Part Three:
Mary Beard on emperor Hadrian’s biography
“The
only fully surviving ancient biography is a short (20 pages or so) life - one
of a series of colourful but flagrantly unreliable biographies of Roman
emperors and princes written by person or persons unknown, sometime in the
fourth or fifth centuries AD”.
Mary Beard
Some of what Mary Beard has written about our lack of reliable information
about the emperor Hadrian does little to make me want to remove him from “Horrible
Histories”.
For example, she writes in “Hadrian
— some myths busted”:
I am
delighted that the Hadrian exhibition at the British Museum looks set to be the
huge success which it deserves. One of the downsides is that we classicists are
going to have to get used to the rest of country enthusing about Hadrian in a
way that will make us cringe.
Last
night’s Newsnight Review was a good example of just this. Newsnight
Review is usually an excellent programme, and last night they had three
intelligent critics on board (David Aaronovitch of this parish, Marina Hyde and Simon Sebag
Montefiore). The trouble was none of them [seemed] … to know much more
about Hadrian or the Roman empire than they had picked up in their preview
visit to the show.
The
result was that they gave all kinds of misleading impressions to the innocent
viewer. For a start you could easily have come away with the idea that we were
uniquely well-informed about Hadrian thanks to his autobiography. As the
presenter said, “No extant copy of his autobiography survives. But later copies
were made so we know a lot about his life”.
Well
sorry guys, all we know is what may, or more likely may not, come from his
autobiography in the scrappy, short and flagrantly unreliable biography in the
series known as the Scriptores
Historiae Augustae. So when Marina Hyde said “he was obsessed with
cohesion the whole way through”, the truth is that we don’t have the foggiest
clue what he was obsessed with.
….
Oh
well, we’ll have to get used to this kind of stuff – and learn not to stifle
the enthusiasm but channel it towards a more sustained (and informed!) interest
in the ancient world. ….
Mackey’s comment: To know much more
about, to fill out, the somewhat poorly-known Hadrian, one might like to read
my accounts of who may have been his ancient alter egos. See, for example, my series:
Antiochus
'Epiphanes' and Emperor Hadrian. Part Two: "Hadrian … a second Antiochus"
and my article:
Mary Beard has yet more to say about the
obscurity of Hadrian in, “A
very modern emperor”:
….
The new exhibition at the British Museum, Hadrian:
Empire and Conflict, features evocative objects from both sides of this Jewish
war. There are simple everyday items recovered from a Jewish hideout: some
house keys, a leather sandal, a straw basket almost perfectly preserved in the
dry heat, a wooden plate and a mirror - evidence of the presence of women,
according to the exhibition catalogue (as if men did not use mirrors). But with
or without the women, these are all bitter reminders of the daily life that
somehow managed to continue, even in hiding and in the middle of what was
effectively genocide. From the other side, there is a magnificent bronze statue
of the emperor himself, which once stood in a legionary camp near the River
Jordan. The distinctive head of Hadrian (bearded, with soft curling hair and a
giveaway kink in his ear lobe) sits on top of an elaborately decorated
breast-plate, on which six nude warriors do battle. It is a striking combination,
even if - here as elsewhere - the catalogue raises doubts about whether the
head and body of this statue originally belonged together.
Far away from Judaea, on the other side of the
Roman world, Hadrian's military operations in Britain were less bloody. Apart
from the low-level guerrilla warfare endemic in most Roman provinces, he had
his troops occupied in building the famous wall running across the north of the
province. This was a project inaugurated when Hadrian himself visited in 122,
one of the few Roman emperors ever to set foot in the empire's unappealing
northern outpost. It is now far from certain what this wall was for. The
obvious explanation is that it was built to prevent hordes of nasty
woad-painted natives from invading the nice civilised Roman province, with its
baths, libraries and togas. But - leaving aside the rosy vision of life in
Britannia that this implies (baths, libraries and togas for whom exactly?) -
this overlooks one crucial fact. The impressive masonry structure, which provides
the iconic photo-shot of the wall, makes up only part of its length. For
one-third of its 70 miles the "wall" was just a turf bank, which
would hardly have kept out a party of determined children, never mind a gang of
barbarian terrorists.
