality as a psychological identity was still 2,000 years or so from being created. And in the classical world, gender roles and sex were not nearly as defined as they are today. So it is hard to come right out and say that Hadrian was gay or that that made him unique among Roman emperors.


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[Assistant] Given, for example, famously commented that Claudius was the only ember whose case in love was, quote, entirely correct.


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[Assistant] In the ancient world, the line of appropriateness came down to whether one was the dominant or passive partner.


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[Assistant] That all being said though, there were certain mores concerning homosexual interactions that it seems Hadrian, as in everything else he did with his life, flouted with impunity.


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[Assistant] His choice of partners, his complete abandonment of women, and above all, his willingness to do everything out in the open, bothered the permissive, but subtly so, Roman aristocracy.


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[Assistant] And this brings us to Antenous, the boy from Bithynia.


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[Assistant] How the emperor and the young man met is a matter of historical speculation, but however he became attached to the imperial entourage, be it at Hadrian's specific request or through some more general order by the emperor to bring all the most beautiful youth to his court,


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[Assistant] The age difference is shocking to modern sensibilities, but in a world where teenage girls were routinely married to middle-aged men, the gap was not a serious impediment to their relationship.


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[Assistant] Plus, one of those unstated mores regarding homosexual behavior was that a young man could indulge in a sort of exploratory bisexual period that was often guided by an older man during his teen years.


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[Assistant] Those exploratory years were supposed to be handled with all due discretion by the elder partner.


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[Assistant] The emperor himself felt no significant pressure to end the relationship.


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[Assistant] Besides, by all account, this was no fling for Hadrian. He appears to have been genuinely in love.


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[Assistant] And Tinnitus had been born in 111 in Bithynia and was by all accounts a beautiful young man.


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[Assistant] It is supposed that sometime around 124, Antinous was enrolled in the Imperial Page Program that trained young men for service as valets, secretaries, couriers, and whatever else the Emperor required.


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[Assistant] It is also supposed that it was around the time Hadrian returned from his first tour of the Empire in 125 that Antinous officially joined the Imperial entourage.


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[Assistant] Moving into the Emperor's villa, Antinous quickly became the Emperor's constant companion, and for the next five years, wherever Hadrian went, so went Antinous.


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[Assistant] For all the happiness they share though, the couple was headed for a tragedy that we are still at a loss to explain today.


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[Assistant] In 130, as I said, the imperial court moved south into Egypt, where Hadrian intended to bask in the glow of the most ancient kingdom of the known world.


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[Assistant] They took in the pyramids and the sphinx and visited the tomb of Alexander the Great.


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[Assistant] Then they boarded a grand flotilla that headed up the Nile to the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis and beyond.


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[Assistant] In October of 130, the flotillas stopped off at Hermopolis to visit an old temple dedicated by Ramses II. And it was while in port there that the drowned body of Antinous washed up on the banks. Hadrian was crushed.


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[Assistant] Like I said, no one knows for sure what happened, and I am certainly not going to push some version or another with certainty.


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[Assistant] Most of the ancient sources report that it was simply an accident while Antinous was off on a swim.


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[Assistant] But others suppose that Antinous committed suicide, either because he knew that the aged Emperor would soon grow tired of him, or, perhaps worse yet, that the Emperor would not grow tired of him, and Antinous would be trapped in a shameful pseudo-marriage he could not control.


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[Assistant] Still others state that Antinous was sacrificed according to the mystical advice of Egyptian holy men who told the emperor he could achieve long life if another died in his place.


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[Assistant] In this last telling, some have it that Antinous willingly gave himself up, some that Hadrian's agents killed the boy in his name but without his knowledge and others that Hadrian ordered up the murder himself.


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[Assistant] Honestly, I don't think anyone knows. But the Emperor's reaction to the news seems to belie that he was anywhere near growing tired of the boy or that he ordered Antenna was killed.


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[Assistant] Because while in mourning, Hadrian founded a city in Antinous's honor at the site where he died.


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[Assistant] Further, the various astrologers and mystics the Emperor often kept hanging around assured the Emperor that the new star in the sky he had detected was indeed Antinous and Hadrian declared that the boy had attained true godhood and a new cult would be created to worship him.


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[Assistant] In fact, as it stands, Antinous is one of the most well-known faces of the ancient world due to the proliferation of statues and monuments Hadrian erected in his honor across the empire.


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[Assistant] Eventually, Hadrian's sadness was overtaken by pressing business.


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[Assistant] But the cult of Antinous spread across the east as local municipalities of every size quickly recognized that an easy way to curry favor with the emperor was to direct a few dollars to the worship of his dead lover.


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[Assistant] For a while, the cult of the now idealized vision of youthful beauty that Antinous came to represent competed head to head with the emerging cult of Jesus Christ for adherence.


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[Assistant] Back in Rome, the news of Antinous' death was accompanied by the news that Hadrian had ordered the boy deified.


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[Assistant] First, there was the fact that a non-imperial family member was being deified.


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[Assistant] Mothers, sisters, fathers, sons, they were all welcome in the cult of the Caesars, but a 19-year-old boy with no legal or familial connection to the Emperor, who was by all accounts simply Hadrian's lover,


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[Assistant] People knew Caligula had really gone round the bend when he threatened to make his horse a consul. Was this really so different?


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[Assistant] Perhaps the more pressing concern for the Senate, though, was that Hadrian, in his grief, had bypassed them completely.


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[Assistant] Emperors who wanted to stand the good side of the aristocracy asked the Senate's permission to deify dead relatives. It was just good manners.


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[Assistant] The last emperor to simply declare someone's divinity was to mission very early on in his reign.


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[Assistant] Not that he really cared much right at that moment, but by deifying Antinous, Hadrian suddenly found himself being compared not to Augustus and Trajan, but to Caligula and Domitian.


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[Assistant] So like I said, Hadrian never would get the aristocracy on his side. And when it came time for Antoninus to deify Hadrian after the Emperor's death in 137, well, that became something of a protracted struggle.


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[Assistant] Antoninus finally threatened to resign, forcing the Senate to deify his adoptive father or face the prospect of civil war.


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[Assistant] After laying the foundations of the new city of Antinopolis, Hadrian made his way back down the Nile to Alexandria, and from there seems to have headed for Greece.


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[Assistant] We don't know whether he returned to Italy at all in the meantime, but Hadrian was definitely in Athens in 132 when news came that a violent revolt had broken out in Judea.


