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 AN ABRIDGED HISTORY OF ROME - PART I
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Trajan expanded the area of the Roman Fora by levelling to the ground Velia, a hill between Campidoglio and Quirinale. The main building of his forum was a large basilica called Ulpia after his family name. The central section of the building can be seen thanks to the first modern archaeological excavations in Rome, initiated by the French government at the beginning of the XIXth century and completed by Pope Pius VII. The basilica was decorated with reliefs celebrating Trajan, some of which were moved two centuries later to Arco di Costantino.
Trajan's forum was designed by Apollodorus of Damascus, a Greek architect who also built for the emperor a gigantic bridge on the lower Danube and public baths in Rome.
Trajan's Wars
Trajan led the Roman Empire to its maximum extension: his best known military campaigns are related to the Dacian wars, but Trajan made also a serious attempt to expand the empire in the Middle East. He conquered part of today's Kingdom of Jordan including the city of Petra. He then waged war against the Parthians; he defeated them in Armenia and Mesopotamia and in 116 he occupied Ctesiphon, the capital of the Parthians located 20 miles south of Baghdad. From there, following the footsteps of Alexander the Great, Trajan reached the shores of the Persian Gulf. But these conquests were ephemeral; a vast rebellion from Mesopotamia spread to other eastern provinces and Trajan had to give up his attempts to further move eastwards; he precipitously returned to Syria where he died in 117.
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Hadrian
Trajan adopted as his successor Publius Aelius Adrianus (Hadrian), another general born in Spain and who was the proconsul of Syria at the emperor's death. Hadrian realized that the recent acquisition of Mesopotamia was not defensible and chose to give back to the Parthians the territories occupied by Trajan in return for a stable peace agreement.
Notwithstanding his military background, Hadrian refrained from new wars and devoted himself to making more effective the administration and in particular the judiciary system; he established that laws and decrees should be reviewed by a body of experts on law to ensure their consistency with other existing regulations.
He extensively visited the various provinces of the empire to show that the emperor was a good pater familias (father of the family) who cared for the wellbeing of his subjects and not a distant despot closeted in the imperial palace.
In one of these tours he recommended to strengthen the northern border of the province of Britannia by building a vallum, a rampart which stretched across the island.
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Nero claimed to be an artist, Hadrian thought himself to be a great architect; so he disregarded the advice of Apollodorus of Damascus and when the Greek architect made some negative comments on a temple Hadrian built near the Colosseo, the emperor exiled him and later on sentenced him to death. The temple, which was dedicated to Venus and Romulus, had a very innovative design and it was made up of two identical buildings, one facing eastwards (Venus) and the other westwards (Romulus or Roma). The two imposing apses were located back to back and were a source of inspiration for many Renaissance and Baroque artists.
Hadrian's Last Years
In 124 Hadrian, while visiting the province of Bythinia (today's north-west Turkey), fell in love with Antinous, a teenager of rare beauty. This kind of relationships between a man of a certain age (Hadrian was then 48 and age patterns were different from those we are accustomed to nowadays) and a much younger man (Antinous was fourteen) were not unusual in the Greek world and were tolerated in the Roman one. They usually ended when the younger partner reached adulthood.
In 130 Antinous died by drowning in the Nile; the passion Hadrian had for him had not yet subsided and the emperor's grief was immense; he dedicated his last years to celebrate his lover by naming after him cities, sending statues with his effigy to all corners of the empire and even by dedicating temples and an obelisk to Antinous.
While the love affair had been regarded as a common practice, a sort of usual phase in man's life, the initiatives taken by Hadrian to celebrate Antinous were seen as extravagant and not in line with the traditional composure expected by a Roman emperor.
Hadrian spent his last years in isolation moving from one to the other imperial villas in the environs of Rome and Naples.
In 136 he appointed as his successor Lucius Aelius, a young senator with no military background; the choice has never been fully understood. Lucius Aelius however never became emperor as he died soon after having been chosen by Hadrian. The ailing emperor decided to appoint as his new successor a respected senator, Titus Aurelius Antoninus, on the condition that he in turn would appoint Lucius Verus (son of Lucius Aelius) and Marcus Aurelius (son of his wife's brother) as co-emperors. At the death of Hadrian in 138 the Senate made an attempt to deny the dead emperor the funerary celebrations for which he had built a gigantic mausoleum, but Antoninus insisted on not damaging Hadrian's memory.
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Hadrian showed his interest for architecture by closely following the design of Villa Adriana, a countryside residence near Tivoli where he spent some of his last years. He also rebuilt the Pantheon, although he preferred to retain the old inscription celebrating Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, Augustus' son-in-law. In Rome the memory of Hadrian is also associated with Ponte Sant'Angelo, the bridge he built to facilitate the access to his mausoleum. There are monuments built by Hadrian in many other cities of the Roman Empire and in particular in Athens.
