SABINA, THE WIFE OF HADRIAN
We are already familiar with the extraction and the training of the
next Empress of Rome. Sabina was the elder daughter of Trajan’s
niece Matidia, and came of the sound and sober stock of the Spanish
provincials. We first meet her in the little settlement on the Rhine,
where she lived with her widowed mother and grandmother, in Trajan’s
house, during the reign of Galba and Nerva. She was in her early teens,
a grave and modest child, easily directed by the three sedate ladies
of the house. Very shortly after the accession of Trajan, a charming
young officer burst into the camp to offer his congratulations. He had
a romantic story to tell, how a jealous brother-in-law had bribed his
servants to break down the chariot on the way, and he had crossed the
great forests on foot to greet his guardian and cousin. It was the
future Emperor, and her future husband, Hadrian.
The wicked brother-in-law, Ursus Servianus, presently arrived, and
put before Trajan a proof of his ward’s enormities in the shape of
a list of his debts. But Trajan was charmed with the handsome and
brilliant young officer, kept him in his suite, and took him to Rome
when he went up to occupy the throne; and we saw that he became a great
favourite of the Imperial ladies. His father had been a first cousin
of Trajan, but Hadrian lost him at the age of ten, and was committed
to the guardianship of Trajan and Attianus. The finest masters of
Rome directed his studies in letters, art, rhetoric, and philosophy,
and he became a most accomplished and learned, as well as, by hunting
and exercise, a graceful and energetic youth. The “Historia Augusta”
expressly says that Trajan “loved him,” and he advanced quickly, and
enjoyed the brilliant literary society of the palace and the capital.
About two years after their coming to Rome he married Sabina. One
chronicler represents him as spending large sums of money to win her,
and so incurring the annoyance of Trajan; another states that he
turned with disdain from her plain propriety, and had to be persuaded
by Plotina that the marriage was to his interest. It was, at all
events, clearly a _mariage de convenance_, and was destined to have the
customary sequel.
Sabina would be in her twelfth or thirteenth year at the time, and we
can imagine the mating of the prim little maiden with the brilliant
scholar and promising officer of twenty-four. For many years she is
no more than the silent shadow of her husband, and we can only dimly
follow her movements as she accompanies him about the Empire. Whether
she accompanied him on the Dacian wars between 101 and 106, or, as
seems more probable, remained at Rome to develop a taste for letters in
the palace of Plotina, we cannot confidently say, but it is recorded
that she did lean to culture. Hadrian was back in 106, high in the
favour of Trajan, who gave him the diamond ring he had received from
Nerva. He could both fight and carouse to the Emperor’s satisfaction.
He was made prætor on his return, and gave brilliant games--at Trajan’s
expense--in which 11,000 beasts were slain. In quick succession he
became legate in Lower Pannonia and consul. The aged statesman Sura
told him that he was destined for the throne; the rumour went about
Rome, and the nobles, at first disdainful of his provincial accent and
jealous of his progress, began to respect him. He, and most probably
Sabina, accompanied Trajan on his fatal journey to the East, and we
have seen what happened.
In the year 117, in about the thirtieth year of her age, Sabina found
herself Empress of Rome, but the elevation seems to have brought her
little happiness and impelled her to no exertion. There is little room
for doubt that, either in the camp or in the tainted atmosphere of Rome
or Antioch, Hadrian had contracted the vice which prevailed among Roman
men. There is another reason, however, why Sabina remains in obscurity
in the chronicles. Hadrian’s biographer, Gregorovius, has relieved him
of the common charge that he relinquished the conquests of Trajan, and
neglected Imperial interests, in a less enlightened zeal for art and
letters. Hadrian had a clear, commendable, and vast policy. He believed
that the Empire would only be weakened by extension, and that it was
a saner ambition to enrich and uplift the life within its frontiers
than to enlarge them. His life was spent in a magnificent realization
of this design; and it was a design so far beyond the modest range
of Sabina’s political intelligence that she was forced to remain a
spectator of his work. She seems, very naturally, to have carped at
his one frailty, which so nearly concerned her, and Hadrian replied
peevishly, and merely conveyed her as an uninterested encumbrance in
the remarkable voyages which fill the twenty years of his reign.