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[Assistant] The reason why a rebellion broke out at that precise moment is still unknown, but in general, the Jews had been in a state of apoplexy since Hadrian had wandered through their homeland, all but outlawed their religion, and then rebuilt Jerusalem as some pagan colony.


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[Assistant] So the fact that an uprising began and all was one of those when not ifs.


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[Assistant] One thing we do know is that the revolt was not spontaneous.


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[Assistant] It was a carefully planned affair that had probably been in the making from the moment Hadrian departed Judea for Egypt.


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[Assistant] In addition to the network of caves and tunnels the Jewish fighters constructed to offer safe harbor in what was sure to be a guerrilla campaign.


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[Assistant] The Jewish leadership also hit upon a neat trick to help them secretly stockpile weapons.


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[Assistant] Knowing Hadrian's exceedingly high standards for military equipment, local Jewish craftsmen sent in deliberately shoddy weapons to the local Roman garrisons.


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[Assistant] When the equipment was predictably returned as substandard it was picked out of the rubbish bin and reworked for use by the Jewish rebels.


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[Assistant] When the revolt finally did break out, Roman commanders were shocked at how well the Jews were armed.


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[Assistant] In 132, prepared as they were ever going to be, the Jewish leader Simon Bar Kokhba announced that he was the messiah Jewish prophecy had long promised and that he was going to drive the pagans out of Judea and restore the independent kingdom of Israel.


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[Assistant] At first, the lunatic ravings of yet another Jewish messiah struck the local Roman administrator, Tinius Rufus, as beneath his time and attention.


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[Assistant] But it soon became clear that Simon was leading a well-armed and politically unified insurrection force.


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[Assistant] The two legions at Rufus' disposal sustained heavy damage from the quick and mobile Jewish guerrillas, and reinforcements had to be sent in from Syria and Egypt.


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[Assistant] But the ineffectiveness of the new arrivals only bolstered Jewish confidence, and the legion from Egypt appears to have been completely wiped out sometime in 133.


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[Assistant] By this point, the whole province was in revolt and the regular Jewish fighters found plenty of housing and supplies from non-combatant sympathizers across the country.


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[Assistant] Simon then declared independence for the new state of Israel, and with the Romans reeling from the unexpected force of the rebellion, the Jewish leadership found themselves in effective control of much of the province.


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[Assistant] But a Hadrian was not going to stand by and watch a Roman province simply shrug off their imperial masters.


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[Assistant] He may have been a skeptic of the efficacy of war when it came to external threats, but internal threats were something else entirely.


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[Assistant] He ordered his best general, Sextus Julius Severus, to leave his post in Britain and make with all haste for Judea and pick up as many troops as he felt necessary along the way.


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[Assistant] Methodically use overwhelming force to crush the insurrection.


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[Assistant] It is reported that no fewer than twelve legions took part in the action, but saw the Romans destroy fifty fortified towns and almost a thousand separate villages.


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[Assistant] In addition to the heavy Roman casualties, almost 600,000 Jews were killed during the retaking of Judea.


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[Assistant] Severus finally strangled off Simon in the last holdouts in 135, and the Legions declared victory.


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[Assistant] The devastation and depopulation that accompanied this last Jewish war, a war many scholars mark as the true beginning of the diaspora.


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[Assistant] Reminds one of Tacitus's famous line, which the historian attributed to a British chieftain, that the Romans make a desert and they call it peace.


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[Assistant] Surveying this desert, Hadrian decided to double down on his plan to eradicate the Jews and leave in their place a Hellenized population of Greco-Romans.


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[Assistant] Hadrian's post-war policy then was nothing less than cultural genocide.


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[Assistant] He banned the Jews from entering Jerusalem, still called Aelia capitalina.


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[Assistant] Continued his ban on circumcision, outlawed the Hebrew calendar, and prohibited the use of Torah law.


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[Assistant] The sacred scroll was carried up to the temple mount and burned. And for years afterward, Jewish scholars were executed for perpetuating their outlawed religion.


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[Assistant] As a final reminder that in Hadrian's eyes, Judaism was dead, the emperor renamed the province Syria-Palestinia after the Philistines, the ancient enemy of the Jews.


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[Assistant] It is hard to understate the effect all of this had on the future of Judaism.


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[Assistant] From 135 on, Judea was no longer the cultural, political, or religious center of Jewish life, and would not be again until well into the modern era.


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[Assistant] The Jewish community scattered across the Roman Empire were forced to look to an enclave of Babylonian Jews for guidance, safe as those leaders were within the more tolerant borders of the Parthian Empire.


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[Assistant] As I just mentioned, some scholars mark the true beginning of the diaspora at Hadrian's genocidal victory of 135, rather than by the tame by comparison victory of the Flavians in 70.


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[Assistant] For having ordered the death and enslavement of their race, and the eradication of their religion, Hadrian is uniquely despised within Jewish histories, who always follow the Emperor's name with the epitaph, May his bones be crushed.


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[Assistant] Next week, Hadrian will return to Italy, where he will spend the last years of his life decaying into a bitter, agonized mess.


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[Assistant] Just as his ascension to power had been marked by political murder, so too would his release of it.


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[Assistant] These violent bookends to the Emperor's career were all the proof the Senate needed to become convinced that despite all of his avowed pacifism, generosity, wisdom and benevolence, the Hadrian was at his core a paranoid psychotic who would kill them all if given half a chance.


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[Assistant] Hadrian had been in Athens when word came in 132 that another revolt had broken out in Judea.


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[Assistant] The two and a half years of fighting to retake the province would prove to be the most significant military operation Rome would engage in during Hadrian's reign. And it is likely, bordering on confirmed fact, that the emperor traveled to the trouble region to oversee the campaign for himself.


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[Assistant] But he did not stick around to see the conflict's resolution, and by 134, the emperor was back in Italy, having left the prosecution of the war in the hands of his best general, Sextus Julius Severus.


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[Assistant] This final trip back from the east would mark Hadrian's last tour as the great traveling emperor. And when he settled into his villa at Tivoli, whether he knew it or not, he was settling in for good.


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[Assistant] By all accounts, the last few years of Hadrian's reign were unhappy ones, both for the Emperor himself, and for everyone around him.


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[Assistant] His mental and physical health began to deteriorate, and as his life grew shorter, so too did his temper.


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[Assistant] The image of himself Hadrian had worked so hard to create, that of a patient, generous, enlightened monarch, began to fall apart, and all the close friends and associates who had stood by his side through thick and thin began to be pushed away one by one.


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[Assistant] Hadrian had been proud to call the best and brightest the Empire had to offer his personal friends. When he died though, he was attended by none but a few slaves.