Antoninus Pius
Antoninus ruled for 23 years: they were almost uneventful years: he acted as a sort of constitutional monarch, returning to the Senate and to the other Roman institutions most of their ancient decisional power.
He strengthened the defence of the empire by building in Britain a more advanced vallum on the Firth of Forth and by founding new Roman settlements in southern Germany. He chose to live in a villa he had in Lanuvio, rather than in the more luxurious imperial residences.
He complied with the commitment imposed on him by Hadrian to appoint as his successors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus (the former in the meantime had become his son-in-law having married Annia Faustina Minor, Antoninus' daughter).
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The Senate gave to Antoninus the appellative (qualifying adjective) of Pius, in recognition of his lifestyle, so respectful of the traditional Roman family values.
Antoninus, most likely to distance himself from Hadrian's behaviour, emphasized his attachment to these values by erecting several temples dedicated to his deceased wife Annia Faustina Maior and by founding charitable institutions for the assistance of young women, named after her puellae Faustinianae.
He built in the Roman Forum a large temple dedicated to her: its structure was so strong that it resisted all attempts to pull it down; its cipollino columns show the cuts made to place the ropes which were vainly used to cause the collapse of the portico. Antoninus also dedicated a temple to Hadrian, which too has at least partially escaped being pulled down.
Marcus Aurelius
Unlike Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus had to face continuous threats to the stability of the empire. In 162 the Parthians invaded the eastern Roman provinces of Syria and Armenia; Lucius Verus led the Roman armies to the counter-attack and in 164 the Romans occupied again Ctesiphon, the enemy capital and briefly restored their rule over Mesopotamia; the victory however brought an unexpected and bitter fruit: a pestilence (now thought to have been a bubonic plague) developed among the Roman legionaries and they brought it back with them at the end of the campaign; in the following years the pestilence spread to the whole empire; a famine followed the disease and further weakened the economy and reduced the population.
The two emperors had just repelled the Parthians in the east, when a new threat arose in the west; the Marcomanni, a German tribe living in today's Bohemia, in association with other tribes (Quadi, Vandals and Sarmatians) attacked the Roman colonies along the Danube in Germany, Austria and Hungary. They were most likely forced to do this because they were in turn attacked by other tribes coming from Central Asia.
After the death of Lucius Verus in 169, Marcus Aurelius had to bear the full responsibility of defending the empire. Being a man of great culture, he would have preferred to have time for his philosophic studies, but he felt it was his duty to personally lead the many campaigns caused by the increasing pressure on the northern border of the empire.
He died in 180 in Vindobona (today's Vienna) where he was closely following the preparation of yet another campaign against the Marcomanni. Many historians set at his death the beginning of the decadence of the Roman Empire as some of its key causes made their appearance during the reign of Marcus Aurelius: a weakened economy, a substantial reduction in population and the first barbarian invasions, i.e. the irruption in Europe of nomadic peoples from Central Asia.
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In 166 the Senate gave Marcus Aurelius the appellative of Pater Patriae and most likely to celebrate this title a bronze statue of the emperor was erected in his family villa near today's S. Giovanni in Laterano. In the Middle Ages the statue was called caballus Constantini (Constantine's horse) and this saved it from being melted, because Constantine was regarded as the first Christian Roman emperor. In 2006 it was placed in a covered courtyard inside Musei Capitolini; according to the tradition when the statue loses its remaining gold leaf, Rome will perish (and with it the world).
Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus erected a column to Antoninus Pius near today's Piazza di Montecitorio; the column is lost, but the fine reliefs at its base are in the Vatican Museums.
Iconography
The following external links show works of art portraying characters and events mentioned in this page:
Trajan's Justice by Eugene Delacroix (1840).
Bust of Hadrian in Museo Nazionale Romano - Rome - it opens in a separate window.
Statue of Antinous in Musei Capitolini - Rome - it opens in a separate window.
Bust of Antoninus Pius in Musei Capitolini - Rome - it opens in a separate window.
Relief portraying Marcus Aurelius in Musei Capitolini - Rome - it opens in a separate window.
Marcus Aurelius Distributing Bread to the People by Joseph-Marie Vien (1765).
Read Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar (at Villa Adriana).
Next page:
X - A Century of Turmoil
Previous pages:
I - The foundation and the early days of Rome
II - The early republican period
III - The Romans meet the elephants
IV - Expansion in the eastern Mediterranean
V - Pompey and Caesar
VI - Augustus
VII - From Tiberius to Nero
VIII - The Flavian Dynasty