Hadrian was then in his fortieth year, a tall, very handsome and
athletic man, of brilliant conversation, untiring energy, and great
public spirit. The most artistic of all Roman Emperors, one of the most
artistic and cultured of monarchs, indeed, he could nevertheless endure
the plain bread-and-cheese of the soldier for weeks together; and he
so much discarded his horse and his chariot, for their encouragement,
that a chronicler describes him as having covered the entire Empire on
foot. By diplomacy and by bribes, which we may or may not admire, he
secured an almost unbroken peace for the Empire during two decades;
and the works of use or adornment with which he enriched every
province of the Empire during those twenty years make up an almost
fabulous achievement. Much as we must sympathize with the Empress in
her resentment of the practice into which his Greek-Oriental tastes
betrayed him, we cannot deny that Hadrian was a great and beneficent
ruler. The sketch of his life in that prurient work, the “Historia
Augusta”--the _chronique scandaleuse_ of the middle Empire--is a
monumental, if unconscious, panegyric.
The biographer of the Empresses cannot escape the conclusion that
Sabina was not a fitting mate for so versatile and constructive
a genius. Her superiority in decency is enormously outweighed by
Hadrian’s magnificent work for the Empire. The natural alienation of
the two in sentiment would not encourage her to co-operate in his work,
in the fashion set by Livia and Plotina, but one feels that this is
not the sole explanation, and that her mediocre faculty was entirely
absorbed in a small pursuit of culture. It is not impossible that, if
there had been cordial co-operation between them, she would have saved
Hadrian from the only serious stains on the record of his reign.
The first of these occurred in the year following his accession.
Bringing to the Imperial task a fresh and vigorous mind, untainted by
mere military ambition--though he was an excellent soldier--Hadrian
glanced round the Empire, and saw that peace must first be established
on its frontiers. The East was aflame with revolt, the African and
German boundaries were disturbed, and trouble was announced from
Britain. He at once sacrificed the conquests beyond the Tigris and
Euphrates, appeased the Jews and the other peoples of the East, and
passed to Lower Germany to still the restlessness of the northern
frontier. There had been some discontent among the older soldiers
and statesmen of Rome at his being forced on them. From Judæa he had
imprudently sent one of Trajan’s most fiery commanders, the Moorish
prince Lusius Quietus, back in some disgrace to the capital, and this
man and others formed a party of opposition. When they saw that he was
sacrificing Trajan’s conquests and reversing his policy, and especially
when he proposed to evacuate Dacia also, they entered, it is said,
into something of the nature of a conspiracy.
How far Hadrian was really responsible for the execution of the leaders
of this party we cannot say, and his emphatic denial of responsibility
is entitled to consideration. We know that, when the aged statesman
Attianus wrote to urge him that the Roman prefect and other
distinguished malcontents ought to be removed, he refused to take any
action. The Senate now announced that a plot to assassinate Hadrian had
been detected, and it put to death, without trial, four men of consular
rank, Nigrinus, Palma, Celsus, and Lusius Quietus. A sullen murmur
passed through the city, and Hadrian hastily composed his affairs on
the Danube and went to Rome. He resolutely denied that he had consented
to the executions, and the question remains open.
With this public resentment in view, Hadrian at once lavished the
most princely favours on Rome, and swore that he would never execute
a Senator without the consent of his order. He remitted debts to the
treasury to the extent of £9,000,000, extended the existing charities
to orphans and widows, provided magnificent spectacles for the people,
and made a sacrifice of Attianus, by deposing him, to the anger of
the malcontents. When the Senate offered him the triumph which had
been due to Trajan for the Eastern victories, he refused it, and
placed a wax image of the dead Emperor in the triumphal chariot. The
citizens of Rome may have been less impressed when he showed a zeal for
public morals, and forbade the mixed bathing that had hitherto been
permitted; but he succeeded, by two years of untiring public service,
in removing the earlier resentment. That he wished to kill Attianus,
and did actually execute the architect Apollodorus, are idle legends.