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[Assistant] Every man who should have stood by the Emperor as he slipped away was either dead or exiled or had chosen to withdraw from a ruler who seemed to be lashing out at those he trusted and who trusted him the most.


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[Assistant] Those who knew him best saw Hadrian's final years as a departure from his natural disposition, while his enemies in the Senate saw it as confirmation that he had been a monster all along.


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[Assistant] For a while after he returned to Italy, things seemed to be okay. Hadrian, naturally feeling the effects of nearly two decades on the throne, began to think about what the world would be like when he was gone.


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[Assistant] Frequent unstoppable nosebleeds had him thinking about his own mortality.


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[Assistant] Who would follow him on the throne and how would history remember him?


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[Assistant] Much like Augustus, Hadrian displayed concern about the future of both the imperial dynasty and the empire as a whole.


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[Assistant] For an emperor obsessed with the stability and strength of Rome, it would have been nearly impossible for him to treat the question of succession with the same cavalier attitude Trajan had displayed.


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[Assistant] He had spent his life consolidating Rome's holdings and establishing peaceful relations with potential external threats. He did not want it all to be thrown away by some less enlightened successor.


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[Assistant] He needed to think long and hard about who he was going to hand power to.


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[Assistant] But it soon became apparent that the aging and very possibly dying emperor was not the same eminently rational man who'd ruled the empire for so long.


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[Assistant] The ancient histories first point to the emperor's feud with Apollodorus of Damascus as proof that he was beginning to lose his grip.


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[Assistant] Hadrian, who always fancied himself an excellent architect, had designed a great temple of Venus that was dedicated in Rome in 135.


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[Assistant] Proud of what he considered a magnificent work of art, Hadrian asked the greatest architect of his generation, Apollo Doris, to comment on the design and construction.


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[Assistant] Obviously fishing for compliment, Hadrian was deeply grieved when Appledorus sent back a stern critique of the building's foundation, the line of sight for visitors approaching along the sacred way, the size of the doors, they were too small, and the size of the statue of Venus inside, it was too large.


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[Assistant] If Venus ever wished to go out for a stroll, Apollodorus caustically informed the Emperor, she would be unable to fit through the entryway.


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[Assistant] Now the Emperor and the Architect had been on tense terms for years.


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[Assistant] Standard legend has it that at some point during the Dacian Wars, Hadrian had interrupted a conference between Trajan and Apollodorus to offer his own opinion of the project they were discussing. And Apollodorus, incensed that this young amateur was even approaching the grown-ups table, dismissed Hadrian, telling him to go back to his drawings, that he understood none of this.


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[Assistant] Relations between the enthusiastic amateur and the proud professional never got much better. Though Hadrian seems to have respected Apollodorus enough that he asked the architect to help design war machines that would allow the legions to attack Jewish cave bases during the Third Jewish War.


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[Assistant] But respect or no, Cassius Dio reports that when Hadrian read Apollodorus' critique that he became enraged and ordered the architect banished from Rome and shortly thereafter had him executed.


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[Assistant] If this seems like an overly rash response to what was probably reasonable criticism, you're right. And most modern historians do not believe that Apollodorus was actually killed by Hadrian, but that instead, the old architect simply died of natural causes around the time of the exchange, and that Hadrian's enemies drew their own libelous conclusions.


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[Assistant] But if the crime itself never took place, the mood of Hadrian's last years certainly made believing that the crime did take place easy to swallow, and that, more than anything else, is the moral of the story.


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[Assistant] Because while he may not have executed Appledorus, the Emperor's treatment of his own family is confirmed fact.


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[Assistant] Placing Apollo Doris' blood on Hadrian's hands is not so much a matter of falsely accusing the innocent, as it is adding one more name to the list.


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[Assistant] As 135 gave way to 136, the issue of succession began to consume the emperor. That, and the completion of his great mausoleum on the banks of the Tiber, which is still standing in Rome, so go visit that too.


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[Assistant] For Neospidanus Fuscus, the only living male relative of the emperor, this should have come as welcome news.


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[Assistant] Fuscus was Hadrian's teenage great-nephew, the grandson of his sister and a powerful center named Lucius Julius Servianus.


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[Assistant] But unfortunately for Fuscus, Hadrian had watched the boy grow up and determined that he was utterly unfit for power. That his tastes were too lavish and too petty. A Nero in the making if there ever was one.


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[Assistant] Hadrian's unwillingness to commit to Fuscus greatly annoyed his grandfather Servianus, who was past 90 years old, but still growing strong.


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[Assistant] Servianus and Hadrian had never gotten along, and the fact that they were brothers-in-law seems only to have widened the gap, rather than bridge it.


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[Assistant] It certainly did not help that it had been widely reported Servianuses was one of the few names Trajan had ever firmly put forward as a possible worthy heir to the throne back in 116-117.


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[Assistant] That he'd been passed over in favor of his younger, cockier brother-in-law, likely through the machinations of a woman at that, had always stuck in Servianus's craw.


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[Assistant] But in his last years, the unmistakable reality that his grandson was the only man living with a blood relation to the emperor seemed to serve Yannis to resemble some kind of cosmic justice.


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[Assistant] But in defiance of this cosmic justice, Hadrian determined that whoever he chose, young Fuscus would not be his man. Blood ties be damned.


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[Assistant] This second Passover of Servianus' family maybe, maybe would have gone without incident had Hadrian chosen as heir someone whose worth could not be denied by anyone. Much as Nervous Choice of Trajan had put to rest every other claim on power, even amongst those who really thought they deserved the call.


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[Assistant] Hadrian could have settled Servianus' discontent by choosing some worthy man. Like, for example, and I'm just throwing this out there, Sextus Julius Severus, the troubleshooting general who had just won the war in Judea.


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[Assistant] But instead, in 136, prompted by a massive hemorrhage that nearly killed him.


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[Assistant] Hadrian announced to a shocked Roman world that he was adopting a relatively obscure and unaccomplished man named Lucius Caonius Commodus.


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[Assistant] Muckriggers immediately pointed to Lucius' reputation as a pretty dilettante as the deciding factor.


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[Assistant] But the emperor's sympathizers argued that Hadrian was playing a game of four-dimensional chess with the succession issue that only the brilliant emperor himself could fully understand.


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[Assistant] I, of course, would adopt the boring conclusion that it was likely somewhere in between these two extremes.


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[Assistant] The choice of Lucius, who changed his name to Lucius alias Caesar when the adoption went through, does seem a curious one taken on its own though.