There are all kinds of alternative suggestion. Was
it, for example, not much more than a fortified roadway across the province? Or
was it more of a boast than a border - an aggressive, but essentially symbolic,
Roman blot on the native landscape? ….
….
If all this seems rather familiar, that is partly
because there really are significant overlaps between the Hadrianic empire and
our own experience of military conflict and geopolitics. We are still fighting
in many of the same areas of the world and encountering many of the same
problems. We are still claiming victory long before we have won the war - or
indeed, in the Iraqi case, instead of winning the war. ….
….
That feeling of familiarity has been boosted by Marguerite
Yourcenar's fictional, pseudo-autobiography of the emperor, Memoirs of Hadrian.
Published in 1951, and once hugely popular (it now seems to me rambling and
frankly unreadable), it took the modern reader inside Hadrian's psyche -
presenting the emperor as a troubled and intimate friend, in much the same way
as Robert Graves made the emperor Claudius a rather jolly great-uncle. But
Yourcenar's fictional construction is not the only reason for Hadrian's
apparent modernity. There are all kinds of ways in which Hadrian's life and
interests seem to match up to our own expectations of monarchs and world
leaders, and to modern interests and passions. He was the sponsor of
Mitterand-style grands projet, a great traveller to the outposts of his
dominion (including that trip to Britain), as well as an enthusiastic collector
of art. And to cap it all, he had an intriguing, and ultimately tragic, sex
life.
….
Traveller, patron, grief-stricken lover, art
collector, clear-thinking military strategist. How do we explain why Hadrian
seems so approachably modern? Why does he seem so much easier to understand
than Nero or Augustus? As so often with characters from the ancient world, the
answer lies more in the kind of evidence we have for his life than in the kind
of person he really was. The modern Hadrian is the product of two things: on
the one hand, a series of vivid and evocative images and material remains (from
portrait heads and stunning building schemes to our own dilapidated wall); on
the other, the glaring lack of any detailed, still less reliable, account from
the ancient world of what happened in his reign, or of what kind of man he was,
or what motivated him.
….
The only fully surviving ancient biography is a
short (20 pages or so) life - one of a series of colourful but flagrantly
unreliable biographies of Roman emperors and princes written by person or
persons unknown, sometime in the fourth or fifth centuries AD. This includes
one or two nice anecdotes, which may or may not reflect an authentic tradition
about Hadrian.
….
Sadly, very little of the life is up to this quality. Most of it is a
garbled confection, weaving together without much regard for chronology
allegations of conspiracies, accounts of palace intrigue, and vendettas on
Hadrian's part - plus an assortment of curious facts and personal titbits (his
beard, it is claimed, was worn to cover up his bad skin). To fill the gaps, to
make a coherent story out of the extraordinary material remains of his reign,
to explain what drove the man, modern writers have been forced back on to their
prejudices and familiarising assumptions about Roman imperial power and
personalities. So, for example, where - thanks to the surviving ancient
literary accounts - it has been impossible to see Nero as anything other than a
rapacious megalomaniac, Hadrian has morphed conveniently into cultured art
collector and amateur architect. Where Nero's relationships with men have to be
seen as part of the corruption of his reign, Hadrian has been turned into a
troubled gay. Hadrian seems familiar to us - for we have made him so.
The British Museum exhibition presents Hadrian as an appropriate
successor to the first emperor of China and his terracotta army, both key
figures in the foundation and development of early imperial societies. Maybe
so. But an even better reason to visit this stunning show is to see how the
myth of a Roman emperor has been created - and continues to be created - out of
our own imagination and the dazzling but sometimes puzzling array of statues,
silver plates and lost keys of slaughtered Jewish freedom-fighters.
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