Serviez seriously reproduces the story that the architect had snubbed
him--telling him to “go and paint his pumpkins”--when he had made a
suggestion to him in earlier years, and that Hadrian avenged himself
when he came to the throne. The truth is that the “Historia Augusta”
describes him in consultation with Apollodorus on some building project
ten years later.
The details of this vast activity of Hadrian’s do not concern us, as
Sabina seems to have taken no part in it. The busts we have of her
seem to show a cold and irresponsive temper, as if the Empress were
contemplating disdainfully the figure of the beautiful Oriental youth
on whom Hadrian’s affection became concentrated. There is distinction
in the smooth lines of the face and in the lofty forehead, and there
is a proud strength that might very well make her “morose and harsh,”
as Hadrian described her, when he gave her such palpable cause for
resentment. Her mother died in 119. In a florid oration Hadrian praised
her beauty of person and character, but the death would not be likely
to improve the relations of the Imperial spouses.
In the year 120 or 121 Hadrian set out on the first of the long
journeys which fill the rest of his career, and Sabina made the tour of
the world with him. Had their intercourse been more pleasant, the lot
of Sabina during the next fifteen years would have been one of great
fortune. They passed together over the whole Roman world from Eboracum
(York) to Arabia and Egypt, surveying the ruined Empires of the past
and the young nations of the future in the light of whatever culture
the age afforded; and so beneficent was their passage that myriads
of inscriptions and coins, bearing such legends as “Golden Age” and
“Restorer of the Earth,” handed on to posterity the memory of the great
works which Hadrian everywhere inaugurated. Through Gaul--probably
through the flourishing Greek colony of Massilia (Marseilles), the
solid and cultured city of Lugdunum (Lyons), and the little trading
centre, Lutetia, that would one day be brilliant Paris--they passed
on to Germany, and traversed the boundless forests that hid the soil
of a great modern nation. No glittering pomp of guards surrounded the
Emperor. Bareheaded alike in the snows of Germany and under the sun
of Syria, marching commonly on foot in the dress of a soldier, and
living on soldier’s fare, he restored the rigid discipline of the
legions wherever he went. Bridges, aqueducts, roads, temples, and
colonnaded squares sprang up in the rear of his march. His staff was a
band of engineers and architects.
[Illustration: SABINA
BUST IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM]
In this novel and admirable company Sabina made the round of Gaul and
Germany, and crossed over to Britain in the Imperial galleys. From the
little colony of Londinium (London), which had been destroyed sixty
years before, and was now restored by Hadrian, they passed along the
solid Roman road to Eboracum (York), the last great station from which
civilization looked out on the turbulent waves of Scottish barbarism.
It was then that Hadrian ordered the building of the great wall, to
keep off the Caledonian marauders, of which the traces still exist.
Sabina may have remained in York while Hadrian surveyed the rough
territory to the north, and it seems to have been on the Emperor’s
return that an episode occurred which must have greatly embittered her.
One of Hadrian’s secretaries was the historian Suetonius, whose work
on the Emperors has provided us with much material. With him and
the cultivated commander of the Prætorian Guards Sabina maintained
a close friendship, and Hadrian made a grievance of it. So closely
did he pry into the affairs of his friends that the rumour was set
about that he had many mistresses among their wives. It was reported
to him that Suetonius and Septicius Clarus “were behaving with more
familiarity than the dignity of the Imperial house permitted,” as
Spartianus puts it, and they were dismissed. There is no suggestion of
grave irregularity on her part. The idea of divorcing Sabina, which
Hadrian is said to have discussed, is expressly connected with what
he called her “moroseness and asperity”; and we can well believe that
her asperity took the form of bitter complaints about his own conduct.