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[Assistant] Lucius was a capable enough senator, but he had well-known health problems, likely suffering from tuberculosis.


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[Assistant] If Hadrian wanted to ensure the stability of the dynasty and the empire,


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[Assistant] Choosing the perpetually bedridden Lucius was an odd choice to say the least.


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[Assistant] But, like I say, it is entirely possible that Hadrian was looking beyond Lucius to the man or men he really wanted to control the empire down the road.


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[Assistant] Lucius would be his stopgap, his very own Nerva, to bridge the interregnum between Hadrian and the young men he really had his eyes on.


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[Assistant] But before we get into them, it is worth mentioning one other salient detail about Lucius that may have recommended him to the Emperor.


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[Assistant] Namely, that he was the son-in-law of Publius Nagrinus, one of the four ex-consuls who had been murdered in 118.


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[Assistant] Hadrian was concerned about his legacy and the choice of Lucius may have been an olive branch to the Senate, at admission that he understood their anger and that he wanted to set things right.


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[Assistant] Most agree though, that Lucius was not the true object of the Emperor's plans. That the fourth dimension of Hadrian's scheme was the grandson of one of the Emperor's closest friends and advisors, Marcus Aeneas Varys.


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[Assistant] Born with his father and grandfather's name, young Marcus Verus, then 15 years old, had caught the Emperor's attention early, as an unusually serious and intelligent boy.


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[Assistant] Having been raised in part by his grandfather, who Hadrian held in the highest esteem.


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[Assistant] Young Marcus was marked from the beginning as one worth watching.


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[Assistant] As the Emperor watched Marcus grow up, he was impressed more and more with the studious and capable teenager.


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[Assistant] We'll get more into the biographical particulars of the man history will come to know as Marcus Aurelius in our next episode, but I just want to note for now that upon Lucius' adoption in 136, Marcus was engaged to Lucius' daughter almost immediately.


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[Assistant] Though he had a son of his own, a six-year-old also named Lucius Caonius Commodus, Hadrian seems to have been setting things up so that when the perpetually ill Lucius Caesar inevitably succumbed to one of his many ailments, power would transfer naturally to his new son-in-law, Marcus.


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[Assistant] This of course begs us to ask the question, why not just adopt Marcus straight away? Why take the scenic route through Lucius?


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[Assistant] The one obvious answer is that at 15, Marcus may have been a promising candidate for power, but was not yet seasoned enough for Hadrian's taste.


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[Assistant] Nero and Caligula had proven the folly of allowing the young too much power.


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[Assistant] Lucius, though weakly constituted, was still in the prime of his middle age, and would likely last long enough to at least get Marcus into his mid-twenties. At which point, he would hopefully have enough experience to temper the excesses of youth.


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[Assistant] But who knows, maybe Hadrian was trying to have his cake and eat it too.


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[Assistant] Adopt the son-in-law of Negrinus to appease the Senate, knowing full well that Lucius would die off quickly and Hadrian's real choice of heir could take over.


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[Assistant] The choice of Lucius appears to have been too much for Servianus and Fuscus to take.


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[Assistant] Fuscus especially saw the throne as his birthright, and when he learned that he had been passed over, just as his grandfather had before him, the young man set himself on a plan to overthrow the aging Hadrian and seize power for himself.


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[Assistant] At some point in late 137, Hadrian's spy network informed him of the plot and the Emperor took decisive action.


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[Assistant] He sees young Fuscus, who was no doubt close at hand, as he was still a member of the Imperial Court, even if his relevance was now virtually non-existent.


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[Assistant] Feeling the brunt of the emperor's wrath, the young alleged usurper was ordered to commit suicide.


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[Assistant] But the death of his great nephew was apparently not enough, and shortly after Fuscus' death, Hadrian unexpectedly turned on Servianus and ordered him too to commit suicide.


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[Assistant] The Roman elites could take in stride the political assassination of a young man who was very possibly himself plotting political assassination.


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[Assistant] But forcing an old man to end his life in such a dishonorable way, especially one who'd spent that life nobly serving the empire, was a pointless outrage.


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[Assistant] Servianus, as you can imagine, was himself outraged. But after firmly avowing his innocence and his fidelity both to Rome and the Emperor, he did indeed kill himself.


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[Assistant] It seems clear that the case against Servianus was trumped up, and that Hadrian was finally acting on a long-held grudge. But what are we to make of Fuscus's alleged coup plot? For the Senate, it was not even a matter of debate.


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[Assistant] Hadrian had invented charges against and then murdered his great nephew to ensure that his own diabolical plans for the future of Rome progressed unhindered.


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[Assistant] Some sources claim that other men of senatorial rank were also caught up in Hadrian's paranoid net and killed at the same time.


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[Assistant] Implying that Hadrian had basically cooked up a wide-ranging conspiracy, so he could prosecute anyone who might trouble his plan for succession.


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[Assistant] In the end, it's really hard to tell what's true and what's not, especially given the Senate's clear enmity toward Hadrian.


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[Assistant] But given the Emperor's mood at the time, it is possible that he did engage in a carefully planned purge to clear the path for his chosen heirs, and perhaps deal a bit of vengeance to his enemies before he died.


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[Assistant] Some sources even have it that Hadrian's long estranged wife, Sabina, was herself caught up in the purge.


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[Assistant] Because however it happened, she died in early 137, and was thus easily lumped into stories about the Emperor's mad reign of terror.


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[Assistant] Rumor mongers breathlessly wondered, did he suspect that she would act as Pompeya had when Trajan died and upset the apple cart of his carefully laid plans? Probably not.


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[Assistant] Though they had never gotten along personally, Hadrian had always gone out of his way to treat her, and make sure everyone else treated her, with great respect.


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[Assistant] And in turn, she was as loyal to the regime as anyone.


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[Assistant] Like with Apple Adores, coincidence is likely leading to conspiracy theory.


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[Assistant] But if, after the deaths of Fuscus, Servianus, and whoever else, Hadrian thought his house of cards was well in order, he was in for a cruel shock.


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[Assistant] Just a month after the executions let's call them what they really were.


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[Assistant] His heir, Lucius Caesar, returned from Pannonia where he had been sent by the Emperor to oversee the defense of the Danube frontier for the year.


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[Assistant] Though Lucius did an admirable job administering the region throughout 137, the climate had taken its toll on the perpetually bedridden new Caesar.


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[Assistant] Back in Rome, Lucius was preparing to address the Senate on New Year's Day when he became seriously ill.