Nothing further was done, and, though we may regard with reserve the
statement that Sabina deliberately prevented herself from having a
child, lest she should put a new monster on the throne, the Imperial
couple continued their uncongenial companionship.[13] Some of the coins
which were struck in commemoration of their passage ventured to bear
the legend, “Concordia Augusta”--struck in honour of the harmony of the
Imperial household.
From Britain they returned to Gaul, where Hadrian excited comment by
the opulence of his mourning over the death of Plotina. They then
passed to Spain, where Roman civilization had taken deep root, and on
to the land of the Moors. The colonies which Rome had planted along the
strip of territory descending from the mountains to the sea had been
devastated by the barbarians, and the frontier had been obliterated.
Hadrian drove back the tribes, restored the towns, and returned, after
an absence of more than a year, to Rome. The city was tranquil, and
the building of the great villa which still, in its ruins, excites the
amazement of the visitor at Tivoli, was proceeding. After a year or two
of peaceful administration, seeing that the west, north, and south of
the Empire were secure and prospering, Hadrian turned his face towards
the east.
We need not follow him in this journey to Greece and Asia Minor, since
it is not clear whether Sabina accompanied him, but it had a sequel
of melancholy interest to the Empress. From the cities of Greece he
made his way along the coast of the Black Sea to the region of the
Parthians, where he again restored peace, and back through Asia Minor
and the islands to Rome. Two or three years had been occupied in this
journey, and Hadrian had become less Roman in taste than ever. He
came home surrounded by Greeks, and with a great zeal for Greek and
Eastern institutions. In particular he brought in his train a beautiful
Bithynian youth whose name is from that time inseparably connected
with his. Hadrian’s passion for Antinous is the chief stain on his
character, and was probably the chief ground of Sabina’s resentment.
The Emperor had visited Bithynia, and presumably met the youth there.
Every traveller among rude and healthy nations is aware that such
practices are by no means confined to decadent civilizations, nor does
the student of contemporary morals see in them anything distinctive
of the life of ancient Syria, Greece, or Rome. Nevertheless, the
remarkable beauty of Antinous, which is familiar to us in many a
statue, and the wanton openness of his association with the Emperor,
attracted general attention and greatly embittered Sabina.
When, therefore, she set out with Hadrian, at the end of 128 or the
beginning of 129, for a fresh and more extensive tour in the East,
her enjoyment must have been heavily clouded by the daily and hourly
presence of the Emperor’s companions. The young Adonis was not the
only source of offence in Hadrian’s suite. Closer still to Hadrian
was a young Roman noble of the most effeminate charm and the most
dissolute life. Lucius Ceionius Commodus was later taken into Imperial
partnership by Hadrian, and, although he did not live to attain supreme
power, his descendants will more than once enter and disturb our
story of the Empresses. Spartianus ascribes to him a “regal beauty”
of face and person, a manner of great charm, a witty and sparkling
conversation, and an utter depravity of morals. He had won the regard
of Hadrian, not so much by the famous new dish which he had invented
for the epicures of Rome--a boar, ham, pheasant, and peacock pie--as
by the sensuous charm of his person and the exotic sensuality of his
life. He would lie, washed in exquisite Persian ointments, on a couch
strewn with roses, with a coverlet of lilies drawn over himself and his
companion. Such ways were entirely foreign to the nature of Hadrian,
but his robust vigour was singularly united with a fine artistic
sensibility and a love of the softer east, which led him into many
inconsistencies.
Sabina had for companion a Greek poetess, Julia Fadilla, of such virtue
and attainments that a statue was somewhere raised to honour her as
a pattern of integrity. The incongruous party, with its conflicting
groups of virtue and vice--a fitting symbol of the unhappy union of
West and East--crossed the sea to Athens, and then visited Corinth,
Eleusis, and the other surviving cities of Greece. The frame of that
superb civilization still gleamed, almost intact, on the soil of
Hellas, though the soul of Greece had departed. It was as if one gazed
on the smooth white corpse of a beautiful woman. Groups of sophists
still disputed in the gardens or under the shady colonnades; but they
were puny mimics of Socrates, Zeno, and Epicurus. Politicians still
babbled in the Agora; but they blessed the hand of Rome that had closed
brutally on the throat of their fair country. The Acropolis still shone
in its panoply of Parian marble, and Hadrian had restored the harbour
and repaired many of the ravages of time and violence. He regretted the
greed of his forerunners, and sought to restore the ancient spirit. But
the poor revival of art and letters and religion, which he succeeded in
effecting, was only the last flicker of the vitality of Greece.
They crossed the sea to Ephesus, which at that time rivalled Antioch
and Alexandria as a metropolis of the decaying civilizations of the
East. Its great Temple of Diana, a teeming store of art and treasure,
drew men from all parts, while priests of all religions mingled in its
streets with panders to all vices and ministers to every form of art
and luxury. Smyrna, another flourishing city of Asia Minor, attracted
them next, with its magnificent assemblage of temples, colonnades,
baths, and theatres, and they passed on to Sardis and the other cities
of that fascinating and repellent Greek-Oriental region, where new
mysticism ran like veins of gold in the old volcanic deposits. The
winter was spent in the luxury of Ephesus and Smyrna, and with the
spring they traversed the successive provinces of Asia Minor, admiring
and restoring the remains of Greek and Persian grandeur. Through Syria,
where famous Antioch detained them for a time, they went on, probably,
to the ruined cities of Tyre and Sidon, and returned to Heliopolis,
Damascus, and Palmyra. In Palestine they found the survivors of the
scattered Jewish nation living in great poverty and dejection among the
ruins of their cities, or still scrutinizing the prophets and looking
for the Messiah in the larger communities on the coast. On the site
of Jerusalem, where a few broken towers gave a melancholy reminder of
their former prosperity, Hadrian ordered that a new Roman colony should
be established.
From Judæa they moved to Arabia, and then to Egypt. Alexandria was then
the second city of the world in importance, the first in interest. All
the exhausted streams of the older civilizations had poured into it.
Never before or since was there so cosmopolitan a population, such a
gathering of old vices and new moralities, dead religions and fresh
religions, cults six thousand years old and the latest gospels of
Judæa and Persia. Its harbour still held the ships of every port in
the Mediterranean, its Serapeum, Museum, and Cæsareum sheltered the
art and culture of the world, and its deafening streets rang with the
tongues of the world. But the soul of Egypt, too, was dead, and the
Imperial party moved up the Nile to admire the surviving relics of its
past. No doubt priests and learned men from Alexandria would attend as
interpreters. They wandered in Memphis, which the sand of the desert
was beginning to bury, passed through Heliopolis, and reached Besa,
where they experienced the great sensation of the tour. The beautiful
Bithynian youth was drowned in the Nile, and Sabina had to regard
with disdain the womanly tears and the extravagant mourning of the
Emperor. It is not clear to this day whether the death was accidental
or voluntary. Hadrian, of course, said that it was accidental; but
a rumour lingers in the chronicles that the Emperor, in his new zeal
for Oriental superstition, had learned that his life was doomed unless
some loved being was sacrificed for him, and Antinous offered himself.
Hadrian has taken the secret with him, but the temples and statues he
raised all over the Empire kept the memory of the pretty youth fresh
for centuries.