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[Assistant] Some report that he overdosed on the medicine he had been prescribed. But whatever the cause, on January the 1st, 138, Lucius Caesar died, sending Hadrian's perhaps too clever by half succession plans into disarray.


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[Assistant] The Senate breathed a sigh of relief that Lucius had not lived long enough to fall flat on his face as Emperor, as they were all fairly sure he would.


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[Assistant] And hope rippled through the aristocracy that Hadrian would come to his senses and choose a deserving candidate.


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[Assistant] But, dipping once again into the well of the handsome yet undistinguished, on January 22, 138 AD, Hadrian pulled out another random name to confound professional prognosticators.


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[Assistant] Titus Aurelius Fulvis Boionius Arius Antoninus was a well-liked senator who had traveled up the Cursus honorum with a sort of stable plotting.


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[Assistant] But he was just about the last man anyone would have guessed Hadrian would adopt as his heir.


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[Assistant] But the fates work in random ways and Antoninus suddenly found himself next in line for the throne. This time, the choice would stick.


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[Assistant] And the man we all now know as Antoninus Pius will soon find himself ruling Rome for the better part of 23 blessedly banal years.


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[Assistant] The Fulvii branch of the Aurelians had emerged during the early imperial period as one of the leading families of non-Italian origin.


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[Assistant] But though they called southern Gaul their homeland, by Antoninus' time, the family had emigrated to Italy, and Antoninus himself was born in Lavinium, about 20 miles from Rome.


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[Assistant] His grandfather had taken the family to the height of imperial favor during the crisis of 69 AD, throughout which he commanded the third legion stationed along the Danube.


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[Assistant] After initially fighting for Otho, he switched, along with the rest of his defeated comrades, to Vespasian's banner, and so found himself seated alongside the Flavians when they finally won that brutal game of musical chairs.


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[Assistant] Rewarded for his service with a Suffolk Consul ship at some point in the 70s A.D.


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[Assistant] Demission rewarded him further with an ordinary console ship in 85.


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[Assistant] Just four years later, his son, Antoninus' father, was similarly rewarded.


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[Assistant] But both Antoninus' father and grandfather died sometime in the early 90s AD, and young Antoninus, then still known by his birth name Titus Aurelius Fulvis, was taken under the wing of his maternal grandfather, Neus Aurelius Antoninus.


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[Assistant] Hence the addition of Arius and Antoninus to the boy's name.


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[Assistant] The elder Antoninus was a well-respected senator who counted amongst his friends plenty the younger. And he brought up his grandson with the stable, if boring values of a cultured Roman aristocrat.


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[Assistant] While in his early twenties, Antoninus married Ania Galeria Faustina, granddaughter of Hadrian's aforementioned friend, Marcus Aeneas Verus.


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[Assistant] The pairing was obviously fortuitous for Antoninus, and when Hadrian became emperor in 117, the young man found himself on the fringes of the imperial court by virtue of his relation to Varys.


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[Assistant] In 120, Antoninus was given a consulship and, having obviously impressed Hadrian, he was later chosen to be one of the four procurators who would govern Italy after Hadrian reformed the administration of the peninsula in 127.


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[Assistant] Long term, of course, his association with this wildly unpopular reform was something of a black mark on his reputation. But for the time being, it was a signal of imperial favor.


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[Assistant] Antoninus was likely looking forward to a career of distinction and responsibility, though it is unlikely he ever considered that he himself would be emperor one day.


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[Assistant] But there he was in January of 138, suddenly called to the Imperial Villa and informed that he could now add Caesar to his long list of names because the Emperor, out of the blue, was adopting him.


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[Assistant] He was capable and trustworthy, sure. But like Lucius before him, there was nothing really special to point to that said, oh yea, you have to pick this guy Antoninus. He's perfect for the job.


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[Assistant] It is at this point though that we can really get into the guts of Hadrian's thinking, where it becomes apparent that it was Marcus Aurelius Hadrian wanted all along.


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[Assistant] Because when he offered Antoninus the job of Emperor, a job that dying Hadrian assured Antoninus would be his sooner rather than later,


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[Assistant] He stipulated that Antoninus had to adopt both Marcus and the dead Lucius Caesar's son, Lucius Commodus as his heirs. Otherwise, the deal was off.


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[Assistant] Clearly, Hadrian was thinking a generation ahead of everyone else.


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[Assistant] Antoninus, then, was merely a dependable way to get from here to Marcus.


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[Assistant] Already well into his 50s, Antoninus could be expected to die off sometime in the next decade or so, giving Marcus time for a proper imperial apprenticeship before he donned the purple for himself.


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[Assistant] Antoninus begged a few days to consider the Emperor's offer.


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[Assistant] Though this humble podcast has been dealing primarily with the most ambitious Romans of every generation, which may leave you all with the impression that lust for power was the defining character trait of every man, woman, and child in the Empire, not every Roman dreamed imperial dreams.


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[Assistant] Antoninus was genuinely unsure whether he wanted the gig.


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[Assistant] He had a pretty good life, a happy marriage, a nice network of friends, and a healthy amount of cash in the bank.


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[Assistant] Was it really worth giving up the comfortable life of a cultured senator for the infinite burdens of empire?


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[Assistant] But the lure of power, or perhaps more likely, the pressure from Hadrian,


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[Assistant] In recognition of the adoption, the Senate invested Antoninus with tribunition power and granted him full imperium. That is, power of life and death over the subjects of the Empire.


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[Assistant] He did not have long to get up to speed on the full gamut of responsibilities weighing down Hadrian's clearly slumping shoulders. And by the look of the Emperor, the transfer of power could come at any time.


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[Assistant] Hadrian was suffering from what modern doctors have diagnosed as congestive heart disease, and his body filled painfully with fluid, forcing him to spend most of his final days in bed.


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[Assistant] In the end, Servianus' prayer came true as the suffering emperor tried and failed multiple times to kill himself.


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[Assistant] He had daggers and poison smuggled into his room on no fewer than three occasions only to be thwarted at the last moment. And one attendant at least committed suicide rather than disobey Hadrian's orders to kill him.


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[Assistant] Antoninus himself finally intervened and begged Hadrian to bear his pain and let nature take its course.


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[Assistant] Hadrian's mood seems to have improved at least some following the intervention and in letters exchanged with his new adopted son, he apologizes for letting his grief take over.


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[Assistant] A correspondence commenced that eventually resulted in Hadrian writing a full autobiography so that the record would be straight and Antoninus would have the full story of the past 20 years laid out in full.