This occurred about the month of October. The dates of these journeys
of Hadrian are much disputed, but a trivial detail has determined
this part of the tour. They went on to Thebes, and, in accordance
with custom, cut their names and the date in the great statue of
Memnon. They probably pushed on as far as Philæ, to see the temple of
Isis, but we find them back in Syria at the end of the year, or the
beginning of 132, and soon afterwards in Rome. The great villa had now
been completed at Tivoli, and we must assume that Sabina lived there
during the three or four years that remained for her. They were years
of continued melancholy. Hadrian was sobered, but soured. The Jews had
disturbed his cherished peace by rebelling, on account of his design
to cover the site of their holy city with a Roman colony, and he had
ruthlessly destroyed what remained of their cities, and erased the name
of Jerusalem by calling the new town Ælia Capitolina. Illness began
to enfeeble his frame, and he brooded darkly over the question of a
successor, which men were discussing. He passed in heavy dejection
through the lovely gardens and marble temples of his villa, still
mourning the loss of Antinous. An obelisk has been found there with the
inscription that it was raised to the youth by Hadrian and Sabina--a
fiction that must have angered the Empress, if it were done before her
death. But she did not live to see the darker gloom of his closing
years. She died in, or about, the year 136, “not without a rumour of
poison,” says Spartianus; the rumour is not worth considering. She had
been entitled “Augusta” by the Senate in 127, but Hadrian refused her
the divine honours which were usually bestowed on dead Empresses. They
were awarded by his successor.
The busts of Sabina which we have suggest just such a personality as
we have gathered from the meagre references to her in the chronicles.
She was a woman of smooth and regular features and fine person, without
beauty or charm. Her face gives an impression of intellect, virtue, and
silent suffering. She is the kind of woman who would neither overlook
the vice of her husband nor actively resent it, or assert herself in
any way; the kind of woman to retreat in disdain to her books. That she
was “treated as a slave” by Hadrian, as Aurelius Victor says, we may
decline to believe, and regard the statement as a popular exaggeration;
nor, on the other hand, can we agree with Gregorovius that a letter
in which Hadrian invites his mother to dine with him on his birthday,
and says that Sabina has gone into the country, shows their “mutual
dislike.” Duruy quotes this very letter in disproof of the belief
that they were estranged, and points out that it goes on to say that
Sabina had “sent her share for the family dinner.” The French historian
believes that the legend, “Concordia Augusta,” on some of the medals of
the time expressed a fact. We cannot, however, imagine Sabina resigning
herself to her husband’s passion for youths, and the few authentic
details left us about her relations with Hadrian generally indicate a
mutual aversion. As an Empress, she was a nonentity; as a woman, an
admirable blend of old-world sobriety and new-world culture.
Hadrian survived her for two unhappy years. The whole Empire was
covered with monuments of his public service, the coinage of every
province proclaimed his beneficence, the slave, the widow, and the
orphan gratefully told of his magnanimity. But the illness and
depression of his last year permitted him to commit a crime, and,
so accustomed was the new generation to good conduct in its rulers,
the recollection of his great deeds was almost obliterated. To the
astonishment of all, and the indignation of the thoughtful, Hadrian
announced that he had chosen as Cæsar his dissolute and decadent
companion, Lucius Verus. His brother-in-law Servianus, now an old man
of ninety, and the grandson of Servianus, a youth of nineteen, seem
to have been among the murmurers, and, on trivial pretexts, they were
put to death. These cruel murders brought a deep shadow over Hadrian’s
last year, but a last opportunity was given him to repair his action.
Lucius Verus, worn and consumptive from debauch, died, and Hadrian now
made choice of the most worthy man in the Senate, Titus Antoninus;
adding, however, in his quaint way of mingling good and evil, that he
must in turn adopt the son of Lucius Verus and young Marcus Aurelius,
a Sybarite and a Stoic, two antithetic types of Roman life. He went
down to Baiæ, suffering acutely from dropsy. The pain and weariness
were so great that he tried to secure poison or a sword, but Antoninus
prudently guarded and nursed him. He died in the year 138, “done to
death by physicians,” he ironically said. In his last days he composed
some slight verses, which I may translate:
Little soul, so tired and still,
Guest of this decaying flesh,
Whither, now, will thy flight be?
Pale and cold and reft of speech,
Never more to utter joke.
It was the note of the time-spirit, which was so strangely incarnated
in Hadrian. He united in his person all the contradictions that were at
strife in his era of change--asceticism and sensuality, public spirit
and selfish sensibility, Stoicism and Cyrenaicism. He needed a stronger
Empress. But the better spirit prevailed in him at the end, and the
Stoics came to the throne.