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[Assistant] Unfortunately, no record of the autobiography exists, though modern scholars suppose that much of Hadrian's entry in the Historia Augusta was sourced to this autobiography.


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[Assistant] Hadrian is one of the most fascinating men in the history of Rome.


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[Assistant] But I will admit that after a month of obsessing over him and trying to fit all of his contradictions and nuances and accomplishments into my head, I'm suffering from a bit of Hadrian fatigue.


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[Assistant] But in this, I kind of feel like I know the Emperor as his contemporaries did.


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[Assistant] Eternally energetic, he was always traveling to some new city or starting some new project.


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[Assistant] But the wisdom of his rule, which bordered on visionary, was accompanied by a know-it-all pomposity that had to have driven everyone at least a little bit nuts.


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[Assistant] No one likes a man who knows everything, especially when he shows up at your doorstep and starts lecturing you on subjects you yourself are an expert in.


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[Assistant] There's a funny story where the emperor and a celebrated philosopher engaged in a debate where it was apparent to everyone that Hadrian's argument was far weaker.


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[Assistant] To the surprise of the audience though, the philosopher eventually gave in and acknowledged the emperor had bested him.


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[Assistant] After the event, the philosopher was pressed by his friends, who demanded to know why he had given up so easily.


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[Assistant] The philosopher simply reminded his friends that the emperor was the most learned man of all.


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[Assistant] Taking it back, the friends laughed at this obviously untrue statement. But the philosopher insisted that it was true.


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[Assistant] You should always remember, he said to them, the most learned man of all is the man who commands thirty legions.


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[Assistant] But he was also a flawed human being who could be an insufferably smug bully.


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[Assistant] But he did bring the beard back into fashion and for that alone, he deserves all the praise he gets.


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[Assistant] There will be no episode next week. Mr. and Mrs. The History of Rome are both celebrating birthdays and we're going to take some time for ourselves. But we'll be back on February 28th to introduce the Antonines, the last enlightened emperors of the Principate.


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[Assistant] After their departure from the stage, Rome will not see rulers with half as much vision until the rise of Diocletian. And by that point, Augustus' Principate will be dead, and a whole new political order will need to be created to sustain the battered empire.


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[Assistant] Unlike Trajan's neo-Alexandrian silence on the subject, and the subsequent doubt and violence that surrounded Hadrian's rise to power.


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[Assistant] When Antoninus Aelius Caesar returned to Rome with the body of the now dead emperor, he was welcomed with open arms by the Senate, the people, and the army. Especially the Senate.


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[Assistant] They never had been happy with Hadrian, and from the very beginning, he had been a boogeyman in their collective consciousness, with his every act, statement, or decree twisted up in their minds to prove that he was actually a dangerous psychopath.


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[Assistant] So his death was greeted with barely contained glee. Glee enhanced exponentially by the fact that one of their own was taking over.


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[Assistant] Antoninus had, after all, been an amiable senator in good standing for more than 20 years before being tapped by Hadrian to become his heir.


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[Assistant] At least from the aristocratic point of view then, 138 was a banner year. The monster was dead, and a senator-senator now sat on the throne.


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[Assistant] Every previous emperor had made their name in the legions, or because they were the blood relative of one of those men who had made their name in the legions.


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[Assistant] The only real exception was Nerva, and he had been an executive agent all the way.


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[Assistant] Antoninus was unique then, as having made his career as a senator first and foremost, and the years he would spend on the throne would prove to be the most internally harmonious in the history of the empire.


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[Assistant] For the first time in a long time, the aristocracy was fused and of one mind.


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[Assistant] The Emperor and the Senate, thinking and acting almost as one.


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[Assistant] And unlike previous periods of senatorial ascendancy, which usually led to unrest among the general population due to the arrogance of the oligarchs, Antoninus never forgot that he was everyone's emperor and made sure his subjects, all of them, were well taken care of.


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[Assistant] There is a reason traditional Roman historiography has the middle of the second century marked down as the golden age of the Antonines, the zenith of an empire at the height of its power, at peace at home and abroad, happy, productive, and safe.


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[Assistant] As with most Golden Age fantasies, probably a bit.


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[Assistant] One of the major problems we have in dealing with the age of Antoninus is the complete lack of primary sources that deal with the period.


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[Assistant] We have some fragments from Cassius Dio, who was born right around the time of Antoninus' death, and a complete, but somewhat suspect biography in the Historia Augusta.


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[Assistant] The same was basically true for Trajan and Hadrian's reigns, but with one major difference. Those guys actually, you know, did things.


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[Assistant] The architectural monuments they built, the wars they waged, the cities they founded, all now serve as a record of their lives set in stone. And historians can piece together a much richer accounting of their reigns than they can of Antoninus, who eschewed practically all of those things.


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[Assistant] But in choosing not to partake in the glory hunting and monument building that defined his predecessors,


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[Assistant] Antoninus may have ironically done more for his reputation than had he emulated them.


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[Assistant] Because the relative lack of a record means that when we think about the man, we couple a few glowing summaries of his reign with the fact that there were no major wars or revolts or scandals or really anything that makes historical headlines and emerge with a portrait of an emperor who ruled over, well, a golden age.


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[Assistant] In addition to some medium-sized crises obscured over the years which we'll get to in a bit, the shine on Antoninus' golden age is dulled somewhat by what Rome endured following his death.


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[Assistant] That is to say that the one major sustained criticism of his time in office is that Antoninus kicked a lot of cans down the road and left it to his successors to use nine stitches, where a single stitch sewed years earlier would have sufficed.


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[Assistant] That is not to say that he was a bad ruler, just that the warm, glowing glow that surrounds his reputation needs to be turned down just a bit.


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[Assistant] His conservative resistance to change went him justifiable plaudits for ensuring a stable and peaceful empire while he reigned. But at the same time, it left Rome unprepared to deal with a fast changing world after he died.


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[Assistant] Rome's great genius had always been founded on an ability to adapt quickly to circumstance, and under Antoninus, that genius atrophied.


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[Assistant] One of the first things we should note about Antoninus' reign is that it was definitely not supposed to last as long as it did. 51 years old at the time of his ascension,


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[Assistant] A reign of around a decade would have been right in line with average life expectancies and probably what Hadrian had in mind when he plucked Antoninus' name out of the hat.


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[Assistant] As I said last time, the plan was probably to season Marcus Aurelius enough so that he would not don the purple too young, which would have left him easy prey for manipulative advisors, while simultaneously not denying the obviously talented boy's ascension for too long.


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[Assistant] Young Prince Marcus, who was supposed to become young Emperor Marcus,


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[Assistant] Was forced to wait in the wings for 23 years, becoming instead just another middle-aged emperor.


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[Assistant] Not that there was anything wrong with that, just that if Hadrian was planning to leave Rome in the hands of some splendid youth, Antoninus's simple taste and prudent aversion to risk killed that plan dead.


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[Assistant] The second thing we should note about the beginning of Antoninus' reign is just how quickly he gained the title Pius, which would come to be his defining cognomen.


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[Assistant] There are two competing theories about where the name comes from, but both have to do with his actions immediately following the death of Hadrian.


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[Assistant] The most common version is that when his adoptive father died, Antoninus personally escorted the body back to Rome and then asked the Senate to deify the dead emperor.


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[Assistant] While they certainly did not hate Hadrian as much as they had demission, and so there was no clamor to damn his memory,


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[Assistant] The Senate had no intention of declaring the nonetheless despised Hadrian a god.


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[Assistant] The Senate was incredulous at the request, and doubly so because it was coming from Antoninus, who they considered one of their own.


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[Assistant] Surely he of all people would understand why they were refusing the request. But Antoninus surprisingly persisted.


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[Assistant] He told him that to refuse to deify Hadrian would stand as a repudiation of his entire reign and thus every decision he had made along the way up to and including his choice of heir.


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[Assistant] Which is fine, I will gladly lay aside the burden of empire and leave it to you or the army or whoever to decide who ought to rule. This calculated threat did the trick.


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[Assistant] Power vacuums were feared at least as much as tyrants were hated.


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[Assistant] And by forcing the Senate to face the former, they abandon their condemnation of the latter.


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[Assistant] Hadrian was duly deified with all honors, and Antoninus' steadfast loyalty to his adoptive father, in the face of perhaps even his own doubts, was lauded throughout the empire as a supreme example of a son's duty to his father.


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[Assistant] Hence the name Pius, which in Latin translates as dutiful.


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[Assistant] He did not stop the deification process either. Antoninus piously, dutifully, completed Hadrian's as of yet unfinished mausoleum and in 139, dedicated the new tomb and placed Hadrian's ashes within.


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[Assistant] The other version of the story is that when Antoninus ascended to the throne, he canceled death warrants and confiscation orders and prison sentences issued by Hadrian during his last heartless days.


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[Assistant] The grateful senators, many of whom were caught up in this mini reign of terror, affixed their brother Antoninus with the title Pius to recognize the good work he had done sparing them from their unjust fates.


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[Assistant] Whichever version is true, Antoninus Aelius Caesar quickly became Antoninus Pius, a name by which we know him today.


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[Assistant] The two stories are of course not mutually exclusive and the whole package of Antoninus' loyalty to Hadrian and the clemency he showed towards his adoptive father's enemies could have both worked to reinforce the image of Antoninus as a just and moral ruler.


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[Assistant] Once he had done his duty to Hadrian though, he quietly stepped out of his adoptive father's shadow and became his own man. In many ways, the polar opposite of the emperor he had honored.


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[Assistant] Where Hadrian attained distinction for his traveling, for his urgent need to be everywhere at once and see for himself the empire he ruled.


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[Assistant] Antoninus is best known for not having gone anywhere.


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[Assistant] In his 23 years in power, he never once left Italy. A remarkable feat when you think about it.


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[Assistant] Even if they accomplish little with their presence, most emperors at least like to visit various hotspots for the photo opportunities they presented.


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[Assistant] An exception was Vespasian, who stayed put in Rome for the most part during his decade on the throne, but he had already been all over, and had earned, as it were, his retirement in the capital.


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[Assistant] Antoninus on the other hand, except for a brief stint as a procurator in Asia,


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[Assistant] Had been an Italian homebody, and after donning the purple, saw no reason to change his ways, and perhaps felt an even greater need to stay in the capital to reinforce Rome and Italy's preeminence after Hadrian's more equalitarian views on the distinction between province and home peninsula had battered Italy's prestige.


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[Assistant] The Italian-centric approach to governance extended beyond the basic fact that the emperor lived and ruled from the capital.


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[Assistant] As I mentioned during the episodes on Hadrian and Trajan, the Roman Empire was fast losing its Roman character.


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[Assistant] Both of the previous two emperors were provincials and Hadrian especially had promoted elites from the provinces into the senate and admitted them into his own circle of advisors.


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[Assistant] At first, one might think Antoninus would continue this movement, as his own family originated in Gaul.


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[Assistant] But the new emperor instead backed the old Roman elite, and when it came time to appoint proconsuls and generals and members of his governing council, he relied heavily on men of Italian origin.


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[Assistant] With the future of the empire clearly out in the provinces, the age of Antoninus then stands as the last time the emperor that had been founded and won and held by Italians was really actively run by them as well.


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[Assistant] Antoninus was also Hadrian's opposite in administrative outlook.


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[Assistant] Where Hadrian was driven by a compulsion to improve, to reform, to rejigger, Antoninus was driven by a compulsion to protect, to entrench, and to maintain.


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[Assistant] In Antoninus' opinion, the imperial governmental apparatus he inherited worked just fine.


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[Assistant] It needed to be maintained, sure, kept free of corruption and inefficiency and all that, but there was no reason to reinvent the wheel.


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[Assistant] The only real innovation introduced during Antoninus' reign was in fact an extension of this conservatism.


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[Assistant] When he took office, he kept on most of Hadrian's staff and extended bureaucracy itself something of a novel concept, one that sharply contrasted Hadrian's purge of so-called Trajan men.


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[Assistant] But the real shift was the extension of proconsul ships, procuratorships, legionary commands and all that to terms of five years or more.


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[Assistant] The realm of aversion to extended terms of office was a prejudice that traced back to the founding of the republic.


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[Assistant] And while extraordinary extensions did occur, Caesar and Gaul for example, these were most definitely the exception rather than the rule.


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[Assistant] Antoninus, though, was temperamentally partial to continuity, and saw the constant office rotations as a bug, rather than a feature of imperial administration.


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[Assistant] A procurator would spend a year in some province and just as he was getting to know the particular challenges of the territory, he would be replaced by someone else who knew nothing about anything. It was silly, and on the frontier provinces, it was dangerous.


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[Assistant] So, for example, under Antoninus, Quintus Lollius Urbicus served as governor of Britain for five years.


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[Assistant] His Praetorian Prefect Marcus Gavius Maximus served an unprecedented 20 years from 138 to 158, despite persistent calls for his removal for a laundry list of sins.


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[Assistant] This emphasis on continuity over novelty was also evident in Antoninus' attitude towards public works.


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[Assistant] Dating back to the reign of Domitian and culminating with Hadrian's empire-wide architectural orgy,


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[Assistant] Antoninus' predecessors had used extensive building projects to modernize the empire, create jobs, and leave everlasting monuments to their own greatness.


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[Assistant] Antoninus, on the other hand, more or less abandoned new construction and focused instead on maintaining what was already existent.


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[Assistant] Because not only was he temperamentally disinclined to initiate change, but he was also temperamentally disinclined to drain the imperial treasury in a quest to build a better temple.


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[Assistant] It is a fitting monument to Antoninus, then, that the one place we do see his name inscribed over and over again are on the mile markers of the Roman highway system. Good, properly marked and maintained roads, worthy expenditures.


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[Assistant] This is not to say that building simply ceased across the empire, only that the emperor was no longer footing the bill.


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[Assistant] Local elites were leaned on heavily to defray the costs of the projects they petitioned the emperor to pay for.


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[Assistant] If they wanted new bath so badly, surely they could find the necessary cash buried somewhere on the grounds of their extravagant estates.


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[Assistant] But if he was a bit of a miser with public funds, Antoninus was generous with his own personal fortune.


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[Assistant] An incredibly wealthy man when he ascended to the throne, Antoninus was careful to separate the imperial treasury he inherited from the personal fortune he had already accrued.


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[Assistant] The former he watched over like a hawk and curtailed as much as he could lavish expenditures.


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[Assistant] But the latter he dispersed generously for a variety of worthy causes.


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[Assistant] So, unlike, say, Tiberius, whose reputation as a miser with the imperial accounts was not offset by personal generosity,


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[Assistant] Antoninus' reputation never suffered for his public tight-fistedness.


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[Assistant] During a particularly bad famine, he personally paid for and delivered the olive oil and grains that people could no longer afford due to shortages.


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[Assistant] When earthquakes struck or fires broke out, as they frequently did throughout the empire.


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[Assistant] Antoninus would underwrite the emergency response and rebuilding efforts out of his own pocket.


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[Assistant] He understood that the coin of the princeps had two sides.


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[Assistant] Heads, executive administrator of a transnational empire, who must be careful to protect the fiscal integrity of the state.


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[Assistant] When it came to foreign policy though, Antoninus was every bit Hadrian's disciple.


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[Assistant] Critics have described it dismissively as a policy of peace at any price.


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[Assistant] But Antoninus definitely followed Hadrian in believing it to be more accurately characterized as peace at a lower price.


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[Assistant] Legionary activity did not cease during Antoninus' reign, as we'll see in a moment.


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[Assistant] War is an expensive undertaking in both money and manpower, and usually costs ten times as much as you thought it would going in, to say nothing of the fact that it usually took twice as long as you thought it would to win the damn thing.


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[Assistant] Keeping a potentially unruly tribe or neighboring kingdom as a client on the other hand, was often not just a cheaper alternative to fighting, but also a more predictable accounting strategy.


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[Assistant] This is where Antoninus takes the most lumps for kicking the can down the road though.


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[Assistant] Because though this policy of pseudo-bribery worked, Antoninus was loath to extend it any further.


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[Assistant] He inherited Hadrian's long list of client kings and auxiliary tribes and continued the financial exchanges that ensured their loyalty, but he was hesitant to add new members to the roles.


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[Assistant] He was approached often by emissaries from various foreign tribes or nations asking for admittance into the empire proper or status as clients or recognition as friends of Rome.


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[Assistant] But Antoninus turned them all down on the grounds that the empire was at its maximum defensible extent, and besides, he simply couldn't afford to take on any new clients.


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[Assistant] This worked fine during his own reign, but eventually, jealousy from those on the outs and suspicions from those on the ins that Rome had become an extortable paper tiger led to an explosion of violence in the north and war with Parthia in the east during the reign of Marcus Aurelius.


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[Assistant] As I just mentioned though, it was not as if Rome was literally at peace in all places during the peace at any price age of Antoninus.


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[Assistant] For Britain, a significant uprising among the Brigantes, whose territory Hadrian had bisected with his famous wall.


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[Assistant] Was put down by the aforementioned Lolius Urbicus after two years of intense fighting that led the Romans to push their frontier a hundred miles north and establish a second wall known as the Antonine Wall around the spot where Agricola had once defeated the Caledonians.


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[Assistant] There was also on again, off again fighting in Africa, where Moorish nomads became emboldened and began to descend out of the Atlas Mountains to harass the province of Mauritania.


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[Assistant] The problem of the Moors would only get worse during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, and Antoninus' failure to nip the problem in the bud with more vigorous action was seen as one of the time bombs he unnecessarily handed off to his successors.


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[Assistant] In the East, there were uprisings in Egypt and the newly renamed province of Palestine that both required a military response. And along the Danube, a revolt in 158 necessitated the division of the province into two districts to effectively divide and conquer the unruly natives.


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[Assistant] However, despite the fact that Roman military activity never ceased, even during this golden age of peace,


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[Assistant] There were no great wars of any magnitude, and Antoninus' diplomacy and bribery did the trick to keep Rome out of large scale conflicts.


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[Assistant] In his most famous diplomatic coup, a single letter sent to the Parthian king advising that encroachment on Roman territory would not be taken lightly was enough to dissuade Parthian expansion plans.


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[Assistant] Probably the one major difference between Hadrian and Antoninus though, when it came to their peace policy at least, was that Hadrian was fanatical about drilling and keeping the legions constantly active and alert.


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[Assistant] This state of persistent readiness left them more than ready to deal with any unavoidable conflict that might arise.


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[Assistant] Antoninus on the other hand, who had no military experience, and never once so much as ventured into a legionary camp,


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[Assistant] allowed a sense of complacency to set in that would leave Marcus Aurelius in a bit of a bind when both the Parthian Empire in the east and Germanic tribes in the north exploded into Roman territory shortly after Antoninus' death.


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[Assistant] As I mentioned, for all of these crises, the frontier battles and the foreign diplomacy, Antoninus himself never left Rome. He ruled entirely by way of correspondence.


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[Assistant] But if we begin to form a picture of Antoninus as a sort of absentee emperor, we should correct that image immediately.


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[Assistant] He was active in all aspects of administration and was thoroughly engaged in the welfare of the empire he ruled.


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[Assistant] Cutting a middle road between Trajans figure it out for yourself, and Hadrians, I'll be there in a few days to tell you what to do.